Professor Eddy

Unsplash Push your furniture aside and dance through your living room during these days of lockdown! More or less by accident George McCrae had a worldwide hit with Rock Your Baby on the Miami-based TK label in 1974. The song was written and produced by Harry Wayne Casey and Richard Finch (KC & the Sunshine Band). It was originally intended as a single for his wife Gwen, but she called in sick the day the studio was booked. When her manager, husband George, showed up to say sorry for his wife, they put him behind the microphone and the rest is history. Rock Your Baby became a million-selling number one all over the world and it heralded the disco craze. Cultures of Soul Records recently released Sparkle’s self-titled album, which initially came out in 1979, just before the disco backlash. Sparkle was a studio group from Connecticut, assembled by producer Harold Sargent, former drummer of legendary funk band Wood, Brass & Steel, and creator of manifold drum breaks th...

Volkswagen “The recipe for good times is simple, it calls for a boat, open shirts, sun kissed women, a few bottles of spirit, a couple of joints and some of that peruvian marching powder.” ( Sweatson Klank ) Soul singer Sunny (Leslie) used to be in the original line-up of Brotherhood of Man ( United We Stand ), but she had left the group already, when they became extremely successful from the mid- to the late seventies. Sunny is mostly known as one-half of UK backing vocals duo Sue & Sunny with her sister Yvonne Wheatman, later known as Sue Glover. During the late 1960s and 1970s, Sue and Sunny were two of the busiest session vocalists in England, working with Lulu (backing her at the Eurovision Song Contest in 1969), Tom Jones, Joe Cocker (on With a Little Help from My Friends ), Cat Stevens and Elton John, to name but a few. In 1974 Sunny Leslie finally had a solo hit record with Doctor's Orders , after quite a few failed attempts. Sister Sue sang with Germany’s Joy F...

Flickr Enjoy my late birthday salute to Motown! The opening track is a small tribute to Bill Withers, who sadly passed away this month. Tommy Good was a singer in local clubs around Detroit, when Motown boss Berry Gordy contracted him and released Baby I Miss You on Gordy, a subsidiary of Motown, in 1964. Tommy Good, one of the first white employees of the famous soul factory, recorded an album, but for reasons that are still unknown today, it was never released at the time and it stayed in the vaults for almost 40 years! In 2006 a collection gathering most of his recordings on the Motown label was released. In 1963, at the age of 13, Carolyn Crawford signed a contract to Motown Records, after winning a talent contest. She recorded a few singles for the label and she also sang backup vocals for some of the Motown artists. Her final record for Motown, When someone's good to you , released in December 1964, failed to chart and her contract was not renewed...

Unsplash Enjoy part 32 of Eddy's Eighties Grooves , exclusively for Mixcloud Select subscribers! Tracklist: Jaki Graham ‎– What's The Name Of Your Game (1984) Yello ‎– Vicious Games (1985) Eastbound Expressway ‎– Primitive Desire (1983) Telex ‎– Moskow Diskow (1979) Yarbrough & Peoples – Heartbeats (1983) Kitty Grant ‎– Glad To Know You (1983) KC & the Sunshine Band – Give It Up (1983) Billy Ocean – Nights (Feel Like Getting Down) (1981) The Nick Straker Band – A Little Bit Of Jazz (1983) Taana Gardner – Heartbeat [Eddy’s Edit] (1981) Yazoo ‎– Situation (1982) Miami Sound Machine ‎– Dr. Beat (1984) Company B ‎ – Fascinated (1986) Lafleur ‎– Boogie Nights (1983) The Flirts – Passion (1983) Lime ‎– Angel Eyes (1983) Time Bandits ‎– Endless Road (And I Want You To Know My Love) (1985) Gary Low ‎– You Are A Danger (1982) Vivien Vee ‎– Give Me A Break (1980)

Unsplash Come sail with me, to quote Buttering Trio! The track by Lonette McKee is for “its first ever re-release” on The Ladies of Too Slow to Disco Volume 2 , which is out on June 19th. Richard Powell’s World Of Ecstasy is from the new compilation album Whispers Lounge , which contains 14 so-called "lounge originals", a genre that was called "easy listening" at the time: "A spent matchbook’s worth of crooners, bossa nobodies, seafood jazzers, and Donca-Matic enthusiasts all in search of their ticket out of a red leather booth hell.” ( The Numero Group ) The sub-genre is officially called ‘folk funk’, but I think ‘soulful folk’ would be a better term, because there is no funk in this kind of music at all. As the 1960s melted into the 1970s in a colourful swirl of musical possibilities, bands and singer-songwriters were experimenting with newfound freedoms. Rock would meet jazz. Soul was mixed with psychedelia. On this fertile soil folk funk would a...

Unsplash Let’s go back to the heyday of FM Radio in these crazy times… Enjoy! Smokie was originally called Smokey, just like the first name of singer Smokey Robinson, but they were forced by the vice-president of Motown to change their name. The band found success at home and abroad after teaming up with hugely successful producers and songwriters Mike Chapman and Nicky Chinn (Suzi Quatro, Mud, The Sweet). They have had a number of line-up changes and even continued after singer Chris Norman had left the band in the 1980s. Their most popular hit single, Living Next Door to Alice , peaked at #1 on the Dutch pop chart, #3 on the UK singles chart and, in March 1977, reached #25 on the Billboard Hot 100. Other hit singles were If You Think You Know How to Love Me , Oh Carol , Lay Back in the Arms of Someone , and, my personal favourite, I'll Meet You at Midnight . I Go Crazy by American singer-songwriter Paul Davis was the first single he released from his 1977 album Singer of ...