Taco

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Biography

Taco gained international stardom when in 1982 he recorded a distinctive cover record of the old Irving Berlin favorite, Puttin’ On The Ritz in Germany, which made him famous early the next year (United States Billboard chart number 4). It has been reported that he did not speak any English at all and merely read the lyrics from transliterations, but this is false: Taco speaks English and almost always performed in English. He also speaks German, having recorded a couple of songs (“Träume brauchen Zeit” and “Blauer Vogel, steig!”) for German Eurovision in 1981. He is also a speaker of Dutch and French.

Taco was born to a Dutch couple in Jakarta (On a side note, Indonesia was once a Dutch colony). Prior to his worldwide hit with Puttin’ on the Ritz, he fronted a Berlin-based band called Taco’s Bizz. Their niche was performing Depression-era oldies in a more contemporary style, and soon Taco was courted by record labels to release a solo single. Puttin’ on the Ritz gained so much attention that an entire album was funded by RCA Records. Both the album and the single were hits in Europe, and thanks to a popular MTV video for Puttin’ on the Ritz, the single and the album became hits in America as well, selling over 500,000 copies of Taco’s 1982 debut album After Eight.

A follow-up album, Let’s Face the Music, was recorded in 1984 for RCA, but it failed to recreate Taco’s initial success, and he vanished from the American market immediately thereafter.
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