Luther vandross songs androgynous
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“If I!” he exclaims, as if sweeping back a velvet curtain, oozing confidence as he stalks the object of his ardour. He is the core of the song’s brilliance, beyond the great technical prowess that makes his long climactic notes so euphoric.
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In the video, the group appear tied up, mirroring the backing track: wriggling but rooted to the spot. Absorbing influences from US and Italian disco, the new language for pop that Kraftwerk and Giorgio Moroder invented was now being codified, its vocabulary broadened and enunciated with the clearest diction. SAW have said they didn’t want anything in their productions to sound like a recognisable instrument, an effect they achieve here with a dense thicket of synthetic matter. But there’s a merciless, exacting energy to You Spin Me Round that would have got it over the line one way or another: it is taut, alien and utterly majestic. It took a 36-hour cocaine-fuelled marathon to finish the song, and 17 weeks for it to journey from No 79 to No 1. By the end of the 14-day session, Waterman said the band and production unit were “ready to murder” each other. You Spin Me Round (Like a Record) was secretly recorded while they were meant to be working on those other three songs. But the hitmen played them a new song, inspired in part by Luther Vandross’s I Wanted Your Love, and the sessions were swiftly rejigged to deliver a masterpiece. Dead or Alive’s label didn’t like the idea of the group working with SAW, and only allowed a tiny budget to record these three pre-approved songs. Their only hit had been a cover of KC and the Sunshine Band’s That’s the Way (I Like It) – not a good sign – and the three tracks Burns had brought to SAW in 1984 were middling, according to Waterman. Kylie Minogue’s I Should Be So Lucky and Donna Summer’s This Time I Know It’s for Real are as fractionally different as two generations of iPhone, and numerous stars from the SAW stable each recorded the same songs: when music is this pristinely crafted, why mess with the formula? Not only was SAW’s music using the cutting-edge technology of the era, it was also embracing its free-market ethos.ĭead or Alive: You Spin Me Around – videoĭead or Alive had been going with various lineups since 1980, based around the commanding baritone and peacock glamour of frontman Pete Burns.
Luther vandross songs androgynous update#
And like the car manufacturers of Detroit who influenced Motown, who in turn influenced SAW, each year brought an update of essentially the same thing. “If they do buy them, they are doing so not because of art but because they like the records.” He would go on fact-finding business trips, visiting France, Germany or Italy to spend hours sitting in his hotel room with pop radio on for inspiration (leading to some notable similarities). “We make records to entertain people for between three to seven minutes, and if they don’t like them they don’t buy them,” he said in 1987. Pete Waterman had something of the cigar-chewing industrialist about him, too. Instruments like the Linn 9000 drum machine and the Roland Juno-106 synthesiser were manufactured in one factory before being installed in SAW’s, the ersatz brass and strings becoming a new set of raw materials. Not only did it generate hits – Never Gonna Give You Up, Venus, Respectable and dozens of others – but the very sound of their records was industrialised. T he UK production trio Stock Aitken Waterman (SAW) dubbed their studio the Hit Factory, and with good reason.