You all know Maniac by Michael Sembello, right? The hit song from the not-very-good 1983 dance movie Flashdance, a film that most people only remember because of the video that accompanied Sembello’s track. It’s a track that is so much a part of that early 1980s culture that most people don’t even give it much thought – it’s seen as a dance track from a dance movie, performed by someone that you’d never heard of before and wouldn’t hear of again – one of the endless collection of anonymous male singers who had a hit with the thrusting theme tune to a popular movie. But none of that is true.
First of all, there is the song itself. We tend to think of this as a dance track because it comes from a dance movie – I mean, it’s even got the word ‘dance’ in the title, and the video is full of shots of Jennifer Beal in a leotard pumping away furiously in the gym. She’s dancing to the song, right? Well, no. Look at the video again – it exists as a mini-movie in its own right, removed from the feature film that it came from and has a dark, obsessive nature to it, complete with a nightmarish strobe sequence and a relentlessness that is frankly exhausting. If this is about dancing, it’s a Red Shoes-style scenario of possession – the character in the song is out of control, gripped with a mania beyond her control. This isn’t dancing – it’s torture, albeit self-inflicted. She doesn’t even seem to be enjoying it most of the time.
In that sense, the images work well with the song that is only seen as a dance track because of the film it is connected to. If you listen to it afresh, what’s striking is just how relentless and furious it feels, like it belongs in a movie rather less feel-good than Flashdance wanted to be. Stripped of the vocals it feels like it would fit alongside the synth-rock scores that were beginning to dominate Italian horror. If this was on the soundtrack of something like Lucio Fulci’s disco giallo Murder Rock – Dancing Death, it would feel less out of place. It turns out that there is a good reason for that.
The original version of Maniac, a demo that Michael Sembello had recorded with writing partner Dennis Matkosky, was a song about a serial killer, inspired by news reports about John Wayne Gacy and their viewing of the 1980 William Lustig film of the same name. Once you know that, it all makes a strange sort of sense. Lines like “she’s a maniac at your door”, “on the ice-blue line of insanity” and “it can cut you like a knife” feel like leftovers from the original version. Once you know, it doesn’t sound like anything else – it’s horror movie music. Sadly, Sembello’s original version doesn’t seem to have emerged anywhere but according to Matkosky, it featured lyrics like “he’ll kill your cat and nail it to the floor, he’ll rape your mother and screw your wife”, which is probably not the sort of thing that was going to get the song much airplay. But when Phil Ramone, music supervisor on Flashdance, heard it, he knew there was something – so a quick rewrite and a musical polish to take out the more obviously discordant parts that song originally contained, and there you have it. Joe Spinell would later claim that the song was written for Maniac, but that was wishful thinking – by the time the song was written, that film was already a couple of years old.
You’ll note that the music video is almost entirely film clips of Jennifer Beal. Michael Sembello is nowhere to be seen, which is odd because generally in this sort of thing, it was a mix of the singer and film clips. But Sembello was as shadowy as Spinell’s character in Maniac. There may have been a reason for that.
We tend to think of the 1980s as the time when image began to dominate music, where The Look became as important as – maybe more important than – the music. It was the era of the New Romantic and MTV, where a good song was no longer enough – you needed to look cool. Maybe in Britain, it was true. But it wasn’t the case in America during the first half of the decade when popular bands could still look like Toto, moustachioed men in their thirties. This was Michael Sembello in 1983:
I think we can agree that the vest is a bold fashion choice for a man that hairy to wear on a 1983 pop show but there is something admirable about the lack of artifice. Then again, Michael Sembello probably wasn’t looking to be a pop idol. He was a highly respected session musician who had worked with artists like Stevie Wonder and written songs for Diana Ross and Michael Jackson. Clearly, he had music that he wanted to release himself but I’m not sure that he had any illusions about becoming a major pop star at the age of thirty. His first solo album, Bossa Nova Hotel, was released in 1983 and as well as featuring Maniac and very strange cover art, it includes the utterly bizarre Automatic Man, a science fiction-themed song that is musically all over the place and has a music video that has to be seen to be believed, playing like a collision of Italian Mad Max clones and Heartbeeps. It feels like every ludicrous moment of the 1980s squeezed into five minutes and it is compulsively, brilliantly awful. For some reason, this was chosen as the follow-up single to Maniac. You may be unsurprised to hear that it was not a hit.
There was a third single from the album, Talk, that is just turgid, but the other album tracks include Godzilla, which is a fairly mad tribute to the giant lizard that was sadly overlooked for inclusion on Godzilla 1985 (Sembello is shown reading Marvel Godzilla comic on the album cover) and Superman, a strangely downbeat song about the Man of Steel. If nothing else, Bossa Nova Hotel is as awash with pop culture references as a Pop Will Eat Itself LP. Most of the songs on the album feel like (slightly) more commercial propositions than Automatic Man but the whole thing is a curiosity that could seem like either self-indulgence or complete artistic freedom, depending on how you look at it. It’s well worth a listen and you can find it online in the usual places.
Michael Sembello’s later output includes a lot of rather more average songs for films like Cocoon, Independence Day, The Monster Squad and Gremlins (his music is playing in the frantic bar scene that includes a visual nod to Flashdance) and much of his later career has seen him playing jazz music, which seems to be where his heart is. It’s solid, serious music – a bit dull if you are not into that sort of thing and certainly nowhere near the eccentric oddness of his 1983 work. He’s discussed the origins of Maniac many times – even appearing on the US Blu-ray of the film – but no one has had the sense to get him to record the original version of the song. Its absence from the 2012 reimagining of the film feels like a lost opportunity.
DAVID FLINT
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