Music Monday: Dancing Girls

It’s 1984. Imagine, if you will, an old classroom, not particularly large, with high ceilings, and walls painted light blue on the upper half, dark blue on the lower. There are posters depicting ancient Greece at regular intervals on the side walls. A doorway in one wall conceals a staircase to the dormitories. On the front wall is a blackboard (U.S. chalkboard). The wooden seats are arranged in rows facing the front, each with a fold-over desktop, chipped and scarred with engravings from previous occupants. This room not only serves as the classroom for Latin and Classical Studies, but it’s the form room (U.S. home room?) for 3Y, a class of thirteen and fourteen year old students.

It’s the middle of lunchtime, and some students return to the room to talk and catch up on homework. You wouldn’t know this was the eighties from their school uniform: dark blue blazers, blue-and-gold striped ties, white shirts and grey skirts for the girls, grey shirts and dark trousers for the boys. But the girls’ poofy and sprayed-rigid hair can’t help but betray the fashion of the era. One such girl, Louise, slips a cassette into her tape player, and the strains of Nik Kershaw’s “Human Racing” album soon drift across the room.

That’s the scene playing out in my head whenever I hear “Dancing Girls,” one of the singles from that album. It took me a while to appreciate Nik Kershaw as a musician and songwriter, so closely did I associate him with the cute boy pop idol image he appeared to embrace (the truth was Nik hated this image, but was too young and naive to object). Later that year, I caught the video to the title track of that album, “Human Racing,” on television. It struck me as a cleverly conceived song, so I went back and listened to those tunes I had ignored coming from Louise’s boombox, and a new respect for Mr. Kershaw was born in me.

Of the songs I came to know well, “Dancing Girls” is, perhaps, the most intriguing. It is the epitome of synth pop, with not an acoustic or stringed instrument in play. But to me that’s secondary to the music itself. First, the introduction has a tune made quirky by the fact it’s played over a single chord that sounds as if it doesn’t quite fit:

Then Nik sings the verses over the sequenced bass line with no harmonies or chord accompaniment. This means all the chords are “implied” (e.g., you don’t actually hear a C-minor chord played, you infer its existence from the bass and the melody). Furthermore, the tune changes key at the end going into the chorus, which I imagine is hard to do vocally with no harmonic support:

There are chords behind the chorus tune, but to keep things interesting and a little off-kilter, Nik changes keys toward the end of the chorus, then finishes it with a line sung in yet another key (“And they dance for him inside his head”), this time with just an A in the bass to accompany him.

The song is about boredom, and the desire for change from the endless cycle of work and sleep. “Bring on the dancing girls” is a call for something interesting to spice up life. This explains, perhaps, all the harmonic twists and turns, echoing the kind of life our “hero” would like to have.

Click HERE for a lead sheet with the chords to the entire song. Before anyone says anything, I know, strictly speaking, that if a song is in a flat key (like C-minor), then all the black-note chords should be flat (i.e., Gbm not F#m, Dbm not C#m, etc.). However, I went with the names most commonly associated with the chords. You see a Bbm more than an A#m, and an F#m more than a Gbm. In other words, I know the rule, and I broke it deliberately.

Here’s the music video:

And here’s Nik from a live gig in 2010 performing a very different take on the song: