(* as part of Shakespear's Sister )
Chart entered : 29 July 1989
Chart peak : 7
Number of hits : 11 ( 8 with Shakespear's Sister, 3 solo )
Marcella was another artist who served a long apprenticeship before making the charts.
She was born Marcella Levy in , you guessed it, Detroit in 1952. She began employing her soprano vocal talents in bands in the early seventies including one called Julia that supported Bob Seger in 1972. He invited her to sing backing vocals on his album Back in 72 which was partly recorded in Leon Russell's studio, Russell in turn invited her on to his tour. She moved to Tulsa where her band was picked up by Eric Clapton in 1975 , beginning a fruitful four year musical relationship which included co-writing "Lay Down Sally". She started work on a solo album for RSO but it never saw the light of day.
She stopped working with Clapton at the end of the seventies and had a US hit in 1980 as co-vocalist with Robin Gibb on "Help Me" , a song for the soundtrack to the film Times Square. The song written by Gibb and keyboard player Blue Weaver sounds like Bee Gees-by-numbers with a " hi-hi-hi" in the chorus in case we were in any danger of forgetting who he was. Marcella proves she can hit a higher note than Gibb's big brother but there's not much else to recommend it. It made number 50 in the US but didn't register here.
She signed for Epic and in 1982 released her solo album "Marcella" in 1982 as Marcy Levy. I've heard about half the tracks and not been impressed. Marcella sounds like she's still in the seventies with her previous employers, producing a colourless AOR effort that wasn't going to cut the mustard in 1982. Epic pulled the plug on a planned tour with John Cougar Mellencamp and dropped her from the label.
Marcella went back to working with Clapton again in the mid-eighties but she also formed a songwriting partnership with Richard Feldman and artists who recorded their songs in this period included Philip Bailey ( Walking on the Chinese Wall ), Jennifer Rush, Randy Crawford and Chaka Khan. Feldman then took a call from his friend Dave Stewart, would they be interested in helping his wife Siobahn Fahey launch a solo career after leaving Bananarama in 1988 ?
Marcella and Feldman answered in the affirmative and co-wrote the first Shakespear's Sister single "Break My Heart ( You Really )" . Fahey had never been happy with the group's sell out to Stock, Aitken and Waterman and had been a constant thorn in the flesh in the studio, You might therefore have expected her to come up with something other than an uninteresting ( save for a HM guitar solo ) Hi-NRG track , hardly different from the 'Nanas' output apart from the revelation of her solo voice, a drab , thin, drone of very limited range. You can hear Marcella's voice in the backing vocals but at this point she wasn't counted a member of the band and didn't appear on the sleeve or in the video. It wasn't even a minor hit which must have had Pete Waterman laughing his socks off.
It was Stewart that suggested the group should become a duo. Fahey then suggested she change her name to avoid being bogged down by her previous associations. Marcella also shed her long tresses for a more contemporary haircut. It was a strange marriage, a punk girl and an AOR songwriter six years her senior to say nothing of the huge disparity in their respective vocal abilities.
Nonetheless it paid off immediately with "You're History".written by Fahey and Feldman. As the title suggests it's a dismissal of an ex-lover with Fahey intoning the verses before Marcella delivers the pay-off line in a falsetto screech which provides the song's main hook. Musically it's mid-paced funk pop owing a lot to Prince with an African chant and fuzz guitar solo squeezed into the middle eight. Marcella also played the funky guitar line which carries the song forward after each chorus. She had helped give Fahey the vindication she craved and their greatest triumph was still to come.
No comments:
Post a Comment