Aquellas Viejas Maxis: Evelyn Thomas

Music career

Although best known worldwide for her '80s Hi-NRG club hits, Thomas recorded and performed in disco, jazz, and gospel music styles for a decade before her successful stint in the 1980s. Discovered by British producer Ian Levine, who was in the U.S. in 1975 scouting for gospel and soul singers he could promote in the UK, the two recorded several tracks which resulted in a contract with 20th Century Records. Evelyn Thomas scored a chart hit with her first single, reaching the UK Top 30 in 1976 with the single "Weak Spot". A follow-up single, "Doomsday", entered the UK charts twice but each time floundered in the lower reaches, and sticky contract issues complicated her newfound success^{[citation needed]}, though Levine and Thomas would continue their association for quite some time. She signed to US label Casablanca Records for her first album release "I Wanna Make It On My Own", released 1978. With Casablanca doing little to promote the LP, she switched to AVI Records for the double A-side 12" single "Have a Little Faith in Me" / "No Time to Turn Around" which prompted the label to release it as an LP, backed with Rick Gianatos' extended remixes of her 1976 tracks "My Head's in the Stars" and "Love's Not Just an Illusion". For a follow-up, Evelyn Thomas re-recorded three tracks from an aborted project by Levine's group Moonstone, "Love in the First Degree", "Summer on the Beach" and "Sleaze" (originally entitled "Out of the Ball Game") but with the disco backlash in the USA, the tracks were left unreleased, and Levine and Thomas' careers stalled as the 1980s began.

Capturing the zeitgeist

Although disco music had been declared "dead" in the U.S. in a backlash in 1979, several songs which continued and advanced the exuberant surge of uptempo dance music managed to scale the U.S. pop charts in the intervening years, notably Blondie's "Call Me" in 1980, Laura Branigan's "Gloria" in 1982, and Irene Cara's "Flashdance (What A Feeling)" in 1983. Unwilling to use the term "disco", the phrase "high energy" had come into usage, probably^{[citation needed]} begun in England in the early 1980s. By 1984 Ian Levine had re-established himself as a producer and asked Evelyn Thomas to come to London to record a new track "High Energy". Just few weeks after it was released, it zoomed up the charts all over Europe - peaking at No. 1 in Germany and No. 5 in the UK, selling a total of 7,000,000 copies^{[citation needed]} worldwide. In the U.S. it hit No. 1 on the Hot Dance Club Play chart, selling 250,000 copies^{[citation needed]}. The song was her only Billboard Hot 100 entry, peaking at #85, although three additional songs hit the Billboard dance chart.

By 1984, the phrase had become embraced as a term by DJs across Europe and in the States, particularly in gay clubs where DJs who preferred to play records that surpassed a certain BPM (Beats Per Minute) threshold found many mainstream hits lagging in tempo. Evolving around that time to the abbreviated "Hi-Energy," the term soon became further shortened to "Hi-NRG", and was still widely in use more than two decades later to describe a certain genre of uptempo dance music. Though it became a widely held myth that the Evelyn Thomas song was the etymological source of the phrase, Thomas' hit certainly captured the dance music zeitgeist, and through that classic club hit she became an ambassador for that wave of dance music at the time of its greatest international prominence.

Later career

The follow-up single "Masquerade" was taken from her third album "High Energy", released the same year. While it received heavy rotation in European clubs, it failed to break into the UK Top 40. In the U.S. the song was a top-twenty Dance hit. The following year, "Heartless" became her only single other than "High Energy" to chart outside of the Club/Dance charts in the United States. "Heartless" peaked at #84 on the Black Singles chart (later renamed the Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Singles & Tracks chart) in 1985.

Though she would not return to the U.S. pop or R&B charts, U.S. dancefloors continued to move to the fast beat of Evelyn Thomas. With a cover of the Supremes' 1967 hit "Reflections", updated in her Hi-NRG style, Thomas peaked at #18 on the Hot Dance Music/Club Play chart in 1986, the same year in which Kim Wilde had a similarly styled hit with the Supremes' "You Keep Me Hangin' On". A second Thomas release that summer fared even better on those charts, as "How Many Hearts" narrowly missed the top 10. The two songs would later appear on Thomas' fourth album release, "Standing at the Crossroads", in 1987. In late 1987, the single "No Win Situation" shot to #1 on the now defunct UK Hi-NRG chart. After the singles "Only Once in a Lifetime" (1988) and "This Is Madness" (1989), both on Levine's Nightmare Records label, Thomas withdrew from the music business.^{[citation needed]}

In spring 1997, Redemption featuring Evelyn Thomas had a minor U.S. club hit with the track "Tell The World".