EARTHA KITT & BRONSKI BEAT - CHA CHA HEELS

Eartha Mae Kitt (January 17, 1927 - December 25, 2008), was an American actress, singer, and cabaret star. She was perhaps best known for her 1953 Christmas song Santa Baby. Orson Welles once called her the "most exciting woman in the world". She took on the role of Catwoman for the fourth season of the 1960s Batman TV series, replacing Julie Newmar who was unavailable for the final series. Born in tiny North, South Carolina to Mamie Kitt, who was of Cherokee and African-American descent, and an American father (surname Kitt) of German and Dutch descent, she was raised by her maternal aunt Anna Mae Riley, whom she believed was her mother up until after Riley's death, when she was sent to live in New York City with her real mother. Kitt began her career as a member of the Katherine Dunham Company and made her film debut with them in Casbah (1948). A talented singer with a distinctive voice, her hits include Let's Do It, C'est Si Bon (It's So Good), Just an Old Fashioned Girl, Monotonous, Love for Sale, I'd Rather Be Burned as a Witch, Uska Dara, Mink, Schmink, Under the Bridges of Paris, and arguably her most recognizable hit, the sexily sung Christmas song Santa Baby. She sang quite a few songs in French, a language she picked up during her years performing in Europe, but she never lost her American accent, which made her French songs sound rather amusing to native French speakers. She dabbled in other languages as well, which she demonstrated in many of the live recordings of her cabaret performances. In 1950, Orson Welles gave her her first starring role, as Helen of Troy in his staging of Dr. Faustus. A few years later, she was cast in the revue New Faces of 1952, introducing "Monotonous", "C'est Si Bon" and "Santa Baby", three songs with which she continues to be identified. During her run, 20th Century Fox filmed a version of the play. Welles and Kitt allegedly had a torrid affair during her run in Shinbone Alley, which earned her the nickname by Welles as "the most exciting woman in the world". In 1958, Kitt made her feature film debut opposite Sidney Poitier in The Mark of the Hawk. Throughout the rest of the 1950s and early 1960s, Kitt would work on and off in film, television and on nightclub stages. In the late 1960s television series Batman, she played Catwoman after Julie Newmar left the role. This was the role for which she would best be remembered, owing to her purring feline drawl. In 1968, however, Kitt encountered a substantial professional setback after she made anti-war statements during a White House luncheon that reportedly made First Lady Lady Bird Johnson weep uncontrollably. Professionally exiled from the U.S., she devoted her energies to overseas performances before returning to New York in a triumphant turn in the Broadway spectacle Timbuktu! (a version of the perennial Kismet set in Africa) in 1978. In the musical, one song gives a 'recipe' for mahoun, a preparation of cannabis, in which her sultry purring rendition of the refrain "constantly stirring with a long wooden spoon" was distinctive. In 1984, she returned to hit music with a dance song, Where Is My Man; the first certified Gold record of her career. Kitt found new audiences in nightclubs across the country, including a whole new generation of gay male fans, and she responded by frequently giving benefit performances in support of HIV/AIDS organizations. In 2000, Kitt again returned to Broadway in the short but notable run of the revival of the 1920s-themed, The Wild Party, opposite Mandy Patinkin and Toni Collette. In 2003, she replaced Chita Rivera in Nine. In recent years she had also appeared as the Wicked Witch in the North American national touring company of The Wizard of Oz. One of her more unusual roles was as Kaa the python in a 1994 BBC Radio adaptation of The Jungle Book. Kitt lent her distinctive voice to the role of Yzma in Disney's The Emperor's New Groove and also did other voiceover work such as the voice of Queen Vexus on the animated TV series My Life as a Teenage Robot. She continued her role as Yzma on the spin-off TV series of The Emperor's New Groove, The Emperor's New School. In recent years, Kitt's annual appearances in New York made her a fixture of the Manhattan cabaret scene. She took the stage at venues such as the Ballroom and, more recently, the Café Carlyle to explore and define her highly stylized image, alternating between signature songs (such as "Old Fashioned Millionaire"), which emphasized a witty, mercenary world-weariness, and less familiar repertoire, much of which she performed with an unexpected ferocity and bite that presented her as a survivor with a seemingly bottomless reservoir of resilience - her version of Here's to Life, frequently used as a closing number, was a sterling example of the latter. This side of her later performances is reflected in at least one of her recordings, Thinking Jazz, which preserves a series of performances with a small jazz combo that took place in the early 1990s in Germany, and which includes both standards (Smoke Gets in Your Eyes) and numbers (such as Something May Go Wrong) that seem more specifically tailored to her talents; one version of the CD includes as bonus performances a fierce, angry Yesterdays and a live take of "C'est Si Bon" that good-humoredly satirizes her sex-kitten persona. Personal life Kitt was married to John William McDonald, an associate of a real-estate investment company, from 1960 to 1965. They had one child, a daughter, Kitt (b. 1962, married Charles Lawrence Shapiro); and two grandchildren, Jason and Rachel Shapiro. Eartha Kitt died of colon cancer on Christmas Day, December 25, 2008. Read more on Last.fm. User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License; additional terms may apply.

Bronski Beat was a very popular Scottish synth pop trio of the 1980s. At their height, the band comprised distinctive and diminutive Scottish singer Jimmy Somerville, backed by fellow Scot Steve Bronski and Londoner Larry Steinbacheck, both of whom played keyboards and percussion. Formed in 1983, their debut hit came the following year - the striking tale of a boy who was cast away by his family and neighbours for being gay. Called Smalltown Boy, it peaked at Number 3 in the UK and was accompanied by a memorable video of Somerville leaving home, forlornly eating an apple on a train, being attacked by a homophobic gang and being returned to his family by the police. The song quickly established the trio as an outlet for gay issues – all three members were homosexual – and the follow-up single Why? pursued the same energetic and electronic formula musically, while the lyrics focussed more centrally and darkly on anti-gay prejudice. Again, it made the Top 10 in the UK. At the end of 1984, the trio released an album which was provocatively titled The Age Of Consent. The sleeve inside listed the varying ages of consent for homosexual sex in different nations around the world. At the time, the age of consent for gay men in the UK was 21. A third single was released from it, again causing controversy. It Ain't Necessarily So, the George and Ira Gershwin classic (from Porgy and Bess) which questions the authenticity of Biblical tales, reached the UK Top 20. Playing the clarinet solos in the song was Richard Coles, with whom Somerville would later team up to form The Communards. In 1985, the trio joined up with Marc Almond to record a version of the Donna Summer classic I Feel Love. The full version was actually a medley, also incorporating snippets of "Love to Love You Baby" and "Johnny Remember Me." It reached Number 3 in the UK charts, equaling the feats of "Smalltown Boy," and was memorably described by one critic as "the gayest record ever made". Following the remix album Hundreds & Thousands, Somerville quit the band, stating he wanted a career which was "more political". Presumably this related to internal politics rather than the lyrical direction of the band, as his new project relied almost entirely on unpolitical songs and cover versions – and they were a huge success in doing so. He teamed up with Coles to form The Communards and in 1986 outsold all other singles in the UK with their version of Don't Leave Me This Way. Bronski Beat recruited John Foster as Somerville's replacement. A very catchy single called Hit That Perfect Beat managed to equal the two previous biggest hits by reaching Number 3 in the UK charts. In 1986, they released their second album, Truthdare Doubledare. In 1989, Jonathan Hellyer became lead singer, and the band extensively toured the U.S. and had one minor hit with the song Cha Cha Heels, a one-off collaboration sung by American actress and singer Eartha Kitt. Bronski Beat released their third and final album, Rainbow Nation, in 1995. They split that year. The songs "Smalltown Boy" and "Why" were sampled by producers Steve Angello and Axwell under the moniker Supermode (originally Supermongo) for their song "Tell Me Why". "Tell Me why" peaked at #13 on the UK singles chart. In 2018, London Records issued a remastered and expanded 2CD edition of their debut, The Age of Consent. Remastered from the original 1984 analogue tapes, it includes demos, BBC sessions, remixes and unreleased tracks. Read more on Last.fm. User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License; additional terms may apply.