Spinning the radio dial last Monday, in search of some easy bank holiday listening, I was suddenly caught up in one of the most harrowing documentaries I've heard for a very long time.
The Boney M Story by Colm Keane was a gut-wrenching trawl through an era many of us would rather forget. Dark and often deeply disturbing, it made parts of me squirm that I wouldn't have thought capable of squirming. And yet, like the memory of some of that band's lyrics, I just couldn't turn it off.
In fact, the great surprise of the programme was that I had actually managed to forget some of the songs. Remember Belfast? Neither did I, until Colm mentioned it. Unfortunately this was a rare example, because most of the group's oeuvre has achieved the sort of immortality to which only great art and really bad pop songs can aspire.
Who will ever forget Rasputin for example? Sing it with me: Ra, Ra, Rasput-een/Russia's greatest love machine/There was a cat who really was gone . . . Or Brown Girl in the Ring? Altogether now, and don't forget the high-pitched backing vocals at the end: . . . She looks like a sugar in a plum. Plum! Plum!
I won't even go into Ma Baker or Hooray, Hooray, it's a Holi- Holi-day (no, wait a minute, I can't resist: Dick a dee doo dee, dicka dicka dee dee, hi de hi de ho. . .), or Daddy Cool, even though I know the mere mention of these titles will set off little karaoke machines in the back of your brains, which will now play a Boney M medley non-stop until next Easter.
The documentary was built around an interview with Liz Mitchell, the band's lead singer (and only one, it seems. The producer recorded the male singing parts, and the other members were only there because they looked good in the chains and exotic lingerie you had to wear to get a disco-band licence in those days).
A sophisticated, articulate woman, Mitchell seems to have known exactly what she was doing at the time - unusual in 1970s pop stars - a factor which I hope the courts will take into account in due course.
For example, she thought that Brown Girl in the Ring was so silly it would be bad for her image to record it. But she prayed to God "for a vision" of how the song should be sung and, she implied, God delivered.
To which one can only say that if the Almighty really was involved in recording that song, a lot of people would have to rethink religion. A vengeful Old Testament God you could live with, but a God with a taste for 1970s Eurodisco - that would be just too scary.
Brown Girl was the B-side of Rivers of Babylon and between them they made that record the second biggest-selling single of all time, after Mull of Kintyre (a song that, to their credit, Boney M had nothing to do with). Another of the group's songs sold three million copies in a week. Which leads me to suspect - and I'm not pointing the finger at anyone in particular: but some of you must have bought these records!
It seems to have been the high point in the band's career when, in 1978, they were invited by Leonid Brezhnev to tour the Soviet Union. Almost certainly, this is where the Russians lost the Cold War. What was Brezhnev thinking? Was he hoping they'd record a song about him? Ra, Ra, Leonid B./Eyebrows thicker than a banyan tree. . .
Who knows? But it seems to me that if the Kremlin had left them where they were for another couple of years, Boney M could have sapped the West's morale even further, spreading defeatism and despair among governments about the direction in which popular culture was going.
On a personal level, for people of my age, the group's domination of the pop charts coincided with a period when dancing - however much we hated doing it - was of crucial strategic importance. But when songs like these (not to mention Yessir I Can Boogie) were liable to be played without warning, the disco floor was no place for the self-respecting. And guys with no moral standards about what they would dance to - or about anything else, for that matter - took advantage of this situation.
I hadn't realised it until the documentary, but by the early 1980s Boney M were recording covers of songs such as Neil Young's Heart of Gold. Disco versions of Blowin' in the Wind, Madame George and Beethoven's Ode to Joy would probably have followed. But mercifully, internal divisions were already taking a toll on the group.
By 1981 Boney M had disintegrated in bitterness (the Soviet Union went the same way soon afterwards). But the influence of the band lingers. As recently as last Tuesday, a horse called Ra Ra Rasputin finished second in the 2.25 at Bath. A sucker for eerie coincidences, I had backed it to win. So not only did Boney M blight my teenage years, I'm now also down a fiver on the deal.
Recalling the band's "glory days", Liz Mitchell told Colm Keane how proud she was that they had "touched" so many lives. Their records had clearly filled "a need" in people, she added. No doubt they did, but I say this: there were plenty of trained professionals who could have dealt with those needs more effectively.
Which reminds me, I'm late for my 1970s therapy group.