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The Night Queen Conquered Wembley: July 1986 and the Last Great Stadium Stand
Nobody in Wembley Stadium on the night of July 12, 1986, knew they were witnessing the end of an era. How could they? Freddie Mercury was at the absolute peak of his powers, commanding 72,000 people like a conductor commands an orchestra, in a white vest and a grin that could power the floodlights. Queen…
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ABBA: Four Lives After the Lights Went Down
When ABBA stopped, they really stopped. No farewell tour, no press conference, no slow fade into the oldies circuit — just silence, starting in 1982, that would last the better part of forty years. The world assumed the four Swedes had simply retired into their millions. The truth is more interesting, and more human: each…
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How ABBA Created “Dancing Queen”: The Story Behind the Masterpiece
It started with a nonsense word. In a Stockholm suburb, on a warm August day in 1975, Björn Ulvaeus and Benny Andersson walked into Glen Studios with three melodies and three placeholder titles. One of them was called “Boogaloo.” Nobody in the room — not the songwriters, not the session musicians, not the engineer —…
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The Pointer Sisters: Three Generations, One Harmony
Ruth Pointer is 78 years old, and she is still singing. Think about what that sentence carries. She is the eldest of four sisters who defied a preacher father, conquered Nashville, taught America to count on “Sesame Street,” and became pop royalty in the 1980s. She has buried her father, her mother, and all three…
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How the Pointer Sisters Set “Fire” to the Charts: The Springsteen Song That Was Meant for Elvis
Some hits are written. This one was redirected by fate — twice. “Fire,” the 1978 smash that carried the Pointer Sisters to No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100, began as a love letter from Bruce Springsteen to his idol Elvis Presley. The demo was mailed to Graceland. The King died before it arrived. What…
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Phil Collins: The Father Behind the Fame
Phil Collins has been called the busiest man in pop, the defining voice of the eighties, the drummer who fell into history. But the story he tells on himself — in his memoir, in his songs, in the quiet of his later years — is simpler and sadder: a man who was brilliant at being…
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“No Jacket Required”: How Phil Collins Made the Biggest Album of 1985
In February 1985, Phil Collins released his third solo album. It had a close-up of his face on the cover, a made-up word for a lead single, and no particular concept beyond one man’s determination to make the pop music he loved. It went on to win the Grammy for Album of the Year, sell…
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Smokey Robinson: The Man Behind the Velvet
For sixty years, Smokey Robinson has been the smoothest man in soul music — the velvet tenor, the poet’s pen, the vice president’s polish. But the life behind the voice is anything but smooth. It’s a story of a boy who lost his mother at ten and was raised in a house with ten cousins,…
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“My Girl”: How Smokey Robinson Wrote the Perfect Song and Gave It Away
Smokey Robinson calls it his “international anthem” — the most well-known tune he ever wrote, the one that has, in his words, “stood the test of time.” He wrote it about his wife. He meant it for his own group. And then he gave it to five other guys, because he heard something in one…
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Patti LaBelle: The Fire and the Faith Behind the Voice
On stage, Patti LaBelle is a force of nature — the kicked-off shoes, the holy-roller rapture, the four-octave soprano that can shake a chandelier. Off stage, she is something rarer: a woman who has buried nearly everyone she grew up with, raised other people’s children as her own, cooked for kings of rock, and kept…