He helped take the British pop band from obscurity to international fame, and he went solo as its success peaked.
British pop group Hot Chocolate posed together in April 1974. Standing, left to right: singer-songwriter Errol Brown, guitarist Harvey Hinsley, keyboard player Larry Ferguson, drummer Tony Connor, bassist and songwriter Tony Wilson and percussionist Patrick Olive. (Photo by Michael Putland/Getty Images)
Hulton Archive
Tony Wilson, bassist, songwriter, and co-founder of the hit British group Hot Chocolate has died in his native Trinidad. His death was confirmed in a social media post by his daughter. Wilson co-wrote the band’s 1975 global hit single, “You Sexy Thing” that peaked at #3 in America and #2 in Britain where it also reached the top 10 in three successive decades.
Hot Chocolate was the first predominantly Black British group to chart successive major hits in America at a time when Black popular music originating beyond the U.S. was largely treated as a cultural novelty. Eventually feeling stifled by the prominence of his songwriting collaborator and the group’s front man, Errol Brown (d. 2015), Wilson left Hot Chocolate in November 1975 for a solo career which never quite fulfilled its commercial promise.
The Hot Chocolate Era
Wilson teamed up with Jamaican-born songwriter and vocalist Brown in London, and the group debuted in 1969 on The Beatles’ Apple Records label as the Hot Chocolate Band with an unsuccessful pop-reggae cover of John Lennon’s “Give Peace a Chance.” Despite the discouraging start, the Afro-Caribbean flavored Hot Chocolate in which Wilson was the original lead vocalist had its first British hit in 1970 with “Love Is Life” reaching #6 on the RAK Records label run by prolific producer Mickie Most (d. 2003).
The group had eight U.K. hits before finally achieving American success when “Emma” (already a #3 British hit in 1974) reached #8 in 1975. Later that year, “You Sexy Thing” became Hot Chocolate’s career peak as spent several weeks in the top five of the Billboard Hot 100, establishing the group as a significant commercial force. The track, issued in the U.S. on the Atlantic-distributed Big Tree label, was certified gold in America in January 1976.
Hot Chocolate scored five Top 40 singles in America between 1975 and 1978, though none of their five chart albums were major hits there. Ironically, Brown and Wilson attained a #1 record in the U.S. as songwriters years before they charted hits in that market with their own group.
In 1973, Hot Chocolate had reached #7 in Britain with “Brother Louie,” a vivid tale of doomed interracial love. As a foreign multiracial band, they were unable to gain any American airplay foothold despite a positive review in the industry trade publication Cashbox magazine, but the all-white American band Stories soon covered the record in a sparse, slower, less compelling style, and topped the Hot 100 with their diluted interpretation.
A year earlier, Canadian rock band, April Wine, had its first U.S. chart hit with “You Could Have Been a Lady” that reached #22 after Hot Chocolate scored a British hit with the Brown and Wilson composition in 1971. The Wilson/Brown songwriting duo also penned the 1970 Herman’s Hermits hit, “Bet Yer Life I Do” (UK #22) as well as the Mary Hopkin single, “Think About Your Children” (U.K. #19; U.S. #87). The cover versions and songs written for other artists built a platform for Hot Chocolate’s eventual American success, but due to growing friction with Brown in a creative and personal rift was never healed, Wilson exited with the group at its commercial peak.
Wilson’s Solo Years
Prior to Hot Chocolate’s formation, Wilson debuted as a solo act on the Decca label in 1964 with the single “Yes I Do,” followed by at least two other 1967 releases on British EMI’s Columbia imprint (not to be confused with the American label owned by CBS). He also issued singles in 1965 and 1966 as part of the Soul Brothers whose track “I Keep Ringing My Baby” peaked at #43 in the U.K. These soul-pop efforts as well as singles by other groups such as The Corduroys and The Souvenirs failed to garner major market attention, setting the tone for Wilson’s struggle for recognition until the birth of Hot Chocolate.
After leaving the band, Wilson signed with Bearsville Records, becoming the label’s lone Black act amidst performers including British blues-rock outfit Foghat and pop multi-instrumentalist producer, songwriter, and artist, Todd Rundgren. Neither of Wilson’s two albums released with Bearsville – I Like Your Style (1976) and Catch One (1979) – charted in either America or Britain, and there were no hit singles. His solo career stalled as Hot Chocolate managed at least one Top 40 hit each year in America until 1979, with the group maintaining a much higher rate of commercial success in Britain into the 1980s.
Little new music was heard from Wilson in the 1980s on either side of the Atlantic, though his limited output included the ambient pop B-side, “Hanging Out in Space,” released independently in 1982 and by RCA in 1988. The original mid-tempo recording used the popular Roland TR-808 drum machine with suitably spacey synthesizer textures suspended over rhythms reflecting his Trinidadian background.
The song’s ambitious soundscapes foreshadowed the electronic dance music that would soon have major international pop impact, but solo commercial success continued to elude Wilson, just as his former collaborator Brown left Hot Chocolate by the mid-Eighties to start his own moderate solo career, effectively ending the group’s commercial success.