Build Me Up Buttercup — The Foundations
When you hear “Build Me Up Buttercup” by The Foundations do you think of “There’s Something About Mary”…yes, the movie with Cameron Diaz and the “hair gel”…?
“There’s Something About Mary” was released in 1998 and, although I haven’t seen it for many years, as always, there’s something very powerful about the way hearing a particular song can connect you across the decades in an instant and make it seem like only yesterday.
However our story goes back much further than 1998…all the way back to 1968, in fact.
For their time, The Foundations were an interesting band. They were a multiracial band at a time when the music industry was largely organised based on the colour of your skin. While it wasn’t completely unheard of for bands to straddle the racial divide, it was incredibly rare.
The Foundations’ mix of white Brits, West Indians and Sri Lankans must have seemed almost impossibly exotic for their day. But they were commercially successful, with two major chart successes.
Their biggest UK hit was 1967’s “Baby, Now That I’ve Found You”. The following year, “Build Me Up Buttercup” was a UK Number Two single and reached Number Three on the Billboard Hot 100.
The Foundations’ niche was to make authentic-sounding soul records in the UK which rivalled…
