Fancy - Biography
By Eric Brightwell
In the 1980s, despite barely registering in the mainstream populace’s consciousness, the German artist known as Fancy created eurodisco hits that achieved massive global popularity in dance clubs and several countries. In addition to his own hits, he wrote and mentored Grant Miller and produced notable Italo-disco hits for Linda Jo Rizzo, Mozzart and others. In the 1990s, like many of his eurodisco comrades, Fancy pursued various changing musical trends with varying success but probably received his widest exposure writing music for stage shows of his friends Siegfried & Roy.
Manfred Alois Segieth (or Manfred Aulhausen) was born on July 7, 1946 in München, Germany. The son of a practically-minded craftsmen, he was enrolled in a Capuchin school where he trained to become a monk. After hearing schlager star Ted Harold’s “Moonlight” as a twelve-year-old, he picked up the guitar and began playing. After high school he formed the Cliff Richard & the Shadows-influenced Mountain Shadows, performing covers of popular songs. At the same time, he shopped around his own schlager compositions which he occasionally recorded as Tess Teiges, beginning in 1971.
1983 is considered by many to be the peak of Italo-disco and Segieth adopted the suitably Italian alias, Manfred Perilano and the moniker, Fancy. After Segieth asked Todd Canedy to write a song for him, he recorded a demo of “Slice Me Nice” which he submitted to composer/producer Anthony Monn, who’d previously achieved world-wide successes with husky-voiced diva, Amanda Lear. Usually collaborating, Segieth and Monn embraced a brand of dance music which, thanks to its elevated sense of melody and songcraft, was as at home in and out of the dance clubs where it was most popular. Though largely unknown outside the dance scene, Fancy performed very well commercially and, along with his eurodisco peers, he undeniably helped open the door for similar-sounding English musicians and producers, like Stock, Aitken & Waterman and their eurobeat acts like Dead or Alive, who achieved both club and mainstream success with a similar formula.
In 1984, Fancy scored a hat trick with the infectious “Chinese Eyes,” “Get Lost Tonight” and “Slice Me Nice.” All three are masterpieces of tuneful, melodramatic fluff that added a pronounced Hi-NRG influence to the relaxed Italo-disco sound epitomized the previous year by Gazebo with his hit, “I Like Chopin.” But whereas Gazebo (Paul Mazzolini) seemed to have a tongue-in-cheek sense of humor, representative Fancy lyrics like “I'm like a pie made for hungry guys” and “Fire in your veins - chains and pains” suggested his camp theatrics were pleasingly devoid of irony.
The following year, Fancy released his first full-length album, Get Your Kicks (1985 Metronome), which included all the previous year’s singles. He made his first appearance on French TV and performed his first shows in the US, mostly at gay clubs. His sophomore release, Contact (1986 Metronome), spawned “Bolero (Hold Me in Your Arms Again),” which was number one in Spain for nearly six months. That same year, Fancy extensively toured clubs in Germany, Sweden and the US. The video for another single off the album, “Lady of Ice,” featured the (as always) tarted up, shiny-clothed Fancy prancing on a laser grid dance floor in outer space and may quite possibly be the most ‘80s thing ever. Not surprisingly, it went gold in Scandinavia. His third album was Flames of Love (1988 Metronome) and featured both Monn/Fancy collaborations as well as some of Fancy’s first solo compositions and its title track was huge in Poland. He closed out the decade that he seemed so indelibly tied to with All My Loving (1989 Metronome), whose title track was a hit in Europe. One of its singles, “Running Man,” though sounding rather like The Pet Shop Boys, came nowhere near achieving their seemingly effortless ability to appeal to both continual generations of club-goers and pop fans. Whereas The PSB were able to remain commercially viable well into the ‘90s due in part to their willingness to take risks, Fancy spent the ‘90s (like many of his eurodisco compatriots) often repackaging, remixing and revisiting his former glories, often clothed in the trappings of fleetingly popular styles like eurodance, hip-house and trance.
In the 1990s, Fancy pursued the emerging eurodance style with releases like Five (1990 Metronome) and with Steve D5 & Grandmaster Tess’s hip-house re-make of his “When Guardian Angels Cry,” “When Guardian Angels… Rap,” featured on VI – Deep in My Heart (1991 ZYX Music), which mixed new material and revisited old. Attributed to “Fancy and Band,” Blue Planet Zikastar (1995 Koch International) moved in a more straightforward pop direction and includes “Saramoti,” a piece Fancy composed for Siegfried and Roy’s Master of the Impossible. Colours of Life (1996 G.I.B. Music & Distribution GmbH) and D.I.S.C.O. (1999 Disco Records) followed.
In the 2000s, Fancy has slowed down considerably, only releasing new material with Voices from Heaven (2004 ZYX Music) and Forever Magic (2008 Happy Vibes). Throughout his career as Fancy, he’s also produced material for other artists, including the compilation Christmas and Vegas (1996 G.I.B. Music & Distribution GmbH) and he continues to make occasional appearances but these days the avowed animal lover can more often be found tending his flock of goats than his fans.
