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Senior Member
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Join Date: Jul 2004
Location: Rutland
Posts: 25,358
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Senior Member
Join Date: Jul 2004
Location: Rutland
Posts: 25,358
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Quote:
Originally posted by Stropz
Is Leo straight?
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Quote:
LEO SAYER
Back on top after being Down Under, Leo Sayer's career is enjoying a new lease of life as a re-mix of his 1970s single, Thunder in My Heart, storms the charts.
"I'm back quicker than a returning boomerang," quipped Sayer. It was only seven months ago that he and his partner and manager, Donatella Piccinetti, moved to Australia, feeling that his talents would be better appreciated there.
It was when he and Donatella were packing to leave their Ł1m Buckinghamshire home to take up residence more than 12,000 miles away that they got a call from Los Angeles.
A DJ named Craig Dimech, better known as Meck, had found a 12-inch record of Sayer's Thunder in My Heart in an LA discount store and wanted permission to give it the dance mix treatment.
Sayer sent him the tape and back came the re-mix of the song written by Sayer that reached a modest No. 22 in the British charts in 1977.
"He's changed it around completely, yet kept all of its integrity," says Sayer. "I keep listening, trying to find something wrong with it ż and I can't find a damn thing wrong."
Guilty pleasure
Neither, it seems, can top DJs including Fatboy Slim and Pete Tong, who was playing the re-mix regularly on his BBC Radio 1 show long before its official release in the past week. His fellow DJ Jo Whiley describes the track as "a true guilty pleasure".
Not that anyone initially envisaged Leo Sayer playing a significant part in its promotion. "They said I'd be the kiss of death ż all those DJs wouldn't touch the bloody thing with a bargepole."
Leo Sayer had 14 British Top 30 hits in the 70s and 80s, including You Make Me Feel Like Dancing, which topped America's Billboard chart, while When I Need You was a No.1 on both sides of the Atlantic.
Leo Sayer
Sayer on his 1970s TV show, Leo Sayer (Sounds like Friday)
To this day Sayer attributes "the finding of his voice" to the parish priest who inducted him into the choir at Shoreham-by-Sea on the Sussex coast.
In his teens, he abandoned his art and design course, soon added singing and song-writing to his harmonica-playing and, in his early 20s, gained a manager, Adam Faith, through Sayer's song-writing partner, David Courtney, who once played drums with Faith.
Inspired by Sayer's great mane of curls, Adam Faith's wife came up with a new name for Gerry Sayer, as he then was, calling him Leo, after the lion.
And record deals ż and hits - in the UK and America followed, along with his own show on BBC television.
Campaign
But by the mid-80s, the hits were drying up. Leo Sayer split up with his wife Janice, his manager, Adam Faith, and his record company, Chrysalis. He sued Faith, settling out of court for a reported Ł650,000 and, helped by his new manager, Donatella, embarked on a legal battle with Chrysalis Records to regain control of the publishing rights to his songs.
Leo Sayer's revival started in 1997 after two journalists from the Sun were excited by his performance at the Café Royal in London.
Their newspaper put its weight behind a campaign to promote Sayer and the little man with the big hair who'd once appeared on stage in a Pierrot's outfit and face paint, became chic at university gigs.
Sayer returned to successful tours of the United States and Australia, but still felt under-valued in Britain.
Now, though, Britain's seeing much more of him. Well, there is much more of him; at 11 stone, he's 42 pounds heavier than in his heyday.
"When I was dressed as a clown in all that make-up I used to shed pounds every night and got agonising kidney stones because I was sweating so much."
At 57, he and Donatella won't be moving back to Britain. Australia's given him a "special talent" visa and the couple love their villa with a view of Sydney harbour.
But just as a Peter Kay video of Amarillo showed Tony Christie the way to a new career, so DJ Meck had made Leo Sayer Feel Like Dancing again.
Swapping some of the Australian summer for British winter may be a shock to his system, but Sayer says that in career terms, it's great being "cool again".
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source: BBC
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04-01-2007, 08:56 PM
Hybrid Mode
