Hackney girls Mel & Kim followed Britain’s first house single with the global chart-topper Respectable in 1987.
I moved to London in 1977 and got my first job on the Hackney Gazette, living in a bedsit in Lower Clapton. A decade later Hackney was still the poorest borough in Britain, I was still on the ‘Ackney, and the first home-grown pop stars I encountered were local girls Mel and Kim.
Melanie and Kim Appleby, a pair of mixed-race Anglo-Jamaican sisters from up the road, were our favourite pop stars and this was everyone’s favourite single at the time.
It’s an earworm of a tune with its sampled laughter, its stuttering, sped-up vocal, and an empowering lyric inspired by the sisters’ dismissive and shame-free response to a tabloid exposé.
The Sun (who else?) had dug up old nude photos of Mel, who had been a teenage “glamour model,” but the girls hit back with a chorus proudly declaring: “Like us, hate us, but you’ll never change us – we ain’t never gonna be respectable.”
Respectable topped the charts in 1987 a few months after Mel & Kim made their debut with what was arguably the first British house single with Showing Out (Get Fresh For The Weekend).
The biggest hit to date for Stock, Aitken and Waterman’s pop factory, it came about somewhat by accident: Pete Waterman had lined up a soul ballad called System.
But after spending time with the girls in the pub, he was struck by their down-to-earth personalities and streetwise attitude and shelved it for a tune channelling the new house sound beginning to emerge from Chicago clubs.
It was an instant hit, reaching No.3, and the next year they did even better when Respectable topped charts all over the world and turned the girls into global stars. But behind the scenes Mel was carrying a dark secret.
She had been diagnosed with a form of liver cancer when she was 18 and in early 1987, just before the release of Respectable, she experienced back trouble that delayed filming the song’s video. It worsened during a promo trip to Japan that summer, when she was unable to perform and returned home in a wheelchair.
Scans found that cancer had returned in her spine and she started a course of chemo, though her diagnosis was kept secret from the public as she underwent treatment and the girls had had two other lesser hits with F.L.M. and That’s The Way It Is – Mel discharged herself from hospital to record the vocals – and were nominated for a Brit award in 1988 as Best British Breakthrough Act.
In April that year both sisters appeared on the Wogan show, while Mel was still undergoing treatment, as part of European Cancer Week, and in late summer – after Mel had finished chemo – the duo promoted the need for teenage cancer wards on Good Morning Britain.
The sisters then again withdrew from publicity while writing songs for a second album; several of these songs later appeared on Kim’s debut solo album. In a TV interview with Trisha Goddard in 2005, Kim revealed that she knew Mel’s illness was terminal in mid-1989.
On 18 January 1990, her immune system weakened by chemo, Mel died suddenly of pneumonia after contracting a cold. She was only 23.
After her death Kim launched a solo career and had a couple of hit singles with Don’t Worry and G.L.A.D. (Good Lovin’ And Devotion) but never reached the same heights as the duo.