In March 1981, Prog readers would have been forgiven for raising an eyebrow in surprise upon seeing Dave Stewart, previously keyboardist with Egg, Hatfield And The North and National Health, sharing a Top Of The Pops stage with The Zombies’ Colin Blunstone. They were there promoting Stewart’s delightfully skewed reworking of Jimmy Ruffin’s What Becomes Of The Broken Hearted as it hovered just outside the UK’s Top 10.
But that surprise would be as nothing compared to the shock of seeing Stewart back on the show a few months later, this time with Barbara Gaskin singing an equally idiosyncratic arrangement of Lesley Gore’s 1963 teen-angst hit, It’s My Party. When the song settled down to a four-week stint at No.1 nobody was more astonished than the duo themselves. “It was just completely bizarre,” says Gaskin, reflecting on the strange and unexpected turn in their careers that ultimately changed their lives. “We’d both been in bands prior to that and we were 30 when we had that hit, so we were kind of mature, but of course, we were very surprised when it shot up the charts.”
