Pop

Gregg Alexander‘s music career could have taken a much different path had he not had a very bad night in Detroit 30 years ago. The reclusive singer/songwriter and leader of the New Radicals recently revealed that his band’s signature 1994 debut single, the up with (positive) people anthem “You Get What You Give,” almost didn’t make the grade thanks to an equally catchy song he ended up handing off.
“I had a moment of annoyance that I couldn’t go to the house clubs in Detroit. So he reached for the acoustic guitar in the back, channelling his emotion into a song beginning ‘It’s murder on the dancefloor, but you’d better not kill the groove,’” Alexander told the Guardian about a 1994 night when his old blue Ford Mustang wouldn’t start, depriving him of an evening of clubbing.

What he got instead, though, was the groove for “Murder on the Dancefloor,” the song that became a No. 2 hit for Sophie Ellis-Bextor in the UK and then hit the top 20 again this year after it was memorably used in the viral hit movie Saltburn. “You know how Paul McCartney originally sang about scrambled eggs in ‘Yesterday?;” Alexander said. “‘Murder on the Dancefloor’ wasn’t anything deep from my subconscious. It was just a dummy lyric that was kind of sung for fun, but then I couldn’t better it.”

Trending on Billboard

Alexander’s lost-to-time demo of the song has the same driving disco meter, but shot through with his signature keening vocals and his band’s eternal sunshine vibe, enhanced by a string section played on a keyboard. Alexander and the Radicals only released one album, 1998’s Maybe You’ve Been Brainwashed Too, which featured the equally bouncy “You Get What You Give,” which hit the top five in the U.K.

“I almost flipped a coin between the two songs,” Alexander, 53, told the Guardian. “The record company wanted something urgently and I didn’t have the time or the budget to finish both. I felt like ‘Murder’ was a monster but ‘You Get What You Give’ was a masterpiece. It was everything I’d always wanted to say inside five minutes.”

In a way, Alexander won on both accounts, since the co-write with Ellis-Bextor (Alexander also co-produced “Murder”) has now become as iconic as the New Radicals’ hit, which has more than 440 million Spotify plays to date. “A publisher told me that in January it [‘Murder’] was the most heard music on the planet,” Alexander said of the track for which he recorded a “master quality” demo at the time. “That’s just incredible.”

Just two years after writing the double dose of pop wonderment, Alexander disbanded the New Radicals and receded from the spotlight to focus on songwriting, penning a Grammy-winning track for Santana (2002’s “The Game of Love”), as well as writing and producing tracks for Enrique Iglesias, Rod Stewart, Hanson, Ronan Keating and S Club 7.

After moving to Notting Hill, England following the New Radicals’ break-up, Alexander’s demo got into the hands of Ellis-Bextor, at which point they finished the track together. “‘Murder’ was a song I always wanted the world to hear,” Alexander said, recalling that during sessions for the song he would walk down the halls at the studio and see people dancing along to “Murder,” which made him think they were on to something. “And when I met Sophie we embarked on a creative journey, the first of three or four Top 10 hits we had.”

The original demo also had the “I know, I know, I know” ad lib, which Alexander said he’d been told was a songwriting no-go. “I’d been told you can’t use the same words over and over because it’s too repetitive,” he said. “So I used ‘I know’ seven times.”

The reboot of “Murder” has also reconnected him with Ellis-Bextor, with Alexander realizing that sometimes things work out just as they were supposed to. “She’s so talented and humble but a great pop star. I think her genius, slightly deadpan delivery helped make it a hit,” he said. “Everything would have been different if I’d put out ‘Murder on the Dancefloor,’ but I feel that everything happened as it was meant to be.”

Listen to the “Murder on the Dancefloor” demo here (paywalled).