Mick Jackson or Michael Jackson? Just Blame It On The Boogie
Post-Glee, it's not unusual for two versions of the same song to duke it out.
But, asks Priya Elan, who remembers the other Blame It On The Boogie?
By Priya Elan, The Guardian, Saturday 20 February 2010
Mick not Michael Jackson Photograph: Channel4
There's a chequered history of different artists releasing the same song and battling it out for chart supremacy. Most recently, Don't Stop Believin' gut-punched the zeitgeist thanks to geordie Joe McElderry doing it on The X Factor, before scoring a British chart double with the Glee cast's buffed-to-perfection rendition, and Journey's resurrected original. And who could forget 1987's When I Fall In Love battle when Nat King Cole's velvet-voiced original was re-released at the same time as a virtual karaoke take unleashed by Stock Aitken & Waterman teaboy-done-good Rick Astley? Similar scenes have happened with Hallelujah, Where Did Our Love Go?, You've Lost That Loving Feeling, not to mention 1964's bloody bun fight between Dionne Warwick and Cilla Black over Anyone Who Had A Heart.
For the most part, we only remember the victors, and that's certainly the case with the so-called "Battle Of The Boogie", the story of which is documented in a new Channel 4 film. It's the story of the two Blame It On The Boogies which fought it out in 1978, one by the Jacksons and the other by the co-author of the song, who was called, rather confusingly, "Mick" Jackson.
In The Other Michael Jackson, rent-a-gurner Pete Waterman tells us (in typical OTT style) that Mick's story is "what can go wrong in the music industry". That and the Reynolds Girls, Pete.
Yorkshire-born Mick had had some minor chart success, but Blame It On The Boogie was poised to be his big breakthrough.
Unbeknown to him, though, his publisher sold the rights to the song to Joe Jackson, who was in search of edgier material for his boys. In terms of where the song fell in the Jacksons' own narrative, they'd just left Motown and needed to shake off the stench of Michael's cheesy smash Ben ("A song about a dead rat," an A&R helpfully points out), in order to make a splash at new label CBS. And what could be better than the disco-tastic Blame It On The Boogie?
The two versions were released a week apart, dividing press and radio; London's Capital sided with Mick, Radio 1 with *****; Tony Blackburn ungallantly says Mick looked "like one of the Wurzels'" as the film cuts to a clip of a hirsute Mick bopping about with a sad tambourine on Top Of The Pops. And when we're played Mick's version – the absolute embodiment of the late-70s "honky does disco" genre; Leo Sayer by way of the Muppets' Rowlf The Dog – it's clearly no match for the Jacksons' masterful take.
Anyone who's watched VH1's Behind The Music will be familiar with the next part of the tale; Mick never saw any royalties despite the track's success. He was caught up in litigation with his publisher for two years while the Jacksons rode the disco boom. "It felt like being in prison," he says.
Today he's seemingly regret-free, writing songs that are "big in Russia, China and Japan", which he says with a laugh, bless him. He's "fortunate to not have had any family tragedies or health problems" which, he concedes, is a bigger deal than any "silly pop song". Clearly he's reached a level of contentment that his one-time chart rival never could, which is some sort of victory in itself.
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2010/feb/20/mick-jackson-michael-jackson