FEATURE:
Groovelines
Betty Boo – Doin’ the Do
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THIS is a timely feature…
as the incredible Betty Boo is on the road soon. This year marks thirty-five since Boomania was released. To mark that, she is embarking on some tour dates. On 25th April, Boomania and Grrr... Its Betty Boo are being released on vinyl, C.D. and cassette. I wanted to celebrate the approaching thirtieth anniversary of Boomania’s second single, Doin’ the Do. The song was co-written and co-produced by Boo. It was a top ten smash in Australia, Belgium, Ireland, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Spain, and the United Kingdom. It was released on 8th May, 1990. I am going to get to some articles relating to Doin’ the Do. Before then, this BBC feature from 2022 gives us some background to this legendary artist. The interview with Betty Boo (Alison Clarkson) was in promotion of her third studio album, Boomerang:
“The Betty Boo story begins, as all good stories should, with a burger.
It was 1987, and Clarkson was walking home from a Public Enemy gig in Hammersmith, when she spotted band member Professor Griff in McDonald's, ordering a Filet-O-Fish.
Full of teenage bravado, she approached him with two schoolfriends and declared: "We're rappers too!"
The trio - known as the She Rockers - proceeded to freestyle for him while being ushered out of the restaurant by an unimpressed employee. (Amazingly, Griff had a documentary crew following him and the footage is on YouTube.)
That chance meeting prompted an invitation to the US, where Griff produced the She Rockers' debut single Give It A Rest, external.
"That trip was an apprenticeship," Clarkson recalls. "I left my A-Levels, went to New York and toured with Public Enemy.
"We were really young and completely fearless. My mum must have worried so much about me."
But by the time they returned to the UK, Clarkson had grown tired with the She Rockers' sound.
"I realised that, actually, I like pop music," she says. "I wanted to try and write pop-rap and they wanted to stay a little bit more underground."
School daze
Her breakthrough came when The Beatmasters asked her to rap on a clubbed-up cover of Martha And The Vandellas' I Can't Dance To That Music You're Playin', external.
"I went to their studio, spit a few lyrics, and the next thing I knew, I was on Top of the Pops," Clarkson recalls with a giggle.
When the song hit the top 10, she used her royalties to buy a keyboard and a sampler, and started writing songs in her bedroom.
Straight away, she came up with Doin' the Do - a catchy-but-withering put-down of a maths teacher who had advised her to become a secretary.
"Going to be comprehensive school during [Margaret] Thatcher's time in the 80s, the teachers weren't being paid properly. I had aspirations to do well in my studies, and they just weren't interested at all.
"So I thought, as I broke out of school, that the only way I could express myself was by putting it on a record."
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End of youtube video 3 by letsgr00ve
The video for Doin' The Do, external channelled her rebellious streak, with Boo strutting around a school corridor in a leather jacket and hotpants, leading the pupils in a mini-revolution.
Fizzing with attitude and humour, it stood out in a year where the UK's biggest-selling singles were depressing ballads like Unchained Melody and Nothing Compares 2U.
"I always wanted to be a bit larger than life because I'd done the hip-hop look, with the troop jackets and the Adidas high tops,"she says. "In a way, I just wanted to dress up and be different”.
I will finish off with a review of the song. Before that, The Guardian spoke with Alison Clarkson and co-producer Rex Brough. Thirty-five years after its release, Doin’ the Do still sounds like nothing else. This infectious Pop released near the start of a magnificent decade. If you have not heard Betty Boo’s music then I would suggest you explore it now:
“Alison Clarkson, AKA Betty Boo, singer-songwriter
When I was 17, I was in a female rap trio called the She Rockers. We saw LL Cool J and Public Enemy play Hammersmith Odeon when the 1987 Def Jam tour came to London. Afterwards, we saw Public Enemy in McDonald’s. We went “Oi!” and told them we were rappers, so they filmed us doing a freestyle rap, right there in McDonald’s.
The next thing we knew, we were flying to New York to work with Public Enemy’s Professor Griff. After that, I did the rap on the Beatmasters hit Hey DJ! / I Can’t Dance (To That Music You’re Playing), which did so well that I got signed as a solo artist by Rhythm King records. With the money, I bought myself a keyboard, a sampler and a four-track tape machine and started writing songs in my bedroom, one of which was Doin’ the Do.
We saw Public Enemy in a McDonald’s and they filmed us doing a freestyle rap
I looped a breakbeat and wrote a bassline, the clavinet/piano parts, then a verse and chorus. Betty Boo was my nickname, because people said I looked like the cartoon character Betty Boop – big eyes and short hair. There are a lot of lyrics. I was a bit of a blabbermouth and self-promoter, but that’s what rappers did then. So the lyrics mention Betty Boo throughout. Also, I’d been to a terrible school and the careers officer told me the best I could hope for was to be a secretary. There’s nothing wrong with that – my mum was a secretary – but I wanted something different, so I channelled my fury into a song of empowerment. “Doin’ the do” basically means I’m getting on and doing things. Much later, someone told me it was a slang expression for cunnilingus.
The song was a slow burner, then we got radio pluggers Ferret N Spanner on board and suddenly I was everywhere. I’d loved glam rock as a child so wanted to make an impact with colourful outfits, big silver boots and backing singers with purple hair. Apparently I was the first British female rapper to have a Top 10 hit. I still remember Capital Radio DJs Pat Sharp and Mick’s Brown review of Doin’ the Do in Smash Hits. They liked it but said: “This rap thing will never catch on.”
Rex Brough, co-producer
I met Alison when she was in a duo called Hit ’N’ Run. She didn’t have a demo: she just had the song in her head. So we worked on it in the box room of my house. Studios were like citadels then, with huge mixing desks and all that rubbish. They looked like something from Star Trek, so working at home was a nice change. Home-recording was new back then, but I had a sampler and a Commodore 64 computer. We took the first organ chord from the Monkees’ I’m a Believer for the intro. The drums were a mix of James Brown’s Funky Drummer, which was ubiquitous then, and our own stuff. We sampled Reperata and the Delrons’ Captain of Your Ship but sped it up. We also used the tambourine and drum break from Bobby Byrd’s Hot Pants (I’m Coming), which the Stone Roses used on Fool’s Gold.
As a young recording engineer, I’d seen producers and engineers make singers do take after take until they burst into tears, at which point they’d all high-five each other. I vowed that if I ever got to produce, I wouldn’t be like that. Alison was very involved in the process and we went with her instincts. We recorded the vocals with a cheap Tandy microphone attached to a broom handle which also recorded the sound of a motorbike going past the house, but we left it in. We redid the chorus in a studio – one of those citadels – but it sounded lifeless, so we brought back the broom handle recording.
Pop music at the time had been either really slick Stock, Aitken and Waterman, Jive Bunny or MOR stuff. There was a space for a big, colourful persona like Betty Boo’s and music that wasn’t made by grownups. I always remember a line she had that didn’t make it on the record: “I’ve got plenty and I’m not even 20”.
I am going to end with a review from 2012. The F-Word made Doin’ the Do their Song of the Day. On 10th September, it will be thirty-five years since Betty Boo’s debut album, Boomania, was released. I remember it vaguely when it came out. I was seven. I definitely recall listening to Doin’ the Do and Where Are You Baby? with friends. Music that has stayed with me since:
“It was 1990 and Betty Boo‘s brand of rap, pop and R&B was infused with 1960s superhero kitsch. Along with Deee-Lite‘s melange of house beats and psychedelic grooviness, she arguably set the tone for a decade that took the previous decades’ excesses beyond “cheese” and back into the mainstream. ‘Doin’ the Do‘ used colourful comic book imagery to build Betty Boo as an icon and ‘Where are You Baby‘, the following hit single from her debut solo album Boomania, was similarly nostalgic and this time played on the space-age theme that had been popular in the 1960s and ’70s.
This left a lasting impression. Indeed, the story goes that the Spice Girls recruitment ad’s request for “larger than life cartoon characters” said “We’re looking for five Betty Boos”. Obviously, their resulting “Girl Power!” brand of empowerment has divided feminist opinion and been criticised widely so it’s perhaps easy to dismiss Betty Boo’s work as a matter of style over substance: cheeky and loud, rather than meek and demure, but somehow not the work of a credible artist.
Such a conclusion would be wrong in my view. With roots firmly in rap rather than pop, Betty Boo (or Alison Clarkson, her widely known real name) was an original member of The She Rockers, who allegedly got their first big break after performing a spontaneous rap in front of Public Enemy in a fast food restaurant. Trained in sound engineering, Clarkson used the money from her single with the Beatmasters to buy equipment. This led to her being invoved in the production for Boomania as well as writing the tracks for it in her bedroom in just a few weeks. Talking to The Independent in 1992, she said it sometimes irked her how little credit she got for that side of things but added that she tackled her frustration with the thought that “The people who buy my records like the sound of my voice and the tune; they’re not interested in credits.”
After a break away from the music business, Clarkson found commercial success again as a songwriter when one of her compositions ‘Pure and Simple’ was recorded by Hear’Say and became one of the fastest selling singles in UK history. When writing and working behind the scenes in the emerging Popstars/Pop Idol/X-Factor age, she found the industry approach very different from the one she had been used to back in the early 1990s:
“As a pop artist, I had my own image. I had got to help the directors with the videos, I worked very closely with an art designer on the sleeves and stuff. It’s completely different now.”
(The Guardian, 23 November, 2001)
Part of the appeal of ‘Doin’ the Do’ lies in Boo’s bragging confidence in the video and lyrics. This itself arguably makes her a good feminist superhero figure. However, it also brings up a more problematic aspect to the persona, with Boo’s rap battling stance arguably glorifying the position of the bully (“You say I bully though I know I’m no goody goody”) and employing sizeism (“fat as a rolypoly”) to insult a rival.
Certainly, the Betty Boo character is not the stuff of revolutions but Clarkson’s profile as a performer, producer and writer firmly files her work under “feminist interest” as far as this feminist is concerned”.
I shall leave things there. It is exciting that there is a Betty Boo tour coming up. Fans get to celebrate Boomania. Of course, Doin’ the Do will feature! Perhaps her best-known and loved songs, it is one that I have a lot of affection for. For my money, nothing like it has come along…
SINCE its release.