KIKI DEE SAVED FROM A FATE WORSE THAN DEATH

KIKI DEE SAVED FROM A FATE WORSE THAN DEATH

Frog Prince Does His Thing:

by Simon Frith & Peter Langley

Ok, so the Beatles got the MBE but when Elton John goes to meet his Queen it won't be any old tin pot medals for him. He'll be on one knee and it'll be "Arise, Sir Elton!" because Elton hasn't just sold millions more records than them but he's a gentleman, an English gentleman.

Take Kiki Dee. It's not just that Elton didn't. He didn't invent her either. Or discover her. Or adopt her. Or any of that showbiz scam. Nope. Elton RESCUED HER! Lady in distress and her hair was longer then, too.

Kiki Dee has had more hairdos than Ringo Starr and John Lennon combinedl The bottom left photo shows her most interesting do—a failed attempt at dreadlocks. We think you're better off with the puddin' bowl, hon.

Kiki Dee was Pauline Matthews even before Elton John was Reg Dwight. At eight years old she was tap dancing on the tables of her native Bedford, England; by age 12 she was singing and at 16 she was fronting a dance band. In 1963 she was talent-spotted. Fontana records came calling and signed her up for five years. That was her fate worse than death and it'd be many years before Elton came riding by.

What you have to understand is British showbiz in the early Sixties. The Beatles did a good job for the boys-1writing their own songs and breaking violins and all that—but the girls they didn't help. And so Kiki went to London and joined Sandie Shaw and Cilia Black and Lulu and Dusty Springfield and even when they had rock dreams (and Kiki didn't then, not even a rock itch) they couldn't have rock practices but were Showbiz ladies, swamped in strings and make-up and off the shoulder dresses for a glimpse of cleavage to add class to cabarets and clubs and TV variety and endless ballads with arrangements by Les Reed. Kiki had a recording contract, a manager and an agent, an orchestrator,and in five years she made an

.. .Kiki Dee got into hedonism. She went to California to hang out and get a tan.

album and some singles and sang on the radio and traveled a lot—working men's clubs and European song festivals. She learned to do her thing (pop singer: classy ballad division) and sang in front of every local pick-up musician this side of the Sahara.

But not in front of Elton yet. First of all something weird happened; something that Kiki talks about like she read it in a comic strip—a nice thing that happened to someone else. It was 1969. She didn't have a contract anymore, had never had a hit, only a lifetime past and a lifetime to come of ballad singing. Her manager had a phone call from Detroit. Tamla Motown on the line. Could Kiki make an album for them?

She spent the summer of '69 in

Detroit. Didn't meet people really, but went into the studio and sang what she was told and talks about the experience now with the ex-Motown mixture of awe at the company's professional expertise and affection for the people she worked with and bewilderment at what the fuck was going on and why had Motown suddenly signed this not exactly bursting with fame English girl and why did nothing happen when she came back to England where no-one even knew she'd gone? The album didn't appear for a year and it was pleasant but not top ten pleasant, not in the pop charts or soul charts or anywhere.

Back to the classy ballads and the clubs and not just Europe now but months in Rhodesia and Zambia, where faded English pop stars hole up, and to Australia with the Bachelors oh dear. And yet, and yet...The spell had been spoken now and she didn't even know. She'd done a particularly appalling BBC-TV show, One More Time, old MOR standards sung by old MOR standards, one mouth close-up after another without even a break for a DJ. And among the back-up singers on her bit was an Elton John.

In 1972 John Reid, who as a very young man had run Motown's London office and handled Kikf's bewilderment with some charm, called her up just as suddenly as then. He and Elton were starting a label. They'd been discussing talent...would she?

It was a nice moment. Kiki had split from her manager who'd been a brother from the start. She'd split from Motown, still confused. She had an agent,, cabaret dates, and she'd just decided that she hated classy ballads; unless, that is, Joni Mitchell wrote them or Carole King maybe. Kiki had been listening to American ladies and thinking. Why was Lesley Duncan still oohing and aahing through session after session? Why hadn't Dusty Springfield had a career? Kiki signed for Rocket and got a guitar.

At first it seemed like the happy ending had happened already^ Kiki had a new manager, John Reid—the best. Her first Rocket LP was an E. John production, a track off it, "Amoureuse", was her first English hit. She got a band together and her pianist, Bias Boshell, wrote "I've Got The Music Ih Me", her second hit. When she toured now she supported The Beach Boys, Steely Dan, the Elton John Extravaganza. This wasa't the Euro-variety circuit, but it wasn't bliss either. In March 1975 Kiki dissolved her band and stopped to think.

She thought two problems. First, she had to learn to lead a band and not just front it. She had to develop the toughness and musical confidence to penetrate the male musician's deafness to a woman's voice. She wanted to be part of a unit and with this band she mostly wasn't. Second, she'd changed since she was 16 but she hadn't stopped, ever: it was time for "a little bit of personal reassessment of myself and what was happening to me."

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KIKI OEE

In 1975 Kiki Dee got into hedonism. She went to California to hang out and get a tan. She'd started going around with Davey Johnstone from Elton's band and she lived in LA. She made a record there but it wasn't "ahead of what I'd done before" and it wasn't released. She learned to wait, for Elton to be free to produce her again. And in the summer of '76 her new virtue was rewarded. The duet she and Elton had joked about for years suddenly happened and happened big—"Don't Go Breaking My Heart." A marking-time EP of old songs was a hit in England, its radio-featured song, "Loving and Free." Kiki was suddenly an honest to god-successful singer/songwriter.

But for all these perks it's the new album that matters and the new tour and new band to go with it. Kiki's got to make it without Elton's permanent presence, she's got to be as successful on album as on singles, in America as well as in Britain. She's bubbling with it, with her own new songs, with her album's new sounds, with her band's new faces and, above all, with the care and confidence that Rocket surrounds her. She interviews like a newcomer, starting out—"Hopefully I'm much more capable of handling it now"— and hopefully Rocket is too. Because the British music business still hasn't done well by its female musicians. And as we wished Kiki well we were all aware of another sleeping beauty, stirring stage left. Dusty Springfield, the plot goes, is making her comeback, squired by Cat Stevens' manager. If Kiki can really work her magic she will break more spells than she knows.