cliccate sulle copertine
per i dettagli degli album
Lesley Duncan è morta il 12 marzo 2010 dopo una lunga malattia
All'interno
della sterminata discografia di Elton John,
LOVE
SONG di Lesley Duncan è una delle poche canzoni non composta da lui
stesso a
comparire in un suo album ed è anche la prima canzone
in cui Elton non suona il piano e si limita a cantare. Prima che
arrivasse
Kiki
Dee, era Lesley una delle vocalist nei dischi di Elton; andate a
leggere le
note di copertina degli album Elton
John,
Tumbleweed
Connection, Friends
e in Madman
Across The Water.
Lesley
Duncan, nata a Stockton-on-Tees (Gran Bretagna) il 12 agosto del 1943,
ha al suo attivo una discografia di cinque LP (Sing
Children Sing, Earth
Mother, Everything
Changes, Moon
Bathing, Maybe
It's Lost) e un
discreto numero di singoli.
Purtroppo non amava esibirsi dal vivo e poco è rimasto della
sua
attività live. Negli anni 70 ha collaborato come vocalist a
decine
e decine di album; basta ricordare "The Dark
Side Of The Moon" dei Pink
Floyd, "Jesus
Christ Superstar" e "Eve"
di The Alan Parsons Project.
Dopo aver abbandonato il mondo musicale si era
stabilita
in Cornovaglia, insieme al sua attuale marito Tony Cox, compositore e
produttore
discografico. Per maggiori dettagli sulla sua storia musicale, date
un'occhiata
al nuovo sito a lei dedicato: http://lesleyduncan.tripod.com/
Sing
Children Sing e Earth
Mother sono gli unici
album ristampati in
CD; il primo contiene la famosa Love
Song,
inoltre Elton suona il piano in molti brani. Di Moonbathing
purtroppo è andato distrutto il master in un incendio, come
ci ha
informato la stessa Lesley, e si sta cercando una buona copia da cui
ricavare
il CD.
alcuni testi tradotti
dall'album
Earth Mother
il singolo italiano
contenente
Love Song
da discoclub.myblog.it
09/08/2010
Per Associazione Di Idee... Lesley Duncan - Sing Children Sing
Lesley Duncan - Sing Children Sing - Cbs 1971 - CD Edsel Uk 2000
D'estate
mi piace, ogni tanto, andare a riascoltare o rivedere vecchi CD e DVD
(alcuni ancora con la loro bella plastichina), ai quali per ragioni di
tempo non ho dedicato una sia pur minima attenzione.
L'altro giorno mi stavo, quindi, guardando un fantastico DVD intitolato The Old Grey Whiste Test (Vol. 1,
ne esistono anche un volume 2 e 3 che non conosco, per quanto in
rete...) che raccoglie filmati realizzati per la BBC dal 1971 al 1987,
uno più straordinario dell'altro, ma oggi non parliamo di questo (ma uno
dei prossimi giorni sicuramente sì): ad ogni buon conto alla fine del
DVD ci sono una serie di interviste esclusive con Mick Jagger, John Lennon, Keith Richards, Robert Plant e anche una con Bernie Taupin e Elton John (giovani ma giovani, era il 1971...) in cui discutono del loro nuovo album Madman Across The Water, un capolavoro, e un Elton John infastidito per non dire inc...to per le critiche alla sua musica cita il disco di Lesley Duncan
in cui ha suonato dicendo, più o meno, "Ho letto che il suo nuovo disco
è stato accolto bene anche se nel disco suona un certo Elton John...".
A
quel punto qualcosa è scattato nella mia memoria, ma io ce l'ho quel
disco, me lo ricordo, copertina gatefold, etichetta CBS primi anni '70.
Ammetto che saranno almeno trent'anni che non lo sentivo (anche se
all'inizio degli anni 2000 era uscito in CD per i tipi della Edsel, ma
ho visto che su Amazon Uk si trova solo usato a 150 sterline).
Morale della favola, mi ricordavo che era bello, ma sono andato a risentirlo ed è molto bello: si chiama Sing Children Children, è stato prodotto dal tastierista e arrangiatore Jimmy Horowitz (che allora era suo marito) con la collaborazione del "mitico" chitarrista Chris Spedding. Al piano, in alcuni brani, naturalmente, c'è anche Elton John, ma non nella versione di Love Song, un pezzo scritto da Lesley Duncan che appare sul disco Tumbleweed Connection e che è uno dei rarissimi brani non composti da Elton John che appare nei suoi primi dischi.
Un passo indietro o avanti, a seconda dei punti di vista: la
discografia della Duncan consta di 5 CD pubblicati negli anni 1970 (i
migliori i primi due, questo e Earth Mother del 1972) e non
quindi gli 8 indicati dall'(in)fallibile Wikipedia, oltre ad una serie
di illustri collaborazioni iniziate negli anni '60 come vocalist di
supporto di Dusty Springfield e Walker Brothers, appare poi, sempre come corista, nella prima versione di Jesus Christ Superstar del 1970, quella con Ian Gillan per intenderci e da lì inizia la sua lunga collaborazione con Elton John. Appare in Elton John, Tumbleweed Connection e Madman Across the Water, una magica trilogia e nel live Here and There pubblicato nel 1976 ma registrato nel 1974 dove duetta con Elton John nella sua Love Song. Nel frattempo, nel 1973, è una delle voci femminili che appaiono in Dark Side of The Moon dei Pink Floyd. Per collegamento, poi apparirà, come cantante, in If I Could Change Your Mind in Eve dell'Alan Parsons Project, ma ha cantato anche con Donovan, Kiki Dee, Ringo Starr e mille altri.
Il
disco è molto bello, tipico del sound dei cantautori di quegli anni: la
voce è dolce e potente allo stesso tempo, malinconica e vissuta, le
canzoni sono come dire, fataliste, con il sound tipico dei seventies,
tastiere e molte chitarre, anche elettriche, Spedding e la stessa Duncan. C'è uno straordinario Terry Cox, proprio quello dei Pentangle, alla batteria, che illumina con la sua performance un lungo brano Mr. Rubin,
già fantastico di suo, con il suo incredibile crescendo vocale e
strumentale che rivaleggia con alcuni brani del Van Morrison di quegli
anni e che nella parte di batteria mi ha ricordato l'assolo all'interno
di un brano di Steve Gadd in Aja degli Steely Dan ma 6 anni prima. Notevole anche l'iniziale Chain Of Love, l'emozionante Lullaby e la vivace Help Me Jesus. Ma tutto il disco meriterebbe di essere sentito e rivalutato.
Lesley Duncan è morta il 12 marzo del 2010, lo stesso giorno del compleanno di mia mamma, per le coincidenze della vita.
Questo era un piccolo ricordo di uno di quei Beautiful Losers che popolano gli annali della Musica con la M maiuscola.
Bruno Conti
da www.heraldscotland.com
Published on 25 Mar 2010
Singer songwriter;
Born August 12, 1943;
Died March 12, 2010.
Lesley Duncan,
who has died aged 66, was Britain’s first hit-making female
singer-songwriter. She maintained she only bluffed her way into the
business after knocking up a couple of songs in her head.
She was waitressing in a Bayswater coffee bar
and living in a bedsit when her brother, Jimmy, fresh out of Wormwood
Scrubs, announced he was going to become a songwriter.
Thinking anyone could do that, she composed two
songs, without any instruments, and promptly sang them unaccompanied to
the head of a music publisher she had arranged to meet. The pair of
diminutive kids with thick Teeside accents were immediately offered a
retainer and her future was sealed.
The
company was Francis Day and Hunter, now part of EMI, and her career,
collaborating with rock and pop glitterati from David Bowie to Elton
John, Pink Floyd and Dusty Springfield, was about to take off. Hundreds
of artists, including Elton John, Dionne Warwick, Peggy Lee, Topol and
Barry White, have since recorded her best known composition, Love Song.
It’s not bad for a girl who thought she “wasn’t much of a singer” and
had no great ambition.
Duncan was born
in Stockton-on-Tees to a Scottish father, Ranald Duncan, from Cluny,
Aberdeenshire, who left her mother, Kathleen, while she was expecting
their daughter. She and her late brother were raised by their mum, a bit
of a good-time girl, according to Duncan, who was a fine pianist and
played in clubs, often leaving the children at home at night.
Despite the lack of parental support she made
it to grammar school but left before her 15th birthday. She later made
up for that by reading intensely. She waitressed in north of England
hotels before moving to London, aged 16, and making the leap into the
music business.
She and her brother won
their retainers in 1963: he got £10 a week, she was on £7. “On Friday I
was a waitress, and on Monday I was in showbusiness,” she once said,
adding: “It was all bluff really, I was just bluffing.”
Within weeks Duncan was in the movie business,
winning a part in the pop film What A Crazy World, with Joe Brown, Susan
Maughan and Marty Wilde, and later a recording contract with Parlophone
Records, the same label as The Beatles.
Although
she then did not have any huge success recording her own songs – nice
but naive affairs – she was well known as a backing singer. She worked
with Dusty Springfield, Madeline Bell and Kiki Dee, all singing on each
other’s records.
It was not until Elton
John, with whom she worked together on sessions, recorded Love Song on
his Tumbleweed Connection album that she got an album deal. Her
songwriting had matured and she produced Sing Children Sing, on which
Elton played, and appeared on Top of the Pops.
She released her album Earth Mother in 1972, dedicating it to
Friends of the Earth, of which she was an enthusiastic member. By that
time she had married record producer Jimmy Horowitz and went on to have
two sons with him, Sam and Joe. Although their professional creative
relationship went well, the marriage broke up and in 1976 she dropped
out and went to live in Cornwall.
It was
there she got to know her second husband, Tony Cox, also a record
producer and music arranger. They had previously met when she was doing
session work. “I recall thinking she was a rather stroppy, difficult
little woman,” he said. “She later said she thought I was a pretty weird
guy – views which we never entirely let go of in 30 years.”
They hit it off better in Cornwall in 1977 and
married the following year. They later spent 11 years in Oxford, where
Duncan worked at Oxfam’s HQ and helped to promote fundraising concerts
with up and coming acts, including Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie. In 1979,
she released Sing Children Sing again as a fundraiser for Oxfam for
Year of the Child.
During her career she
released a number of albums and also sang on the Alan Parson’s Project
release Eve, the Jesus Christ Superstar album, Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of
the Moon, Elton John’s Madman Across the Water and with Ringo Starr,
Donovan and the Dave Clark Five.
Never
comfortable with being on the road or performing, and taking her duties
as a mother seriously, she was happiest in the recording
studio. Duncan, who latterly suffered from
cerebrovascular disease, never officially retired but her last record
was released in 1986.
The couple moved
to Tobermory on Mull in 1996 where her illustrious music career was
unknown to many of the locals but where condolences arrived from Elton
John and David Bowie. She died in the island’s hospital with her husband
at her side, just as Love Song, playing in the background, came to a
close.
da www.timesonline.co.uk
The singer and songwriter Lesley Duncan will be best remembered for her
gentle, heartfelt composition Love Song, which so captivated
Elton
John that he covered it on his Tumbleweed Connection album. Under
John’s patronage she went on to record a number of solo albums in the
1970s.
She was also an in-demand session backing singer, working with Dusty
Springfield and Donovan and singing on Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of
the Moon.
Duncan was born in 1943 and emerged in the mid-1960s as one of a
talented crop
of British female pop singers that included not only Springfield but
also
Lulu and Sandie Shaw. Her first single, I Want a Steady, appeared
in
1963 under the name Lesley Duncan and the Jokers, but failed to make the
charts. She was unusual for the time in that she was already writing
some of
her own material, but further singles with titles redolent of the era
such
as Just for the Boy, See that Guy and Hey Boy,
failed
to score commercially.
She found greater success as a backing singer, particularly with
Springfield
and John, with whom she began a fruitful partnership when she appeared
on
his self-titled second album in 1970.
She went on to sing on three more albums by John, including Tumbleweed
Connection, on which he sang her Love Song, a slow, haunting
ballad built around the mesmerisingly simple but heartfelt refrain,
“Love is
the key we must turn, truth is the flame we must burn”.
John’s support turned the key for Duncan and won her a recording
contract with
Columbia. Sing Children Sing, her debut album, appeared in 1971.
It
was produced by her husband, Jimmy Horowitz, and John played piano on
the
album, which included her version of Love Song. A second album,
Earth Mother, appeared in 1972 and the title track was one of the
earliest pop songs to express environmental concerns.
Her debut album made enough of a stir for her to appear on the first
edition
of The Old Grey Whistle Test on BBC2 in 1971. But despite this
and
plenty of radio play, her commercial success was held back by her
reluctance
to perform live. Although she appeared occasionally with John, crippling
stage fright meant she seldom performed solo concerts.
Three more albums followed for different labels, Everything Changes (1974),
Moonbathing (1975), which again featured John on piano, and Maybe
It’s Lost (1977). None of them sold at all well — although by then
she had appeared on one of the biggest selling albums in rock history,
when
in 1973 she joined Doris Troy and Liza Strike in the female chorus on Dark
Side of the Moon.
The final album she appeared on was Eve by the Alan Parsons
Project in
1979, although she recorded several more solo singles, produced by her
second husband, Tony Cox, including a 1979 rerecording of Sing
Children
Sing, which featured Kate Bush on backing vocals. In recent years
her
first two albums were reissued on CD.
Lesley Duncan, singer and songwriter, was born on August 12, 1943.
She died
on March 12, 2010, aged 66, after contracting cerebrovascular disease.
Singer songwriter;
Born August 12, 1943;
Died March 12, 2010.
Lesley Duncan, who has died aged 66, was Britain’s first hit-making female singer-songwriter. She maintained she only bluffed her way into the business after knocking up a couple of songs in her head.
She was waitressing in a Bayswater coffee bar and living in a bedsit when her brother, Jimmy, fresh out of Wormwood Scrubs, announced he was going to become a songwriter.
Thinking anyone could do that, she composed two songs, without any instruments, and promptly sang them unaccompanied to the head of a music publisher she had arranged to meet. The pair of diminutive kids with thick Teeside accents were immediately offered a retainer and her future was sealed.
The company was Francis Day and Hunter, now part of EMI, and her career, collaborating with rock and pop glitterati from David Bowie to Elton John, Pink Floyd and Dusty Springfield, was about to take off. Hundreds of artists, including Elton John, Dionne Warwick, Peggy Lee, Topol and Barry White, have since recorded her best known composition, Love Song. It’s not bad for a girl who thought she “wasn’t much of a singer” and had no great ambition.
Duncan was born in Stockton-on-Tees to a Scottish father, Ranald Duncan, from Cluny, Aberdeenshire, who left her mother, Kathleen, while she was expecting their daughter. She and her late brother were raised by their mum, a bit of a good-time girl, according to Duncan, who was a fine pianist and played in clubs, often leaving the children at home at night.
Despite the lack of parental support she made it to grammar school but left before her 15th birthday. She later made up for that by reading intensely. She waitressed in north of England hotels before moving to London, aged 16, and making the leap into the music business.
She and her brother won their retainers in 1963: he got £10 a week, she was on £7. “On Friday I was a waitress, and on Monday I was in showbusiness,” she once said, adding: “It was all bluff really, I was just bluffing.”
Within weeks Duncan was in the movie business, winning a part in the pop film What A Crazy World, with Joe Brown, Susan Maughan and Marty Wilde, and later a recording contract with Parlophone Records, the same label as The Beatles.
Although she then did not have any huge success recording her own songs – nice but naive affairs – she was well known as a backing singer. She worked with Dusty Springfield, Madeline Bell and Kiki Dee, all singing on each other’s records.
It was not until Elton John, with whom she worked together on sessions, recorded Love Song on his Tumbleweed Connection album that she got an album deal. Her songwriting had matured and she produced Sing Children Sing, on which Elton played, and appeared on Top of the Pops.
She released her album Earth Mother in 1972, dedicating it to Friends of the Earth, of which she was an enthusiastic member. By that time she had married record producer Jimmy Horowitz and went on to have two sons with him, Sam and Joe. Although their professional creative relationship went well, the marriage broke up and in 1976 she dropped out and went to live in Cornwall.
It was there she got to know her second husband, Tony Cox, also a record producer and music arranger. They had previously met when she was doing session work. “I recall thinking she was a rather stroppy, difficult little woman,” he said. “She later said she thought I was a pretty weird guy – views which we never entirely let go of in 30 years.”
They hit it off better in Cornwall in 1977 and married the following year. They later spent 11 years in Oxford, where Duncan worked at Oxfam’s HQ and helped to promote fundraising concerts with up and coming acts, including Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie. In 1979, she released Sing Children Sing again as a fundraiser for Oxfam for Year of the Child.
During her career she released a number of albums and also sang on the Alan Parson’s Project release Eve, the Jesus Christ Superstar album, Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon, Elton John’s Madman Across the Water and with Ringo Starr, Donovan and the Dave Clark Five.
Never comfortable with being on the road or performing, and taking her duties as a mother seriously, she was happiest in the recording
studio. Duncan, who latterly suffered from cerebrovascular disease, never officially retired but her last record was released in 1986.
The couple moved to Tobermory on Mull in 1996 where her illustrious music career was unknown to many of the locals but where condolences arrived from Elton John and David Bowie. She died in the island’s hospital with her husband at her side, just as Love Song, playing in the background, came to a close.