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The Chosen Few


The Chosen Few - Footsee / You Can Never Be Wrong - 7

Footsee / You Can Never Be Wrong - 7"
Trans-World - 1968


Michael Panontin
In the fall of 1974, Russ Winstanley gave an obscure US instrumental 45 a spin at the legendary Wigan Casino. It was a long-forgotten throwaway song called 'Footsie' by a group of Montrealers called the Chosen Few, and it was originally used to promote a skipping toy of the same name that hooked around a child's ankle. It wasn't even a northern soul record, but the reaction on the dance floor was almost instantaneous. "The people who went to the Casino absolutely loved it," Winstanley would later write. "They almost jumped off the balconies to dance to it."

'Footsie' was written by a couple of Montrealers, Nick Bohonos and John Peters, and produced by Ken Ayoub, who at the time was managing RCA Studio, where the disc was recorded. It was issued on the Trans-World label (with a version of the Flowerpot Men's 'You Can Never Be Wrong' on the flip) and managed to chart locally on CFOX, but pretty well nowhere else.

Footsees, though, were flying off the shelves. They were originally manufactured by a Montreal-based plastics company called Twinpack and were allegedly based on a game Twinpack co-founder Bob Asch had seen an Arab child playing while he was in Jerusalem. With young baby boomers everywhere, the American market for Footsees was huge. And the suits at Roulette Records were salivating. The label had attached themselves to the hula-hoop craze ten years earlier and scored a top-40 hit with Teresa Brewer's version of the promotional tie-in song, and they were seeing dollar signs dancing in front of their eyes.

However, footsees were not nearly as successful as the hula-hoop, and by the mid-seventies Roulette copies of 'Footsee' would have been languishing in warehouses or in bargain bins with the dreaded BB-hole shot through the label. British northern soul deejays often made regular pilgrimages to those US warehouses to find unknown records to spin at all-nighters across the north, especially at rival clubs like the Blackpool Mecca and the nearby Wigan Casino in Lancashire. Ideally, once a deejay had scored an obscure disc that no one else had heard of, he would guard its exclusivity religiously. Some were even known to cover the labels with blank paper so as to prevent anyone else from acquiring another copy, a practice that can be traced back to early Jamaican selectors, who would even go so far as to scratch out the artist and title of the 78s they had purchased in America.

There were more than a few northern soul purists who viewed 'Footsee' with disdain, considering it, as journalist and soul fan Stuart Maconie would write in his book Cider with Roadies, an "embarrassing novelty". But new pressings of northern soul singles were hot sellers in the UK in 1974 - a reissue of R. Dean Taylor's uncharted 1967 record 'There's a Ghost in My House', for instance, shot all the way up to #3 that year - and 'Footsie' was just too popular to ignore.

According to most sources, Dave McAleer, an employee of Disco Demand, a subsidiary of Pye Records, which owned the UK rights to Roulette, heard the song and wanted to reissue it. Unfortunately, he was unable to locate Ayoub to secure the rights to it, and so as a workaround he bumped up the tempo to make it a little more dance friendly (no doubt for the speed-addled club kids of the day). McAleer also added overdubs of car horns and crowd noises, the latter said to be taken from either a 1966 FA Cup final between Everton and Sheffield Wednesday or a group of revellers invited into the Pye studio.

This new version of 'Footsie', remixed, overdubbed and "complete with handclaps from some of Wigan's favourite patrons", as a review in Blues & Soul described it, was issued in January 1975 (with a real northern soul song, Chuck Wood's iconic 'Seven Days Too Long', on the b-side). The record entered the UK charts immediately after its release. It peaked at #9 in February and stayed in the Top 75 for a solid eleven weeks before dropping off. And interestingly, in the absence of any live group to perform it, 'Footsee' was featured on the BBC's Top of the Pops with a group of dancers from the Wigan Casino giving the rest of the country a demonstration of northern soul dancing.
         
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