I exercised for the first time in two years last week -- I don't recommend it -- and found myself frantically searching for appropriate music for 20 minutes on the ole elliptical machine. As I am want to do, I panicked and selected Bananarama: the perfect "Now or Never" EP on Tuesday and then the (underappreciated by me) "Viva" album on Friday. It was when track 2 -- "Love Don't Live Here," with "anymore" thrown in the chorus -- came on that I thought it would be fun to do a week of similarly named songs, starting with this one. Instead of Madonna -- which is where most gays of a certain age learned the other song with that title -- I give you the original version, recorded by Rose Royce in 1978.
The American soul group -- known for hits like "Car Wash," "I Wanna Get Next to You," "I'm Going Down" and "Wishing on a Star" -- took "Love Don't Live Here Anymore" to No. 32 on the Billboard Hot 100, No. 5 on the Billboard R&B chart and No. 2 on the singles chart in the U.K., where they achieved their greatest success overall.
Bananrama's single only reached No. 114 on the U.K. singles chart, but the 12-inch version featured a remix of "The Runner," a Giorgio Moroder-Sheila Ferguson song also on "Viva" that was first made popular by Philly girl group The Three Degrees around the same time as Rose Royce's "Love Don't Live Here Anymore."
2 comments:
Just old enough to made out to the Rose Royce version in the back seat of my (then) 10y/o 69 Cougar XR7.
Played a Rose Royce CD often, back in the day. What became of them?
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