Act Natural knows… The Boys Come To Town Before Midnight!
Earlene Bentley is a Legend. Oh Mary is she ever. She is the remarkable voice at the foundation of a slew of electric 80’s & 90’s hi-NRG super hits. Long a favourite of mine, The Boys Come to Town is a sassy high camp slice of cosmic synth disco, where Earlene recounts her hair raising nightly trawl of local clubs and bars looking for A MAN.
“I'm lookin' for a man to do what counts
In all the right places
Every time I tell my thoughts to my friends
You should see their faces”
I don’t think she was gonna take no for an answer, and the gay clubbers across the world in 1984 were lapping up her brazen, shame-free attitude. Bentley was in fierce company at the time, and not just sharing space on the dance floor with all of the first ladies of Hi-NRG, she supplied backing vocals for both Miquel Brown and Barbara Pennington, as well rubbing vinyl in disco booths with Evelyn Thomas, Sharon Redd, Divine and Earth Kitt.
Bentley had actually first started to make a name for herself as a actor in the UK of the 70’s, appearing in theatre in plays, musicals and TV shows. She performed in 1974 on the hugely successful talent show Search for a Star, in 1975 on New Faces and earned critical acclaim for her performance in the hit West End production of The Wiz. But it was that voice, the gospel authenticity and rousing soprano drama, that would ultimately bring her to the attention of one a particular gay song writer and producer.
The Boys Come To Town, her debut release, was written and produced by the gay song writing team of Ian Levine and Fiachra Trench, released by San Francisco’s Megatone Records in the US, the imprint founded by none other than Patrick Cowley, Levine was one of the key figures in the emergence of the Northern Soul scene in the UK, and went on to become the original resident in the legendary London gay nightclub Heaven. As a record producer he is often referred to as the great “maestro" of Hi-NRG. (Oh, and he later managed a group of Northern thirst traps called Take That.)
Earlene’s widest moment of exposure came from a short burst of her first hit in the massive comedy film Police Academy, in a “hilarious” scene where the main characters end up in a gay leather bar. Not an entirely positive representation from the perspective of 2024, but in 1984, starved of images of gayness, the idea of scene filmed in a gay bar brought visibility of homosexuality into the lives of many gay men who would never see it elsewhere. And that brief burst of Earlene’s soaring Hi-NRG realness, in a sea of leather clad men, will have shown many young (and old!) gay men that a life of possibility and validation lay out there in the world, somewhere, in a back street basement space where Earlene and her sisters in Hi-NRG would rule their world.