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Every track has a story. Classic songs from the rock music, pop, reggae & soul archive and the stories behind them with Simon Tesler, founder and former editor of 1980s music, media and pop culture magazine BLITZ.
Hello, this is Simon Tesler with more classic Sounds from the Rock and Soul Archive and the stories behind the songs. This week my theme is HEARTS: yes, hearts broken, hearts mended and hearts beating as one from Blondie, St Etienne, Al Green, U2, The Jacksons and many more. But first up, Groove Is In Heart from Dee Lite.
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The glorious Groove Is In The Heart, from the New York based dance trio Deee-Lite, who exploded onto dancefloors around the world in 1990. Singer Lady Miss Kier -- real name Kierin Magenta Kirby -- and her partner Dmitry Brill were already well-known faces on the New York club scene. Kier was herself a sort of spiritual predecessor to Lady Gaga, a larger than life character in zipped-up 60s-style catsuits, platform shies and extravagant beehive hairdos, while Dmitry was already an in-demand DJ at clubs such as Danceteria, Paradise Garage and Pyramid. Kier would accompany him to most gigs.
“We were out at least five nights a week," she told DJ magazine, "him in the DJ booth and myself on his dance floor. We weren’t out to drink or do drugs, we were there to dance.” Kier started writing songs in around 1986, and they started performing these in clubs to pre-recorded backing tracks and samples, teaming up with Japanese-born producer Towa Tei two years later, already a self-taught expert in sample mash-ups. All of the songs on their debut album were built around samples from other records. Groove Is In The Heart, for example, was built around the bassline on a track by Herbie Hancock.
“I wrote the lyrics for Groove Is In The Heart before I heard the musical loop,” Keir said. “Dmitry had a record by Herbie Hancock and I can’t remember if he or Towa found the loop, but as soon as I heard it I laid down the melody that was in my head and we all added samples onto it."
Even that repeated, I-I-I-I-I refrain is a sample, not a loop of Kier singing. It's a single note lifted from Eva Gabor's theme song for a cheesy American sitcom called Green Acres.
Around the same time, Kier wrote a fan letter to the celebrated bassplayer Bootsy Collins, originally a member of James Brown's Famous Flames backing band, and then of George Clinton's Parliament and Funkadelic. She enclosed a demon tape and to her amazement he wrote back saying he'd love to work with them if they ever got a record deal. When they got signed in 1989 he lived up to his promise, and introduced them to two other musical legends from James Brown's circle, the horn players Fred Wesley and Maceo Parker. Bootsy didn't play bass on Groove Is In The Heart, that's still the Herbie Hancock sample, but it's Fred and Maceo on trombone and saxophone. Everything else is a sample, including the drum track lifted from Vernon Burch's track Get Up.
The song was a huge hit globally, and so was their accompanying album World Clique, but from that point onwards it was a case of slowly diminishing returns. The next three albums each fared less well than its predecessor and Deee-Lite eventually went their separate ways in 1994. Groove Is In The Heart lives on.
Two more goddesses of the groove now. In a few minutes, Blondie, but first it's pixie pop princess Kylie Minogue and 2 Hearts. Released in 2007, it marked her return to the music business after a two year absence as she battled breast cancer. The song was originally written and recorded two years earlier by the London electronic duo Kish Mauve, comprising singer Mima Stilwell and synth player Jim Eliot. They pitched the song directly to Kylie and she loved it, so much so that she signed them up to produce her version as well. This is 2 Hearts.
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2 Hearts from Kylie followed by the song that transformed Blondie from New York pop punks with a cult following to bona fide pop superstars. And in the process prompted a fierce backlash from many fans who accused them of selling out to the disco crowd. They already had a following in a few international markets, most notably in the UK, where Denis had got to No 2 in the charts a year earlier. But in their home market of the US, not one of their nine previous singles had been even a minor chart hit. Heart Of Glass went to No 1.
Oddly enough the song had been kicking around for years. Debbie Harry and partner Chris Stein had originally penned it in 1974, just after they formed a group together as Angel & The Snake. Their inspiration was the Hues Corporation's early disco hit Rock The Boat, and they called the first version Once I Had A Love. “We were living in a loft in New York’s then-notorious Bowery area," Harry told The Guardian newspaper in 2013, "rehearsing at night in rooms so cold we had to wear gloves. It was one of the first songs we wrote... We tried it as a ballad, as reggae, but it never quite worked. At that point, it had no title. We just called it The Disco Song.”
But the song didn't fit in with the rough and ready style of New York's emerging proto-punk scene, so they out it away and almost forgot about it, until they went into the studio in 1978 to work on their third album Parallel Lines with Australian producer Mike Chapman, a veteran of Britain's early 70s pop market. With his former business partner Nicky Chinn he'd overseen the success of bands including The Sweet, Suzi Quatro and Mud. He asked to see all the songs they had.
Chapman told Classic Rock "Most of the ideas were unfinished songs that I needed to help them arrange and basically finish writing. One of the demos was a song called Once I Had a Love. It had a reggae feel and I told them the title was too long and suggested they call it Heart of Glass, which was one of the lines in the chorus. I thought the song was an obvious hit if the arrangement was right." After a few rehearsals they ditched the reggae feel, and tried to do it as straight rock but that didn't work either.
"I could see Debbie was getting a bit frustrated," said Chapman. "So, I asked her, ‘Debbie, what kind of music that’s happening right now really turns you on?’ She said, ‘Donna Summer.’ I said, ‘OK, then how about us treating this song like it was meant for Donna Summer?’”
When it turned out to be such a huge hit, it cost Harry and Stein a few of their friends. "It wasn’t cool in our social set to play disco," she wrote in her autobiography Making Tracks, "but we did it because we wanted to be uncool. A lot of people we’d hung out and been close friends with on the scene for years said we’d sold out by doing a disco song. This is a blatantly ridiculous statement. It always annoyed me that people could have the nerve to pretend to be so stupid. We’d been consciously looking for a sound to break into American radio, and Heart of Glass was one of the most innovative songs Blondie ever recorded. The reason it’s a hit is because it’s a good song.”
OK, here's another song that has existed in several different musical styles. It was originally written and recorded by the prolific American songwriter Dennis Linde. His song Burning Love had been a huge hit for Elvis Presley in 1972, and he used that success to get himself a deal as a recording artist in his own right. He recorded a couple of albums mid-decade but his career as a performer never really took off. Yet his songs kept on being covered by other people.
In 1980, two very different British acts recorded striking different versions of a song he'd written as a sort of folk rock ballad. Manfred Mann's Earth Band covered it as synth rock song, sort of Pink Floyd meets Ultravox. But the former Deaf School singer Bette Bright did something completely different. This is her version of the same song, Hello I Am Your Heart. Also playing on the track are her former Deaf School colleague Clive Langer, then turning into a star producer as a result of his work with Madness and The Teardrop Explodes, Madness sax player Lee Thompson and the British reggae band The Cimarrons.
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Hello I Am Your Heart by Bette Bright, and then U2 with Two Hearts Beat As One, from their third album War. What with Adam Clayton's funk punk bassline and Larry Mullen's hit-hat drum patterns that might just be U2's first stab at disco.
This is still the rough and ready U2, not the more polished stadium-conquering mega-band they would become a couple of years later. It's also and out and out love song, arguably the band's first after the rather more spiritual pondering of the songs Bono wrote for their first two albums. Producer Steve Lillywhite told the BBC in 2008, "The band had been questioning whether their beliefs could coincide with their new experiences. And in the end, it was their manager Paul McGuinness who sat down and said, 'Don't be so silly; you can have them both'."
So Bono actually wrote Two Hearts Beat As One as a love letter to his new wife. He'd been dating Ali Stewart since 1975 and they finally tied the knot in August 1982. Bono being Bono, though, he spent at least part of their honeymoon in the Caribbean working on songs for the upcoming album -- another song on the album, New Year's Day, also began as a love song to Ali but was subsequently reshaped to be a song about the Polish Solidarity movement -- and he was still wrestling with questions of faith and his purpose in life.
Two Hearts begins "I don't know which side I'm on / I don't know my right from left / Or my right from wrong / Say I'm a fool / Say I'm nothing / But if I'm a fool for you / Oh, that's something."
Two more unusual love songs now. In a minute, The Vibrators with You Broke My Heart. But, first, another performer from the early days of British punk rock. Patrik Fitzgerald was a sort of offbeat Bob Dylan of the later 70s and beyond. Sometimes described as the original punk poet, he was a very different, much gentler character compared to the spiky and irascible John Cooper Clarke, who shared that punk poet title with him. Fitzgerald started out as a busker performing his poetry to his own acoustic guitar, but he got swept up in the punk movement when it exploded during 1977, and secured a deal with one of the many indie record labels then springing up all over the country. He has continued recording sporadically ever since, but he's still best known by far for his first single. This is Safety Pin Stuck In My Heart.
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Patrik Fitzgerald with Safety Pin Stuck in My Heart, followed by The Vibrators with the wonderful You Broke My Heart -- I do love that song, I can't believe that's the first time I'm playing it on this show -- and then we rounded off with Heart Of The City by Nick Lowe, the b-side to So It Goes, which was the first single ever released by the revered indie label Stiff Records.
Two more British bands now, or rather Scottish bands to be more specific, and both from the following decade, musically a rather gentler period. In a few minutes, The Bluebells with Young At Heart. But first, a lovely song from Aztec Camera, which was of course the vehicle for singer songwriter Roddy Frame, a former wunderkind who recorded his first single under the name Aztec Camera when he was just 16, and subsequently became one of the most admired songwriters of the 80s. His first two albums High Land Hard Rain and Knife were heaped with praise and their success, and the pressure that came with it, led to a period in which Frame -- still only 20 years old -- retreated from the music business for more than two years, struggling with mental health issues and living for part of that time in a wooden shack in Hollywood.
Gradually he got himself together again, and began writing again. His inspiration this time around came the new generation of mid-80s funk performers and producers. "I went to America and wanted to make a Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis kinda record. I was listening to Sugar Free by Juicy, Anita Baker, people like that. Green from Scritti Politti had just been to America and I wanted to marry that New York R&B electro thing with my kind of lyrics and style and that British thing."
That album -- Love -- was released in 1987. But one song he wrote at around the same time -- Somewhere In My Heart -- had come from a different place altogether.
“When I wrote that I was walking around with a Walkman playing Bruce Springsteen all the time. But it was all of his poppy stuff. I got into Springsteen back to front; I started with Born in the USA and Tunnel of Love and worked backward. I guess I was just trying to come up with something like Hungry Heart or something. Just something really strong and catchy. I was trying to write a pop song. But when it came to putting Love together I tried everything to keep it off the album." He said it didn't feel like a stylistic fit with the rest of the album, but he eventually gave in under pressure from the record company, who insisted it was a surefire hit.
Released as the third single from Love, it became the biggest hit of his career. “I didn’t really get it," he said, "until I was being driven down Ladbroke Grove one day and the sun was shining and someone was in a convertible and I heard it blaring out on their radio. It’s one of those songs. It was my biggest hit but it was the runt of the litter. That’s been the song that’s survived. My little baby, the orphan that no one wanted!"
This is Somewhere In My Heart.
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After Aztec Camera and Somewhere In My Heart that was The Bluebells with their biggest ever hit Young At Heart, released in 1984. It did pretty well back then, earning a brief stay in the UK top 10. But you probably know the song because almost 10 years later it was used as the soundtrack for a Volkswagen ad. The Bluebells had already split up by then, but the single was re-released and became a hit all over again: a no 1 single for 4 weeks.
But were you aware that The Bluebells' version was not the original recording? A year before, a very different version was included on Bananarama's first album. "Our version was more like a northern soul stomper," said Bananarama's Siobhan Fahey, and she should know, because she co-wrote the song with her boyfriend at the time.... who just happened to be Bobby Hodgens of The Bluebells.
"One night," Hodgens told The Guardian, "we were lying in bed watching the Frank Sinatra film Young at Heart, one of my dad’s favourites, and talking about our backgrounds. Siobhan is Irish but her father was in the British army, so she’d moved around and changed schools a lot. I think she had just wanted to escape, so we started writing lyrics about how her parents had got married young to have sex and have kids, because that’s what people did then."
"You can hear the difference," said Fahey "between our personalities in the song. My words reek with pain, his are more loving: two very different experiences of growing up."
Now we'll return to Siobhan Fahey again in part two of the show, but we're heading towards the break. I will be back with you after the news for another hour of great music on the theme of HEART. But to take us there two very different tracks.
Only Love Can Break Your Heart is a song that has come to be closely associated with St Etienne. Released in 1990, it was their first ever single, predating even the arrival of Sarah Cracknell as St Etienne's vocalist. At the time St Etienne was just school friends Bob Stanley and Pete Wiggs and their original plan was to use a different singer on each song. Only Love Can Break Your Heart features the vocalist Moira Lambert. And of course it's actually a cover version of the song originally written and recorded by Neil Young for his album After The Goldrush.
He wrote it for his friend and former bandmate Graham Nash to mark the end of Nash's relationship with the Canadian folk heroine Joni Mitchell. They had spent several passionate years as a couple -- and shared a house in LA -- and it was actually Mitchell who inspired the formation of the group Crosby Stills Nash & Young by introducing David Crosby to Neil Young. But Nash's excesses on tour began to create problems within the relationship, and the two began to argue more and more frequently. Eventually Mitchell walked out. Nash was absolutely devastated, and it was that breakup that inspired Neil Young to write the song.
"It's a beautiful song," Graham Nash said later, "and it was incredibly important for me to hear what Neil had said because he was dead right, it is only love that can break your heart. We are strong, mankind, but these love things can really trip you up.”
That's in a few minutes. But first, an extraordinary electronic collage by the mysterious Australian duo The Avalanches. You probably know their best-known track Frontier Psychiatrist, which I played a few months ago, but this is another track from their debut album Since I left You. Rather like Groove Is In The Heart with which we started the show, this is a track composed from samples, but between 1989 when Dee-Lite were making their first album, and 2000 when The Avalanches were working on theirs, computer technology had increased almost a hundred-fold making even the most incredibly complex cut-and-paste audio collages possible. There are elements lifted from at least 14 different sources, most obviously from different parts of the movie Cabaret, as well as from songs by John Cale and the Beach Boys, but the main vocal sample comes from a mid-70s track by the American jazz singer Marlena Shaw. This is Two Hearts In 3/4 Time.