Eddie's Spiral

If anyone had told me several years ago that I'd be launching my career on a commercial scale with a club remix, I would have laughed in their face - for no apparent reason other than the fact that I've always been miles away from dance music, let alone clubs and remixes.

In fact, years ago I was strongly advised to take this very route by a dance music connoisseur but chose to keep pursuing what I had initially envisioned.

In the very beginning of my career, a very good friend and publicist, Jeff Chegwin, arranged a meeting for me with one of the most prominent figures in UK Dance music, Eddie Gordon. I couldn't quite understand "why" dance music when my demo recordings at the time were all compiled of classic musical numbers, such as Andrew Lloyd Webber's "Sunset Boulevard" and songs penned by Michel Legrand and the Bergmans. Now how did that fit in with club music, I wasn't so sure....

The day before I met Eddie Gordon, I had just been introduced to Nigel Wright, one of Lloyd Webber's primary producers, who was incredibly charming and sweet. It seemed like a perfect match for the type of music I had been passionate about, but it was the same old story - with just a few bare-bone demos to my name and no management whatsoever, there wasn't much Nigel, or anyone else in his position, could do for the Moscow-based teenager.

Next stop - DANCE.

I can vividly remember walking into Eddie's office together with my parents (they were with me in London for my two-week trip of meetings and initial introductions - that was right before I actually moved to the UK) - club music thumping out of loud speaker, I felt at the very least out of place genre-wise.

We spent about an hour talking about this, that and the other. Eddie's immediate verdict was the following: "forget theater music for the time being, you should pursue dance music instead..." It came across as Chinese to me at the time, honestly. Imagine a Streisand-admiring teenager singing songs from "Yentl" who is suddenly being told that it's dance and club music she should consider above all.

My folks and I exchanged puzzled looks of confusion, as Eddie stepped away for a few minutes. He came back a while later with a notepad and started drawing a big circle which then became a spiral....And by the end of it, he put a big black dot in the middle of the spiral.

What did that mean?

"Basically, you'll keep going in circles and all sorts of musical directions until you finally home in on a dance track, trust me."

We thanked Eddie for his time and left the meeting feeling a little puzzled.

And guess what?

I have a feeling that he was right!