Dan Hartman -- Relight My Fire

 

Welcome once more to Reminiscings of Youth. This week's article will be taking a slightly more circuitous route, so please bear with me.

Recently, I encountered a music video I hadn't seen in some time and it was The Avalanches' "Frontier Psychiatrist" from 2000. The Australian electronic music band specializes in plunderphonics which has samples of other songs woven together to make a totally new and hopefully very listenable song. "Frontier Psychiatrist" is one of The Avalanches' hits which brings in among other things snippets of a comedy routine by Wayne & Shuster, one of Canada's premier duos from way back. The video is something that a particularly imaginative psychiatric patient would come up with, and I would advise keeping a strong libation on hand when watching this one.

Liking the cut of their jib, I began looking for some more Avalanches fare and so I came across something that had been created by them years later in 2013 which was a remix of Australian rock band Hunters and Collectors' 1982 debut single, "Talking to a Stranger", cheekily retitled "Stalking to a Stranger". The original song and music video were already intriguing enough as something rather art rock but then The Avalanches injected some old-fashioned disco into the earthy and growly rock to make something that sounded and looked just as comfortable in Manhattan's Studio 54 as it did on the Outback (the Australian interior region, not the restaurant).

That injection turned out to be Dan Hartman's "Relight My Fire" from 1979, near the end of the disco era. I know that by this time, the whole "Disco Sucks" movement was pretty much on fire as the title but the song still sounds like those strings, horns and dancers were enjoying the time of their lives on the dance floor. And it still managed to hit No. 1 on Billboard's Dance/Club Play chart in December that year. Hartman was joined by Loleatta Holloway on the vocals, and there are apparently a number of different remixes.

I barely remember hearing it as a kid, and part of the reason that I have opted to cover "Relight My Fire" was that it wasn't something that I recall hearing in its entirety aside from that dynamic intro, perhaps not even through K-Tel record compilation commercials on TV. The instrumental version was used in a number of other ways including on NBC's late-night show "Tomorrow Coast to Coast". Most likely, I heard it on sports broadcasts since I recall that they enjoyed injecting some disco as background music.

Considering that "Relight My Fire" was hitting high on that dance chart in mid-December, let's go with what was hitting the Oricon chart for that month in 1979 (specifically December 3rd). I give you Nos. 2, 3 and 4.

2. Saki Kubota -- Ihojin （異邦人）

3. Hirofumi Bamba -- Sachiko

4. Toshi Ito and Happy & Blue -- Yoseba ii noni (よせばいいのに)