Monday, August 31, 2015

My Music Monday

The last of the duet theme. Phew.

Finding good duets was harder than I thought. I have tons of iffy ones, or too familiar ones. So it came down to the choice I opted for versus another one.

What to do?  What to do?

Well, I went with Fun Boy Three & Bananarama doing, "It Ain't What You Do (It's the Way That You Do It)".

Originally it was titled "T'Aint What You Do (with the parenthetical). Maybe even back in 1982 "Taint" wasn't looked on favourably by the record execs.

It was the two groups first duet, but later they re-teamed for "Really Saying Something" with Bananarama (oh yes, in some iteration, 30+ years later, they're still recording) at the top of the ticket.

Terry Hall had already achieved fame from co-writing "Our Lips are Sealed" which became a huge hit for the Go-Go's, but was recorded by FBT a few years after the Go-Go's made the song famous.

The song has a ska vibe and at the time, I'm not sure one would glean that Bananarama had a strong enough vocals presence to ever achieve the number of hits they'd end up having - though some would say that was more the doing of their producers than its singers (though Siobhán Fahey would later prove herself more than competent as founder and vocalist for Shakespears Sister) .

Still, for what it is, I still like "It Ain't What You Do".  It's less than three minutes, and that is just fine. I mean, it was the early 80's. It was expected.


2 comments:

David G said...

Sounds kind of like a soulless zombie version of the Macarena. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

Erik Rubright said...

Always loved, and still love, this song. :)