FIFTY YEARS AGO we were humming along to the hits of 1976. Some have magnificently stood the test of time; others have not. Join us on Memory Lane as we review them on their golden anniversaries.

It really wasn’t a good year, 1976. On 2nd March, Tina Charles knocked the Four Seasons off the top spot and took over with I Love To Love.  This was not progress.

ILTL had a catchy melody and a disco vibe: unfortunately, you caught yourself humming it at school or on the bus – a great embarrassment. On top of the melody soared repetitive lyrics, as if someone had accidentally released a working copy of the song, on which the lyrics had not been finished. It is a lyric which relies on “dance” rhyming with “chance” and “town” rhyming with “down”.

The lyrics centre around a young, probably heterosexual relationship in which the boyfriend wants to spend date nights dancing – but the girlfriend wants to have a night in and “get down” to some love, because she loves it, that love – absolutely loves it. This did not chime with young people’s lived experience of the 70s, where the scenario was much more a case of girls wanting to go dancing and boys wanting to stay home and get their end away.

When this song was released as a single – the second single to come out of Tina Charles’s debut album – Charles already had seven years’ experience as a session singer, and she did have a strong voice. But she sang the song by the book, with no emotion or real connection with the audience.  The song is in many ways similar to the Nolans’ I’m in the Mood for Dancing – but at least the Nolans looked as if they were enjoying themselves when they sang it.

The song was successful in Europe and gave Tina Charles a solid, rather than meteoric, disco career for some years. She took time off to have a family and then returned to a career which relied heavily on nostalgia events.

Tina Charles stayed at number one for three weeks – eventually being replaced by… watch this space.

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