Sounds with Simon Tesler: Kiss Me! (Part 1)

Hello, this is Simon Tesler with more great Sounds from the Rock and Soul Archive and a few of the stories behind the songs. Each week I select tracks with a specific theme, and this week the theme is KISS ME. Pucker up for more than 20 fabulous songs about love and kisses from Dua Lipa, The Cure, Basement Jaxx, Sade, Prince and many more. But first, Pere Ubu and Love Love Love. ** So yes our theme this week is Kiss Me! or perhaps more correctly Love & Kisses, but don't expect too many slow smoochers. Staying in the spirit of our opening track, we're going to stay resolutely uptempo for most of the show. With a couple of exceptions. And that opening track was the cajun house mix of Love Love Love, a track from Pere Ubu's 1989 album Cloudland. It's a very different kettle of fish from the spiky avant-garage rock for which that band is probably best known, not least perhaps because of the influence of producer Stephen Hague, also the man behind the controls for the likes of Pet Shop Boys, New Order and Robbie Williams among many others. Let's stick with a club beat for our next two very special smackers. In a few minutes, One Kiss from Dua Lipa and Calvin Harris, but first Jus 1 Kiss from Basement Jaxx. ** Ahhh! Feels like summer doesn't it! Crazy isn't it how music changed at some point the 1990s when producers and DJs overtook bands as the dominant figures in the industry. Basement Jaxx are of course the British electronic duo of Felix Buxton and Simon Ratcliffe and that track comes from their second album Rooty, named after the infamous club nights they hosted in Brixton in London in the early 2000s. Although most Basement Jaxx tracks feature guest vocalists, most notably Corinna Joseph, the vocals on Jus 1 Kiss are actually from Jaxx's own Felix Burton. Bizarrely, the track also has a songwriting credit to Chic's Nile Rogers and Bernard Edwards because it contains a fragmentary sample from the Chic track You Can't Do It Alone -- nope, me neither -- but you'd hardly even notice it. It's just a little snippet of Nile Rogers' guitar. And then, the mega-multi-gazillion selling One Kiss released in 2018, from another DJ and producer turned above the title artist, Calvin Harris, in partnership with the all-conquering Dua Lipa. The other big change in the modern music industry is the way in which half of the big dance records are like something out of the Marvel or DC Cinematic Universes in which the music biz equivalent of superheroes are brought together like the Avengers to record a new song. Not just Calvin Harris but also Dua Lipa! Together for the first time! Calvin Harris even has his own alter ego like Superman or Batman. By night he is superstar producer Calvin Harris, but by day he's mild-mannered Adam Wiles. Famously, he's not keen on his stage name of Calvin Harris. "No one calls me Calvin," he has said. "It's horrible and it's not my name... At the start of my career when people were meeting me for the first time, I let it slide. It was sort of a nickname." But it all got too much when a girlfriend started calling him Calvin. '"I was like, 'I'm sorry this is ridiculous. You're speaking to my alter ego.'" Weirder still considering that Dua Lipa actually *sounds* like a superhero name, but is of course her real name. Let's rewind to a simpler time now. Back to the 1980s for two kisses. In a few minutes, French Kissin' from Debbie Harry, but first, Stephen Tintin Duffy and Kiss Me. ** So Stephen Duffy has quite a story and it has more twists and turns than a rollercoaster. He was of course, with his art school friends John Taylor and Nick Rhodes, the original founder, bass player and vocalist for a band you might have heard of. They're called Duran Duran. Yes really. Duffy even came up with the name after he and John Taylor watched the cult scifi movie Barbarella on TV one night. Durand Durand was the name of the main villain, but when Duffy went to design their first poster the typesetter only had two Ds left so they had to settle for Duran Duran. But after a few months of playing small clubs in and around Birmingham, Duffy quit the band in the summer of 1979. There are several different versions of the story why. One is that Duffy thought Duran Duran was going nowhere; another is that his bandmates were too driven and too commercial. "I had never met people with such ambition before," he said later in an interview. "They wanted to be famous... I would have held them back." Whatever the real reason, Duffy left but Rhodes and Taylor carried on. John Taylor switched from guitar to bass, Simon Le Bon was eventually recruited to be the band's new vocalist, and they were signed by EMI Records at the end of 1980. The rest is history. Duffy, meanwhile, forged his own solo career. Kiss Me the first song he released, not once but on three separate occasions in slightly different versions over the course of two years. After twice failing to make any impression on the record-buying public, the third version released at the end of 1984 eventually became a hit. Numerous other projects followed over the next two decades including the experimental electronic dance duo Dr Calculus, and folk pop group The Lilac Time. But Duffy didn't really hit the big time until the mid-2000s when Robbie Williams picked him to be his musical director. He spent the next three years with Williams, co-wrote and co-produced the hugely successful Intensive Care album, and oversaw the subsequent world tour. It was limos and champagne every day. But eventually Duffy decided to retreat quietly back into the shadows again, to rural tranquility in Cornwall, and the occasional venture back into the limelight with The Lilac Time. Quite some journey! Debbie Harry has enjoyed quite a journey as well, though she hit the big time early with Blondie and has remained in the spotlight ever since. After Blondie broke up in 1982, she stepped back from the music industry for a while to care for her seriously ill partner Chris Stein, before launching a solo career. French Kissin' comes from her second solo album Rockbird, and was probably the best thing on it. It's actually a cover version of a song written a couple of years earlier by Chuck Lorre, then a struggling musician, later the hugely successful producer of TV sitcoms including Two and a Half Men and The Big Bang Theory. That's another journey altogether! Fast forward to the mid-2000s now for two more female singers. In a few minutes, the explosive debut single by Katy Perry. You know what's called. But first, the lovely Love Song by singer songwriter Sara Bareilles, from her first mainstream album. You've got to get inspiration where you can when you're a songwriter, and Love Song was born out of the intense pressure put on Bareilles by her first record label Epic to come up with catchy radio-friendly songs to fill her first album. The chorus goes "I'm not going to write you a love song cos you asked for it cos you need one". Bareilles said later "No one was really excited about the material I turned in. Love Song came on a day where I was like, 'God, just let me write something - anything - just for me. The label had no idea I was actually writing about them." Here it is. Sara Bareilles and Love Song. ** Sara Bareilles with Love Song and then of course Katy Perry and I Kissed A Girl. Proof, as if you needed it, that a little bit of controversy is always guaranteed to boost record sales. And I Kissed A Girl was a mammoth success all over the globe, eventually selling something like 12m copies. Though it certainly seemed like it at the time, Katy Perry was no instant star. By the time I Kissed A Girl was released in 2008, she'd already been plugging away at a career in music for almost a decade, with little success. Her first album, released under her real name Katy Hudson, sold only 200 copies in 2001 before the record label that released it went bust. In the years that followed she recorded two more albums of pop songs for different labels but they were never released, and it wasn't until 2007 that she ended up in the studio with starmaker producer Dr Luke. She says that the chorus for I Kissed A Girl had popped into her head in a dream a couple of years earlier, but she didn't do anything with it until the last two days in the studio recording her One Of The Boys album with Dr Luke. He brought in superstar British songwriter Cathy Dennis to help her finish it. You might remember Cathy Dennis as a modestly successful singer songwriter in the 90s, but the following decade she reinvented herself as a songwriter for hire, crafting a string of mammoth hits for other singers, like Toxic for Britney Spears, Sweet Dreams My LA Ex for Rachel Stevens and Can't Get You Out Of My Head for Kylie Minogue. She worked the same magic on I Kissed A Girl. Only problem was the record label was really nervous about releasing the song, or even including it on the album, because of what sounded like an its sexy bi-curious lyrics. "'This is never going to get played on the radio. How do we sell this? How is this going to be played in the Bible Belt?'" Perry responded that it wasn't about being bicurious, it was about girlish innocence. "Girls are really touchy-feely and sisterly," she said. "Especially when we're growing up. We're holding hands, we're having sleepovers, we're doing choreographed dance moves in our pajamas, we're practicing kissing on our arms - or maybe on one another. I was scared of boys when I was growing up! My first kiss was with a boy, and he almost swallowed me alive. I wish I had kissed that girl I had the girl-crush on when I was growing up. I would have been much more prepared for my dating life." But possibly not for being married to Russell Brand.... Anyway, Perry stuck to her guns and it kickstarted her superstar career. We're gonna rewind now for two classic songs about kissing from the 1960s. No controversy here though; it's girls singing about boys. First up, the glorious Shoop Shoop Song from Betty Everett, and then a Wall of Sound classic from producer Phil Spector: The Crystals and Then He Kissed Me. ** OK, we're heading into the break in a few minutes. I will be back with you after the news with another hour of great tracks. To take us there, two very different songs about loving you. First up, the wonderful Minnie Riperton, who gave us five gorgeous albums before she tragically passed away at the age of just 31 in 1979 after a brief battle with cancer. I'm going to play the song that marked her breakthrough in 1973. She had already released two albums by then, critically admired but not commercially successful. Riperton persuaded her record label to release a final single from her second album, Perfect Angel. This was a song she had written for her baby daughter Maya, who grew up to become the actress and comedian Maya Rudolph, who you probably know from Bridesmaids and other movies and TV shows. It was originally written as a lullaby for baby Maya, who was in the studio when Riperton recorded it, which is why the song ends with Riperton singing directly to her daughter. Maya, Maya, Maya... And then taking us to the break, a stunning blues from Led Zeppelin, which is probably one of my four or five favourite songs ever recorded by that band. It comes from the Led Zeppelin III album, though it was in fact written the year before for II, but was bumped at the last minute in favour of Whole Lotta Love. It's Since I've Been Loving You. First though, Minnie Riperton and Lovin You.