Anti Love Songs

On Betty Davis, Doing It Differently & The Full Spectrum of Love

There’s nothing that brings me more happiness than seeing people get their flowers.

I was fourteen when my disco/funk loving big brother bestowed a copy of Betty Davis’ revolutionary record They Say I’m Different on me, and it was as though the world suddenly lit up and I knew my own possibilities were endless.

Hey Lo, I reckon you’ll really like this record.

Good God!

The young woman who adorned the cover wielding perspex rods on her knees in a funkadelic space suit simply blew my mind.

And I wasn’t the only one – young Betty not only married Miles Davis in the late 1960’s but was responsible for introducing him to her up and coming guitarist buddy Jimi Hendrix, which lit the fire under Miles’ ass that inspired him to head down a whole new direction with Bitches Brew – thus inventing jazz fusion. Thanks Betty.

But much more importantly to me, as a budding music maker, she wrote and produced her own albums - three of ‘em - albums that sounded like nothing had ever sounded before. A rare feat indeed. Just gazing at her album covers was like entering a portal to another world, let alone dropping the needle on the wax.

She was an auteur of song.

She was the sole proprietress of her own foxy, down and dirty sound, with incredibly groundbreaking songs like He Was A Big Freak, If I’m In Luck I Just Might Get Picked Up and Anti Love Song.

Betty was truly a musical expeditionist and you could hear it pay off in the genre defying sounds she created. In her statement song They Say I’m Different, Betty sings about discovering Chuck Berry when she was sweet 16. About Lightning Hopkins, Bo Diddley, Big Mama Thornton, Leadbelly – about how her heritage is what made her who she is and that’s why she’s different, why she’s strange. This moved me. I was hooked. I’ve always loved seeing how connections are made, what sparks a fire. Betty grew up soaked in the good stuff.

Back when I first heard about Betty, I didn’t know a single other person apart from my brother Josh who had heard of her. My Betty records were my prized possessions. If I ever happened across someone else who knew who she was, it was like we were instant soulmates, bonded by a love of the Queen of Foxiness.

Over time, I discovered that Betty was a hit songwriter for acts such as the Chamber Brothers and The Commodores, a top model, a nightclub entrepreneur. That Jimi wrote Foxy Lady for her. That until this recently unearthed 27 seconds from a show in the South of France, there was not a single minute of video footage of this remarkable performer onstage in existence, despite her few live concerts being described as outrageous, incendiary events, half the time getting closed down by religious groups protesting her ‘obscene’ lyrics.

That amongst other personal reasons, Betty finally decided the world wasn’t ready for her, after three albums that didn’t sell, and simply retired, leaving a tiny but ever growing legion of helpless, obsessive devotees in her wake, waiting breathlessly for a whispered about mythical lost album to emerge.

This patchwork of facts, the deliciously torturously slow gleaning of snippets of precious information was gathered over years from various unreliable sources, with each new fragment of information accompanied by a flicker of excitement. The lack of available information made me hungry for it.

I called my first album Born Funky Born Free in some kind of secret homage to Betty, and wrote a song from her imagined point of view called My Friends Call Me Foxy. Performing that song always makes me stand up a little straighter.

Beyonce has been channelling Betty Davis a long long time (take a listen/look at her solo debut ‘Work It Out’ and you’ll see what I mean), but this Halloween just passed, Beyonce perfectly recreated an iconic Betty Davis look and shared it with her 3.14 million followers. I’ve got a feeling a few more people around the world are waking up and wigging out to the raw funk genius of Betty these past few days.

Beyonce as Betty/ Betty Davis

I did my own Betty inspired photo shoot in the early 2000s and used one of the images for one of my ‘lost albums’ (yes, I have a few of them!)

Below is the cover of a vinyl only single that was going to be a precursor to the mini-album recorded with the band I put together to tour the songs from my debut solo album Born Funky Born Free live - the deeply funky seminal underground musician Cathy Green (X, Cough Cough) on bass, who should also be far more revered than she is given credit for, and legendary experimental musician/producer Chris Townend, who played a toy drum kit with chopsticks through a Space Echo, producing some of the most insanely dubtastic beats I’ve ever heard.

I can’t even remember now why this never came out - I think maybe the vinyl only label got as far as designing a cover and then folded… and as for the rest of the album, I guess we ran out of time/money/reason/impetus etc and it remains mostly finished but in need of some love before we could release it. Which I haven’t given up on.

One of the many things I’ve learned from loving Betty Davis is that sometimes things happen in their own sweet time.

Betty’s own lost albums have since been released by the magnificent record label Light In The Attic, who have their own Substack

Light in the Attic

which has deeper dives into more Betty stories amongst other great musical artists that deserve to be discovered/rediscovered/explored. Very excited to see them here!

I recently found some footage from the Born Funky Born Free album launch, which was the very first show performed with this band. My dad also played keys with us.

For our encore we did our own (rehearsed once) version of Betty’s Anti Love Song, one of the most perfect songs ever written, and a total trailblazer stylistically, tonally and lyrically.

Before Betty, there were love songs, and wish I could love you songs, and break up songs, but Betty wrote about NOT wanting to be in love, about actively choosing not to be, about that feeling of being magnetically drawn to someone you just know - and have maybe found out - would be an explosively sexy situation but would not be kind to your mind or your soul and making a hard choice not to go there. To resist. To protect yourself. It’s a modern kind of self awareness that was not in vogue back in 1973. But Betty was always way, way ahead of the times. Betty understood the full spectrum of love and sound and had no desire to box it into something more palatable or fashionable.

Here’s the real thing - if you have not entered the world of Betty before, I highly encourage you to keep exploring:

My brother’s gift of Betty Davis really encouraged me search out the unknown, the pioneers, those that ran their own race, often without anyone cheering them on from the sidelines. It reassured me that those that flew their own freak flag were often those with the greatest gifts to offer the world, that popularity has never been a measure of talent and that as an artist its important to create whatever you damn well want and try not to let it break your heart if it takes an audience thirty years to hear you.

Music has to be its own reward.

Betty knew this, and rewarded us all with her gifts, gifts that are still giving, still revealing their treasure within.

How lucky are we?

It’s so great to see Betty finally getting all the love back that she gave us.

Lo x

PS: For more - here’s the 2020 documentary Betty:They Say I’m Different on Prime.