In the 1970s Baccara

UPDATED 12 09 21

María Mendiola, who sang the disco anthem Yes Sir, I Can Boogie, has died at the age of 69.

These two ladies were from Spain who formed the group way back in 1977. The girls (ladies) were Mayte Mateos and Maria Mendiola both born in the early 1950s. The two girls met and teamed up more as dancers in Spain with a dance group called Venus. They also studied ballet, and appeared in night clubs and on TV too.They moved from mainland Spain to the Canary Islands where there sang Spanish folk style music to the tourists, one of the tourists was high up in RCA and help to get the girls a recording contract as Baccara. Baccara was Black Rose as a reference to what the girls normally wore, like black skirts to dance in.

Composers Rolf Soja and Frank Dostal wrote their first hit Yes Sir I Can Boogie. Frank was also partially responsible for some of the songs from the Smurfs and The Goombay Dance Band. Yes Sir I Can Boogie was recorded in Holland and went on to sell a whooping sixteen million copies, and still holds the Guinness Book Of Records for the highest selling female duo.

They were also the first female duo to have a number one record in the UK. However the single did not chart at all in the U.S.

The group released three albums in the 1970s called Baccara, Light My Fire and Colours. They also had a compilation album out in 1978 called The Hits Of Baccara, which had only two hits on the album.

The second hit was Sorry I’m A Lady which, which was No. 1 all over Europe, but only got as high as No. 8 in the UK charts, but that seemed to be it for the group. They did make a sort of comeback in 1978 with an entry for the Eurovision Song Contest called Parlez-Vous Français?