The edition of X Factor this year it was won by a twenty-year-old from Ancona who presented himself with the stage name of Baltimore. It was a well deserved victory and we wish him happiness and success. But someone at X Factor could tell him that Baltimore was a stage name already taken. Anyone who had been alive in 1986, in Italy as in the United States, could not fail to remember “that” Baltimore, the one who sang Tarzan boy.
Baltimore, as often happened to the Italian disco products of the eighties, was not an artist but a recording project. It was formed by the musician and producer Maurizio Bassi and the American singer and arranger Naimy Hackett, joined by the guitarists Giorgio Cocilovo (well-known session player who has played with anyone, from Mina to Cristina D’Avena) and Claudio Bazzarri, bassist Pier Michelatti and drummer Lele Melotti (another veteran of Italian rock: it was his drums in I’m going to the max by Vasco Rossi). Bassi and Hackett wrote, arranged and sang everything: he the solo part and she the choirs.
But something was missing: in the mid-eighties it was unthinkable to send a group of anonymous musicians to play a disco piece on television broadcasts such as Discoring The Superclassifica show. An image boy was needed, someone who lip-syndicated, danced and materialized for the audience from a cloud of dry ice. Northern Irish dancer and singer Jimmy McShane, who had previously had experience as a backing vocalist to Dee D. Jackson, was a nurse at the Red Cross at the time, but dropped everything when he was offered to become Baltimore’s face and body. Tall, blond, thin, slouchy, bespectacled and very smiling, McShane had everything they needed: he was exotic enough for the Italian audience, he knew how to move and was a born entertainer. He could do everything without taking himself too seriously: he had the moving face of a clown and the agile body of a dancer. Wrapped in large dusters (it was 1985!) That let a glimpse of lurex jumpsuits or improbable dungarees, he fluttered around the stage without missing a syllable of his playback.
Tarzan boy, released in 1985, was a hit, first in Europe and in the United States a little later. The formula worked: the song, a synth pop tune that carried an irresistible pop melody, was on the verge of insane, but McShane’s presence made it somehow true and like all true things it was in equal measure a little cheerful and a little sad. I speak of truth and not of authenticity: McShane was not a singer, he moved his mouth and fidgeted, yet he was Baltimore. Tarzan boy was he: he had something liberating, hilarious. For a gay teenager of those years it was an embarrassing mirror in which to recognize himself (“the party fool”, “my strange but super nice friend”, “he dances too well”) and at the same time it was liberating, because he slammed that in your face. that was with a laugh.
Baltimore is universally considered one one hit wonder, or a hit and run success. Technically, however, this is not true. Not just after Tarzan boy an album came out (Living in the background), but there was another single, Woody boogie, which nevertheless had a good success. So let’s give Baltimore what Baltimore is: it was at least one two hits wonder.
Tarzan boy e Woody boogie they had in common, in addition to the almost identical structure of the song, a cartoon aesthetic: in Tarzan boy there was Tarzan’s scream and in Woody boogie the keyboards mimicked the unmistakable sound of the Woody Woodpecker. Hard to imagine the Aqua di Barbie girl or Cartoons by DooDah! without the pioneering Baltimore precedent.
L’album Living in the background it contained other surprises besides those two singles. Bassi and Hackett were musicians and were able to decline the pop of the eighties in all its subgenres. Pull the wires is a ballad with the cumbersome sax solo that was a must in those years and transforms Baltimore into a strange mutation of Mike Francis. Also Living in the background, the song that gives the title to the album, takes us elsewhere: it seems in all respects a good piece of Duran Duran, it could be a demo of a song from the album Notorious. E Chinese restaurant is anything but trivial: an epic pop wave track with not too distant echoes of Big in Japan of Alphaville and of One night in Bangkok by Murray Head.
Baltimore’s success was such that in 1987 they released a second album, which was quickly forgotten. Jimmy McShane in 1994, in Milan, discovered that he was infected with the HIV virus. He left for Northern Ireland and died at his home in Derry on March 29, 1995 at the age of 37.
Baltimore
Living in the background
Emi
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