The singer gave the audience his famous advice on how to master the dance – "Just pretend you're wiping your bottom with a towel as you get out of the shower, while putting out a cigarette with both feet" – and a month later the record was No 1 in the national charts. Let's Twist again Fifty years ago, a new dance craze swept the world and changed for ever the way people move. In 1985, Kids Incorporated covered "Let's Twist Again" in the Season 2 episode "Rock of Ages". The voice coming from the jukebox is that of Chubby Checker, and the song is the Twist. This was quickly spotted by Philadelphia-based disc jockey Dick Clark, who already had a national following for his own TV show, American Bandstand, which was broadcast in an early evening slot on weekdays. As things turned out, it was only sleeping, and 1961 was destined to be the year of the Twist. This is something new. Finally, there is no leader: here is the first dance in which the genders are created equal. Their fresh faces are registering surprise and delight. And since you are not physically attached to your partner, there is nothing to stop you drifting away to dance with someone else who has caught your eye (of course, you can also have that humiliation visited upon you, and find yourself dancing alone). [17] In Wallonia (French Belgium) his single spent 40 weeks on the chart, also peaking at number 1. Within weeks, Joey Dee and the Starliters were not only topping the charts with Peppermint Twist but entertaining Manhattan's social elite at a charity ball in the Plaza hotel and a party at the Museum of Modern Art. On the dancefloor, the Twist – which had enjoyed a brief vogue among America's teens the previous summer – is enjoying a second coming that will sweep the world and change the way people move. The Peppermint Lounge would lose first its celebrity clientele and then its liquor licence, but it could be credited with popularising the idea of the discotheque: a phenomenon that, with or without go-go girls, would be a great deal harder to eradicate than the dance that made its name. 1962, the Italian actress Sophia Loren (left) demonstrating the Twist at the Saint-Maurice studios with her teacher Regine. King Records' boss was Syd Nathan, an archetypal cigar-chomping philistine who liked the Twist so little that it first saw the light of day, in January 1959, as the B-side of a ballad called Teardrops On Your Letter, which edged its way into the Top 100. Richard Williams, up on his feet when it first hit the dancefloor, celebrates the birth of a revolution.• Gallery: How to do the Twist• Gallery: The craze that swept the world. Checker also recorded the song in German as "Der Twist Beginnt" and in Italian as "Balliamo il Twist". Since the club was licensed to hold no more than 178 people, those crowds could never be huge. For a while, the Twist was ours and ours alone. Anthropologists and psychologists were asked for their opinions, and the dance made the cover of Time magazine. As occasionally happened, however, disc jockeys decided they preferred the Twist and played it at teenage functions. Its profoundly secular nature prevented him performing it himself, but when the Nightingales found themselves sharing a Florida hotel with the popular (and very secular) Hank Ballard and the Midnighters, Wallace offered them his song. As the author of a book called Your Happiest Years, which included chapters entitled "Good Manners are Good Sense" and "Teenagers and Parents Can Be Friends", he had initial reservations about the propriety of the Twist's pelvic movements. Photograph: Getty Images, he finger presses the plastic button. What counted was not the size but the nature of the audience, for in the late summer of 1961 the Peppermint Lounge enlisted the services of Earl Blackwell, publisher of the Celebrity Register, to arrange visits by a couple of New York columnists: Igor Cassini, who contributed gossip items to the daily Journal-American under the byline "Cholly Knickerbocker", and Eugenia Sheppard, a fashion writer for the Herald Tribune. Chubby Checker and the Twist were duly given their first national exposure in August 1960 to the broader audience offered by Clark's Saturday night show, broadcast from New York. No more waltz, quickstep or foxtrot. The song received the 1962 Grammy Award for Best Rock & Roll Recording. Later they would become known as the Ronettes, but for now they merely gyrated while the Starliters' high-energy versions of current hits pulled in crowds of young dancers. It is a narcissistic dance, but it also gives you the chance to watch your partner's moves, and read their intentions. Within seconds the younger set of Mad Men characters, gathered after work in their three-button suits and twinsets to celebrate the acceptance of Peggy Olson's first stab at copywriting by her bosses at Sterling Cooper, are dancing on the floor of PJ Clarke's Third Avenue bar. Checker rerecorded Let's Twist Again in German, for an audience also dancing to Der Liszt Twist. One of the biggest hit singles of 1961, it reached No.8 on the U.S. Billboard pop chart (No.3 on Cash Box) in August of that year and subsequently reached No.2 in the U.K. in February 1962. and featured Checker, Dion DiMucci and the Marcels with such songs as Twist Along, Twistin' USA and The Twist Is Here To Stay. In Britain, where Let's Twist Again reached No 2 in the charts, the film industry followed suit, recruiting Checker to sing something called The Lose Your Inhibitions Twist in Dick Lester's It's Trad, Dad!, which also featured Acker Bilk, Kenny Ball and Chris Barber. Lowe selected one of his contracted artists, a cheerful, good-looking, puppy-fattish 19-year-old called Ernest Evans whose professional name, Chubby Checker, paid homage to Fats Domino, but whose previous recordings had provoked little response. The little black disc drops down and the needle finds the groove. Twist Around The Clock was launched on 30 December 1961, with the craze at its height. A sample of "Der Twist Beginnt" would later be used by The Residents to begin their 1976 album The Third Reich 'n Roll. Owned by the Genovese crime family, and operated by one of its underbosses, Matty "The Horse" Ianniello, as part of a string of strip clubs and gay bars, it had acquired as resident band a young New Jersey group called Joey Dee and the Starliters. Appell changed the underlying rhythm from the jazzy shuffle of Ballard's original to an even eight-to-the-bar feel derived from Latin music – a pattern that became identified as the Twist beat – and inserted a gritty tenor saxophone solo. A barely disguised low-budget rewrite of Rock Around The Clock, it was advertised with the slogan "It's twist-errific!" [18], Grammy Award for Best Rock & Roll Recording, "The Help (Music From the Motion Picture)", Kids Incorporated – Let's Twist Again (1985), "The best-selling singles of 1962 in Italy", "Artist Chart History Details: Chubby Checker", "CASH BOX Top 100 Singles week ending August 5, 1961", "Viens danser le Twist - Johnny Hallyday - Hit-Parade.net", Ultratop.be – Johnny Hallyday – Viens danser le twist", Lescharts.com – Johnny Hallyday – Viens danser le twist", http://www.chubbychecker.com/discography.asp, Crimson Rivers II: Angels of the Apocalypse, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Let%27s_Twist_Again&oldid=968301344, Pages using infobox song with unknown parameters, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License, This page was last edited on 18 July 2020, at 14:33. Billboard pop chart (No.3 on Cash Box) in August of that year and subsequently reached No.2 in the U.K. in February 1962. The song refers to the Twist dance craze and Checker's 1960 single "The Twist", a two-time U.S. No.1 single (in September 1960 and again in January 1962 on re-release). "Let's Twist Again" is a song written by Kal Mann and Dave Appell, and released as a single by Chubby Checker. And so along came the Locomotion, the Fly, the Madison, the Hitch Hike, the Watusi, the Hully Gully, the Frug, the Stroll, the Monkey, the Dog, the Mashed Potato and countless others, including that nameless creation, beloved of mods, in which all movement was reduced to the merest twitch of one knee and a barely perceptible shrug of the shoulders: it was, as New Orleans R&B singer Chris Kenner would proclaim in 1962, the Land Of 1,000 Dances indeed. In France there was Twist à Saint-Tropez, by Dick Rivers et Les Chats Sauvages, while Johnny Hallyday invited his followers to Viens Danser Le Twist. 1 on the singles sales chart in France (from 13 November to 13 December 1961 and from 13 January to 9 February 1962). "Let's Twist Again" is a song written by Kal Mann and Dave Appell, and released as a single by Chubby Checker. [1], Croatian singer Tatjana Cameron Tajči made a remake of the song in Croatian renaming it Moj mali je opasan. By the end of the year, however, it had been forgotten. Jackie Kennedy, the epitome of the new carefree spirit of the post-Eisenhower era, did the Twist in a Capri nightspot. The song refers to the Twist dance craze and Checker's 1960 single "The Twist", a two-time U.S. No.1 single (in September 1960 and again in January 1962 on re-release). On West 45th Street in midtown Manhattan, a small nightclub called the Peppermint Lounge was setting aside its past as a sleazy leather bar. At the start of the year Checker had a second No 1 with another dance-craze song, Pony Time, but his next record was a flop. Before long columnists were recording the presence of Marilyn Monroe, Truman Capote, Greta Garbo, Tennessee Williams, Elsa Maxwell, Noël Coward, Norman Mailer and the offspring of various European royal families. Rather than going through a set of predetermined steps, you are free to use dancing as a means of self-expression, of doing your own thing, though that phrase will not come into use until the 60s have become fully swinging. Doormen were being bribed to secure admission for celebrities emerging from Rolls-Royces. Checker's The Twist topped the chart for a second time.

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