Sounds with Simon Tesler: Kiss Me! (Part 2)

I'm Simon Tesler. Welcome back to another hour of great tracks with the theme Kiss Me! This is The Emotions and The Best Of My Love. ** Rather like Sister Sledge and Chic, The Emotions are really defined for posterity by the work they did with Earth Wind & Fire, primarily in the mid 1970s. The Hutchinson sisters Wanda, Sheila and Jeanette started singing together in the late 1950s, initially as backing vocalists for their father Joe, and they got their first record contract as a trio in the late 60s with Motown rival Stax. But commercial success remained out of reach and after a series of poorly performing singles they were dropped by Stax in the early 70s. In 1975, though, Earth Wind & Fire were really flying high and main man Maurice White negotiated his own production deal with label CBS. Joe Hutchinson and EWF drummer Ron Ellison went way back, and it was Ellison who suggested to Maurice White that The Emotions be the first signing. Maurice White said later, "I signed them because of their unique sound and identifiable harmonies... They gave me a chance to explore a softer, sweeter side of music than was possible with an all-male band." And as the backing band, Earth Wind & Fire brought to the girls their own unique musical style, and the results were fabulous. The first album they recorded with Earth Wind & Fire did well, but the breakthrough was its follow-up Rejoice, released in 1977. It's packed full of great songs, but none better than Best Of My Love, written by Maurice White and guitarist Al McKay. That's Wanda Hutchinson on lead vocals. Further Emotions albums followed, but none enjoyed the same success as Rejoice. Two years later, of course, the girls provided the backing vocals for Earth Wind & Fire's mammoth hit Boogie Wonderland. Now in her mid-70s, Wanda Hutchinson still occasionally performs live under the name The Emotions, and still bets out Best Of My Love, but it's no longer her sisters onstage with her, but her daughters Wyann and Wendi Vaughn. Ahhhh! OK, two songs now with a distinct reggae influence. Deee-Lite enjoyed a short but stellar career in the early 1990s as a New York based house and dance music group. Groove Is In The Hart was their big hit, from the album World Clique, but two more albums followed. I'm going to play a track from their final album Dewdrops In The Garden. It's a veritable smorgasbord of music samples, and you'll recognise elements lifted from The Clash's reggae track Armagideon Time and Linton Kwesi Johnson's Loraine, as well as The Detroit Emeralds' You're Getting a Little Too Smart. After that, a track that I know you know, by Jamaican reggae band Third World. But first, this is Apple Juice Kissing. ** Apple Juice Kissing from Deee-Lite, followed by Third World's massive crossover hit Now That We've Found Love from 1978. Did you know that the song is a cover? It was written by the Philadelphia Soul maestros Gamble & Huff for The O'Jays, who recorded a much slower version five years earlier. Where shall we go now? OK, I said the theme of the show this week is Kiss Me! Well, how can you have a collection of songs about Kisses without this next track? It's one of the most iconic tracks of the second half of the 80s, but in fact it almost never was. Mazarati was a rock and funk band from Minneapolis who were one of the many different bands and performers circulating around Prince and his entourage, and were signed to his Paisley Park label. Prince's bass player Brown Mark was producing Mazarati's first album at the same time that Prince was finalising the tracks for his own new album Parade. Famously, Prince's band were rarely involved in playing the music on the maestro's albums, and were there primarily to play live on tour. Brown Mark asked Prince if he'd be willing to write a song for Mazarati, so in a break from recording his own tracks Prince dashed off a minute-long demo on a tiny tape recorder. "It was just an acoustic guitar with his voice," Brown Mark said later "He wasn't singing in his high falsetto, but just in a natural voice. It sounded like a folk song." Brown Mark then worked up the demo to a full song. When he heard the finished track, Prince knew he'd made a mistake giving it away, so he told Brown Mark he wanted to take it back. He replaced Mazarati's vocals with his own, added his own guitar break and stuck it on the Parade album. By way of apology he said he'd give Brown Mark a writer's credit. "I thought that sounded like a good deal. I spread the bad news to Mazarati, who were pretty angry... From a financial standpoint, I knew that I would benefit more from it being with Mazarati – *if* it hit. But having a co-write on a Prince record? That would be phenomenal. So, that outweighed everything. He kept saying to me, 'We, we, we …. Just think, you put this on Parade and we will have a hit.' It was always 'we,' until it came out, and my name wasn't anywhere on it. I never did get royalties on that. That's the way it is though, man. Showbiz." Still haven't worked out the name of the song? It is of course Kiss. ** Kiss by Prince, followed of course by Crazy In Love, the debut solo single from Beyoncé with some extra help from Jay-Z, who she was already dating. The real genius behind the song, however, was producer Rich Harrison. It was Harrison who played all the instruments on the track and most importantly perhaps sourced that fabulous horns sample that provides the irresistible engine for the song. It comes from an earlier track by The Chi-Lites, Are You My Woman (Tell Me So). Here it is: ** Doesn't really work, does it, after that fabulous opening. Anyway, Harrison had been sitting on the sample for years, waiting for the right opportunity to come along. He told MTV "I hadn't really shopped it much, because sometimes you don't want to come out of the bag before it's right. People don't really get it and you'll leave them with a foul taste in their mouth. So it was just something that I held on to until I got the call from B." Beyoncé almost didn't get it either. No one uses horn riffs in the 2000s she told Harrison. Give me a couple of hours he told her, so Beyoncé went off on a break and when she came back Harrison had written the verses and the hook, and all she had to do was add the bridge. She happened to catch sight of herself in the mirror. She was wearing mismatched clothes and her hair was a mess. "I'm looking crazy right now," she said. "That's it!", said Harrison. They finished the song, but something wasn't quite right, Beyoncé felt. At 3am on the day they were due to hand in the finished album, she got Jay-Z to come in and add his rap. It took all of 10 minutes and a classic was born. From Beyoncé to another diva of soul. For our next two tracks we're heading back to the heady days of London's club scene in the early 1980s. The New Romantic movement had started in the Blitz Club just as the new decade opened, but within a year or two it had been eclipsed by a different style, the so-called new jazz scene centred around two other clubs, Le Beat Route and The Wag Club. Several bands got their start here, but none achieved the same level of success as the artist I'm going to play next. In a few minutes, the archetypal new jazz hipsters Animal Nightlife with Love Is The Great Pretender. But first, the girl born Helen Folasade Adu, better known to you and me as Sade. ** Sade's debut single Your Love Is King, followed by Love Is The Great Pretender from Animal Nightlife. We're heading into the last half hour now, so we're going to ramp up the tempo a little, but slowly. Three tracks coming up from bands associated with the punk scene that predated Sade and Animal Nightlife's new jazz. And who said punks can't write love songs? First up, is Generation X, a band that was very much part of the original punk scene in London but was often rather looked down upon by more hardcore bands and scenesters as a bunch of posers. And being a poser back then in London's punk scene was one of the worst crimes anyone could commit. One key contributor to this was their first ever write-up in the NME, in January 1977, when journalist Tony Parsons ridiculed Billy Idol and bassplayer Tony James as 'Clean Punks: A Menace To Our Kids' because they ordered orange juice in the pub and said drugs were a waste of time. Well, the drugs thing certainly changed, eh Billy? James later confessed that they were both on antibiotics at the time after catching an STD off the same girl, so couldn't drink alcohol for two weeks. Anyway, the first Generation X LP is a great little album with several fine songs. One of them is this next track, Kiss Me Deadly. It's quite unusual for any punk band of the time, in that it is -- to begin with at least -- a slow ballad that tells a compelling story about teenage lovers against the backdrop of the regular running battles on the streets of London between punks and rockers. Lyrically at least it's probably one of the best songs Billy Idol and Tony James ever wrote. After that we'll hear from The Damned and Australian punks The Saints, but this is Generation X with Kiss Me Deadly. ** After Generation X that was The Damned with Love Song and then The Saints with Kissin' Cousins. Like the Ramones in New York, The Saints, from Brisbane, Australia, were arguably punks before such a thing really existed. Their debut single I'm Stranded was released down under in September 1976, a month before the first British punk single -- The Damned's New Rose -- and two months before Anarchy In The UK. Like British punks, one of the key influences on them was American proto-punks like the Stooges and MC5. But just as important were a previous generation of rockers. Kissin Cousins is a cover of a track originally released by Elvis, and alongside their own songs they played similarly rocked up versions of songs by Del Shannon, Connie Francis and Ike & Tina Turner, like Lipstick On Your Collar and River Deep Mountain High. The Damned are -- and it seems incredible to still be referring to them in the present rather than the past tense -- the last men standing of British punk. Singer Dave Vanian has held the band together -- in one form or another -- in a more or less unbroken line for half a century. Although individual band members have come and gone and in many cases come back again, and guitarist Brian James passed away last year, the original lineup of The Damned -- excluding James -- is back together again and about to embark on a 50th anniversary tour of the UK and Europe. Love Song was originally released in 1978 as a limited edition white label single after the band was dropped by Stiff Records because of the dismal failure of their second album Music For Pleasure. A record *no one* loved!They released it themselves and distributed it by mail order through the music press -- I had a copy myself -- and it was so good it earned them a new record deal with Chiswick Records, who got them to re-record the track for a new album Machine Gun Etiquette. That was the album version I played. Since we're talking original punks, let's have a track from another pioneer of that movement, Siouxsie. During rehearsals for The Banshees' 4th album Juju, Siouxsie and drummer Budgie started experimenting with tracks that consisted only of voice and percussion. So began their side-project The Creatures. Siouxsie & The Banshees continued to record together for another 15 years, but in breaks between albums and tours, Siouxsie and Budgie -- who were also lovers -- would go back into the studio to continue their personal project. I'm going to play the first single from their debut album Feast, Miss The Girl, which was inspired by JG Ballard's cult novel Crash. After that, to close the show, and maintaining a connection with Siouxsie & The Banshees, the spectacular opening track from The Cure's 7th studio album Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me. Robert Smith had of course spent a couple of years filling in as the Banshees guitarist in breaks from The Cure's schedule, and you might see a little of the Banshees' dark influence on the screaming guitar of this track, The Kiss. First though, The Creatures and Miss The Girl. **