Pat Benetar had her breakthrough right at the end of the Seventies, with a string of singles from her October 1979 album “In The Heat Of The Night”, particularly “I Need a Lover”, “If You Think You Know How to Love Me” and “Heartbreaker”, the latter reaching No. 23 in the U.S.
So she’s “only just” a Seventies artist, but who cares…
Especially with songs like these.
“I Need A Lover”:
“If You Think You Know How to Love Me”:
“Heartbreaker”:
Shortly after that, with her second album “Crimes Of Passion”, came her signature song, “Hit Me With Your Best Shot”:
One of the biggest hits of Pat Benetar’s career was “Love Is A Battlefield”. I particularly remember this one (albeit we were now in the Eighties, not the Seventies any more), because a dance band I was working for as a roadie in South Germany had a female singer who sang the song a lot.
Here’s the orignal of “Love Is A Battlefield”:
And not much later came another smash hit, “We Belong”:
Pat Benetar was the first female artist featured on MTV and is one of the top-selling female artists overall.
Linda Ronstadt was a name you heard a lot in the Seventies, her biggest hits included “When Will I Be Loved”, “You’re No Good” and “Blue Bayou”.
By coincidence, these are just about the only ones of her many songs I can recall…
I found a couple more that I recognise though, but I can’t say now whether it’s just the songs themselves that are familiar or Linda Ronstadt’s versions of them!
Songs like “It Doesn’t Matter Any More” and the Cat Stevens number “First Cut Is The Deepest”, best known in the Rod Stewart version.
Whatever Linda Ronstadt sings, with her powerful voice she certainly makes it her own.
Here are some of those songs –
“When Will I Be Loved”, live in 1977:
From the same concert in Atlanta, Georgia, the quieter track “It Doesn’t Matter Any More”, featuring Linda Ronstadt accompanying herself on acoustic guitar:
“You’re No Good”, on the Midnight Special (with an introduction by Jose Feliciano):
This is probably the Linda Ronstadt track I like the best, once again from that 1977 concert in Atlanta, “Blue Bayou”:
On a late January 1980 night at an open air festival in Ngaruawahia, New Zealand, in the southern summer heat, I heard Australian blues and soul singer Renee Geyer singing “(If Loving You Is Wrong) I Don’t Want To Be Right”.
It has stuck in my mind ever since.
I could only find a couple of very short fragments of Renee Geyer singing “(If Loving You Is Wrong) I Don’t Want To Be Right”, but I thought I’d include them anyway to give you a taste. Here she is in 1976:
And here’s a video excerpt of Renee Geyer’s version of “(If Loving You Is Wrong) I Don’t Want To Be Right” in 1982:
One of Renee Geyer’s earlier successes was with the James Brown song “It’s A Man’s World”:
Her biggest Australian hit was “Stares And Whispers”, here live in 1977:
Renee Geyer’s first single released in the US and UK was “Heading In The Right Direction”, sung here live in 1976:
“Do You Know What I Mean” came out just after the Seventies ended:
And, still going strong three decades later, here with the classic “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood”:
What a voice. Just like on a hot summer night 30 years ago.
And now for something completely different… In 1972 Vicky Leandros had a European hit with “Après Toi” (After You), and I went on my first overseas trip from New Zealand, to the French Pacific colony of New Caledonia.
All the time we were in Nouméa, its capital, we heard the song “Après Toi” again and again, and it came to be the theme song of our two week visit – and always reminds me of that time.
Of course I bought the single (see above), although unlike New Zealand singles it had a huge hole in the middle, so I had to find an adapter to be able to play it!
The reason the song was so big in Europe was she had just won the Eurovision song contest with it, on behalf of Luxembourg.
This is “Après Toi”, in French:
And here are the French lyrics:
Tu t’en vas, l’amour a pour toi le sourire d’une autre,
Je voudrais, mais ne peux t’en vouloir
Désormais, tu vas m’oublier
Ce n’est pas de ta faute, et pourtant tu dois savoir
Qu’après toi, je ne pourrai plus vivre,
Non plus vivre qu’en souvenir de toi
Après toi, j’aurai les yeux humides,
Les mains vides, le coeur sans joie
Avec toi, j’avais appris a rire,
Et mes rires ne viennent que par toi
Après toi, je ne serai que l’ombre
De ton ombre, après toi
Même un jour, si je fais ma vie
Si je tiens la promesse qui unit deux êtres pour toujours
Àpres toi, je pourrai peut-être donner de ma tendresse
Mais plus rien de mon amour
Après toi, je ne pourrai plus vivre,
Non plus vivre qu’en souvenir de toi
Après toi, j’aurai les yeux humides,
Les mains vides, le coeur sans joie
Avec toi, j’avais appris a rire,
Et mes rires ne viennent que par toi
Après toi, je ne serai que l’ombre
De ton ombre, après toi
Vicky Leandros is actually Greek, and having spent much of her early life in Germany with her musician father (Leandros is actually his first name), Vicky Leandros sings in numerous languages and apparently she sang “Après Toi” in seven languages.
The English version, which reached No. 2 in the UK, is called “Come What May”:
Think I prefer the French version… for the words and the memories…
Paul
P.S. Vicky Leandros earlier came 4th at Eurovision in 1967 with “L’amour est bleu”, also known as “Love is blue”, which became very popular in the late Sixties in the version by French orchestra leader Paul Mauriat.
I was thinking that “You’re So Vain”, from 1972, was the only song by Carly Simon song I knew.
I soon found there were a number of others.
At the time everyone was trying to work out who the song was about. As it turns out, she now says it was the result of various scraps of words noted at different times and then put to the music of another song in the making (see below).
In any case the song was one of the biggest hits of the Seventies.
So here it is, “You’re So Vain”
And here is Carly’s explanation of how the song was written, divulged in an episode of “Conversations with Michael Eisner” aired in late June 2008:
From the same album (“No Secrets”), in 1973 “The Right Thing To Do” became a favourite for many:
Another Carly Simon song that really stands out for me is the theme song from the James Bond Film “The Spy Who Loved Me”.
“Nobody Does It Better” went to Number 2 in 1977:
Three years later, in 1980, Carly Simon had another million-selling US Gold single with “Jesse”, sung here live in New York’s Grand Central Station in the mid Nineties:
From that same performance in New York, here are three more beautiful Carly Simon songs from the Seventies, “Haven’t Got Time For The Pain”, “Anticipation” and “That’s The Way I’ve Always Heard It Should Be” (her first hit):
