It sort of proves the theory that you can get anything past the easily shocked brigade if you deliver it via someone who looks like they knit their own sweaters.
It was followed by a trip to France for Solitaire, another top 10 hit, which paved the way for the unbridled filth of 1984’s Self Control – an ode to cruising if ever I heard one – to climb all the way to no.4 in the US (and no.5 in the UK). If you didn’t pay attention – and I certainly didn’t in 1982 – you wouldn’t necessarily realise what a fantastically dark record it was (the line “if everybody wants you / why isn’t anybody calling?” always gives me the chills), hinting at mental ill health and paranoia. In an English translation by Jonathan King, Laura’s cover went all the way to no.2 on the Billboard Hot 100 (and no.6 in the UK), propelled by its irresistible, chant-laden bounciness and Laura’s clean, oddly joyous delivery. Despite being of the same generation as her peers, she appeared (to me at least) to be somehow that bit older, more proper. Parents seemed to instinctively disapprove of Madonna, and Cyndi too (at least if they’d heard She Bop), but nobody I knew objected to the nice lady who sang Gloria.Īh, Gloria. Originally a smash hit across continental Europe for Umberto Tozzi in 1979, it’s something of a Trojan horse, this song.
Was there ever an American pop star who embraced Europop quite so willingly as Laura Branigan? While her contemporaries – principally Madonna and Cyndi Lauper – radiated a very modern, very American mix of confidence, sex and a little bit of danger, Laura was, if you ask me, a different thing altogether – a clean cut American soccer mom type on the surface, but a mysterious Europhile temptress beneath.
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