Tuesday Tunes 201: Some More Dances

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After last week’s celebration of the 200th post in this series I thought I’d return again to another theme which I have featured before, but for which I have some more songs to play you. Back in 2022 I played three selections of songs with dance in their title, and as that is a natural fit for music I thought I’d take it round the floor again. So, here is my fourth selection of dance tunes.

I don’t really know why I haven’t played this one before, as it seems an obvious starter:

Chris Montez released Let’s Dance as a single in June 1962 and it reached #4 in the US and #2 in the UK. It is very much a song I grew up hearing, as I was coming up for 9 at that time and music was beginning to be a large part of my life. We weren’t well served for pop music on radio and tv back then, but somehow this one broke through for me and it is still great to hear today. It gets us off to a rousing start, which I always like to do if I can.

The rest of this week’s picks are a little more laid back than this, though they feature four of my favourite usual suspects. This one is a lovely song, though in its original version it was only ever an album track. I don’t usually play cover versions, but this one is exceptionally good:

Circle Dance was first a track on Bonnie Raitt’s album Longing In Their Hearts: this was her twelfth, released in March 1994 and peaking at #1 in the US and #26 in the UK – still her best placing in our charts, to our shame. This cover by Stevie Nicks and Vanessa Carlton is even more beautiful than the original, to my ears, with such wonderful harmonies and real feeling for the song. If you’d like to hear more of this concert, the recording of this and several other shows was released in March 2009 as The Soundstage Sessions, and made #47 in the US.

In one of the previous posts on this theme I played a Chris Rea song called Let’s Dance – not the same song as the one I started with today, though. It seems to be a popular choice of title, as here’s a third different song:

Let’s Dance was released as a single by David Bowie in March 1983, a month before it became the title track of his fifteenth album. That got to #1 in the UK, Australia, Denmark, the Netherlands, Finland, New Zealand, Canada, Norway, and Sweden, but only managed #4 in the US. Nevertheless, it still sold more than 2m copies there, as part of total worldwide sales of around 11m. The single went to #1 in both the UK and the US, selling more than 1m in the UK in the process: a double #1 to go with the album!

This is the only live performance video I can find for this next one. It is a bit of a hybrid, having been compiled from several recordings, but I think it preferable to just playing the audio-only version:

Romance Dance was the opening track on Little Feat’s fifth album, The Last Record Album, which came out in October 1975 and peaked at #36 in both the US and the UK. It is a great record, probably my favourite of theirs though others run it close. They shared their vocals around and on the record this was sung by Bill Payne (keyboards) and Paul Barrère (guitar), so as they are both performing here I think this video is ok to play even though it was shot in 1989, ten years after the passing of Lowell George, whose slide guitar featured on the original recording. They didn’t release many singles, so this one stayed on the album.

On to today’s final tune, and I think I may have left the best until last. This is an absolutely gorgeous live performance of a great song:

As if you didn’t know, that was Leonard Cohen with a wonderful version of Dance Me To The End Of Love, from a double album/DVD called Live In London, which was recorded in July 2008 and released in March 2009. The album reached #19 in the UK and #76 in the US. Backing singers are Sharon Robinson and, from left to centre, the Webb Sisters, Charley and Hattie, and the wind player is Dino Soldo. The original version of the song featured on Leonard’s album Various Positions, which was released in December 1984 and achieved various positions in charts around the world including #52 in the UK, though it didn’t make the US listings. Leonard is noted for his witty and self-deprecating comments in between songs, and Wikipedia quotes one of them from this show:

“It’s been a long time since I stood on a stage in London. It was about 14 or 15 years ago. I was 60 years old, just a kid with a crazy dream. Since then I’ve taken a lot of Prozac, Paxil, Wellbutrin, Effexor, Ritalin, Focalin. I’ve also studied deeply in the philosophies of the religions but cheerfulness kept breaking through.”

Isn’t that fantastic? And at the risk of being controversial, I’ll say again what I have said before: when the Nobel Prize Committee decided that they wanted to give their Literature award to a singer-songwriter, I think they chose the wrong one. Leonard was robbed, and I say that as a Bob Dylan fan.

That’s all for this week. I’ll see you again in a few days so until then I hope you enjoy your week, and a word of advice for those of you in the UK: don’t get over-excited about the General Election campaign 🤣