Don’t Let A Thieving Minstrel Ruin Your Life
Dee D Jackson had probably a more unusual start to her career than most. According to her wiki:
Deirdre Elaine Cozier was born on 15 July 1954[1] in Oxford, England, and lived there with her father Roy (a pianist), her mother Gloria (a former chorus girl, dancer and singer) and five younger siblings until her early 20s.[2] Her passion for music was kindled in her youth thanks to "a fabulous music teacher who thought [she] was worth investing his time on".[3] Cozier took classical dance lessons and learned from an early age to play the violin and piano;[2] she noted that "music lived in [her] house" as a child.[3] When she was nineteen, she was married for a period of three weeks "to a minstrel"[3] who "absconded with all of their belongings after only three weeks".[4] After she "began [her] search for him", Cozier left the United Kingdom for Germany with only the clothes on her back and the little money in her pocket; she never saw the man again.[3]
With little to fall back on, Cozier earned her scarce income by performing gigs all over Germany, noting that her "very first gig was in a strip club singing three songs a night with a Turkish jazz quartet".[3] After she found a manager and producer, she spent several months performing whenever and wherever she could in Munich; she was soon introduced to the likes of Giorgio Moroder, Keith Forsey, Zeke Lund and Harold Faltermeyer;[2][3][4] Cozier soon began performing under the stage name Dee D. Jackson upon the suggestion of her producer Gary Unwin and his wife Patty. The alias was coined "because no one ever got [her real] name right".[3]
This is the first time I’ve ever heard of anyone marrying a minstrel, so it seems harsh to make a blanket judgement off the back of this one anecdote.
Still I’m glad it worked out for her. Once you’ve gone from marital abandonment and destitution to running into Giorgio Moroder in the European club scene whilst having bonafide musical ability and it’s the late 1970s you are pretty-much locked in tight for a wild train ride of artistic success. (Giorgio Moroder of course making his second significant artistic mention here after our rollicking blockbuster of a column on Sammy Hagar).
Dee D went on to have a number of hits under a now buried-and-unloved genre once known as space disco. As someone who once hosted a show on SYN FM Melbourne called The Almost-Midnight-Space Disco-With-Max-Galaxio its amazing I’ve never given this woman more thought.
So here we are.
I reckon this is all pretty fun shit. At some point we’ll need to talk about the disco-sucks movement and its fireballing of any possibility of a straight white man liking dance music without having questions asked, but we’ll leave that for another time. Judas Priest and Queen both had gay frontmen and it never stopped their appeal to those of a rocking-out inclination. And then there’s the secret history of gay-gangsta rappers (look it up if you like, don’t blame me for anything you’d rather not have seen). Meanwhile Giorgio Moroder was straight and Donna Summer was an out and proud Christian-Conservative who was called “one of us” by Rush Limbaugh upon her passing. Then you’ve got Lime: the husband-and-wife duo had undeniably amazing talent, and it seems unfair to outright kick ‘em to the curb just because the lad became a lady later on in life.
A lot of this stuff is overthought, Just like whatever the fuck you want. Public moral standards and protecting the kids notwithstanding, which of course are both important things (I fully support heteronormativity).
Anyway, that’s off on a tangent. But back to Dee D Jackson. Basically, a woman as multi-talented as this doesn’t deserve to be forgotten.
Automatic Lover (this video presages the modern era of robot lovers).
Moonlight Starlight (apparently her favourite of her own tracks)
SOS (live on Italian TV’s Discoring, the crowd goes pretty wild for this one)
and the creme de la creme, the piece de resistance,, the third michelin hat, the leg of the frog, the cherry on top:
My Sweet Carillon. (This song has a bitterswett sound to it and when you combine that with the medieval setting of the video and take into account her failed-marriage origin story, its all abit of a coinkidink don’tcha reckon… it probably isn’t, im sure she’s mentioned the link in an interview at some point.)
Encore:
We might as well go full-italo at this point, we ‘re practically there already.
What more is there to be said, a paradise lost…
Postscript of sobriety:
Dave Chapelle’s 18 minute bit on “the spectrum” from a few years back. This is kindof where I’m at too. Balancing distaste and disdain with civility.
