1977 · Behind the Songs
The lead single from “Thunder in My Heart” — and the album that set up Leo Sayer’s strangest second act.
By 1977, Leo Sayer was no longer the clown. The pierrot makeup was gone, the curly hair was under control, and the British singer had reinvented himself as a soulful pop craftsman with American ambitions. His fifth album, Thunder in My Heart, was recorded in Los Angeles with producer Richard Perry — the hitmaker behind Barbra Streisand, Carly Simon, and Ringo Starr — and its lead single, “How Much Love,” was Sayer’s bid for the sophisticated, radio-ready sound of late-seventies California. It worked: the song reached the UK top ten, and the album became one of the defining records of his career.
The transformation was deliberate. Sayer had conquered Britain in his clown suit, then conquered America with the disco sparkle of “You Make Me Feel Like Dancing” — a US number one in 1977. But he was restless, and he knew that novelty had a short shelf life. The clown suit had made him famous, but he worried it would also make him a footnote — a novelty act remembered for the makeup rather than the music. For Thunder in My Heart, he wanted something deeper: a record that would establish him as a serious singer-songwriter in the Laurel Canyon tradition. Perry, with his golden touch for adult pop, was the perfect partner — a producer who understood how to make sophistication sound effortless.
“How Much Love” was the album’s opening statement. A mid-tempo soul-pop gem, it showcased Sayer’s voice at its most expressive — the former clown now singing with the grain and ache of a man who had lived a little. The production was immaculate: warm keyboards, a supple rhythm section drawn from LA’s finest session players, and a chorus that built with quiet inevitability. It was the sound of an artist growing up in public, and British radio embraced it, sending the single into the UK top ten.
The Thunder in My Heart sessions were a meeting of two worlds. On one side stood Sayer, the British showman with music-hall in his bones; on the other, Perry’s crew of Los Angeles studio aces, musicians who had played on half the hits of the decade. The combination shouldn’t have worked, but it did — Perry knew how to frame Sayer’s theatrical instincts in a sleek California setting, and Sayer rose to the occasion, delivering some of the most committed vocal performances of his life. You can hear the effort and the joy in every track — a singer determined to prove he belonged in the big leagues.
The thunder, thirty years later
Here is where the story takes its strangest turn. The album’s title track, “Thunder in My Heart” — a solid album cut that was never a single in its original form — refused to die. In 2006, nearly thirty years after the album’s release, the British dance producer Meck sampled and remixed it into “Thunder in My Heart Again,” a euphoric club anthem built around Sayer’s original vocal. The remix went to number one on the UK Singles Chart, giving Sayer a chart-topper in a fourth different decade and introducing him to a generation that had never heard of the pierrot clown.
It was one of the most unlikely comebacks in pop history. Sayer, by then living in Australia and years removed from the charts, suddenly found himself back at number one — not through nostalgia, but through a dance record that treated his 1977 vocal as raw material for the clubs. He embraced it wholeheartedly, performing the song with Meck and reveling in the absurdity and the joy of it. For a man who had started out in clown makeup, there was something beautifully symmetrical about becoming a dance-floor phenomenon in middle age. “How Much Love” may have been the album’s hit in 1977, but “Thunder in My Heart” became its immortality.
A singer, finally taken seriously
“How Much Love” deserves to be remembered on its own terms, not just as the prelude to a dance remix. It was the record that proved Sayer could do more than entertain — he could move people. The song’s quiet intensity, its refusal to showboat, marked him as a singer of real substance, and it paved the way for the mature balladry of his eighties work, including the deeply personal “Orchard Road.”
The song also captures a moment in seventies pop when the lines between rock, soul, and disco were gloriously blurred. Sayer, the music-hall kid, singing over a California soul groove arranged by a Brill Building veteran — it shouldn’t have cohered, but the seventies were full of such beautiful mismatches. “How Much Love” is one of the best of them: sophisticated without being slick, emotional without being sentimental. It is the sound of the seventies at their most generous — a decade that had room for everyone, from the clown to the crooner.
What to listen for
Listen for the warmth of the production — the Rhodes piano, the unhurried tempo, the way Sayer’s voice sits right at the front of the mix, intimate and unguarded. Notice how the chorus sneaks up on you, building from a murmur to a swell without ever raising its voice. And then, for contrast, find Meck’s 2006 remix of the album’s title track: the same voice, thirty years later, riding a four-on-the-floor beat to number one. It is the same singer, two different eternities.
“How Much Love” asked a simple question, and the answer turned out to be: quite a lot, for quite a long time. From the pierrot clown of 1973 to the California soul man of 1977 to the dance-floor ghost of 2006, Leo Sayer kept finding new ways to make people feel. The thunder in his heart never really faded — it just waited for the right remix.