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Fact #111299

When:

Short story:

At Abbey Road studios, London, England, UK, Europe, David Bowie and Mick Jagger record their version of the Martha And The Vandellas 1964 hit Dancing In The Street, for use in the upcoming African Famine Relief Charity Concert Live Aid.

Full article:

Clive Langer (co-producer) : That day, we (Langer and his partner Alan Winstanley) did Absolute Beginners (with Bowie) in the morning.

When he did the ‘Ba-ba-ba-oohs’ on Absolute Beginners, if you isolated them, they were out of tune, but he knew that the track was going to be all right and you knew he knew. He stops when he sings wrong lines, but you don’t stop him other than that. If you stopped him, he would say, ‘I’m stopping because this or that was wrong’. He just knows what’s happening when it’s happening.

Then he said he wanted to do a song for Live Aid. Jagger came along later and we did that in the evening.

John Regan (bassist) : That song had long been favorite of mine, but when I arrived at the studio to find Mick Jagger greeting me, it was something I will never forget. My most vivid memory of that day was that it happened to be one of those rare occasions that the part that made the final recording was a first take for me, but as I was laying down the bass track I could see Mick dancing around the studio, just getting into the music as if he were onstage. Powerful moment in time for me, and it hit home how much Jagger was moved by the power of the song, and how sincere his love of music must be.
(Source : interview in Songfacts website)

Clive Langer : Dancing In the Street got sent to America to have some brass put on by Nile Rogers and then Bob Clearmountain mixed it. We mixed the video version and there’s a couple of lines, if you watch it, which don’t sync. These are lines we re-did after they shot the video.
(Source : not known)

Mick Jagger : My favorite memory (of David Bowie) was the time we did Dancing in the Street together. We had to record the song and film the video all in one day. We walked straight from the studio onto the set of the video. At the end of the day, we were saying, "See, it can be done! Why are spending years in the studio?" We enjoyed camping it up. The video is hilarious to watch. It was the only time we really collaborated on anything, which is really stupid when you think about it.
(Source : Rolling Stone, January 2016)