The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
SIMON HEFFER HINTERLAND
Welcome to Ely’s one-stop lesson in architectural history
Every great pop star understands the need to evolve in order to remain relevant, and by 1979, Diana Ross knew she was due another reinvention. Though still only in her mid-30s, the Detroit-born singer already had 15 years of hits under her belt – first as lead singer in the Supremes, then as a solo star who’d recorded everything from Marvin Gaye duets to Billie Holiday covers. But it had been three years since her last top ten single, the disco classic Love Hangover, so Ross stepped away from her regular collaborators Brian and Eddie Holland and went in search of someone who could take her music in a new direction.
Having seen for herself how Chic’s funky hits, such as Le
Freak, would fill the dance floor at the New York nightclub Studio
54, Ross recruited the band’s creative duo, Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards, to write and produce her next record. The result, Diana, released 40 years ago this month, would become the most highly regarded and biggest-selling album of her career. It sold more than 10million copies and spawned two eradefining singles, Upside Down and I’m Coming Out, tracks that have been sampled since by artists including Salt-N-Pepa and The Notorious BIG. But while the album’s sinewy disco grooves and ebullient vocals still sound effortless today, the recording process was anything but. Rodgers has worked on hundreds of albums over the years since, collaborating with everyone from David Bowie to Madonna to Grace Jones, but he identifies Diana as “the most difficult record I’ve ever made in my life”.
By 1979, Rodgers and Edwards had already produced a successful album for Sister Sledge – We Are Family, released in January that year – but as the jewel in
Motown’s crown, Ross was, Rodgers acknowledges, “the first bona fide star we’d worked with”. The duo had, after a number of heated rows, managed to persuade Sister Sledge to sing lyrics they didn’t particularly like. But, recognising Ross as an artist unlikely to back down so easily, they decided to take “a more personal approach” to her album, proceeding almost as if they were making a documentary about the pop diva.
“Bernard and I talked endlessly with [Ross and] went to her apartment to see who this woman was,” Rodgers recalls in the liner notes for the album’s 2003 deluxe edition. “Once we met her and became friends, she started to reveal things about herself that no one knew. No one understood that she was driven, complex and intellectual.” Rodgers and Edwards then used Ross’s own words as the foundation stones for the songs on the album: Upside Down was inspired by her stated desire to “turn her career upside down”, while Have Fun (Again) reflected her intention to do just that.
And then there’s the second single, I’m Coming Out, which Rodgers and Edwards wrote after a visit to a New York drag club. “I went to the bathroom and I happened to notice on either side there were a bunch of Diana Ross impersonators,” explained Rodgers to Billboard magazine in 2011. “I ran outside and called Bernard and told him about it and said: ‘What if we recognise Diana Ross’s really cool alignment with her fan base in the gay community?’”
Rodgers and Edwards ostensibly wrote I’m Coming Out to capture Ross’s sense of creative emergence “from under the thumb of the label”, Motown, which was still headed up by her former flame Berry Gordy, and the song certainly works on that level. But its subtext is difficult to miss – and made it a sure-fire gay anthem from the start.
When Ross took an early rough mix of the track to Frankie Crocker, a highly influential New York DJ, he told her he “hated” it. Rodgers recalls Ross coming back to the studio and asking him: “Why are you trying to ruin my career?” She also asked if they’d deliberately tricked her into making “a gay record” and whether fans might misinterpret it as a declaration of her own sexuality. “It’s the only time I’ve ever lied to an artist,” Rodgers has said. “I looked her straight in the eye and said: ‘Are you kidding?’”
At the root of Ross’s discomfort with I’m Coming Out was the growing popularity of the so-called “Disco Sucks” movement, a backlash against the musical genre catalysed by a disgruntled Chicago radio DJ, Steve Dahl, who had been sacked when his station stopped playing rock music in favour of disco. After Dahl was picked up by a rival station, he made espousing anti-disco sentiments a fundamental part of his show.
Dahl’s anti-disco campaign proved popular with traditional rock fans who’d grown increasingly suspicious of this new musical style that had sprung from underground nightclubs and on to mainstream radio. It also attracted the attention of Bill Veeck, owner of the Chicago White Sox baseball team, who collaborated with Dahl on an infamous publicity stunt known as Disco Demolition Night. On July 12 1979, tens of thousands filled the White Sox’s stadium to watch a crate of disco records being blown up between baseball games. So many fans stormed the field after the detonation that the second game had to be postponed.
There was a nasty undercurrent to all this. Disco Sucks wasn’t just about disco supplanting rock music on the radio; it was a way for some white American males to express their disapproval of a genre originally rooted in black and gay culture. “When that happened it was because they hated gay people, they hated black people and
Even forty years later, Rodgers calls Diana ‘the most difficult record I’ve ever made’
had been commissioned to make, making the excuse “tfhat one lamp post needs a friend on the left…”
In 1961, the critic Mervyn Levy observed that Lowry “has begun to isolate his figures, to set them adrift, sans compass or rudder, in a wasteland of white… he is now extending his sense of the apartness of human beings by detaching them from the context of the townscapes in which so many of his pictures are set.”
The same can be said of items of street furniture that he plucked from his larger industrials to become subjects in their right, sometimes deformed, derelict and frequently separated from the industrial background. As John
Betjeman observed: “Lowry can give significance to things by leaving space around them.”
Forsaken and devoid of people, these works from the 1950s and 1960s are far from “empty”, instead rather loaded with meaning. As the artist put it, “there must be innumerable ways of looking at the same aspects of life. A silent street, a building for instance, can be as effective as a street full of people to me. It is the outlook or message that matters.”
In the mid-1960s Lowry produced a number of works that he called “self-portraits”, comprising monuments standing isolated and lapped by the sea. As Lowry said himself: “Look at my seascapes, they don’t really exist, you know, they’re just an expression of my own loneliness.”
He confessed an admiration for the surrealists and confided to his friend Monty Bloom that he was often tempted to plonk a mill chimney in the middle of an empty seascape: “But they would have accused me of being a surrealist wouldn’t they?” adding with relish the name “Salvador Lowry”.
Since 1960, Lowry had taken to visiting Sunderland, staying at the Seaburn Hotel. A creature of habit, he always stayed in the same room, number 104, with a view of the promenade and the sea. Lowry had a belief in the supernatural and told a story of how he once woke up in the night at the hotel and, in a semi-dream, thought that he could see someone looking in at him through the window.
The next morning he realised that what he actually saw was the top of the street lamp outside. His personification of a street lamp was the inspiration for a number of disturbing sketches including the surreal The Street Lamp Looks In (1968) where a pointed face on a long neck peers in with an expression of surprise and alarm at the viewer.
It was Levy who first observed that Lowry’s lamp posts feel like “an autobiographical note symbolising loneliness and isolation of the artist as an observer”. As Lowry himself once confided: “Had I not been lonely I would not have seen what I did.”
Lowry’s Lamps by Richard Mayson is published by Unicorn at £20 in July