The Afternoon Delights
1980s American vocal quartet
The Afternoon Delights were a Boston-based vocal studio quartet, including Rebecca Hall, Janet Powell, Robalee Barnes, and Suzanne Boucher.
Career
In 1981, the Afternoon Delights released the novelty song "General Hospi-Tale" that lyrically summarized some of the plot developments on the ABC soap opera General Hospital. The song was co-written by Harry King (who also produced) and Lisa "Lips" Tedesco, a soap updater for Medford-based station Kiss 108. Hall sang the lead vocal, including the spoken word portion at the end talking about her "addiction", noting "I just can't cope/without my soap!" Musically, meanwhile, the track was very reminiscent of Blondie's recent hit "Rapture". "General Hospi-Tale" peaked at number 23 on Billboard's Hot Soul Singles chart and number 33 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart. Despite its modest chart placings, "General Hospi-Tale" (the single) sold 850,000 7-inch singles and 250,000 12-inch copies.
The group quickly released a follow-up single ("Dancing For Pennies", which was a non-novelty pop/R&B tune.) An Afternoon Delights album called General Hospi-Tale was also released, which was a straight pop/R&B release, aside from the title track. These both failed to chart, and the group quickly disbanded. Hall later recorded some solo singles in the mid-1980s, and Barnes and Boucher both continued work as studio vocalists.
The song was integrated into a movie, Young Doctors in Love, which had a successful run on cable channels in the US and abroad.
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This entry incorporates text from “The Afternoon Delights” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.