Song of the Day 10/31: The Strangeloves, “I Want Candy”

Happy Halloween. Were you expecting “Monster Mash”?

There’s a good reason this song is built around the “Bo Diddley beat” — it started out as a cover of “Bo Diddley,” Diddley’s eponymous song, until producer Bert Berns and the three guys who became the Strangeloves decided to write new lyrics.

The Strangeloves were advertised as three sheep-breeding brothers from Australia named Giles, Miles, and Niles Strange. They were actually three record producers from New York named Bob Feldman, Jerry Goldstein and Richard Gottehrer who specialized in girl groups (the Angels’ “My Boyfriend’s Back” was their biggest hit) but saw the writing on the wall when the British Invasion arrived. Realizing they couldn’t convincingly fake British accents, they decided to become Australian because, they later explained, nobody in the US in 1965 knew anybody from Australia.

This worked up to a point, and that point arrived when “I Want Candy” became a hit, eventually reaching No. 11 on the Hot 100. The problem was that the three producers couldn’t actually play instruments well enough to perform live, so they had to trot out the studio musicians who helped record the song as the actual band. The quartet who appear here on “Shindig” look nothing like the three “brothers” photographed on the record sleeve.

The version of the song most people know today was a cover released in 1982 by Bow Wow Wow, another band put together in a less-than-organic manner. Malcolm McLaren, most famous for assembling the Sex Pistols, needed a backing band for a 13-year-old singer he discovered, Annabella Lwin. McLaren, ever the provocateur, got a lot of attention by sexualizing his young star, but the band had its biggest hit with this cover.

The guys who masqueraded as the Strangeloves went on to other projects. Gottehrer in particular found success as a producer of albums by Blondie, Richard Hell and the Voidoids, Marshall Crenshaw and the Go-Gos.