Stars on 45

Stars on 45 was a Dutch novelty pop act that was briefly very popular throughout Europe and in the United Kingdom, the United States and Australia in 1981. The group later shortened its name to Stars On in the U.S., while in the U.K. and Ireland it was known as Starsound. The band, which consisted solely of studio session musicians under the direction of Jaap Eggermont, formerly of Golden Earring, popularized recordings made by recreating hit songs as faithfully as possible and joining them together with a common tempo and underlying drum track.

Jaap Eggermont originated the "Stars on 45" concept after Willem van Kooten, managing director of the Dutch publishing company Red Bullet Productions, visited a record store in the summer of 1979 and happened to hear a disco medley being played there. The medley combined original recordings of songs by the Beatles, the Buggles, the Archies and Madness with a number of recent American and British disco hits like Lipps Inc.'s "Funkytown," Heatwave's "Boogie Nights," and The S.O.S. Band's "Take Your Time (Do It Right)," as the rhythms of the various songs tended to complement and "dovetail" into each other. When van Kooten heard that the medley also used a segment of "Venus," a 1970 US #1 hit by Dutch band Shocking Blue — a song for which he himself held the worldwide copyright — and knowing that neither he nor Red Bullet Productions had given the permission for the use of the recording, he realised that the medley in fact was a bootleg release. The record turned out to be a 12-inch single called "Let's Do It In The 80's Great Hits," credited to a nonexistent band called Passion and issued on a nonexistent record label called Alto. The medley had its origin in Montreal, Canada, and it was later revealed that it was the work of one Michel Ali, together with two professional DJs, Michel Gendreau and Paul Richer. Gendreau and Richer both specialised in the art of "splicing," stringing together snippets of music from different genres, in varying keys and BPMs and from different sound sources, at this time still predominantly from vinyl records. The first version of the medley was eight minutes long, and it included parts from some twenty tracks of which only three were by the Beatles: "No Reply," "I'll Be Back," and "Drive My Car." A later extended, 16-minute, 30-track mix of the same medley labeled "Bits and Pieces III" added another five Beatles titles: "*Do You Want to Know a Secret," "We Can Work It Out," "I Should Have Known Better," "Nowhere Man," and "You're Gonna Lose That Girl." With the bootleg recording obviously already circulating in dance clubs on both sides of the Atlantic, van Kooten decided to "bootleg the bootleg" and create a licensed version of the medley by using soundalike artists to replicate the original hits and therefore contacted his friend and colleague Jaap Eggermont.

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