Back To Now: Now Dance

It’s 1985, you’re on holiday at Butlin’s, and you’re in the ‘entertainment hall’ – basically a very big room with a stage and some amenities – throwing every spare ten pence you have at trying to get the high score on Atari’s Quadra-Scan Vector-based spinny dial-facilitated arcade game Tempest. Almost by accident, you fall in to mid-dial-spin blast conversation with a slightly older girl called Yolande, dressed as much after the fashion of Into The Groove-era Madonna as a fourteen-year-old can get away with, who later that week will win both the ‘Miss Personality’ contest and a talent show; you’ll never guess what she was singing. While you chat – as it was pretty much everywhere throughout that holiday – the full-length extended version of Clouds Across The Moon by The RAH Band is issuing from somewhere in the background.

It’s scarcely a holiday romance, and it’s not what the Bratpack movies and The Kids Of Degrassi Street are determinedly telling you what a ‘moment’ should be, but it’s the sort of brief and influential friendship that you might, say, want to reflect on fondly while playing the dreadful ZX Spectrum port of Tempest. By that time, though, Clouds Across The Moon has been and gone as a chart contender and an in-stock item, and the ‘Bargains’ box in WH Smith can only yield a 7″ copy that looks like it’s been pressed at an angle. If you want the full Yolande-wistfulness occasioning version, there’s only one place you can find it.

1985’s Now Dance was the first attempt at expanding the Now That’s What I Call Music! brand – even predating Now – The Christmas Album – and there’s a strong case for arguing that it may actually be the oddest compilation of recent ‘hits’ that Ashley Abram and Box Music ever put together a putative tracklisting for. Unlike Now That’s What I Call Music! 5 and its line-up of literal mid-eighties chart hopefuls from Steve Arrington and Scritti Politti to The Conway Brothers and The Commentators, Now Dance is a collection of 12″ Extended Mixes that have recently been big in ‘the clubs’ – and it’s not dance music as we know it. While there were still obvious evolutionary ancestors including Northern Soul and the entire gay scene which had been defiantly pursuing its own direction before it was even legal to do so, ‘dance music’ as the unstoppable all-consuming phenomenon we might recognise it now essentially didn’t exist until around 1986, and this is a collection of ‘club music’ – basically very long versions of pop, rock and soul songs like when The Rolling Stones used to do a single track per album that was that crucial amount more programmed and ‘funky’ in the hope of scoring club play that had been acting as the backdrop to sophisticated types in designer jackets glugging down Taboo in chrome-festooned neon-lit swanky hangouts like a bad scene from Only Fools And Horses made reality. It came in a racy and suggestive cover, was plugged on television by an advert with a flash of nudity in it, and had the general air of being too exclusive, exotic and aspirational for the likes of you. Though it had Clouds Across The Moon on it. Along with DeBarge, Eurythmics, Stephen ‘TinTin’ Duffy, Ashford And Simpson, Phyllis Nelson, far too many men called Curtis and a remake of Theme From Shaft that should have been flung out of a window in a tartan trenchcoat. Oh and ‘Belouis’ ‘Some’.

If you want to know more about the ‘2 Hours Of Wicked Mixes To Keep You Moving All Night Long’, which apparently somehow involves a cover of Groovin’ only apparently reconfigured as Farmer Barleymow’s theme from Bod, then you’re in luck as you can listen to me chatting about it on the Back To Now podcast here. So join us for a chat about ‘the album you’ve been dreaming of’ along with Kamelion from Doctor Who‘s dance moves, Jermaine Jackson presenting Pob’s Programme and why Phil Collins should have gone on Top Of The Pops with a copy of Out Now! on cassette on top of his piano…

You can download Back To Now: Now Dance here or listen to it below, and you can find more thoughts on Now Dance – and indeed Clouds Across The Moon – here.

Buy A Book!

If you enjoyed this, then you’ll enjoy my book Can’t Help Thinking About Me, a collection of columns and features with a personal twist which includes a lot more about eighties pop music. Can’t Help Thinking About Me is available in paperback here or from the Kindle Store here.

Alternately, if you’re just feeling generous, you can buy me a coffee here. Don’t give one to Lillo Thomas though. He keeps telling us he needs to settle down.

Further Listening

You can find a chat about the quietly forgotten original version of Now – The Christmas Album in Looks Unfamiliar with Ben Baker here and Suzy Robinson’s thoughts on Now That’s What I Call Music! 4 here.