“Dancing in the Dark” is a celebration. It remains a key part of every Bruce Springsteen live show, usually in the encores, when he pulls someone from the crowd to dance with him, recreating the video, in which a young Courteney Cox cavorts with Springsteen. It’s a moment of ecstatic release. Even in his current Broadway theatre shows, with no E Street Band behind him, it still takes its place third from the end, a promise of joy after the soul-baring that has come before. It is a pop song; a pop song that took Springsteen, with deliberate calculation, to the upper reaches of pop stardom.
It’s a very black celebration indeed, though. When Springsteen’s manager, Jon Landau, explained that the Born in the USA album still lacked a killer single, he perhaps didn’t expect what Springsteen set to paper that evening early in 1984, what Springsteen described in his autobiography as “my song about my own alienation, fatigue and desire to get out from inside the studio, my room, my record, my head and … live.” In “Dancing in the Dark”, the singer wants to “change my clothes, my hair, my face”; he’s “just tired and bored with myself”. He knows there’s “something happening somewhere” — he just knows he is not part of it.
The despair is masked by the euphoria of the song — Roy Bittan’s swelling synth line is like riding a motorboat on calm waters – and the joy of the video. Quite how important the video is becomes apparent when one trawls YouTube and finds early drafts of it: Springsteen rehearsing with Clarence Clemons in his home; the original version, which was just Springsteen dancing against a black background. He looks desperately uncomfortable, like the man in the song. Evidently it took staging the video around a real gig — the opening night of the Born in the USA tour, in St Paul, Minnesota — to get Springsteen to relax just enough.
The song reached number two in the Billboard Hot 100, and entered the bloodstream of popular culture immediately. The following year, Tina Turner took to performing it live, in lieu of the song she said Springsteen had promised to write for her. Her version was clumpy and colourless, a party hit shorn of desperation. Also in 1985, Big Daddy had a hit single with a dreadful novelty cover, recast as 1950s easy listening country. In 1986, The Shadows tackled it instrumentally, which rather robbed the song of its whole point.
But “Dancing in the Dark” was too dark to be subsumed into light entertainment, and the best versions are those that emphasise both parts of the equation. Mary Chapin Carpenter perhaps took it too far towards misery in her live reading, introducing it as “a bummer song” and playing it as “a bummer song”. Ruth Moody of the folk band The Wailin’ Jennys began the song sombrely before allowing the sunshine in.
Best of all, though, was Hot Chip’s version from 2015. The London electronica group have always had a keen eye for the intersection of melancholy and joy, and “Dancing in the Dark” was made for them. It has the excited propulsion of the dancefloor, taken at a HiNRG tempo — it seems to be racing itself to its end — but Alexis Taylor’s fragile voice can’t carry bombast. And then they perform a brilliant trick — mashing in snatches of another great joy/despair anthem, LCD Soundsystem’s “All My Friends”. Theirs is the only reading, bar Springsteen’s live performances, that leaves you unsure whether you should be dancing or crying.
It’s surely inconceivable, given his obsessional knowledge of pop music and his love of Frank Sinatra, that Springsteen didn’t know there had already been one very famous song called “Dancing in the Dark”. It’s worth comparing the two, because Springsteen’s reads like an answer to the former. Howard Dietz’s 1931 lyric was about two lovers so entwined in each other that they provide the light for each other to dance through the dark. Springsteen, by contrast, sees dancing in the dark as something to be resigned to. And as he comes to the end of the song, he alters the structure of the chorus (“Can’t start a fire / Can’t start a fire without a spark”) to make the song suddenly lurch over a precipice like a rollercoaster. “Can’t start a fire,” he sings, “worryin’ ’bout your little world falling apart,” and — because people remember choruses — the sting of the song becomes fully apparent.
We’re keen to hear from our readers. What are your memories of ‘Dancing in the Dark’? Whose version do you prefer? Let us know in the comments below.
‘The Life of a Song Volume 2: The fascinating stories behind 50 more of the world’s best-loved songs’, edited by David Cheal and Jan Dalley, is published by Brewer’s.
Music credits: Columbia; Rhino; UMC (Universal Music Catalogue); True North Records; Domino Recording Co; Reborn Recordings
Picture credit: David Gahr/Getty Images