1978 is the year of Olivia Newton-John (1948-2022). After a nearly ten-year career in country pop (with a hit, I honestly love youthan in the film The shark played on a transistor radio before the second attack of the beast), the Australian-born English singer and actress begins a dizzying climb to success thanks to her participation in the musical film Grease.
Olivia was born in Cambridge, UK, in 1948. Her father, Bryn Newton-John, worked in the British Secret Service. During the war he had collaborated on the Enigma project and had been among the agents who held Rudolf Hess in custody after his capture. Her maternal grandfather was the pioneer of quantum mechanics and Nobel laureate in physics Max Born.
At 28, Olivia Newton-John knows she is too old and too Australian for the role of Sandy in Grease, an ultra-American high school student of the late 1950s. Yet an audition with John Travolta is enough to transform the Sandy of the screenplay into Sandy Olsson, an Australian high school student who, recently moved to the United States, falls in love with her Danny Zuko. The film makes John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John the biggest teen stars between the seventies and eighties. The success of the three singles Summer nights, Hopelessly devoted to you and especially You’re the one that I want it is also a personal success of John Farrar, author and producer of Olivia Newton-John since the beginning of her career. The pieces he composes for her and for Travolta are gods pastiche sixties with the crisp sound of late seventies radio pop. Summer nights is an updated doo-wop and You’re the one that I want, the final duet that sees Sandy transform from santarellina to vamp, is a piece that recalls the old rock’n’roll but with the propulsion of an unmistakably disco bass line. Musically it is right Grease to open the long, cannibalistic obsession that pop of the eighties cultivated for the sixties.
The one that really works though is Olivia Newton-John. The metamorphosis of Sandy 1 (virginal clone of Debbie Reynolds, the sweetheart of America) into Sandy 2 (cougar in tight satin pants, leather jacket and backcombing more eighty than sixty) remains etched in the imagination of a generation. The sequence in which Sandy, encouraged by her friends, removes the cigarette from her scarlet lips, throws it on the ground and puts it out by stepping on it with a high-heeled clog, is a moment of pure pop fetishism and the awakening of the senses for an entire generation of little boys and girls. Sandy 2 was simply sex. When, more or less six years later, Madonna arrives with her lace stockings, exposed bras and that scene in which she dries her armpits with the jet of hot air in a public bathroom, the fourteen year olds of the eighties hug because they had already been weaned by the diabolical Sandy 2. John Farrar and Olivia Newton-John know well that the point (to put it as Roland Barthes) by Grease, especially for the younger audience, it was Sandy’s metamorphosis scene. And so, when they start working on an unreleased album, they decide to take Sandy out of Grease and to evolve it into an adult and sexy pop album.
Already the title and the cover of Totally hot show an Olivia Newton-John different from that of her previous nine albums: the soap and water girl-girl who sang harmless pop songs covered with a country icing is an adult woman, dressed in black leather who, leaning against a column that could be from a hotel lobby to an underground garage, she looks directly into the camera, her heavy makeup and her hair hastily combed to one side. Her voice has changed too: she remains high-pitched and supple, full of that vibrato that made her so adorable for country pop audiences, but she sounds fuller, more adult and sexier.
The songs, chosen with cunning together with Farrar, continue to oscillate between sweetness and roughness, between fake naivety and mischievous provocation. The pop rock tour de force that opens the album, Please don’t keep me waiting, lasts almost six minutes and is the declaration of intent of a woman who is no longer a girl and knows what she wants. “Don’t make me wait, I can’t take it anymore… I know you want me too”. After a synth and guitar arpeggio, Olivia’s new voice is heard attacking with the verse: “I want to love you once again”, I want to love you once more. The confused and romantic Sandy from the first part of Grease is now a faded photograph, a distant memory of high school. The first two singles taken from Totally hot, Deeper than the night and especially A little more love, are the essence of the pop rock of the late seventies: songs with an immaculate production, skilfully poised between the most updated pop and the “adult contemporary” rock that rages on American radio. When in the insinuating A little more loveanother song that reflects on a love that does not work as it should, Olivia Newton-John sings “where is my innocence?”, the listener can not help but think of a non-idyllic evolution of the story between Sandy and Danny from Grease. Totally hot, the song that gives the album its title, is one of the few pieces that radiate from soft rock orthodoxy: it is a robust rhythm’n’blues piece written by John Farrar. It’s the most sexually explicit moment on the album and a litmus test of how a white pop artist, in order to be able to talk more openly about sex, had to trace African-American genres and styles. Music critic Ann Powers has written an entire book on this topic. Another rhythm’n’blues piece closes the album in glory: it is Gimme some lovin’ (written by Steve Winwood), which the Blues Brothers would make a hit just two years later in the John Landis film.
It could be liquidated Totally hot as a shrewd strategy to capitalize on the success of Greasethe transition album that a few years later would allow the new Olivia Newton-John to define the sound and style of the eighties with the immaculate Physical, his most famous number one in the charts. Nevertheless Totally hotas an album, it is much more interesting and courageous than Physical. In Sandy’s metamorphosis into Grease and in the shrewdness of Totally hot there is the root of so much contemporary pop narration: from the sexy virginity of the early days of Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera and Jessica Simpson to the transformation of Kylie Minogue from CuteKylie (Kylie carina) a SexKylie (Kylie sex goddess) in the nineties, up to the sexual claims of today’s younger pop stars.
Kylie Minogue in particular, also from Australia, is the artist who most of all has metabolized Olivia Newton-John’s lesson: she has taken the natural step from a teleromaniac starlet, an idol of adolescents, to a global pop star; she has the same light soprano voice tending to vibrato and has demonstrated the same chameleonic ability to make her the pop styles and trends of the moment. Upon Olivia Newton-John’s death on August 9, Kylie tweeted: “Since I was ten I have loved and admired Olivia Newton-John and always will. For me she was and always will remain an inspiration ”.
Olivia Newton-John
Totally hot
Mca, 1978