Robbed Hit of the Week 5/4/15 - Paul Lekakis' "Boom Boom (Let's Go Back To My Room)"...

"Boom Boom (Let's Go Back To My Room)" - Paul Lekakis
from the album Tattoo It (1990)
Billboard Hot 100 peak: #43

This week's "robbed hit" is by actor/model/singer Paul Lekakis, who was hired on to sing a HI-NRG track written and produced by an Italian team with some help from Ric Wake (who would himself go on to helm dance classics from Taylor Dayne). "Boom Boom (Let's Go Back To My Room)" was novelty and reality all at once in the gay bars of the 80s, and was way more popular than people were ready to admit to, and suddenly the music that mirrored the older club sound of Patrick Cowley, Paul Parker, and Loverde was getting actual mainstream radio airplay...

"Boom Boom" peaked right under the American pop top-40 in April of 1987, though it never even nicked the dance club play chart in Billboard at that time (though it went to #6 on the 12" single sales chart). Overseas, though, it was a different story (much like the Weather Girls' gay anthem "It's Raining Men"), topping the Australian singles chart for five weeks, an going to #2 on the Canadian chart. It wouldn't be until 1990 that Paul would finally release his first album Tattoo It, but a subsequent single "My House" (co-written by Jody Watley and produced by Shep Pettibone) only made it to #17 on the club chart. After battling drugs and living with AIDS since 1989, Paul returned to the dance chart in 2007 with a remade version of the song, which finally made the club list at #39...

In the end, it may be "fluff" club fare, but the song was the mainstream's exposure to gay dance music in the mid-80s.