One of Christopher Lee’s lesser-known forays into the world of popular music.
I think it’s pretty well established by now that there wasn’t much that Christopher Lee wouldn’t do if you offered him enough money – and sometimes not even that much money. His appearance in films like The Hollywood Meatcleaver Massacre was down to him being too busy pocketing his fee to ask just what the footage was going to be used for, and he seemed to lend his name and voice to pretty much anything. Fussy he wasn’t.
Lee’s music career, as everyone knows, was decidedly odd. After some 1970s dabbling with opera, he made a handful of spectacularly ill-advised pop songs in the early 2000s with Gary Curtis, who seemed to have some sort of hold on Lee’s career for a while – their records are notoriously bad, with She’ll Fall for Me being among the most astonishingly wrong things that Lee ever did. But there was precedent for Lee getting involved in shoddy pop music, and I don’t mean his appearance in the musical The Return of Captain Invincible.
In 1989, Lee guested on The Little Witch, a single from Kathy Joe Daylor. Despite what you might think, Kathy Joe was not a US country singer, but instead a German-based recording artist who came and went without many people noticing. How she managed to get Lee to appear on her record is anyone’s guess, but I think it probably involved the handing over of a large sum of cash. The song is, of course, terrible.
However much money was paid, it also seems to have stretched to covering an appearance by Lee when Kathy Joe performed on German TV. He looks decidedly awkward and has somehow been convinced to wear a Dracula cape as he stands stiffly at the side of the stage.
Lee would, of course, have a more entertaining late career diversion into heavy metal, where he seemed – weirdly – to find his musical niche. Sadly, he never found time to re-record this in a metal style (surely a duet with one of those operatic women from Nightwish and the like would’ve been just the ticket), so this remains a little-known curiosity in his discography.
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