1978 Ted Gardestad – Blue Virgin Isles

Blue Virgin Isles was the fifth album and the international debut from Swedish singer/songwriter Ted Gärdestad, released in late 1978 on the Epic Records label in the UK and Polar Music in Scandinavia.

The Blue Virgin Isles album was mainly recorded in Hollywood, California with a large number of noted American and English musicians, among them Jim Keltner, Jay Graydon, Lee Ritenour, Fred Tackett, James Newton Howard, Dr. John, John Mayall, Chuck Domanico, Mike Melvoin, four of the future members of Toto; Jeff Porcaro, Steve Porcaro, David Hungate and Steve Lukather, and backing vocals by David Cassidy, Venetta Fields and Sherlie Matthews. The album was produced by Norwegian-American Eirik W. Wangberg, also known as Eirik The Norwegian, a nickname given to him by Paul McCartney during the sessions for McCartney’s 1971 album Ram. The Blue Virgin Isles recordings began in the United States in the autumn of 1977 and were completed with some additional overdubs made in Stockholm in the summer of 1978.

The album spawned two single releases, “Take Me Back To Hollywood” and “Love, You’re Making All The Fools”. “Take Me Back To Hollywood” was a re-recording of Swedish hit single “Chapeau-Claque” from the preceding album Franska Kort, produced by Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus, Michael B. Tretow and Gärdestad himself. The Blue Virgin Isles album was promoted by a guest appearance on ABBA’s BBC TV special ABBA in Switzerland a.k.a. Snow Time Special, filmed in Leysin and broadcast worldwide in April 1979. Despite this and a number of other personal appearances in West Germany, The Netherlands, the UK, the US and the Scandinavian countries in the winter of 1978 and the spring of 1979 and generally favourable reviews by music critics, Blue Virgin Isles was only a moderate commercial success; in Sweden the album peaked at #29 and only spent two weeks on the chart.

After having won the 1979 Melodifestivalen, the Swedish pre-selections for the Eurovision Song Contest, with the song “Satellit”/”Satellite” in February 1979 the Blue Virgin Isles album was re-released both internationally and domestically to include this track. The second Polar Music edition of the album features both the Swedish and English language versions of the song. “Satellit” received a disappointing eight points in the contest, held on March 31, 1979 in Jerusalem, Israel, and finished seventeenth out of nineteen participating entries, making it Sweden’s second lowest placing in the contest up until that point. Despite the added Eurovision exposure, the second attempt to promote the Blue Virgin Isles album consequently met with the same result as the first, both internationally and in Sweden.

When Gärdestad made his comeback on the music scene in 1993 he re-recorded a Swedish language version of the title track “Blue Virgin Isles”, entitled “Himlen Är Oskyldigt Blå” (“The Sky Is Innocently Blue”), for career retrospective Kalendarium 1972-93, then using the original backing track.