Songoftheday 9/4/14 - Oh I saw you by the wall, ten of your tin soldiers in a row...

Elton John - "Nikita"
from the album Ice On Fire (1985)
Billboard Hot 100 peak: #7 (two weeks)
Weeks in the Top-40: 11

Today's Song of the Day comes from the flamboyantly biggest pop star of the 70s, Elton John, who by the mid-80s, like many of the superheroes of the previous decade, had settled into a string of adult-contemporary style successes. Churning out an album every year like clockwork, Elton was still racking up top-40 hits on both sides of the Atlantic. With the release of his 1985 album Ice On Fire, he teamed up with white-hot British (and closeted) singer George Michael for the ridiculously campy "Wrap Her Up", which made the top-20 in the States and in the UK. For the follow-up he released another track recorded with George, "Nikita", a mid-tempo story-song about a Cold War romance with a Soviet with the titular name "Nikita". Now this was before (and probably caused) the movie and TV show La Femme Nikita, and at the time the name was a man's name in Russia, so of course you can extrapolate the sexual undertones of the song, but Elton was still making the "straight go of it" for appearances, so the video of course has a gorgeous blonde girl as the "interest". But lord did his outfits just scream "I'm Coming Out" like nobody's business...

"Nikita" became Elton's fourth top-ten pop hit in America in March of 1986, while climbing to #3 on Billboard magazine's adult contemporary radio chart. Internationally, the single was a huge success, topping the singles charts in Germany, Switzerland, Ireland, and the Netherlands, and reaching #3 in Elton's native Britain. It continued his pattern of successful hits that weren't as big and long-remembered as his 70s work, but kept him in money and touring interest throughout the decade.

Compared to "Wrap It Up", certainly this one is a better pill to swallow, but it did see him coasting on his laurels until the voice troubles he'd be having soon would cause a crossroads in his career. In listening, what I get is "pleasant", and hey, there's that.

(Click below to see the rest of the post)


Here's the audio of Elton touring behind the Ice On Fire album in 1986. You can really hear his voice going...

Compare that to this 1989 show from after his nodule surgery...

Fast forward ahead to his concert in Italy in 2004...

Up tomorrow: the bearded boys are incremental.