Classics

Love Can't Turn Around: the story of the record

"Love Can't Turn Around" by Farley "Jackmaster" Funk was the first house record to reach the UK top 10, peaking at No. 10 in September 1986. It also started one of house music's best-known feuds: the idea came from Farley's roommate Steve "Silk" Hurley, who would answer a few months later with the first house No. 1, "Jack Your Body".

At a glance

Chicago, 1986: two roommates, one name

Farley Keith Williams was one of the original Hot Mix 5 DJs on WBMX-FM in 1981, the radio crew that carried house music into Chicago homes. He also ran his own mix show at the station, which would matter later. With Chip E he ran House Records, and he DJed at the Playground club.

For a while he shared an apartment with Steve Hurley, in what Hurley later called a "horrible, really degenerate neighbourhood". The two were close, until they fell out over a name. As Hurley tells it in an interview clip in a video by Olean's House, he had announced he would call himself Jackmaster Silk. By the end of that week his roommate was on air as Farley "Jackmaster" Funk.

The source: Isaac Hayes, 1975

The song at the heart of this story is not a house record at all. "I Can't Turn Around" is the closing track of Isaac Hayes' 1975 album Chocolate Chip, his first record after leaving Stax. It came out on ABC Records through his own imprint Hot Buttered Soul, with Hayes producing and arranging it himself. At 6:32 it is a long, horn-heavy soul groove from the album that moved him towards the dancefloor.

In Chicago the track had a second life in the clubs. It was a favourite of Frankie Knuckles at the Warehouse, and across town at the Music Box it became one of Ron Hardy's records.

Ron Hardy's edit

Ron Hardy was the resident at the Music Box, 326 North Michigan Avenue, from 1982 to 1986, and the rawer, faster counterpart to Knuckles. He played disco edits and Italo imports next to tapes by local producers, including early demos by Chip E. and Steve Hurley. His nephew Bill Hardy says Ron made his edits live off the tape deck and turntables rather than by splicing tape.

Hardy cut his own edit of the Hayes track, and his surviving mixes show how much he played it. The Ron Hardy archive on Gridface lists his edit of "I Can't Turn Around" in around nine mixes from 1984 to the mid-1980s, often near the start of a set. Next to it, in about a dozen mixes from 1984 to 1987, sits an early version of Hurley's J.M. Silk recording, played from tape before it was ever released. In other words, the demo Farley later built on was already part of the Music Box sound. Hardy did the same for another Chicago record that year: he broke Marshall Jefferson's "Move Your Body" from a cassette.

Hardy's edits were never released officially in his lifetime. He died in 1992. His version of the Hayes track later appeared as a limited, unofficial white label: Ron's Edits #1 from 2004 runs to 9:15 and was pressed in 500 copies. A decade later Ron Hardy Edits #14 put out his edit of Hurley's "I Can't Turn Around", described by the seller as a Music Box favourite.

Making the record: one idea, two versions

Around 1983 or 1984 Hurley rebuilt the Hayes song as an electronic instrumental on his four-track, with the bassline, a drum machine and synth brass, and played it in clubs and on the radio. According to Olean's House, tape copies of that demo were already circulating in Chicago. Ron Hardy's mix archive shows him playing an early version of it at the Music Box.

Hurley planned a proper release with J.M. Silk singer Keith Nunnally. Farley moved first. He took the idea to Jesse Saunders, whose 1984 "On and On" is often called the first house record on vinyl. Vince Lawrence wrote new lyrics, Duane Buford played keys, and the vocal went to Darryl Pandy, a choir singer from Chicago's Church of Universal Awareness with a huge range. Saunders later said Pandy was a last resort after several other singers had been considered.

Farley saw himself as the man in charge: "I'm the producer and I'm leading," he told DMC. He also had a radio show to test it on, and says he played the finished track about four times on its first night because listeners kept calling in.

Who had the idea first?

For once, the people involved mostly agree. "He used my arrangement, he used my keyboard riffs," Hurley told The Guardian. In an interview clip in the Olean's House video, Farley himself says his biggest UK record came together from an idea Hurley had.

The two versions sound different, though. Farley's has Pandy's gospel shouting and a piano part that Hurley's lacks. Hurley's own version, "I Can't Turn Around" by J.M. Silk, came out later in 1986 and went to No. 1 on Billboard's club play chart and only No. 62 in the UK. Overseas many listeners took it for the copy.

The money did not flow evenly either. Saunders says his name was left off the UK release, and in the Olean's House video one of the collaborators says he never received any payment for the record.

Britain: the first house hit

Pete Tong picked the record up for the UK, and it came out on 4 August 1986 as LONX 105 in London Records' series The House Sound of Chicago. Three weeks later it entered the UK Singles Chart at No. 36 and climbed for five weeks.

In total it spent 12 weeks on the chart in 1986, plus one more week at No. 98 in January 1987. That was the same week "Jack Your Body" entered at No. 18.

Darryl Pandy on Top of the Pops

Unlike Hurley a few months later, Farley and Pandy did fly in. On 4 September 1986 they performed the song on Top of the Pops, and Pandy ended it by kicking off his shoes and dropping to the floor. Farley says it was the first house record ever performed on the show.

Versions and reissues

On the original US pressing, Darryl Pandy is not credited at all. The writing credits name only J.M. Funk and V. Lawrence, although the song is built on Isaac Hayes' melody.

Why it still matters

"Love Can't Turn Around" was the first house record to cross from Chicago's clubs into the UK top 10, and it prepared the ground for everything that followed. Hurley sees it that way himself. In the Olean's House video he says Farley's hit opened the UK up to house music, so that by the time "Jack Your Body" came out, the charts were ready for it. A bad experience, he says, ended up opening a door. Four months after Farley's peak, Hurley had the first house No. 1.

The record also shows how rough the early house business was. Ideas, edits and basslines moved between DJs, credits were patchy and money often went to whoever held the contract. Darryl Pandy went on to sing on other Farley records and with other producers, but never had a bigger hit. He died in June 2011, aged 48, after several months of illness.

Both records still turn up in DJ sets today. Classics like these show up every month in the "Still in the bag" corner of our chart, and how the chart works explains how we track them.

Questions

Who made "Love Can't Turn Around"?

Farley "Jackmaster" Funk and Jesse Saunders produced it in Chicago in 1986, with lyrics by Vince Lawrence, keys by Duane Buford and vocals by Darryl Pandy.

Is it a cover?

It is built on Isaac Hayes' 1975 song "I Can't Turn Around". Steve "Silk" Hurley had made his own house version first.

Is there a Ron Hardy version?

Yes. Ron Hardy played his own edit of Isaac Hayes' original at the Music Box in the mid-1980s, along with an early tape of Hurley's version. Both edits later appeared on unofficial white labels.

How high did it chart in the UK?

No. 10, on the chart of 27 September 1986. It spent 12 weeks in the chart that year.

Was it the first house record in the UK charts?

It was the first house record to reach the UK top 10. The first house No. 1 followed in January 1987 with Steve "Silk" Hurley's "Jack Your Body".

Who sang it?

Darryl Pandy, a Chicago church singer with a range of several octaves. He was not credited on the original US pressing.