AWB, Eddie C, Gloria Ann Taylor
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On the show today, I start off with a song from Vince Aletti's Disco Files column for November 30, 1974. As a regular feature on Sunshine After Dark, I'm tracking the column week by week, and I try to play one or two songs mentioning in the column of the current week.
In his column of November 30, 1974, Aletti, reporting on the Pippins club in New York city and its DJ, Tyrone "DJ" Hollywood, wrote that while the crowd there leaned toward African rhythms from the likes of Fela Kuti and the Lafayette Afro-Rock Band, "it's also among the first clubs to report solid success with the Average White Band's finely polished Pick up the pieces." It's kind of remarkable to hear the first reports of a song that would go on to be so well-known!
Average White Band was a British group, and I follow them up with a track from fellow Brits Hot Chocolate.
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Also on the show, I feature a couple of recent 7" edit releases from Eddie C on his Red Motorbike label. Eddie grew up DJing in Ontario, before relocating to Banff for a number of years. About 10 years ago, after a string of well-received edit records, he moved to Berlin, but he has a strong connection to Edmonton, playing here many times at the Common and 9910, and providing tracks for the Common Edit 7" series. I recently met up with Eddie in Berlin, where he just released Red Motorbike number 20 through the OYE recordshop.
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Love is a hurting thing, performed by Gloria Ann Taylor with the Walter "Whiz" Whisehunt Orchestra - a long song and you have to hear the whole thing to get the full effect. I've been waiting to play this one on the show, and I think it pairs rather nicely with Harold Melvin & the Bluenotes.
[Cribbing from the Discogs biography:] Gloria Ann Taylor was born in 1944 in West Virginia, and died in 2017. She met Walter Whisenhunt in the early 1960s. He became her manager and record producer, and they married. Eventually they moved to California, but her singing career had slowed down by 1977 and their marriage ended after that. Ubiquity records began reissuing many of her recordings in 2015, two short years before she passed away in 2017.
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Finally, I close out the show with a few more records that I picked up on my trip over to Germany. The first one is actually a new release from British musicians Alan Hawkshaw and Brian Bennett. They are both famous for producing disco and Funky jazz back in the 1970s, but reunited to release new material on library music label KPM in 2018.