Ellen Foley
December 14, 2008 by Andrew Watt
Filed under What Have You Been Doing Lately?
There probably isn’t a rock music fan in the last thirty years who hasn’t heard Ellen Foley’s voice. Does the name still not ring a bell? Ellen Foley is best known as the voice that duets with Meatloaf on Paradise By The Dashboard Light, the epic tale of broken romance that features on the ridiculously big selling Bat Out Of Hell album.
She was the one who stopped the big fella in his tracks with the howl “stop right there!”
That moment and the millions and millions of copies that that album sold should have been a springboard that led to Ellen Foley being a major star in her own right. The fact that she was a very easy on the eye blonde should have closed the deal. Not that anyone would have known that at the time – in the music video to the song Foley was replaced by Karla de Vito who was lip-synching to Foley’s vocal.
The predicted success didn’t quite happen.
The St. Louis born Ellen Foley was a session singer prior to her turn on Bat Out Of Hell. Soon after her appearance on that album she had her own record deal and a very good album on the shelves. Entitled Nightout, the album was produced by Ian Hunter and Mick Ronson. It had plenty of great songs and showed Foley to be a serious singer.
She wasn’t a writer though and the best songs included the Stones cover Stupid Girl, the Graham Parker song Thunder and Rain and a bunch of other songs drawn from various writers. The only song she co-wrote was the big ballad We Belong To The Night, which ought to have been a big hit. Incidentally former Dingos member Kerryn Tolhurst played slide on a couple of tracks.
Her next album was an interesting effort. Spirit Of St Louis was produced by Mick Jones of The Clash – although he was credited as “My Boyfriend”. It was a fascinating album with most of the songs written by Jones and Joe Strummer and another Clash alumni Tymon Dogg. Recorded in London the mood of the record was broadly European, with a chamber music approach to some quirky pop songs. It still stands up well today but at the time the style of the album didn’t do much for American radio and the public and its sales were mediocre.
Around this time Foley could also be heard singing on the Clash’s Hitsville UK from their extraordinary triple album Sandinista.
Ironically the most commercially successful element of her collaboration with Jones was the song Should I Stay Or Should I Go which he wrote about their relationship and which became a hit on the Clash’s Combat Rock album.
Ellen Foley had one more role of the dice with 1983’s Another Breath, but her window of opportunity had passed.
She was later heard on another Ian Hunter project and on Joe Jackson’s Body and Soul album. Late in the eighties she featured on the Jim Steinman project Pandora’s Box.
Ellen Foley also ventured into theatre and television with her best known television acting role is the role of Billie Young on Night Court for one season (1984-85), She had parts in Miloš Forman’s 1979 film adaptation of the stage musical Hair, as well as the films Cocktail, Fatal Attraction and Married to the Mob.
Foley continues an active career in music and has appeared on Broadway in such shows as Me and My Girl and the revival of Hair and off-Broadway in Beehive. She originated the role of The Witch in Stephen Sondheim’s Into the Woods at the Old Globe Theater in San Diego but was replaced by Bernadette Peters before the play reached New York. She eventually reprised the role by appearing on Broadway herself.
Foley is married to the writer Doug Bernstein. The couple live in Manhattan with their two sons, Timothy and Henry.
She’s still active as a singer and was quite recently teaching vocal lessons at The Paul Green School of Rock Music in Manhattan, New York City, a school that teaches kids to be rock stars!
Recently she formed a band called Ellen Foley and The Dirty Old Men and are playing shows in New York. A YouTube video suggests that she can still sing up a storm….