The Lady In Red (Chris de Burgh, 1986)

My gig as DJ support for a Shania Twain tribute act in 2000 (when they were still called sound-alikes) was memorable mainly for being the only time in my career when a member of the public tried to flirt with me. I was (and still am) happily married; but even if I hadn’t been, I was quietly warned off during the evening on the grounds that the drunk young woman in question was the wife of the promoter.

She wore a red baseball cap, which she kept trying to place on my head. The promoter was a member of the locally powerful Stobart family, owners of a nationally well-known road haulage business. It would have been personally and politically disastrous if I had been at all tempted to wear the red cap.

I say with no regret that a mobile oldies DJ is not a rock god. It is not a job for someone who wishes they were one, with all the attention that goes with it. His job is to disappear behind the music, to play the music of his audience’s dreams, not his own. I would happily play music I loathed if it made a client and his or her guests happy. Job done.

This is especially true of that crucial last slow dance of the evening. The DJ’s task at that point is draw couples together, to help them fall in love, or at least to make love, if that’s what they want. A floorfilling slow dance is the end of a successful evening – and the loneliest four minutes of DJ’s life. There they all are, lost in each other’s gaze, body to body, heart to heart, while in a few moments he must negotiate the drunks to get his fee, dismantle his rig, pack it into a mechanically unreliable van and drive, still sober, perhaps fifty miles home to a quiet house and a sleeping wife. Rock’n’roll it ain’t.

A good slow dance has a much longer shelf life than most up-tempo hits. It isn’t subject to passing dance fashions; and by virtue of bringing people together it is more likely to become a couple’s “our song”. Chris de Burgh’s The Lady In Red has stood the test of time.

Chris de Burgh was hardly an overnight sensation. The Lady In Red was on his eighth album, Into the Light. Apart from his perennial Christmas hit A Spaceman came Travelling, which was #1 in Ireland in 1975, and Don’t Pay the Ferryman which reached #5 in Australia in 1982, De Burgh had made little impact on the Top 40 before The Lady In Red broke into Top 5’s around the world in 1986. He wrote it about his wife Diane.

Like many success stories, The Lady In Red has attracted more than its fair share of haters. “Only James Blunt has managed to come up with a song more irritating than Chris de Burgh's Lady in Red,” wrote Neil Norman of The Independent in 2006.

I am not a particular admirer of the song, preferring De Burgh’s earlier story-telling songs on, for example, his second album Spanish Train and Other Stories, which includes the magnificent Patricia the Stripper. One of the worst things about The Lady in Red is his fudged attempt to rhyme the very British long vowel of “DAH-nce” with the short second syllable of “ro-MANce” halfway through the first verse. It makes me squirm.

But as a slow last dahnce, it works. It was a staple of my DJ set from 1999 to 2006, alongside Phyllis Nelson’s very smoochie Move Closer and Robbie Williams’ more laddish Angels – the latter best suited to nights when there was less romance in the air because its chorus could be sung with tuneless drunken enthusiasm by a crowd:

And. Threwit. AWLL, she offers me protection,
A lorra luv an’ affecshun …

It’s a really good song, and everyone is happy.

That Don't Impress Me Much (Shania Twain, 1999)

My mobile disco business Blame It On The Boogie! never had a residency, although for one or two hotels in the Lake District it was the go-to if they had a wedding booking. Every gig was a one-off and it was a precarious way to scrape a living.

I was almost always the sole source of entertainment at my gigs, unless you counted the wedding speeches. Only a few times did I serve as a support act for live music. Once I was playing second fiddle to a drag act. Another time the headliner was a local girl who would soon afterwards be whisked off to Los Angeles and groomed for a stardom which never quite materialised.

On one occasion I supported a four-piece covers band led by a would-be guitar hero with a large ego. He strapped on a twin-neck guitar, 6- and 12-strings as modelled by Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin; but throughout the set he only played the 6-string neck. The other was all for show.

Most memorably, I was booked alongside a Shania Twain tribute act in Appleby Market Hall in the summer of 2000. Twain was at the height of her popularity, three years after the release of her enormously successful Come On Over album. The album was a record industry phenomenon – it spent 151 weeks in the Billboard Country Top Ten, entering at #1 and occupying the top spot for a total of 50 weeks.

It is still the best-selling country album in the world, best-selling studio album by a female artist and best-selling album by a Canadian performer. It is the ninth best-selling album in the world in any category. Its status is helped by the fact that Twain released three different versions of the album – the original country take in 1997, followed by pop and international versions with different mixes and running orders – to maximise its appeal to every conceivable marketing sector. To my surprise, while writing this piece, I found a copy of Come On Over on my CD shelves. No one is immune, it seems.

In spite of that, I had never heard of Shania Twain at the start of 1999 when I was returning to DJ-ing. She was “country music”, something I had never much listened to. I came across her as I gradually transferred my operations from vinyl to CD. The easiest way for me to get up to speed on current hits, having stopped buying 45s in about 1985, was to buy the Now That’s What I Call Music! compilations which came out three times a year. Now 44 included That Don’t Impress Me Much in one of the strongest Now collections ever released. It’s still, more than twenty years later, the best-selling volume of the series.

That Don’t Impress Me Much was the seventh of twelve singles culled from the sixteen-track album.I was suspicious at first. It was said at the time that Twain’s husband and producer Mutt Lange had crafted her vocal track out of thousands of digital edits to make it “perfect”. As a music snob I thought we were hearing more of Lange’s work than Twain’s as a result. As a DJ however I could not argue with success. That Don’t Impress Me Much was a guaranteed floorfiller at gigs. That’s all a DJ asks.

It’s women who dance at discos. On the few occasions when I have played a man’s request, the floor emptied and the man in question stood against a side wall nodding appreciatively or making sporadic power gestures with his limbs. Women love to dance and a song which expresses their feelings, fantasies or frustrations with the world will always be a DJ’s friend.

In that respect That Don’t Impress Me Much sits right up there with Gloria Gaynor’s I Will Survive and the Weather Girls’ It’s Raining Men. It mocks men who think they are god’s gift to women by virtue of their hair style or the car they drive, and its opening fanfare summons women to join in the mockery in the safety of the dance floor, something they might not always feel able to do at home.

My gig supporting “Shania Twain” was a success, and the singer did a very good impression of the woman and her music. During the fit-up however I made a classic faux pas. The singer had naturally requested that I not play anything by the real Shania Twain and of course I agreed. Then unthinkingly I put on a country music compilation CD which I had bought specially for the occasion. Sure enough, the first track was You’re Still The One, the third single from Come On Over. Instantly “Shania” turned the air blue with her furious reaction. No doubt Shania would have done the same.

Turn Around (Phatts and Small, 1999)

Turn Around was included on Now That’s What I Call Music! 43, which I bought in desperation for a gig in late 1999. At the age of 41 I had no feel at all for the contemporary dance scene and was very apprehensive when I accepted a booking to play for a bunch of 13-14 year old boys who were celebrating the end of cadet camp at the army barracks in Warcop. I was still playing vinyl at gigs, reliant on my collection of old 45s which went back to the 1950s but not much further forward than 1985 – before my young audience had even been born.

Phatts and Small have endeared themselves to me for two reasons. When I started DJ-ing again in 1999 I had some catching up to do. I hadn’t followed the charts for about fourteen years and promoted myself very much as an oldies act. I used to joke wishfully that in my part of rural Cumbria the 1970s had never really gone away. There was a certain amount of truth in that, but people still wanted the current hits.

 I bought Now 43 and Top of the Pops ‘99 Volume 1 (a Now rival which also contained Turn Around) in an attempt to get up to speed. I played them non-stop for a week to familiarise myself with “what the young people were listening to these days” and expanded my two-turntable DJ rig with my domestic hi-fi CD player and my CD Walkman. The set-up looked exactly what it was – cobbled together by someone who had never run a disco using CDs.

 The Now That’s What I Call Music! series has been the dominant compilation brand in the UK since its launch in 1983. It is, in its 107 volumes to date, the nearest thing to an audio history of pop music since then. Inclusion on a Now ensures a kind of immortality for a pop act and Phatts and Small returned the favour by calling their debut album – what else could it have been called? – Now Phatts What I Small Music. A sense of humour goes  long way with me: Reason One to like the duo.

 The video for Turn Around was filmed in and around Brighton, the home town of Jason “Phatts” Hayward and Russell Small. Turn Around was their first and biggest hit, reaching #1 in Britain and Belgium and the Top Ten in seven other European countries. It made #10 in Canada but did not chart in the US or South America.

 The track is a very basic exercise in sampling. The rhythm is a loop of just one bar from a 1980 disco hit, Change’s The Glow of Love. Change were label mates with disco gods Chic at Atlantic Records and showed the considerable influence of Chic in their own singles. The bands used the same backing singers in the studio and – although he isn’t heard in the Phatts and Small sample – lead singer on The Glow of Love is a then unknown Luther Vandross.

 The Turn Around vocals are lifted from the first verse of Reach Up, a post-disco hit for singer Toney Lee in 1986. Phatts and Small mashed vocals and rhythm together and introduced variety by the simple trick of playing around with the EQ – boosting the treble or the bass, a technique pioneered by Daft Punk at the time.

 I was apprehensive as I arrived at the barracks. A soldier on duty at the gate waved me in. I felt I was under surveillance both by the army and by the toy soldiers I was supposed to be entertaining.But the boys were so excited to be getting their own disco and to be going home the next day that they danced to night away.

 They were only too happy to advise me on what to play. Out of 79 titles, my two double CDs had about fifteen credible dance tracks between them. Interspersed with older disco hits I played the chart music over and over again, to the delight of my audience – they cheered Turn Around each of the five times I played it. Reason 2.

 I bought every new edition of Now That’s What I Call Music! from then on as well as seeking out earlier volumes and investing in a proper CD DJ rig. By the time I retired in 2006 I had every ­one from Now 26 to Now 76. At time of writing Now is well into its second century. One man, Ashley Abram, compiled every Now from Now 2 to Now 81. Since the first Now in 1983, all but one, Now 4, has reached #1 in the UK charts.

 

My Feet Keep Dancing (Chic, 1979)

By the time this, Chic’s seventh hit, came out in December 1979 I was a bona fide Chic fan and bought the twelve-inch version on the day of release. I had a gig that night with Radio Claudine, the Student Union mobile disco of Queen Margaret College in Edinburgh.

We weren’t in truth all that mobile; most gigs were in-house or at Corstorphine Rugby Club where a member of the teaching staff was a regular. This gig was different. A former student had booked us to play for a dance at the farm where she volunteered. The place was a halfway house for people with mental health issues trying to re-enter the society from which in various ways they had fled.

I had been warned that some of the guests were fragile and in my ignorance of such conditions I was apprehensive of the night ahead. I needn’t have worried. Everyone was happy to be having a party; there was no alcohol; and they had turned the barn into a dance hall lined with straw bale seating. It was a great atmosphere. I played for seven straight hours from 8pm to 3am; and after a short nap I and everyone else started up again from around 5am for another four or five hours. It’s one of the nicest bookings I’ve ever had. All our feet kept dancing.

Not having heard My Feet Keep Dancing ahead of the gig, I played it early in the set in case it was a dud. As if. I liked it so much that I think I played it a further four times over the next twelve hours. Partly because of its association with that booking it remains my favourite Chic single.

Every hit has its hook, and My Feet Keep Dancing had three. The first is its chugging beat; while the drums play a relentless 4:4 of kick-snare kick-snare, the chords advance every three beats, jumping the gun and making your feet feel they have to catch up. The repetitive arrhythmic “Dancing!” of the chorus plays a similar trick.

Second, and almost unnoticed at first, are the strings. They play one note throughout (bar a little riff at the end of every eighth bar); but in a stroke of genius, three minutes into the song, the note starts to go up an octave every two bars. This incredibly simple device ratchets up the excitement until all that matters is the dancing.

Third, you can’t help but smile when halfway through the track the rhythm cuts to simple drum and bass to make way for … a tapdance solo. I defy any dancer not to be tempted to join in.

In the weeks that followed the gig I made several return visits to the farm as a volunteer, partly because I admired its work and partly because I admired the sleepy smiling eyes and wild red hair of the woman who had booked me. She and a colleague were, unknown to anyone, an item all the time and eventually left the farm together to do more good work elsewhere in the country. I was booked back for their farewell party, which was a very different affair.

My set was cut short after only two hours by the attempted suicide of one of the residents, a friendly young man with a bipolar disorder who could not cope with the imminent departure of my client. He locked himself in a toilet cubicle and made a pretty good attempt at cutting his wrists. Farce followed tragedy: the farm was in the dark in the middle of nowhere, and the attending ambulance could not find the entrance to the farm track. We watched frustrated from the farmyard as its blue light raced back and forth in the night on various West Lothian country lanes. I’m glad to say the unhappy man survived.

Thirty or so years later, Chic’s leader and guitarist Nile Rodgers was appearing at the Edinburgh International Book Festival to promote his new autobiography, Le Freak. His formal event was an interview by a famous Edinburgh author; it was a disappointment. The author was foul mouthed and Rodgers, out of politeness, responded in kind. But the night before that he had a spot in the festival bar which may be the best gig I’ve ever been at. As we filed in, he was sitting there on a high stool noodling on his famous transparent Fender Stratocaster. Then he began to talk to us, articulate thoughtful, witty. He overran his one-hour slot by at least an hour, regaling us with tales of his life and snatches of song.

At one point, when he invited questions, a bedroom guitarist in the fifth row asked if he could play the legendary guitar – “Gie’s a shot o’ yer guitar, Nile?” The room recoiled at the impudence, but not Nile, who passed it over the heads of the intervening four rows and listened patiently while the lad premiered his latest composition. Then Nile played the chaotic chords back to us all note for note, but embellished them with his trademark flare and rhythm. What an act of kindness and flattery by a charming, generous man.

O Superman (Laurie Anderson, 1981)

When we were young, we would from time to time (if we were lucky) hear a song which was (we were convinced) The Future Of Music^TM. I was raised, musically, on The Beatles via my mother’s copy of the Oldies But Goldies LP. I remember turning to her during Top of the Pops (the BBC’s long-running TV chart rundown) and telling her flatly, aged 14, “Now THAT’S music!” It was School’s Out by Alice Cooper and I was adolescently bewitched by the fury and the theatricality of the performance.

 I felt the same thing when Chic first emerged. That coincided with my first three years as a DJ and Nile Rodger’s instinctive feel for an inescapable hook made a profound impression on me. I believed that Chic could make the telephone directory catchy. And then, in my final year at college, O Superman blindsided me.

 By 1981 we were all used to hits where the rhythm was everything. Soul music had become disco music and in the early years of the Thatcher reign we were all dancing ourselves into numbness. Anything with a bass drum beat would do. But Laurie Anderson arrived with a vocal rhythm track, and more than that a rhythm track that was laughing bitterly with us at the state of the world. Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha. It was music stripped bare, it was punk, it was ambient pop, a catchy version of Brian Eno’s pioneering abstract 1970s albums Discreet Music and Music for Airports. It was eight and a half minutes long!

 The lyrics were equally bleak, tantalisingly obscure: something about American planes (made in America) and about authority figures – O Superman, O judge, O mom and dad. That phrase, we learned later, was based on an aria – Ô Souverain, ô juge, ô père – from Massenet’s 1885 opera Le Cid. The voice that spoke them (“Who is this really?”) was futuristic, electronic.

 The sparseness of the music made every word ominous and memorable. “Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds,” the optimistic unofficial motto of the US postal service, becomes a certainty that snow, rain, heat and gloom will try to stay those couriers. The decline of all things, overturning a phrase from the Tao Te Ching, suggests that Mom may be the least hopeful refuge of all: “when love is gone, there's always justice; and when justice is gone, there's always force; and when force is gone, there's always Mom.” The song always leaves me feeling unbearably sad.

 Championed by the original influencer, DJ John Peel, O Superman rose to #2 in the UK chart. But the song polarised opinion. It appeared in the Top Tens of Best and Least Favourite UK Hits of 1981.

 Eagerly anticipating the revolution which O Superman surely heralded, I waited for more of the same. There were green shoots. In the same year Rupert Hine released Immunity, the first of three albums of darkly complex electropop. Those LPs seemed to fulfil the musical promise of Quantum Jump, his quirky 1970s band which had an unexpected hit with their song The Lone Ranger. Hine wrote not of love but of solitary confinement, snipers and dystopias.

 Hine had his greatest successes as a producer of others: he made Tina Turner’s comeback album Private Dancer and (more significantly for me) the debut album of electropop artist Howard Jones, Human’s Lib. Jones was very much the idealist, and his optimistic songs chimed with my early 1970s musical roots – hippy ideals for the electropop age. I thought Jones was part of Laurie Anderson’s, Rupert Hine’s and my own Future Of Music^TM.

 If one thing is certain it is that nothing lasts forever. Everything is a fad, a phase. There has never been another O Superman; and Howard Jones now plays his greatest hits for the elderly on the 1980s retro circuit.

 But I did get to see Anderson perform O Superman live, in the Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh, in the early 1980s. My seat was next to the lighting operator in the gallery and in a pre-digital age he manipulated slides and shadows with a set of strings like a dexterous puppet master. Laurie Anderson was everything I hoped for: imaginative, innovative, amusing, amused. She played a violin fitted with a pick-up, across which she dragged a bow “strung” with magnetic tape. As she toyed with the tempo the word recorded onto the tape gradually came into focus. Bowed in one direction it said “Say”; bowed in the other it said “Yes”. Sayes. Say. Yes. Say yes. I was mesmerised.