The 1969 Jane Fonda movie that inspired one of the biggest one-hit wonders of the 1970s
From the days of silent film and their orchestral accompaniments, to the neon-hued soundtracks of John Hughes classics, music and film have always complemented each other perfectly, and there are countless shining examples of films which have sent songs on to colossal chart success. In the case of one 1977 smash, though, that film hit screens years before the accompanying single ever did.
Racing Cars are not a group that have been afforded a terribly enduring reputation within the music world. From their emergence in 1973, from the mining stock of Wales’ Rhondda Valley, the pop-centric soft rock group never seemed to fit in with the prevailing sounds of the UK singles charts, nor its rock underground.
Sonically, the group shared far more in common with the middle-of-the-road rock emanating from the US airwaves at the time, but that didn’t stop major label Chrysalis from signing them up in the mid-1970s.
In the tradition of the American groups Racing Cars were trying to evoke, the band thought of themselves as an album-centric group, as opposed to being harbingers of throwaway hit singles. Chrysalis, on the other hand, disagreed, particularly when it came to the band’s 1976 track ‘They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?’ which would eventually become the band’s defining moment.
“‘Horses’ was the throwaway song on Downtown Tonight,” guitarist Graham Williams once told Mojo, citing the song as perhaps the most unimportant on that largely forgotten LP. “Our manager and the record company thought differently – one day during rehearsals, our manager walked in and declared, ‘I don’t want to hear you in the pursuit of excellence, I just want you to give them something, to sing along to.”‘
In ‘They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?’ Racing Cars certainly fulfilled that brief, creating a single that was catchy enough to rise to number 14 in the UK singles charts, thereby resigning Racing Cars to joining the legions of 1970s one-hit wonders. Even for a pop song, though, the title of that track was something of an oddity, presumably causing enough intrigue to shift a few more copies of the record.
As cinema aficionados will already be aware, though, the song took its title from a 1969 film of the same name; a psychological drama centred around a Depression-era dance competition, with Jane Fonda playing arguably its most memorable role.
While it isn’t the most prominent work in Fonda’s filmography, the film was notable enough in its day for Racing Cars to use it as a basis for their song, and for audiences to recognise the title. It might be a rather cynical view of what is, admittedly, a pretty solid middle-of-the-road hit, but it certainly seems as though the notoriety of that film spurred the single on to a greater degree of commercial success than if it had been called, for instance, ‘Jaws 2’.
Regardless of the exact reasons for the song’s miraculous success, ‘They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?’ was enough to make Racing Cars a memorable act of the late 1970s pop scene, battling against the harsh abrasion of the punk rock creeping over the airwaves at the same time. Ultimately, though, the single proved hard to follow up on – perhaps they struggled to find another fitting Jane Fonda flick to base things on.
