Performance

S P O T L I G H T

by P.C. Williams

Sound check at the Copa in Fort Lauderdale,
Manager Robert Lee is giving directions to the
DJ in the booth while Lisa runs through her songs
for the nights show. I lean back against the bar,
close my eyes, and listen. There’s something
about this lady that intrigues me.
I can’t quite figure out what it is.

I had been pleasantly surprised only minutes earlier.
Having only seen the publicity photo, I had been
totally unprepared to meet the striking beauty who
stepped out of the limousine. For a moment, I
wondered whether the lady standing in front of me
was a face-for-hire, who would lip-sync the songs.

And then she got behind the mike and started singing.
The voice was unmistakable. This was Lisa.

Suddenly, the DJ cut the music. Caught up in the melody
of “Mandatory Love”, she continued singing a capella.
And then I realized what had been bothering me all night.
The lady could really sing. At a time when record companies
were cashing on the resurgence of dance music, creating
acts and sending in pretty faces who could sing in the key of “off”,
here was a pretty face, with a wonderful voice singing some of
the catchiest melodies I had heard in a while.

I listened as she sang the final few bars of the song, I smiled,
and inwardly whooped with joy.
This after all, was no ordinary lady.

All my life I sang. In 1959 I went solo. I would stand in front of my house with a brightly painted wooden carnival cane and sing Al Jolson songs at the top of my lungs.

The neighbors loved me.

In 1964 neighborhood friends and I started a group called the ‘Avocado Sisters’. We sang our hearts out every afternoon and the backyard swings were our gathering spot.

In 1969 I sang with the older kids. They had the guitars and knew how to play them. I learned about harmony and the meaning of a folk song.

I always had my transistor radio tuned in to WKNR. I was IN LOVE with the Motown sound. I was the Motown sound. I sang on the bus, I sang as I walked. I would play my records over and over again until I learned every word. All the parts. Where to come in and when to leave.

In 1979 singing began a new journey for me. I was washing the dishes, singing my head off to get through the chore, and my roommate heard me. He came into the kitchen. Then and there he invited me to sing with his band ‘The Nubs’. I did.

In 1981 The Nubs were performing. Again my voice caught an ear. I was asked to sing on a demo of a high energy dance tune ‘Jump Shout’. Written and produced by Barry Blum and John Hedges. The demo was a success.

In 1982 we got a record deal with Moby Dick Records. I spent the next few years learning the art of performing, song writing, and creating wearable art. Learning to hold a stage alone. My husband, then boyfriend Robert Lee collaborated with me on all aspects of this part of my life. From to songwriting, video creation, and costume design. My costume creations would never have come to life without the mad skills of Roxanne Spring and Josie Levine, 2 clothing designers I was fortunate to know as friends and honored to collaborate with. Their understanding of all of our ideas was beyond important. All of their input and talent brought every idea to fruition.

In 1984 we created a music video to the song ‘Invisible Love’ lyrics written by Robert and I. Denise Gallant, a talented video and filmmaker, was asked to collaborate with us. Truly Denise and all of her sensibilities worked in our favor. It is such a gift when people work together to make every idea and effort count. Denise was such a gift.

I fit my visual art in whenever I could. I knew in my heart performing was not my calling still I had the desire to sing. I performed all over this planet. Things seemed to be winding down. Performing and plane rides can take a toll. Just when I was ready to change the scene I was contacted by Paul Parker, who was a singer, songwriter, and collaborator. We worked together with Ian Anthony Stevens. Fantasia Records. We put out a number of great songs. A part of my singing career I treasure. It was all creative and wonderful but it was not my first love. My ART.

My career as an international recording artist never entered my brain. I had to do it. I was meant to sing. Until I wasn’t. Enjoy this slice of my life.

Season 4, episode 9 features Lisa singing ‘Rocket to your heart’ celebrating the wedding scene of all time. Aired May 2025

Spain, 1982. The country is about to thrust itself into a new political order with the PSOE party taking the political establishment by storm, in a sweeping electoral victory. “The times they are a-changing” as the song goes, but the newly minted freedoms coexist with dark parallel realities that paint a very complex political and cultural picture.

In a remote village in Galicia, Lucía, a teenager, has recently discovered that she is pregnant. Her mother, Marisa, decides to sneak her off to Madrid, where the nuns at the Santa Cristina clinic, who run the LDR and the nursery, have offered to provide shelter for her at Peñagrande, a facility for pregnant young women. But Peñagrande is nothing but a reformatory intended to isolate and abscond pregnant teenagers and unmarried young women until their due date.

At Peñagrande, also run by nuns, Lucía will meet and befriend other girls, some older, some younger than herself- all underage. Each of them has their own story and together, they form a community apart from that of other young women “from good families” and cushier circumstances, who lead more comfortable lives there.The girls’ days and nights go by and are filled with strictly scheduled tasks and chores: cleaning, cooking, or working in different workshops. Within these profoundly normative spaces, the girls find crevices to play, dance, and share in their experiences. Some of them will even devise ways to escape. And as bodies transform, the situation evolves for each of them and they fade from the scene, one by one, to carry on with their lives in the outside world.

Lucía, feeling cut off and under pressure in an increasingly unbearable situation, causes a fire in a burst of anger. She is forcibly drugged and taken under duress to the Santa Cristina clinic, where she will finally deliver her baby, a girl, who will be taken from her shortly after, with the approval of the clinic’s physician.

The truth is almost all the children born to the likes of Lucía, are placed for adoption and assigned to families, cherry picked by the nuns. Sometimes mothers are coaxed into agreeing. When written consent cannot be obtained, the nuns routinely pretend the pregnancy ended in a stillbirth.

On the sad trip back home to their village, at a road stop, Lucía’s mom reproaches her for her behavior at Peñagrande. It’s the straw that broke the camel’s back. When her mother’s attention gets diverted for a moment, Lucía crosses over to the other side of the road, flags down a car, and heads back to Madrid, determined to get her daughter back.

LINK TO FILM: https://vimeo.com/1024307284?share=copy

PASSWORD: AlUmBrAmIeNtO!

Box of Sin CD featuring Lisa singing ‘Rocket to your heart’

Compilation released September 2023

About this release

The influence that 80s gay nightlife had on electronic music, pop music in general and the evolution of clubbing for subsequent generations is pretty much incalculable. In spite of the shadow of AIDs and reactionary political and media forces both at home and in the USA, the period 1980 – 1990 bore witness to a dazzling explosion of dance music that artfully drew a line from the peak of late-70s disco to the emergence of house and its 90s glory days. The art of the 12” single, the thrill of the remix, the rise of the superclub, the electronic spark of chart pop, the challenging of gender barriers… all had their origin in the gay clubs. It’s not unreasonable to make the claim that by the end of the 80s, virtually ALL chart pop music sounded like it had its origins on the dancefloors of Heaven nightclub!

Over 5CDs ‘Box Of Sin’ strives to tell the story of that decade across 54 tracks, and to tease apart the strands of 80s gay clubbing to show a period of unrivalled creativity and disco diversity. Via the box’s themed discs it shows how high-energy became house, how gender-bending synth bands took over the pop charts, how pop stars the whole world over found a route to fame via the gay clubs, and how the era’s biggest producers aimed their masterworks purely at the dancefloor. High energy, deep house, Eurobeat, synthpop, divas, acid house… all combine to paint a picture of a rich and vibrant lifestyle. Along the way, ‘Box Of Sin’ unearths some overlooked gems rarely compiled today: meanwhile some of the decade’s biggest names in club music gather to get into the picture – from Whitney Houston to Dead Or Alive, Bananarama to Bronski Beat, Aretha Franklin to Inner City.

Based on the actual club charts at the time and with a stunning design package inspired by the small ads section of 80s gay press, ‘ Box Of Sin’ comes fully annotated and with an introduction by renowned gay author Paul Burston. Throughout, it’s illustrated with photography documenting 80s gay clubbers in action, provided for Demon by The Bishopsgate Institute, the UK’s LGBTQ+ archive. The project also resurrects the much-loved brand ‘Disco Discharge’, a recognisable hallmark of quality among collectors and aficionados of club music heritage.

The journey that emerges is a stylish and nuanced inquiry into the connection between place and identity—a tale of liberation, but one that invites us to go beyond the simplified Stonewall mythology and enter lesser-known battlefields in the struggle to carve out a territory. Elegiac, randy, and sparkling with wry wit, Gay Bar is at once a serious critical inquiry, a love story and an epic night out to remember.’Rocket to your heart’ has a mention of the sound track that brings these memories to light.

S P O T L I G H T

by P.C. Williams

Watch Lisa in action:

The Nubs (performance in 1978)

‘Invisible’ music video (1984)

‘Rocket To Your Heart’ music video (1984)

Tribute Videos:

‘Jump Shout’ music video (1983)

‘Jump Shout’ music video (alternate version)

‘Love is Like an Itching in my Heart’ music video (1985)

‘Sex Dance’ music video (1984)

‘P.A.S.S.I.O.N.’ music video (1993)