Tina Charles – I Love To Love

The Girl Who Sang An International Hit And Didn’t Get Her Name On It — Until She Recorded This One Alone In A Room With A Bollywood Producer

By the time “I Love to Love (But My Baby Loves to Dance)” was released on January 23, 1976, Tina Charles had already been recording for seven years, had already sung lead on an international hit, and had already been erased from the credits of that hit without a word of explanation. She was 22 years old and had more reason to be cynical about the music business than most veterans twice her age. Instead, she walked into a studio with an Indian producer who had just scored a global hit with Carl Douglas, sang a song written by a former US Marine turned Radio Luxembourg DJ and a French musician using a pseudonym, and made the biggest-selling single of her career — and one of the defining recordings of the European disco era. It reached number one on the UK Singles Chart for three weeks and number one in Ireland, while reaching the top two in France, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden and Portugal. The girl who had been written out of someone else’s story had just written one entirely her own.

The single reached number two on the US Billboard Disco chart, while in Canada “I Love to Love” won the Juno Award for bestselling international single of 1976, having sold over 200,000 copies in Quebec alone. It also peaked at number six in Australia and West Germany, number seven in New Zealand, and number four in South Africa. In the United States it reached number 23 on the Billboard Hot 100 — respectable for a British disco record in a market still warming to the genre, but a number that understated its global reach considerably. A decade later, remixed by the DMC (Disco Mix Club), it was reissued in 1986 and charted all over again — returning to the top two in France and proving that great pop has a longer half-life than anyone in 1976 had calculated.

Tina Charles was born Tina Hoskins in London in 1954. By the age of 14, in 1969, she was working as a session singer. When Hoskins was taken to CBS Records that year, she released her first non-album single “Nothing in the World” with a then-obscure piano player in the studio named Reginald Dwight — who shortly afterwards took the stage name Elton John. The parallel careers never intersected again in quite that way. By 1975, Charles was singing lead vocals on “I’m on Fire” by 5000 Volts — a track that became an international hit across Europe and Australia. Her contribution was unacknowledged, with Luan Peters cited as vocalist in promotion for the group. She had been there at the beginning of Elton John’s career and there at the peak of someone else’s hit — and on neither occasion had her name been the one above the title. The credit erasure on “I’m on Fire” was not simply a contractual detail. It was a fundamental injustice that made what followed feel like an especially satisfying form of correction.

It was through a mutual friend — singer Lee Vanderbilt — that Charles met record producer Biddu, who encouraged her to record “I Love to Love,” utilizing Manchester musicians Richie Close on keyboards, Clive Allen on guitar, Des Browne on bass, and Tom Daley on percussion. Biddu was not an obvious choice. Born in Bangalore, trained in London, he had just produced Carl Douglas’s “Kung Fu Fighting” in 1974 — a record made in ten minutes as a B-side that became one of the best-selling singles in history. His instinct for a pop hook was, by this point, empirically proven. The song he brought to Charles had a more complicated history than anyone involved was advertising. It was first recorded in 1975 by Napoleon Jones featuring David Christie on vocals, released on the French label Disc’Az as a mid-tempo disco number with a concise 2:56 runtime. The co-writer using the pseudonym James Bolden was in fact David Christie — the same David Christie whose Napoleon Jones recording had been the song’s original vehicle. The song that launched Tina Charles had already existed for a year. Nobody outside France had noticed it. Biddu and Charles were about to fix that comprehensively.

What Biddu built around Charles’s voice was a masterclass in the specific kind of Euro-disco production that would dominate the second half of the decade. Instrumentation highlights a prominent walking bassline and crisp hi-hat patterns, supporting orchestral swells that evoke lush disco-era orchestration — fusing funky bass grooves with sweeping strings for a full, immersive sound. Charles’s soprano sits above all of it with a brightness that is simultaneously effortless and precisely controlled — a voice that sounds like it belongs in a larger room than any studio could contain. The lyric itself — built on the tension between romantic love and a partner who would rather dance — was playfully era-specific without being throwaway. The standout line referencing the boogaloo added to the song’s lighthearted, era-specific vibe, but the chorus hook transcended its moment entirely. People who have never set foot on a 1970s dancefloor can still sing every word.

The song’s influence on subsequent recordings is more specific than most listeners realise. The Buggles made production choices on their 1979 hit “Video Killed the Radio Star” based directly on the production of “I Love to Love” — and they had Tina Charles provide backing vocals on the track, who added a demo with “Oh-a-a-a-oh” thrown in. The Buggles liked it and included the vocalized vowels in the studio recording. The first video ever played on MTV owes a quiet but audible debt to Tina Charles — a connection that has never quite received the attention it deserves. More recently, ABBA’s Benny Andersson revealed in a 2021 BBC Radio 2 interview that hearing the song in the 2015 BBC series River inspired the composition of “Don’t Shut Me Down” for ABBA’s comeback album Voyage. One song, released in 1976, can be heard in the DNA of “Video Killed the Radio Star” and an ABBA album recorded 45 years later. That is not a modest legacy.

The story behind the song’s co-writer carries its own devastating coda. Jack Robinson had been a US Marine, a UPI journalist based in Paris, a Radio Luxembourg DJ, and a professional manager whose publishing company had signed The Rolling Stones and The Who. His co-writer “James Bolden” — David Christie — had a brief singing career under various stage names and released seven albums between 1974 and 1984. He died by suicide in 1997 following the accidental death of his eleven-year-old daughter Julie. The man who had written the most joyful song of 1976 was gone at the end of a decade that began with that song at number one. The lightness of the record contains no knowledge of any of this. It never does.

Charles followed “I Love to Love” with seven more UK chart entries — including “Dance Little Lady Dance” and “Doctor Love” — but none reached the same heights. The debut single had set a standard that was genuinely difficult to match, which is both the best and worst thing that can happen to an artist in the first year of a solo career. She had spent seven years as a background presence in other people’s music — uncredited, overlooked, paying dues in a business that was taking full advantage of her talent and offering very little in return. Then Biddu put her in a room with a song about dancing, and everything changed. Three weeks at number one in the UK. Number one in Ireland. Top two across five European countries. Reginald Dwight, the piano player from her first-ever session, went on to become Elton John. Tina Charles went on to become herself. Watch the video, read the full story at Music Videos Club, and give this one the attention it has always deserved.