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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.
I'm Simon Tesler, back with you for another hour of great music on the theme of DOCTORS. Feeling hot and sweaty and maybe a little shivery? You've probably got a fever. Don't worry, you're not alone. Gwen Guthrie has it too.
**
Now you may know the American singer Gwen Guthrie for her dance anthem Ain't Nothin Goin On But The Rent, a global smash in 1986, but by then she'd already been working in the music business for years. She got her start in the early 1970s as a studio session player, recording backing vocals for the likes of Aretha Franklin, Stevie Wonder and Billy Joel. She also turned her hand to writing, composing songs for Sister Sledge before they hooked up with Chic, and for Roberta Flack.
However, it was a session job in 1978 that was to change the course of her career. The reggae star Peter Tosh, formerly of Bob Marley's Wailers, was in New York to record Bush Doctor, his first album for the Rolling Stones' record label. Guthrie was hired as one of the backing singers and she hit it off with the legendary rhythm duo Sly Dunbar and Robbie Shakespeare, who were also backing Tosh on the album.
When they finished work on Bush Doctor they invited Guthrie to come and record a few tracks at Island Records' Compass Point Studios in the Bahamas. Her version of Bob Marley's Is This Love caught the ear of Island Records founder Chris Blackwell and he signed Guthrie to a three album deal, backed by Sly and Robbie. I just played the title track from the first of those LPs, Dance Fever. There are some great tracks on all three but none proved to be a sizeable hit until she swapped Sly & Robbie for the Paradise Garage DJ Larry Levan. That led to Nothin Goin On But The Rent.
More Fever now with two killer songs from four Australian singers who need no introduction whatsoever. You know who they are.
**
Yes of course, that was the Brothers Gibb, Maurice, Barry and Robin, better known as the Bee Gees with one of the mammoth tracks from the soundtrack of the movie Saturday Night Fever. And then, the pixie pop princess Kylie Minogue with Burnin' Hot, the closing track from her smash hit album Fever. Amazing isn't it how dance music was the style that relaunched the careers of both those acts.
It's hard to remember now but the Bee Gees' career was coming to an end back then in the early 1970s. They'd been very successful during the previous decade with a slightly folky style of pop music, but by the turn of the decade they'd rather lost their way. Their singles and albums weren't selling and they'd gone from selling out large auditoriums to playing regional variety clubs.
"We were fairly dead in the water at that point," Barry Gibb told an interviewer from The New Yorker. "1975, somewhere in that zone, the Bee Gees' sound was basically tired. We needed something new. We hadn't had a hit record in about three years. So we felt, Oh Jeez, that's it. That's our life span, like most groups from the late '60s. So, we had to find something. We didn't know what was going to happen."
It was Eric Clapton of all people who suggested they move to Florida and try their hand at a hot new trend called disco music. Jive Talkin' was their first stab at this, and was also the first time Barry tried singing in falsetto rather than his usual tone. Jive Talkin' was a hit and it looked like the Bee Gees might have found a way to reignite their career, so they started writing some new songs in the same style.
As it happened, at around the same time, their long time manager Robert Stigwood had bought the rights to an article that had been published in New York magazine called Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night. This was a piece by the British journalist Nik Cohn about working class kids in the New York suburbs who got dressed up every Saturday Night to go dancing. Stigwood thought it would make a good movie, which he called Saturday Night.
Now if you've seen the movie you'll know that for the most part it's just a gritty street-hustle drama, like Martin Scorsese's Mean Streets but with discos and dancing instead of bars and gangsters. When they started filming the movie, the dance sequences were all choregraphed to songs from Stevie Wonder and Boz Scaggs. But when it came to finalising the soundtrack it turned out that the movie's budget wouldn't stretch to rights for big names like that. So Stigwood turned to the Bee Gees. Now they'd just written a song called Night Fever, so they suggested to Stigwood, "Rather than call the film Saturday Night, why not call it Saturday Night fever instead", and we have a whole bunch of other songs you can use too..." And so a legend was born.
And of course Kylie also re-ignited her career in the late 1990s by switching from experimental trip hop and rock to plain and simple dance music. Burnin' Hot is one of the less well known songs on the Fever album, but particularly interesting in the way it keeps switching from upbeat disco to laid back ballad.
Keep those dancing shoes on for one more track now, from the British electronic house project Electribe 101. They were originally four guys from Birmingham who had been creating dance music to play at their own club nights in the city. But they needed a female singer. That's when they stumbled upon a jobs wanted ad in the music paper Melody Maker. It read "Soul rebel seeks musicians – genius only". The ad been placed by the German-born singer Billie Ray Martin who had relocated to London to try and launch a career in music. It all just came together from there. I'm going to play their breakthrough track, Tell Me When The Fever Ended.
**
Well the fever's not over just yet... how can I play a string of songs about Fever without referencing the grandmama of them all, from the one and only Peggy Lee. Almost everybody knows her version of the song, recorded in 1958, and it's the track for which she is best known by far.
But it wasn't her song at all. It was written three years earlier by Eddie Cooley and pianist Otis Blackwell. Now, Otis Blackwell already had plenty of form. His other songs include such rock & roll classics as All Shook Up and Don't Be Cruel and Great Balls Of Fire. Fever was first recorded by the 18 year rock n roll hopeful Little Willie John and it was a sizeable hit, so much so that a couple of other versions were released over the following years.
Peggy Lee was the first woman to try her hand at the song, and she added her own new lyrics about Romeo and Juliet and Captain Smith and Pocahontas. Her producer and conductor favoured a much more complex big band arrangement but Lee insisted on a stripped-down arrangement: just bass, percussion and finger-snaps, and her sultry sensual voice. In a few minutes, another sultry sensual singer, Alison Goldfrapp is waking up in the accident & emergency department of her local hospital with A&E but this Peggy Lee and Fever.
**
A&E was the first single from Goldfrapp's 4th album Seventh Tree, and that song and indeed the whole album demonstrated a complete change of style from the synth-led electronica of their twoo previous albums towards a more acoustic style of folk-based pop. Alison told The Guardian newspaper that the change of direction resulted directly from an unplugged session they were asked to do for DJ Jo Whiley's show on BBC Radio.
"We were very against playing acoustic sets before that - one, because we're not an acoustic band and, two, because people often want to hear you unplugged as they think that validates your status as musicians, which we're very anti. But we were so desperate to take our music down a few notches, we went sort of, unggh, nyaaargh, oh-kaaaay. And then - ha! - we loved it."
The song A&E is in fact based on a real-life experience for Alison, but not because of the sort of home alone overdose scenario described in the song. "It was inspired by a few hours I had in A&E on a Saturday afternoon. It was nothing serious but I remember they pumped me up with loads of painkillers. I was standing there looking at all these rugby players coming in on trolleys - arms up here, noses round there. They were in those weird green gowns they make you wear and it was all a bit surreal. And I suppose A&E is also a sort of metaphor for a relationship that was going horribly wrong. That's all mixed up in the song too."
Now for another song inspired by a real-life medical emergency. Comfortably Numb is, of course, one of the standout tracks on Pink Floyd's The Wall album, with lyrics written by Roger Waters, while the music was largely the work of David Gilmour. Their working relationship was already beginning to disintegrate and this particular song prompted one of their fiercest arguments up to that point, and arguably initiated the eventual break-up of the band. Gilmour had come up with the musical theme and wanted the song to retain the stripped back simple arrangement he had conceived, whereas Roger Waters favoured a full orchestral backing. In the end they agreed on a compromise with the first verse stripped back and the second featuring the orchestra.
“We argued over Comfortably Numb like mad,” said Gilmour later. “Really had a big fight, went on for ages. ... Those were the last embers of mine and Roger’s ability to work collaboratively together."
Though the lyrics suggest that it's Waters' account of a childhood infection, it was actually inspired by an experience he had while touring with Pink Floyd in the US in 1977. He actually had hepatitis but didn't realise it.
He told Mojo, "I had stomach cramps so bad that I thought I wasn't able to go on stage. A doctor backstage gave me a shot of something that I swear to God would have killed an elephant. I did the whole show hardly able to raise my hand above my knee. He said it was a muscular relaxant. But it rendered me almost insensible. It was so bad that at the end of the show, the audience was baying for more. I couldn't do it. They did the encore without me."
Here it is. Comfortably Numb.
**
It feels very odd to go from Pink Floyd to two bands who marked the complete opposite in musical style in the later 1970s. Famously, John Lydon was first asked to come and try out for what became the Sex Pistols because someone from Malcolm McLaren's circle spotted him walking down London's Kings Road wearing a home-customised t-shirt that read I Hate Pink Floyd. Well, I'm not actually playing the Pistols but two of their peers. In a few minutes, we're going to close the show with a classic song from Van Morrison, but first, The Boys and The Damned, two other bands from the first wave of punk.
The Boys never really made it big, but they were great live, and released several great singles and two fine albums in 1977 and 1978. First up is a track from their first album which became a fan favourite at the time because of its title and lyrics. You'll understand why in a minute. After that, The Damned with Sick Of Being Sick, originally released as a promotional fans-only single in the summer of 1977, but later re-recorded for their second album Music For Pleasure. First though, The Boys and Sick On You.
**
Another change in musical style for an early blues-soaked early masterpiece by Van Morrison, TB Sheets. It was recorded in March 1967 in New York and was the closing track on the first side of his debut album Blowin' Your Mind. It couldn't be more different from the bright and sunny Brown Eyed Girl that opens the album. Instead, it's an almost stream-of-consciousness transcription of the thoughts of the singer as he sits in a hospital room where a friend, Julie, appears to be dying of tuberculosis -- the TB of the title.
The writer Laura Barton called it a "a song that doesn't so much play as ooze, that winds you up in a feverish, Otis Redding-style delirium, with that groggy-sounding organ, that raving harmonica, that rattlesnake shake of a tambourine. And above it all, in that stifled voice, Morrison singing about how "the sunlight shining through the crack in the window pane/ Numbs my brain, oh, Lord."
It's not known who or what experience inspired the song. It has been said that the character of Julie may have been based on an early girlfriend called Dee or his cousin Gloria who died young, but Morrison has never said. However, the photographer Michael Ochs, who was present at the recording session said that as soon as the track was recorded, the rest of the session had to be cancelled because Van broke down in tears. Yet, it's not so much the imminent death of Julie that seems to be troubling the singer so much as his desperate desire to get out of her hospital room and into the fresh air outside. This is TB Sheets.