Hot Chocolate , Errol Brown is no more.. now

Errol Brown, the frontman and co-founder of British soul band Hot Chocolate, has died at the age of 71.

The singer was most famous for hits in the 1970s and 1980s including You Sexy Thing, It Started with a Kiss and So You Win Again.
He had suffered from liver cancer and died at his home in the Bahamas.
His death was announced by his manager Phil Dale, who said he was "a wonderful gentleman".
Brown scored his first success with Hot Chocolate in 1970 with the top 10 track Love Is Life and went on to have more than 20 top 40 hits.
Hot Chocolate had some famous fans - in 1981 they played at a pre-wedding bash in Buckingham Palace for the Prince of Wales and Lady Diana Spencer.
In 1985, Brown left the band and took time out to spend more time with his wife and then young children, before he embarked on successful UK solo tours in 1990 and 1993.
He helped with the promotion of the classic You Sexy Thing in 1997 and also had further successful UK solo tours.

Brown, who moved to Britain from Jamaica with his mother at the age of 12, was made an MBE in 2003.
And a year later, he was given an Ivor Novello award for his outstanding contribution to British music.
Dale said: "There was always music around wherever he was. I've been with him in the middle of Australia and he has got an idea for a song and started writing.
"Errol was a lover of life and obviously music.
"Errol was a gentle man and was a personal friend of mine who will be sadly missed by everyone who knew him. His greatest legacy is that his music will live on."
Brown is survived by his wife Ginette and two daughters, Colette and Leonie.
ot Chocolate were a peculiar band. They were a hugely successful chart act that had hit singles over three decades, but their albums barely scraped into the top 30, unless they were greatest hits collections. They were best known for fluffy, hook-laden pop disco, but their back catalogue was packed with other stuff: music that was far weirder, darker and more intriguing. Errol Brown was a great singer, possessed of the ability to convey anguish with a chilling falsetto shriek, but it was a sound he rarely used: instead, he tended to unflustered cool, an imperturbable loverman who wouldn’t have broken sweat if someone had set fire to his tight satin trousers.

They began life as an opportunistic novelty act, born when Brown and bassist Tony Wilson took up an offer to join a group of Brixton based musicians who were employed recording reggae covers of current hits. One track, a bizarre version of Give Peace a Chance with a stentorian vocal and additional lyrics courtesy of Brown – “Rubbish! Rubbish!” he kept shouting, for reasons that weren’t entirely clear – found its way to John Lennon and was released on Apple. Signed to Mickie Most’s RAK, they floundered, devoid of a direction – scoring the occasional pop soul hit, like 1970’s Love Is Life, trying their hand at everything from glam to bubblegum to hard rock in the vein of Free’s All Right Now. It wasn’t until Most steered them in the direction of social commentary and brought in string arranger John Cameron that they settled on what appeared to be a winning style: the bleak funk of Brother Louie, the astonishing 1974 hit Emma, an impossibly morose tale of poverty, failure and suicide. The latter featured a remarkable vocal from Brown: he’s the model of resigned stoicism until the song’s closing minute, where he unleashes a series of harrowing screams.
It’s hard not to wish Hot Chocolate had made more records like that, had made more use of Errol Brown’s voice in that way. That said, you could see why they ultimately didn’t. Emma made No 3, but the band’s success was far from assured. Setting what was to prove a pattern, their subsequent debut album, Cicero Park, failed to make the charts at all, despite being a genuinely great record, offering a far tougher, sparser take on the nascent disco sound than the one they would subsequently become famous for. Of their follow-up singles, only the densely orchestrated A Child’s Prayer was a big hit. On the B-side of one of the flops was a track called You Sexy Thing: it was lightweight compared to Emma or Brother Louie or most of Cicero Park, but it was packed with hooks. Rerecorded, it became a hit on both sides of the Atlantic and set a kind of pop-disco template for the rest of Hot Chocolate’s career: So You Win Again, Every 1’s A Winner, deathless wedding disco favorites all.