Sandra – In The Heat Of The Night

The single that proved Sandra was more than one lucky summer spent three weeks at No.2 in Germany, with a German pop star singing behind her.

Three weeks. That is how long In the Heat of the Night sat at No.2 on the West German singles chart in late 1985, close enough to the top to settle a question that had hung over Sandra since the summer. Her previous single, (I’ll Never Be) Maria Magdalena, had gone to No.1 in nine countries. A second hit is what turns a breakout into a career, and this was it. The voice answering hers on the record belongs to Hubert Kemmler, who already had a following of his own in Germany as Hubert Kah.

Keep watching: Sandra – Maria Magdalena · explore more →

The doubt was earned. Sandra Ann Lauer, born in Saarbrücken in 1962, had spent the early 1980s as one of the singers in the girl group Arabesque, and her first solo single, Japan ist weit, never charted in Germany in 1984. What changed was the team around her. Producer Michael Cretu built Maria Magdalena with Kemmler and Markus Löhr, and Virgin released it on July 15, 1985. The German chart picked it up two weeks later and carried it all the way to No.1.

A follow-up had to come fast, and Cretu kept the same circle. In the Heat of the Night is credited to Cretu, Kemmler, Löhr and Klaus Hirschburger, the lyricist whose name runs through Sandra’s credits for the rest of the decade. Cretu produced it. Where the first hit was bright and insistent, this one is darker and more atmospheric, and it opens her debut album at more than five minutes. Kemmler’s voice answering hers set a pattern that held: he sang behind her on most of her hits through 1989.

The second hit is the one that counts

Virgin issued the single in November 1985, backed with an instrumental called Heatwave, and the debut album The Long Play arrived the same month. The German chart picked the single up on November 18 and kept it for 15 weeks, three of them at No.2. Belgium’s Wallonia chart put it at No.1. Sweden and Switzerland stopped at No.2, Finland at No.3 and France at No.5, where SNEP certified it silver. The pan-European Top 100 ranked it No.18 at the turn of the year, and German radio made it a Top 5 airplay hit.

The video takes the title at its word. Sandra performs in a steam-filled sauna, surrounded by bare-chested men, a concept simple enough to read with the sound off. The clip has stayed in circulation ever since, collected on the 1987 VHS Ten on One (The Singles), on 18 Greatest Hits in 1992 and on the 2003 DVD The Complete History.

The single made the first hit look like the start of something rather than a fluke. The German chart returned Sandra to its Top 10 with Hi! Hi! Hi!, Everlasting Love and Hiroshima, and by 1988 her songwriting credits carried the name Sandra Cretu. Michael Cretu later founded Enigma, whose Sadeness Part 1 held No.1 in Germany for 11 weeks from November 1990. The song kept a life of its own. Sandra remixed it in 1999, 2006, 2007 and 2016, Anita Mui and Andy Hui recorded a Cantonese version, and the Finnish gothic band To/Die/For took a cover to No.17 in Finland in 2000.

Maria Magdalena made Sandra famous; In the Heat of the Night made the arrangement permanent. A former girl-group singer, a producer, a pop star content to sing in the background and a lyricist known mainly from the credits proved they could do it twice in one season, with a song in a different mood from the first. Germany kept it at No.2 for three weeks. That near miss is a better measure of the team than the No.1 before it.