Maxine Nightingale

Maxine Nightingale (born 2 November 1952) is a British R&B and soul music singer. She is best known for her hits in the 1970s, with the million seller "Right Back Where We Started From" (1975, UK #8 & 1976, U.S. #2), "Love Hit Me" (1977), and "Lead Me On" (1979).

One of the three children of Guyanese-born comedian Benny Nightingale and his wife Iris (they also had daughter Rosalind and son Glenn), Maxine Nightingale first sang with her school band: she attended Bryon Primary (in Gillingham, Kent), Ealing Grammar School, and Guildhall School of Music and Drama. At age thirteen, she and a friend visited a neighbourhood house where the band Unisound was rehearsing. They asked her to sing with them and she joined them in performing extensively on the British cabaret circuit. The manager of one of the clubs where they performed asked Nightingale to cut a demo and shipped it to Pye Records, for whom Nightingale made her first recordings. Despite being overseen by label A&R head Cyril Stapleton, Nightingale's three Pye single releases—issued in June and July 1969 and 26 March 1971—went unnoticed.

In 1969 Nightingale began a tenure of roughly 18 months in the West End production of Hair, playing a supporting role and understudying the female lead role of Sheila; she then relocated to Germany, having formed a relationship with an actor from the German production of Hair whom she had met when he visited the West End production. In Germany, Nightingale continued her stage musical career in Hair (as Sheila), Jesus Christ Superstar, and Godspell, and she began a relationship with Minoru Terada Domberger, the director of the German production of Hair, which led to marriage and a daughter, Langka Veva Domberger, born in 1973.

Nightingale returned to London with her husband and daughter and appeared in the West End production of Savages, after which she withdrew from professional performing. According to Nightingale, "I started doing session singing. I didn't do a lot but it was easy to go out in the evening when the baby was sleeping." Her singing on the recording of Al Matthews' "Fool" caught the attention of the session's producer Pierre Tubbs, and he asked composer J. Vincent Edwards, who had worked with Nightingale in the West End production of Hair, to co-write a song for her, which became "Right Back Where We Started From". Tubbs asked her to sing on the demo; as she told the story in 2013, "he took it straight to United Artists Records [in London], and they loved it too. They paid me 100 pounds [... and after that,] they [offered] me an advance and a contract to finish recording the single." ...

Source: Article "Maxine Nightingale" from Wikipedia in English, licensed under CC-BY-SA 3.0.