Words: Joe Bennett, John Pierce O’Reilly
[JB note: this was our last ‘Midnight Musicology’ slot of 2024, as Gordon moves on to presenting a new show on 5 Live. It’s been a great year, and my team and I have loved every moment working with him and the awesome team at BBC 5 Live. Good luck with the new show Gordon!]
This week Gordon and I trod the boards, and heard from a troupe of thespians who have contributed to popular music in some form. While some of those featured may be more known to audiences as singers, each artist in our playlist here began their careers on the stage or screen.
David Soul, riding high on the success of Starsky & Hutch, made the decision in 1976 to return to his first passion – singing. Don’t Give Up On Us, written by Tony Macauley, was a worldwide hit. The song spent four weeks at No. 1 on the UK Singles Chart in January and February of 1977, and a single week at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 in April 1977, and (as of 2012) has sold over a million copies in the UK alone. I chose this some because it’s ‘all melody’ – interval leaps, key changes, and interesting use of form; you could argue that it has no chorus, and the hooks are at the top of each verse. In this respect, it owes a lot of its form to the Great American Songbook.
Euphoria – a cautionary tale
All For Us was originally written, produced, and recorded by Labrinth in 2019, and released as a single from his album Imagination & the Misfit Kid. The song was later reworked and featured heavily on the soundtrack of American teen drama Euphoria, with vocals from Zendaya, who plays the show’s lead character Rue Bennett (no relation). The reworked song went on win a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Original Music and Lyrics in 2020. If you haven’t seen the show, the scene in question (end of season 1) has the song underscoring a poignant and partly surreal scene in which Rue’s drug relapse plays out. The juxtaposition between the cold all-synth production and Labrinth and Zendaya’s oh-so-human vocals is deeply unsettling in the context of the scene, and those heavily pitch-shifted choir samples contribute further to the otherworldly sense that pervades the show.
David Hasselhoff claimed his biggest international hit in 1989 with Looking for Freedom, a song originally written by German music producer Jack White and released in 1978 by German singer Marc Seaberg. Hasselhoff covered the song as the lead single from his third studio album Looking for Freedom, and it reached number one in Germany (for eight weeks), Switzerland (for four weeks), and Austria (for one week). Hasselhoff – wearing a piano-keyboard scarf and a leather jacket covered in motion lights – famously performed this song before throngs of pro-German reunification activists at the Berlin Wall on New Year’s Eve 1989, weeks after wall had begun to be taken down.
From Camelot to MacArthur Park to Hogwarts…
Irish actor Richard Harris, known to most younger audiences for his portrayal of Albus Dumbledore in the first two Harry Potter films, recorded MacArthur Park in 1967 after meeting American singer-songwriter Jimmy Webb, who composed the song, at a fundraiser. Harris’s version peaked at number two on the Billboard Hot 100 chart and number four on the UK Singles Chart, and later was covered in 1970 by country singer Waylon Jennings (who won a Grammy for his rendition) and in 1978 by Donna Summer.
Star Trek‘s Leonard Nimoy released The Ballad of Bilbo Baggins in 1967. The song was composed by Charles Randolph Grean, and tells the story of Bilbo Baggins and his adventures in J. R. R. Tolkien‘s 1937 novel The Hobbit. Since it was ‘rediscovered’ on the 1996 BBC documentary Funk Me Up Scotty and more recently propagated over the internet, the single and its accompanying psychedelic and far-out music video have been tread as an example of 60s camp. Hit play above and judge for yourself.
Ariana Grande will be known to most as a pop icon, but it was her role as Cat Valentine in the Nickelodeon television series Victorious (2010–2013) and its spin-off series Sam & Cat (2013–2014) that first shot her to fame. Grande’s 2016 song Dangerous Woman, released as the first single from her album of the same name, illustrates the vocal virtuosity that explains why her career as a singer has somewhat overshadowed her TV beginnings – though her recent performance as Glinda in Wicked may change that…
Why Do You Let Me Stay Here? is the debut single from American duo She & Him, released in 2008. ‘She’ is Zooey Deschanel who is best known for her roles across film and TV including the 2003 movie Elf, in which she sings “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” with Will Ferrell and “Auld Lang Syne” with James Caan. Deschanel has also provided music for the TV series New Girl (2011-2018), Winnie the Pooh (2011), and the 2009 film 500 Days of Summer (which also features Why Do You Let Me Stay Here?).
Frankie Valli vs the World…
This week’s soundslike looked at a familiar harmonic pattern (arguably) first heard in Frankie Valli‘s 1967 song Can’t Take My Eyes Off You. It’s a descending major progression that moves from chord I through to a minor IV chord; in C major it would be C – Cmaj7 – C7 – F – Fm. We traced the progression through five decades of pop: Something by The Beatles (1969), Save Your Kisses for Me by Brotherhood of Man (1976), Silly Games by Janet Kay (1979), Walk Away Renee by The Left Banke (1967), (If Paradise) Is Half As Nice by Amen Corner (1969), Goodbye To Love by The Carpenters (1972), Make You Feel My Love by Adele, Simple Twist of Fate by Bob Dylan (1975), Saltwater by Julian Lennon (1991), and If by Bread (1971).
For our quiz this week you heard 7 songs from actor-musicians. We gave you a short excerpt with the vocalist taken out of the mix, in a section we’re calling “fire the actor”!
As always, find the show and blog at joebennett.net/5live, with occasional Instagram extras at @joebennettmusicology. And you can find our Spotify mega-playlist, which contains all songs ever featured on the show, here:
- Words: Joe Bennett, John Pierce O’Reilly
- Audio production: Joe Bennett, Rafi Waters
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