Nightclubbing — Grace Jones (1981)
A record everybody remembers looking at, and almost nobody remembers hearing
By Rafi Mercer
Some records get remembered as pictures.
You know the ones. The sleeve does its work so completely that it stands in front of the music for forty years, and people who could describe the cover in detail couldn't tell you what the bass is doing on side two. The image becomes the memory. The record goes quietly on without you.
This is the most extreme case I know.
Nightclubbing arrived on Island Records on 11 May 1981 with Jean-Paul Goude's painting on the front: the flat-top, the Armani jacket with shoulders that enter the room first, the cigarette held at an angle no human has managed since. It is one of the great album covers. It is also the single biggest obstacle to hearing the album, because it does your looking for you and then convinces you that you've listened.
Take the picture away.
Underneath it is a rhythm section record.
It was made at Compass Point Studios, on a strip of land outside Nassau, across 1980 and into 1981. Chris Blackwell produced it with Alex Sadkin, and Blackwell's brief was the thing that shaped everything else: don't record a model, record a musician. Put her inside a band. Let them all play at once, the way bands used to make records, and let the room decide what it sounds like.
The band was Sly Dunbar and Robbie Shakespeare, Wally Badarou on keys, Barry Reynolds and Mikey Chung on guitars, Uziah "Sticky" Thompson on percussion. The Compass Point All Stars. A Jamaican rhythm section, a Paris-born Beninese keyboard player, and a couple of guitarists working out where the edges were.
Sly and Robbie don't play parts here. They build floors. You stand on them.
That's the first thing you notice once the picture is out of the way: the bass has been given more authority than the voice. Almost no pop record permits that. The low end isn't underneath the song, it is the song, and everything else — the guitar figures, the keyboard cold-fronts, the woman at the microphone — arranges itself around it like furniture around a fireplace.
The second thing is the space.
There's dub logic running through the whole album. What has been taken out matters as much as what was left in. Gaps are held open on purpose. Sounds arrive late and leave early. Badarou drops something glassy and European into the middle distance and the temperature of the entire track changes for four bars, then he takes it away again.
And Grace stands back from all of it.
Sometimes singing. Mostly not.
She talks. She murmurs. She narrates, like someone describing a scene she's watching through glass. The detachment is the instrument — the further back she stands, the bigger the room becomes. It's the opposite of how records usually work. Most singers pull the arrangement towards them. She lets it go on without her, and the effect is oddly enormous.
Half the album belongs to other people. Iggy Pop and Bowie's "Nightclubbing," slowed until it's barely moving. Bill Withers's "Use Me," relieved of its sweat. "Demolition Man," written by Sting and released by her months before the Police got round to their own version. Flash and the Pan's "Walking in the Rain." Marianne Faithfull and Barry Reynolds's "I've Done It Again," which is where you find out what her voice can do when she stops holding it at arm's length.
And Astor Piazzolla's "Libertango," rebuilt as "I've Seen That Face Before" — a French lyric, an English session player called Jack Emblow on accordion, a Jamaican rhythm underneath a tango from Buenos Aires.
Strange, I've seen that face before.
On paper that combination is a mess. In the room it's one of the most composed things on the record.
The originals hold their own — "Pull Up to the Bumper," "Feel Up," "Art Groupie" — but the covers are where the argument gets made. She doesn't interpret songs. She relocates them. Each one gets moved to Compass Point, stripped of its original weather, and rebuilt in the local climate.
Which is why this record behaves so well in a listening room.
Played quietly through a laptop it becomes atmosphere, and atmosphere is the one thing it isn't. Played properly, front to back, through a system with some authority in the bottom end, the details start arriving in order. The tambourine commenting throughout "Use Me." The delay trailing off Sly's cross-sticks on "Walking in the Rain." The whispered chorus underneath "Art Groupie" that most listeners have never actually heard. Small things, placed deliberately, audible only if you give the record your attention rather than your background.
It was mixed for people who were going to sit still. There weren't many of those in 1981 either.
The world worked it out slowly. It reached thirty-two on the US pop chart, respectable rather than triumphant. "Pull Up to the Bumper" went to number two on club play and got itself removed from various radio playlists by programmers who had decided, with confidence, that it wasn't about parking. NME named it their album of the year. Goude directed the One Man Show that followed it onto stages at Drury Lane and the Savoy, and the image grew larger still.
Then the eighties happened around it and left it more or less untouched.
That's the strange afterlife of this record. Most albums from 1981 announce their year in the first ten seconds — the drum sound, the sheen, the keyboard preset. Nightclubbing has all of those things and still refuses to sit in 1981, because nobody involved was trying to be of the moment. They were trying to get six incompatible things to stand in the same room without any of them raising their voice.
Reggae that isn't a reggae record. Funk that doesn't behave like funk. Disco with most of the lights switched off.
The picture on the front has aged.
The floor underneath it hasn't.
Quick Questions
Is Nightclubbing a reggae album?
No, though reggae runs all the way through it. Sly Dunbar and Robbie Shakespeare bring Jamaican rhythm to the foundations, but the record sits across new wave, funk, dub and post-disco without settling in any of them. The genre confusion is the point rather than a flaw.
Which track should I start with on a good system?
"I've Seen That Face Before (Libertango)." It contains the whole argument in five minutes: a Piazzolla tango, a French lyric, an accordion, a Jamaican rhythm section, and a vocal standing several feet back from the microphone. If your room can hold that together, it can hold the album.
Why do listening bars keep returning to records like this?
Because it was mixed for attention. The detail is placed rather than decorative, and it only reveals itself at volume, in a room, with time. Played as background it flattens into mood. Played properly it turns into architecture, which is what a listening bar is for.
Rafi Mercer writes about the spaces where music matters. For more stories from Tracks & Tales, subscribe, or read more from The Listening Shelf.
