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Lesley Duncan è morta il 12 marzo 2010 dopo una lunga malattiaAll'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 primacanzone 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.
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.
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dall'album Earth Mother |
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contenente Love Song |
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| da www.heraldscotland.com
Published on 25 Mar 2010 |
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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.
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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.