Evelyn Thomas
| Evelyn Thomas | |
|---|---|
| Birth name | Ellen Lucille Thomas |
| Born | August 22, 1953 |
| Origin | Chicago, Illinois |
| Genres | Hi-NRG |
| Occupation(s) | Singer |
| Instruments | Vocals |
| Years active | 1976–present |
| Labels | 20th Century, Casablanca Records, Record Shack, TSR |
Ellen Lucille "Evelyn" Thomas (born August 22, 1953) is an American singer from Chicago, Illinois, best known for the dance hits "High Energy", "Masquerade", "Standing At The Crossroads", "Reflections", and "Weak Spot".
Thomas has an entertainment incorporated company, called Eljopan Entertainment Incorporated.
Although best known worldwide for her 1980s Hi-NRG club hits, Thomas recorded and performed in disco, jazz, and gospel music styles for a decade before her successful stint in the 1980s. Discovered by British producer Ian Levine, who was in the US in 1975 scouting for gospel and soul singers he could promote in the UK, the two recorded several tracks which resulted in a contract with 20th Century Records. Evelyn Thomas scored a chart hit with her first single, reaching the UK Top 30 in 1976 with the single "Weak Spot," co-written by Levine and Paul David Wilson . A follow-up single, "Doomsday", entered the UK charts twice but each time floundered in the lower reaches, and sticky contract issues complicated her newfound success, though Levine and Thomas would continue their association for quite some time. She signed to US label Casablanca Records for her first album release I Wanna Make It On My Own, released 1978. With Casablanca doing little to promote the LP, she switched to AVI Records for the double A-side 12" single "Have a Little Faith in Me" / "No Time to Turn Around" which prompted the label to release it as an LP, backed with Rick Gianatos' extended remixes of her 1976 tracks "My Head's in the Stars" and "Love's Not Just an Illusion". For a follow-up, Evelyn Thomas re-recorded three tracks from an aborted project by Levine's group Moonstone, "Love in the First Degree", "Summer on the Beach" and "Sleaze" (originally entitled "Out of the Ball Game") but with the disco backlash in the US, the tracks were left unreleased.
Although disco music had been declared "dead" in the US in a backlash in 1979, several songs which continued and advanced the exuberant surge of uptempo dance music managed to scale the US pop charts in the intervening years, notably Blondie's "Call Me" in 1980, Laura Branigan's "Gloria" in 1982, and Irene Cara's "Flashdance (What A Feeling)" in 1983. Unwilling to use the term "disco", the phrase "high energy" had come into usage, probably begun in England in the early 1980s. By 1984 Ian Levine had re-established himself as a producer and asked Evelyn Thomas to come to London to record a new track "High Energy". Just few weeks after it was released, it zoomed up the charts all over Europe - peaking at No. 1 in Germany and No. 5 in the UK, selling a total of 7,000,000 copies worldwide. In the US it hit No. 1 on the Hot Dance Club Play chart, selling 250,000 copies. The song was her only Billboard Hot 100 entry, peaking at #85, although three additional songs hit the Billboard dance chart. By 1984, the phrase had become embraced as a term by DJs across Europe and in the States, particularly in gay clubs where DJs who preferred to play records that surpassed a certain BPM (Beats Per Minute) threshold found many mainstream hits lagging in tempo. Evolving around that time to the abbreviated "Hi-Energy," the term soon became further shortened to "Hi-NRG", and was still widely in use more than two decades later to describe a certain genre of uptempo dance music.
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