The Story In The Song – Barry Manilow – Copacabana

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In 1978 Barry Manilow managed to turn a tragic story into one of the jolliest, cheesiest disco songs of all time. It’s the story of the tangled relationships of Lola, a faded glory showgirl at the Copacabana Club, in Havana, though Manilow was inspired by the name of a club he saw in Rio and later again in New York. Starting in the 1940’s the story has Lola’s love affair with one of the bar workers, Tony, thrown into chaos when she is courted by a powerful Mafia gangster, Rico. The men fight over her, and a gunshot kills one of them. Manilow cleverly leaves us in suspense as to who died, but then the song jumps forward to the 1970’s when Lola still attends the club, which is now a 70’s discotheque and she still wears her fading feathered 1940’s dance dress, clearly now out of her mind. She has become a Miss Haversham figure. Manilow tells us Tony has gone, implying that he lost the gunfight or went to jail for killing Rico, but the details are not spelt out for us. Either way, his loss has all but destroyed Lola. Despite the sad story, the song has a cheerfulness that makes everyone rush to dance to it, and fight for it when it comes up on Karaoke play lists. Even Manilow seemed to have difficulty taking its absurd sob story too seriously, throwing in the rhyme of ‘banana’ with ‘Copacabana’. Arthur Chappell