5000 Volts – I’m On Fire

She sang the biggest disco hit of 1975 and wasn’t allowed to admit it

In February 1976, Tina Charles went to number one in Britain with I Love to Love, under her own name, at last. A few months before that she had sung lead on a record that reached number four in the UK and topped the charts in Germany, Sweden and Belgium, sold across a dozen territories, and made the American Hot 100. Her name was on none of it. She was contracted elsewhere, and the paperwork said she could not be acknowledged, so officially somebody else had sung I’m on Fire.

Keep watching: Disco – The Golden Age of Dance Music · more 70s videos →

5000 Volts were barely a band. Tony Eyers, a London producer, had two session vocalists on his hands — Charles and Martin Jay, who had worked together before in a group called Northern Lights — and a rotating cast of players around them. He cut a song called Bye Love, adapted from an Italian original by Renato Arrouh and Ricky Gianco, put it out in West Germany under the name Airbus, and Philips picked it up for Britain a few weeks later, rechristening the whole operation 5000 Volts because it sounded more electric. I’m on Fire, which Eyers wrote himself, went on the back of the single as an afterthought.

The DJs turned the record over

Club disc jockeys around the country ignored the A-side and played the flip, and enough of them did it that Philips gave up and swapped the sides. What they were reaching for is obvious the moment it starts: two minutes and thirty-nine seconds built on an interpolation of Black Is Black, the Los Bravos hit from 1966, with a lyric that has no metaphor in it anywhere and no interest in acquiring one. It arrived just ahead of the full disco wave, when European producers were still working out what the floor wanted, and it turned out the floor wanted this.

It reached number four in Britain, number one in Germany, Sweden and Belgium, number five in Australia, number twenty-six on the Billboard Hot 100 and thirty-seven on the American soul chart, and the top twenty-five in the Netherlands, Canada, Austria, South Africa and Argentina. Jim Gilstrap released a competing version in the States and got to seventy-eight with it. Sheila cut a French one. For a B-side by a band that did not really exist, it travelled remarkably well.

Somebody had to stand there

Which created a problem, because a hit that size means television, and television means a woman at a microphone. Charles could not be that woman. The job went to Luan Peters, an actress and singer whose face British audiences already half-recognized from Hammer films, and the promotional material named her as the group’s vocalist. On paper it was entirely correct.

She is the one you are watching here, out front of the working five-piece — Martin Jay on vocals and guitar, Martin Cohen on bass, Kevin Wells on drums, Mike Nelson on keyboards. Jay is the only person on that stage who sang a note on the record. Everyone else is performing a song by a woman who is somewhere else entirely, and Peters is carrying a vocal she did not sing, in a job that must have been strange to accept and stranger to explain afterwards.