I bought a Copy of Grace Jones — Nightclubbing

Nightclubbing — played in full, vinyl, start to finish. Nine tracks. Made at Compass Point in Nassau in 1981, where Chris Blackwell took all of Grace Jones's separate worlds — the French side, the rock'n'roller, the Jamaican drum and bass, the android electronics — and welded them into one band. Five years earlier, he had tried the same thing with someone else. It ended her career.

The session opens without words. Around the album — the worlds that arrived separately before it, and the women who carried the result forward after it.

Nightclubbing by Grace Jones - Listening Sequence

Total runtime approx. 1 hr 15.

Thank you for Listening

Rafi Mercer - Founder of Tracks & Tales

TRACKLIST

OPENING TRACK

01 Nasty Gal — Betty Davis - Nasty Gal (Island, 1975)

Chris Blackwell bought out her contract and signed her to Island with complete creative control. She produced it herself and styled herself entirely — silver thigh-high boots, hot pants, an enormous afro. Reviewers said her image eclipsed her talent. It failed, Island dropped her, and she left music for good. Five years later, the same man tried again.

SIDE A

NIGHTCLUBBING

02 Walking in the Rain — Grace Jones - Nightclubbing (Island, 1981)

Feeling like a woman, looking like a man. The line that opens the record is the thesis of her entire public life — and two men from Sydney wrote it. She found it in their song and claimed it so completely it now reads as autobiography.

03 The Model — Kraftwerk - The Man-Machine (Kling Klang, 1978)

The android. Kraftwerk turned themselves into mannequins to escape being looked at, and sang about a fashion model as a product. Three years later, an actual fashion model became the machine — and made being looked at the work.

NIGHTCLUBBING

04 Pull Up to the Bumper — Grace Jones - Nightclubbing (Island, 1981)

One of three songs she co-wrote, and the one that broke the album. Several radio stations refused it. On a record built largely from other people's songs, the biggest thing on it is hers.

NIGHTCLUBBING

05 Use Me — Grace Jones - Nightclubbing (Island, 1981)

Bill Withers sang it as a rueful confession. She sings it as a statement of policy. Not a single word changes.

NIGHTCLUBBING

06 Nightclubbing — Grace Jones - Nightclubbing (Island, 1981)

An Iggy Pop and David Bowie song from Berlin, made glacial. Bowie and Iggy wrote nightclubbing as survival. She sang it as sovereignty — and named the whole album after it.

THE TURN

07 King Tubby Meets Rockers Uptown — Augustus Pablo - King Tubby Meets Rockers Uptown (Yard Music, 1976)

The Jamaican drum and bass. King Tubby was an electronics repairman in Kingston who worked out you could remake a record by taking things away. It's the reason Nightclubbing has space in it where other records have noise.

SIDE B

NIGHTCLUBBING

08 Art Groupie — Grace Jones - Nightclubbing (Island, 1981)

A song about wanting to be looked at, on an album whose sleeve is one of the most reproduced images in pop. Side B runs unbroken from here to the end.

NIGHTCLUBBING

09 I've Seen That Face Before (Libertango) — Grace Jones - Nightclubbing (Island, 1981)

An Argentine tango, sung in French, by a Jamaican woman, over a reggae rhythm, recorded in the Bahamas. There is no other record where that sentence makes sense.

NIGHTCLUBBING

10 Feel Up — Grace Jones - Nightclubbing (Island, 1981)

The most Jamaican thing she ever recorded. Hand drums up front, and a vocal that slips into patois — the accent she spent a career keeping ambiguous, coming home.

NIGHTCLUBBING

11 Demolition Man — Grace Jones - Nightclubbing (Island, 1981)

Sting wrote it and gave it to her. Her single came out in February 1981 — months before The Police recorded their own version, after hearing hers and deciding they could do better. Hers came first.

NIGHTCLUBBING

12 I've Done It Again — Grace Jones - Nightclubbing (Island, 1981)

Written by Barry Reynolds and Marianne Faithfull. After thirty-five minutes of control, the album ends in regret — and she doesn't oversell it.

13 Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This) — Eurythmics - Sweet Dreams (RCA, 1983)

Two years later. Annie Lennox in a man's suit with cropped orange hair, and the idea Island had struggled to sell in 1981 goes to number one in America.

CLOSING TRACK

14 Overpowered — Róisín Murphy - Overpowered (EMI, 2007)

Twenty-six years on, the argument still running — that a woman can be the artwork and the artist at once. The session opened with a woman destroyed for building her own image. It closes with one celebrated for it.