I Want You

Off-topic Sunday on a Saturday.

I heard a version of this song on the excellent free music stream Ichiban Rock n Soul from WFMU and immediately stopped the work I should have been doing and investigated. The first path led me to this version by Billie Davis, recorded for the German TV Show Beat Club (which featured in an earlier blog post about The Monks).

The presenter, who looks like a juvenile Rwandan mountain gorilla with a shaved face, is a British DJ called Dave Lee Travis. Yep, German 1960s TV had a British speaking UK 'star' as a presenter, such was the influence of UK acts.

DLT, aka the Hairy Cornflake, was a household name in the UK in the 1970s and '80s, after starting out on the influential pirate station, Radio Caroline, before moving to the fledgling BBC Radio 1, but his 'reputation', as it was, has been irrepairably damaged by his implication in Operation Yewtree and his conviction for historical sexual assault. These phrases might seem heavy for some foreign readers, but they are every day usage in the UK, so tainted is the light entertainment of much of our youth, by historical sexual abuse. DLT was found guilty of 'breast jiggling' and putting his hand up a colleague's skirt. It doesn't sound much more than goes on at every work's Christmas party, but I'm not a woman, so it's hard to know the psychological impact of the act. In fact, looking at DLT's huge ape-like noggin, I change my view, it's not hard to imagine the impact, it would be horrific. He should be glad we still don't have the death sentence. Look at the woman next to Travis in this intro to this clip. She has the demeanour of a person who has climbed into a cage with a tiger, and the excitement is overweighing the danger, but she's constantly looking at her friend for looks of reassurance that she has done the right thing, or at least something that will gain her kudos at work/college on Monday morning.

Anyway, back to Billie Davis. How paired back is her Northern Soul-esque performance? Let me get this straight. She's a dream, the sleepy eyes, the half-smile, the hair. That thing she does with her knees, but... her performance is so minimal it's like it was choreographed for Stephen Hawking.

The whole clip, even with the sexual offender's intro, is only 2:38, so you'd be an idiot not to watch it.

#Germany #Music #1960s #offtopicSunday