In 1994, Gregg Alexander got into his blue Ford Mustang to go out clubbing, but the old car wouldn’t start. “I had a moment of annoyance that I couldn’t go to the house clubs in Detroit,” he remembers. So he reached for the acoustic guitar in the back, channelling his emotion into a song beginning “It’s murder on the dancefloor, but you’d better not kill the groove.”
“You know how Paul McCartney originally sang about scrambled eggs in Yesterday?” he chuckles. “‘Murder on the dancefloor’ wasn’t anything deep from my subconscious. It was just a dummy lyric that was kind of sung for fun, but then I couldn’t better it.”
Eight years later, Murder on the Dancefloor was a No 2 hit for Sophie Ellis-Bextor and 23 years later it has spent the first two months of 2024 camped in the Top 20, after being used in the film Saltburn. The song has equalled its original chart position and been a global smash again. “A publisher told me that in January it was the most heard music on the planet,” Alexander says. “That’s just incredible.”
By the time Ellis-Bextor recorded it, Alexander had had his own international hit. His band New Radicals’ first single You Get What You Give reached the UK Top 5 in 1998, and has since become one of the most enduring songs of the 90s, racking up almost 440m plays on Spotify. It’s an exuberant anthem about commodification, urging that kids who have “the dreamers’ disease” have the power to change things. However, it has never been previously revealed that Murder on the Dancefloor, not You Get What You Give, was intended to be New Radicals’ first single.
“I almost flipped a coin between the two songs,” Alexander, 53, explains. “The record company wanted something urgently and I didn’t have the time or the budget to finish both. I felt like Murder was a monster but You Get What You Give was a masterpiece. It was everything I’d always wanted to say inside five minutes.”
So strong was his feeling that he’d made his defining statement that he soon disbanded New Radicals to focus on songwriting for others, including hits such as Ronan Keating’s Life Is a Rollercoaster, Santana’s Grammy-winning The Game of Love and Texas’s Inner Smile.
He has given few interviews since (this is his first in almost a decade) but once he gets on the phone he talks for three hours, until 1am, beginning with the previously untold story of Murder on the Dancefloor. As Alexander tells it, after making a “master quality demo” he then poured all his energies into You Get What You Give. “I was really excited and it was newer.”
After New Radicals’ demise, he had decamped to Notting Hill, where he “lived like Mick Jagger in Performance, in this mad crazy flat”. He was still in London when the demo found its way to Ellis-Bextor – who’d had a dance hit, Groovejet (If This Ain’t Love), with electronic producer Spiller. She and Alexander finished his song together.
“Murder was a song I always wanted the world to hear,” Alexander says. “And when I met Sophie we embarked on a creative journey, the first of three or four Top 10 hits we had.” Alexander recalls recording in Mayfair Studios with Matt Rowe, who had co-written and produced the Spice Girls’ Wannabe. “Every time I went down the hallway for a coffee I’d see people dancing to Murder on the Dancefloor. I’d think ‘Wow, maybe this is tapping into something.’”
Although unfinished, Alexander’s original demo already had the disco feel, the arrangement and the delightful strings (played on keyboards – the hit version features orchestral players). Even the ad lib-ish “I know, I know, I know …” vocal is on the demo. “I’d been told you can’t use the same words over and over because it’s too repetitive,” he chuckles. “So I used ‘I know’ seven times.”
Alexander has never been one to bow to convention. Growing up as a Jehovah’s Witness in Grosse Pointe, Michigan, he was 14 when Prince’s Purple Rain came out and he decided “I didn’t want to be part of organised religion or follow the same path as my schoolmates into college and a career that I didn’t love. I was willing to throw it all away for rock’n’roll.”
Within two years, he’d run away to Los Angeles, eternally grateful to the “couple of families from the African American musical community” who let him couch-surf while he hawked his demos. After signing a record deal at 17, his solo albums Michigan Rain (1989) and Intoxifornication (1992) “got lost during hair metal and grunge” so Alexander drove his Mustang back to Detroit.
However, one fan of his debut was Danielle Brisebois, a child actor turned musician who was in the original cast of Annie on Broadway aged eight – her sampled voice appears on Jay-Z’s Hard Knock Life. After collaborating on each other’s albums, they started New Radicals.
They recorded most of their album, Maybe You’ve Been Brainwashed Too, by pulling in favours from musicians or working cheaply after midnight. “You Get What You Give was the only time I had an unlimited budget. That’s why that song has so many different sections and melodies. Pop. Rock. Soul. Pianos. I figured, ‘Nobody may ever even hear this so let’s throw in the kitchen sink and the bathwater as well.’”
The song came to him after a dream in which he’d heard music coming from a house. “I walked in to hear, and Joni Mitchell was in baby blue pyjamas. She said, ‘Have a seat’ and we talked about music. I wrote You Get What You Give the same day.”
Mitchell subsequently declared the song “the only thing I heard in many years that I thought had greatness in it” and said it stopped her quitting music. Alexander sounds momentarily tearful. “After that, I met her. I told her about the dream and she said, ‘Oh wonderful’, like she has coincidences like that every day. She must be some kind of lightning rod for all these magical things.”
The lyrics – which begin “Wake up kids …” – were triggered by his realisation that the American dream was a myth for most people. The jokey digs at “Beck, Hanson, Courtney Love and Marilyn Manson” were the result of “naive curiosity, whether a pop song had the audacity to go after bankers, the FDA, health insurance companies and corruption and include a throwaway lyric about three or four artists. I got the answer loud and clear because almost nobody asked me about the political lyrics, which are its legacy. Twenty-five years ago all that stuff was on the horizon but nobody could have imagined that it would get so much worse. That song was my own innocent attempt to fight the power.”
He admires “fearless” Russians Pussy Riot, but wishes more contemporary acts would make protest music. Meanwhile You Get What You Give has had its own magical second life. When Barack Obama used it in his presidential campaign, Alexander was invited to meet him. “It was at Oprah Winfrey’s house and sure enough he played You Get What You Give before he started speaking. I felt like I’d snuck into Fort Knox! I’ve met him a dozen times and he always says ‘I love your song’, which is very flattering.”
After the Bidens used the song to encourage their late son Beau as he suffered terminal brain cancer, Alexander promised to perform it if Joe Biden became president. So, in 2021, Alexander and Brisebois performed as New Radicals for the inauguration. “That was fun and exciting,” he says. “It was two weeks after the storming of Capitol Hill so it felt like a celebration of democracy surviving.”
The pair still work together and co-wrote the Oscar-nominated Lost Stars, performed by Maroon 5’s Adam Levine, for the 2013 film Begin Again. “Expect the unexpected,” he teases. “I feel like a teenager. I could walk out on stage any time I want to. It’s a blast, but I enjoy the studio more than performing because a recording is there for ever.” He writes all the time and has hundreds of finished songs and recordings which may yet emerge – wonderful demos occasionally surface on YouTube – but he explains: “Songs are like children: you want to protect them, but I’m delighted when some make their way out in the world.”
Brisebois is also a successful songwriter on her own (amazingly, Unwritten, her 2004 song with Natasha Bedingfield, has also returned to the Top 20), while Murder’s second life has reconnected Alexander with Ellis-Bextor. “She’s so talented and humble but a great pop star,” he says. “I think her genius, slightly deadpan delivery helped make it a hit. Everything would have been different if I’d put out Murder on the Dancefloor, but I feel that everything happened as it was meant to be.”
