The Belle Stars
London's Belle Stars came together in 1981 from the ashes of
2-Tone act, The Bodysnatchers, when it was Rhoda Dakar, not Jennie
McKeown fronting the band.
They couldn't really play but they had
a single - a hit single - called Let's Do Rock
Steady. It was ska beat, they were
all girls. Rhoda left and the Snatchers turned into the
Stars.
Signing to Stiff in 1981, the
seven-woman combo played and sang neo-soul with
ska-flecked dance beats. The press adored them - what they wore,
how they giggled, even what they played.
Commercially things got off to a shaky
start. Their first single, Hiawatha, was not
all that was hoped. The critics said it sounded like it had been
recorded in Epping Forest. It flopped.
Then
came Slick Trick - a wicked rap
about some devious young madam taking all her men to the cleaners.
It was fragile funk but it had a nice melody and some attractive
idiosyncrasies, like the sax break which replaced a legitimate
chorus. But again it flopped, and the services of Madness
producers Clive Langer and Alan Winstanley were dispensed
with.
With the release of the Latin Love Song EP, decrees of plagiarism of
the worst degree were levelled at the seven. With their confidence
in their own song writing abilities undermined, the band turned to
covers.
 The first was Iko, Iko.
As luck would have it, the week before its release an unknown
blonde called Natasha sprung into the charts with her own version,
and The Belle Stars could only manage a sorry hiccup near the
bottom of the Top 40.
Their version did, however, become a huge
hit when recycled on the soundtrack of 1988's Rain
Man.
Another cover, The
Clapping Song, managed to get them into the charts at
last. Their third cover, Mockingbird,
returned them to the land of the flops.
Then
- out of the blue - it happened. Their new single, Sign
Of The Times, went straight in at Number 19 and
suddenly The Belle Stars were on TV every time you turned it
on.
Despite Sign
Of The Times reaching the Top Three the band never released
an album, and effectively ended up as two distinct bands - one
that had the hits, and the constantly touring live
band.
In 1987 they slimmed down to three
members (Owen, Joyce and Shone) and spent two months making an
album in New York with Trevor Horn which Horn eventually refused
to release.
Vocalist Jennie McKeown
developed a serious heroin problem and moved to Miami to "sort herself
out". In recent years she has performed
with members of Selecter and The Bodysnatchers in an outfit called
Skadiva.
Hirst moved into the jazz world and
formed The Clare Hirst Quartet. Most of the others moved out of
the music industry into relatively "normal"
jobs.
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