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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 great Sounds from the Rock and Soul Archive and a few of the stories behind the songs. This week is another In Memoriam edition in which we celebrate a few of the musicians who joined that great gig in the sky over the past three months. I'll be playing tracks from Dolly Parton, ZZ Top, Bonnie Tyler, William Orbit, Kavinsky & many more and revealing a few of the stories behind the songs. First up, is EMF, whose keyboard player Derry Brownson left us in August. This is I Believe.
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EMF with I Believe, the follow-up to their chart-topping debut single from 1990, Unbelievable. Founder member and keyboard player Derry Brownson passed away in August aged just 55. So why am I playing I Believe instead of its predecessor? Well two reasons. Firstly cos I think I Believe is the better track, but also because the original album version of I Believe is preceded by a short sound-clip of Derry Brownson drunkenly smashing up furniture while vocalist James Atkin shouts "Derry! Derry! what are you doing?" and other members of the band are falling about laughing. But sadly I can't play you the clip because for it would consist mostly of bleeps to replace all the expletives. But despite his often wild behaviour, Brownson was -- as all the many testimonials published by fans and his bandmates since his passing -- the sweetest guy. "He was beautiful inside and out," said guitarist Ian Dench. "I can't think of anyone who embodied lust for life like Derry did but underneath all that excitement and laughter he was a sensitive soul."
Most of EMF were famously hard-partying teenagers from the town of Cinderford in the Forest Of Dean in Gloucestershire. The name actually stands for Epsom Mad Funkers -- though the band later claimed it stood for several other alternative phrases including Ecstasy Mother ... oops there's that expletive deleted bleep again. They borrowed it from a description in the music paper the NME by journalist David Quantick of the fans of New Order.
Initially, it was just the trio of Atkin, Brownson and bassplayer Zac Foley. "We didn't have much direction," Atkin told the Guardian. "We'd just go to the village hall and muck about dressing in jumble sale clothes. We had the name EMF but no songs." But then they teamed up with Ian Dench, who was a few years older and had been playing in various local bands for several years. "We’d sit around Ian’s mum’s piano with this really primitive synthesiser and wrote the 10 songs that ended up on our first album Schubert Dip. I said “I want to be Chicago house, Detroit techno” but Ian pulled us back into crossover indie/dance." They had a couple of glorious years in the early 90s, but nothing quite matched the success of Unbelievable, and their truly superb second album Stigma was an undeserved commercial failure, and they eventually split up towards the end of the decade, though there have been a few reunions since then.
Two more hard-partying musicians now, each of them Like Derry Brownson the lynchpin of their respective bands. In a few minutes, we'll honour Eugene O'Connor -- known professionally as Cheetah Chrome -- who was the guitarist for American punk pioneers the Dead Boys. More about them in a few minutes, but first let's celebrate ZZ Top drummer Frank Beard, who also passed away in August. Formed in 1969 in Houston, Texas, ZZ Top had been paying their dues for more than a decade before they finally achieved global commercial success in the early 1980s with the album Eliminator, and its three multi-million selling singles. I played one of these, Legs, last week, but this was the first, their international breakthrough from 1983. This is Gimme All Your Lovin.
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Gimme All Your Lovin from ZZ Top followed by the Dead Boys and their anthem Sonic Reducer. Though the Dead Boys grew up in the same mid-1970s New York scene centred around the club venue CBGBs as Patti Smith, Blondie, Talking Heads, Television and The Ramones, they were actually cut from quite different cloth. Most of those other bands were more like the rock n roll equivalent of performance art, and the Ramones were musically if not lyrically a harder-edged version of Phil Spector's 50's Wall Of Sound pop.
But the Dead Boys were more akin to British punk bands like The Damned and The Sex Pistols: badly behaved brats with buckets full of attitude. No wonder their debut album was titled Young Loud & Snotty. Oddly enough, though, that track Sonic Reducer was co-written by guitarist Cheetah Chrome with another notable figure from the art-rock world, Pere Ubu's mild-mannered front man David Thomas.
Next up, we'll mark the passing of two major figures from the British entertainment world. In a few minutes, a man best-known as a silken-voiced film and television actor but who first made his name playing a pansexual cross-dressing mad scientist in one of the most unusual and outrageous stage musicals of the 1970s. I'm sure you already know who I mean. More about him in a few minutes.
But first the much loved Welsh singer Bonnie Tyler, sometimes described as Britain's first lady of rock. Earlier this year she celebrated five decades in the music industry since the release of her first single in 1976. Tyler worked consistently throughout the intervening years, releasing her most recent single in April this year, just three months before her unexpected passing in July. She is probably best-known for Total Eclipse Of The Heart and Holding Out For A Hero two massive global hits in the 1980s that were both overseen by the American producer Jim Steinman, also the man behind the Meatloaf albums. But I'm going to play her breakthrough single, released in 1977. It was her 5th single, but the previous four had not really enjoyed much success. In early 1977, she underwent an operation to remove nodules from her vocal cords. The procedure was a success and didn't affect her ability to sing, but it completely changed the sound of her voice, giving her a husky rasp that was to become her unique sound. This was the first song she recorded following that operation. It's A Heartache.
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Who else but the lovely Tim Curry in the role that made him famous, as the "sweet transvestite" Dr Frank N Furter in the counter-culture masterpiece The Rocky Horror Show. Or more correctly that's actually the version from the film adaptation The Rocky Horror Picture Show, and follows his big entrance. Many actors since have played the part onstage, but for sheer camp and silken gorgeousness, Curry's performance has never been equalled let alone bested. The character was originally intended to have peroxide blonde hair and a German accent, and it was Curry's idea to have him speak in a cut-glass Belgravia accent. "He should sound like the Queen" he said.
I think we safely say that the show's author and composer Richard O'Brien, who co-starred as the Dr's servant Riff Raff, could never have expected or anticipated the show's massive global popularity. More than 50 years later, there are still productions of the Rocky Horror being performed all over the world. In 2023, on its 50th anniversary, the BBC reported that it had been performed in 20 different languages and had been seen well over 30 million people.
Tim Curry himself went on to enjoy a long and successful career on stage, and in cinema and television in the US and in the UK. He was amazingly versatile as an actor, but was often at his very best when playing similarly outrageous and over-the-top characters. No one could match him for cartoonish tongue-in-cheek villainy. Tragically, Curry suffered a stroke in 2012, which confined him to a wheelchair and ended his screen and stage career, but he continued to lend his inimitable voice to audio-based projects until he finally succumbed to ill health in August.
Two more musicians now, who are better known for their skills behind their scenes. In a few minutes, the musician and producer William Orbit, but first Vincent Belorgey, a French DJ and producer who released music under the stage name Kavinsky. He was a key figure from the second ranks of the French house scene of the 1990s that was led by Daft Punk and Cassius. He was widely celebrated in his home country but never reached the same level of international success as Daft Punk or Cassius. When he died in July at the age of 50, possibly from a stroke, he received tributes not just from his fellow musicians but also from figures as significant as the French Culture Minister, the Mayor of Paris and even President Macron who called him "a source of French Pride forever".
He adopted the stage name of Kavinsky, he said in 2007, because "Showing my own face holds absolutely no interest for me. Kavinsky is a character I created because just putting my face on a record sleeve isn't something that suits me. I'd much rather make music and tell a story, because for me music is linked to images. When I'm making music, I have images in my head of films and television shows I liked when I was little. So I created this story that mixes all those memories together."
It's appropriate then that Kavinsky is probably best known for Night Call, the track he contributed to the soundtrack of Nicholas Winding Refn's noir crime thriller Drive, starring Ryan Gosling. Belorgey had originally recorded the song to explain the back story of his fictional stage persona. Kavinsky, he explained, is a man who died when he crashed his Ferrari Testarossa sports car, but is then resurrected as a zombie. "Night Call he said is about when the zombie guy goes to his former girlfriend's house and says okay I'm not the same, we need to talk." This is Night Call
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Night Call by Kavinsky and then a version of She Cries Your Name by Strange Cargo, one of the many projects launched by William Orbit over the course of almost 45 years as a prolific musician and producer. The song was originally written by Orbit with his then-girlfriend Beth Orton. She released it first on her 1993 album SuperpinkyMandy, produced by Orbit.
I played his version, which he released two years later as a solo project under the stage name Strange Cargo. He released four albums of ambient electronic music under the Strange Cargo between 1987 and 1995, and other projects in that period included rap house collective Bass-o-matic, and synthpop group Torch Song. Orbit also released two acclaimed albums of electronic covers of well-known pieces of classical music, Pieces In A Modern Style.
However, his greatest fame was as a remixer and producer of other artists' material. Two fine remixes of tracks by Madonna resulted in him getting the call to work with her in the studio on her 1998 album Ray Of Light, and then again two years later on its follow-up Music. There were other collaborations over the course of the 2000s with artists as varied as Britney Spears, All Saints, U2, Queen, Blur, Robbie Williams and many others. But these were not happy times for him' He had a habit of obsessing over his production work, often spending months on even the smallest details. He worked on Madonna's Ray Of Light for four months, and spent all of two months constantly refining and remixing the All Saints song Pure Shores for the soundtrack of the movie The Beach. He died in July at the age of 69.
Now we have to acknowledge the sad passing of one of the giants of popular music and indeed of popular culture over the past 60-plus years. Even people who have no liking for country music like Dolly Parton, and it would be close to impossible to find anyone with a bad word to say about her. Always self-deprecating -- self-deprecating to a fault indeed -- about her appearance and her background, she was nonetheless a songwriter of musician of immense talent and ability, who released an astonishing 49 studio albums with combined sales in excess of 100 million copies. Her career that spanned almost 75 years. She wrote her first song aged six, was performing regularly on television at age 10 and published her first professional song at 16. Two of the songs she wrote are among the highest-selling of all time: Jolene and I Will Always Love You, the latter first recorded by Parton and then subsequently covered by Whitney Houston. Legend has it that both songs were written by her on the same afternoon in 1972 or 1973.
I'm going to play two of Dolly's songs now. Jolene, of course, which she said was written about a tall and beautiful bank clerk in Nashville who would always flirt with her husband Carl when he went in to deposit or withdraw cash. However the name Jolene and the description of a girl with red hair, green eyes and fair skin were inspired by a strikingly beautiful 8 year old fan who once came up to her onstage and asked for her autograph. She was so impressed by the little girl's beauty that she asked her name, and then repeated it over and over to herself so she would remember it. Jolene, Jolene, Jolene.
After that Here You Come Again, another big hit for her, but also a comparatively rare example of a song she didn't write herself. It's by the celebrated songwriting team of Barry Mann and Cynthia Weill, and became the title track of the 1977 album in which Dolly began to cross over from traditional country into the wider pop market. But first, Jolene.
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OK we're heading into the break now. I will be back with you again after the news with another hour of great music honouring artists who left us over the past three months, with tracks from Martha & The Vandellas, The Teardrop Explodes, Lipps Inc, Funky 4 + 1 and many more.
But first, let's celebrate an important musician who passed away on the last day of June this year, too late for inclusion in my last quarterly In Memoriam edition.
Victor Willis was the original singer and figurehead of Village People, as well as the co author of all of their biggest hits including YMCA, In The Navy and Go West. Yet it was a role with which he grew increasingly uncomfortable, and in fact he always resisted the general impression that all their songs were specifically about gay life. "That is a false assumption," he said on several occasions, "based on the fact that my writing partner was gay, and some (not all) of Village People were gay." Willis himself was straight and claimed that his lyrics were simply about friendship. The line in YMCA "you can hang out with all the boys" was, he said, "simply 1970s Black slang for Black guys hanging out together for sports, gambling or whatever. There's nothing gay about that."
Whatever Willis' own intentions might have been, Village People's founder and mastermind, the French disco producer Jacques Morali, was certainly gay and always conceived of the project as a bold symbol of out gay life. In 1977, he was looking for a vocalist for an album of disco songs he'd written with his business partner Henri Belolo, and was introduced to Willis, who was then working as a session singer and backing vocalist. They recorded a couple of demos and Morali was impressed by what he described as "this young man with the big voice". "I had a dream that you sang lead on my album," he told Willis, "and it went very, very big". So they went into the studio to record an album entitled Village People. With songs like San Francisco and Fire Island, it was undeniably about gay life, and it was a big success internationally, especially with gay clubgoers.
At the time, though, Village People was just one guy, Victor Willis, so Morali hastily recruited a group of dancers who could perform alongside him. He placed an ad in the trade press: "Macho Types Wanted," it said. "Must Dance And Have A Moustache", and what was to become the familiar line-up of costumed macho stereotypes was assembled to back Willis, who took on the role of a motorcycle cop. Their job, said cowboy Randy Jones, was to "breathe life into the fantasies of the music and to sing, promote, and bring the concept of Village People to television and to the live performance onstage."
Macho Man was the title of Village People's second album, released in 1978, and now Willis was himself contributing to songwriting. For their third album, Cruisin', released later the same year, all songs were jointly credited to Jacques Morali and Victor Willis. They included what was to become the Village People anthem, YMCA. The 4th album, Go West, also including In The Navy, was released in march 1979.
But by now, Willis was tiring of the project, not least because he had been persuaded to assign his one-third share of songwriting royalties to companies controlled by Morali and Berolo. Just before production began in summer of 1979 on what was to prove a disastrous Village People movie called Cant Stop The Music, Willis quit. He had been in the group for only two years.
He was persuaded to return for one further album in the 1980s, but departed once again in 1984 and the next few years were not easy. He tried but failed to restart his career as a solo singer, partly because he refused to perform any Village People songs, and he tried to ease the pain with drugs. There were several run-ins with law enforcement.
Eventually though, after almost 20 years in the shadows, Willis cleaned up, and commenced legal action to take back direct ownership of his share of royalties for the songs he'd co-authored. By this time, Morali had died, and finally, in 2015, a jury agreed that his partner Henri Berolo had not in fact actively contributed to the writing of any of Village People's biggest hits. Victor Willis was awarded 50% of all royalties. A few years later, Berolo, who still owned the Village People name persuaded Willis to resume recording and touring with a reconstituted group. He continued to do so until 2025.
So how shall we celebrate Victor Willis's contribution to popular culture? Well, it's obvious isn't it?