#1389: Are You Ready For Love by Patsy Gallant

Peak Month: February 1977
6 weeks on Vancouver’s CKLG chart
Peak Position #17
Peak Position on Billboard Hot 100 ~ did not chart
YouTube.com: “Are You Ready For Love”
Lyrics: “Are You Ready For Love”

Patricia Gallant was born in 1948 in Cambellton, New Brunswick. Her family was Acadian, and she was one of ten children. From the age of five she was the youngest of four sisters performing as the Gallant Sisters. Her mother coaxed four of the sisters for the group, hoping to earn some funds for the cash-strapped household. By 1956, when the family moved to Moncton, NB, the Gallant Sisters began appearing on TV. This led to appearances in nightclubs when they moved to Montreal in 1958. In 1967 she recorded her first single in French for the Quebec and New Brunswick Francophone market. She continued to release songs over the following five years in French, and then issued English versions. Gallant was featured in numerous TV commercials. And she was a regular on both the French-language TV variety program Discothèque and an English variety show called Music Hop.

In 1971, Gallant co-starred on the weekly television variety show Smash presented by Television de Radio-Canada. Her popular Francophone hits included “Tout va trop vite”, “Le lit qui craque”, “Un monde en voie de naître”, and “Un jour comme les autres”. She released her first album in 1972 titled Patsy Gallant (Tout va trop vite). In 1974 a second French album was released titled Toi l’enfant. Meanwhile, she released her first English album in 1972 titled Upon My Own. It included a Top 40 hit titled “Get That Ball”that made the playlists in English-radio stations in Quebec, Newfoundland and the Maritimes.

In 1973 she released another English-language album titled Power. The album contained the singles “Save The Last Dance For Me”, a cover of a number one hit for The Drifters in 1960. The following year she released a cover of the Carol Douglas disco hit “Doctor’s Orders”. The single was a minor hit in a few Canadian record markets. But Patsy Gallant had yet to score a breakout hit on English-language radio. In 1975 she won a Juno Award for Female Vocalist of the year.

Things changed for her in 1976 when she released Are You Ready For Love. The album won Paul Page a Juno Award for Recording Engineer of the Year in 1977. The album also was nominated for Producer of the Year, along with Ian Robertson as producer getting the nomination. And she won the 1977 Juno Award for Female Vocalist of the Year. The debut single from the album was “From New York To L.A.”

Her followup single was the title track, “Are You Ready For Love”.

“Are You Ready For Love” was written by Jerry Rix and Pete Bellotte. Jerry Rix was born in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, in 1947. He was a singer-songwriter and recording artist. He released a cover of “Ebb Tide” in 1964. In 1971 he released his first of four studio albums. He was a pop singer who became identified with disco in the Netherlands. In 1976 his hit “Disco Train” crossed the Atlantic to appear on the Billboard Hot Dance/Disco chart.

Co-writer, Peter John Bellotte was born in High Barnet, a market town north of London, UK, in 1943. He learned to play guitar in his youth and by the age of 19 was in a beat band called the Sinners. In the mid-sixties he toured France and Germany with British singer Linda Laine. In 1965 Linda Laine and the Sinners had a #5 hit on the German pop charts with a cover of the 1958 doo-wop classic “Get A Job” by the Silhouettes. While in Hamburg, Pete Bellotte met Bluesology and became friends with Reg Dwight (who later adopted the stage name Elton John). Having learnt German, Pete Bellotte teamed up with producer Georgio Moroder who had written a song in German titled “Nachts scheint die Sonne” (In the Night Shines the Sun). Bellotte wrote the English lyrics to “Son Of My Father” which became a number-one hit on the pop charts in Argentina, Belgium, Spain, South Africa and the UK in 1972 (as well as Top Ten in Ireland, the Netherlands and Norway).

Around 1974 Georgio Moroder and Pete Bellotte met a young singer-actress-model named Donna Sommer (formerly Donna Gaines, she had married Austrian actor Helmuth Sommer in 1973). Donna Sommer had moved from the USA to Germany and performed in German productions of Hair, Godspell and Show Boat. Moroder, Bellotte and Sommer’s collaboration resulted in her first studio album released in 1974 titled Lady Of The Night. The album contained the single “The Hostage” which climbed into the Top Ten in Belgium, the Netherlands and Spain. Due to an error on the record cover her name was not spelled Donna Sommer, but Donna Summer – and the error inspired her new stage name. In 1975 Donna Summer released her second album titled Love To Love You Baby. The 16-minute title-track, according to the BBC, included 23 orgasms. “Love To Love You Baby” was co-written by Georgio Mororder, Pete Bellotte and Donna Summer. The single was released in 1975 and became an international hit topping the pop charts in Canada, and climbing into the Top Ten in at least a dozen other countries.

Georgio Moroder and Pete Bellotte wrote and co-produced almost all the songs for Donna Summer on her first six studio albums. Bellotte also wrote or co-wrote other hits for Donna Summer, including “I Feel Love”, “Rumour Has It”, “Heaven Knows”, “Hot Stuff”, and number-one Dance chart hits “Try Me, I Know We Can Make It” and “Love’s Unkind”. Pete Bellotte also produced “Bad Girls” and “Dim All the Lights” for Donna Summer. In 1976 Pete Bellotte also wrote “Trouble Maker”, a number-one Billboard Hot Dance Club Play chart hit in July 1976. Then in 1979, Moroder and Bellotte co-wrote “Harmony”, a number-one Billboard Hot Dance Club Play chart hit in November 1979.

In 1980 Pete Bellotte, Georgio Moroder and Donna Summer received several Grammy Award nominations. One was for Album of the Year for Bad Girls which was awarded to Billy Joel for 52nd Street. They received a second nomination for the single “Bad Girls” was for Best Female R&B Vocal Performance, which was awarded to Dionne Warwick for “Déjà Vu”. Bellotte also received a third nomination at the 1980 Grammy Awards in the Best Disco Recording category for “Dim All the Lights”, which was won by Gloria Gaynor for “I Will Survive”. Pete Bellotte published his first collection of short stories in 2016 titled The Unround Circle. 

“Are You Ready For Love” is a song about a woman who has been holding back on making love and “saving it for the man I lack.” But now, she’s finally met the guy who made her heart stand still when he called her on the phone. The lyrics are part of a theme in pop music where a female vocalist has been saving her love, and sexual expression, for the right guy. In 1981 Vancouver/Bowen Island singer-songwriter Shari Ulrich had a hit single with “Save It“. This is in contrast to male vocals by groups like Culture Beat’s “Mr. Vain” who sings “I know what I want and I want it now.”

After “Are You Ready For Love”, Pasty Gallant went on to have her biggest charting success with the disco-infused “Sugar Daddy”. It peaked at #3 in Vancouver (BC) in August 1977. It was Gallant’s debut release from the album Besoin D’Amour. In 1978 Pasty Gallant returned to the Juno Awards to be nominated for Producer of the Year for “Sugar Daddy”, and win Female Vocalist of the Year for three out of four years in a row. She also won the Juno for Best Selling Single with “Sugar Daddy”.

Her final appearance on the Vancouver (BC) pop chart was in early 1979 with a Top 40 single titled “Best Of The Woman In Me”. At the same time she charted “O Michel” in Fredericton (NB) into the Top 20. In addition, Patsy Gallant had her own TV variety show on CTV for a few years in the late 70s. She also added on more trip to the Juno Awards as a fourth time nominee for Female Vocalist of the Year. But this time she lost the nomination to Anne Murray.

When disco faded, Patsy Gallant found it harder to maintain her pace of record sales. By the mid-80s she shifted her focus from singing to acting. She appeared in a production of Cats, Nunsense, a stage biography of Édith Piaf, Cinderella, and played the role of Stella Spotlight in the French hit musical, Starmania in Paris France which ran for eight years from 1993 to 2001.

Patsy Gallant moved to Paris, France, in 1993. She lived there until 2005. In 2002, Gallant had a supporting role as a nightclub singer in the feature film, Yellowknife. She performed four songs for the film soundtrack, including “Sugar Daddy” and three songs she wrote: “Ain’t No Way to Treat a Woman,” “Dancing in the Wind,” and “Save My Soul”. For this role, Gallant was nominated for a Quebec Cinema’s 2003 Jutra Award for Best Supporting Actress.

In 2015 she released her fifteenth album, Patsy Gallant chante Piaf. And in 2015 she was part of a tour of older Quebec stars along with Claude Vallade, Gilles Girard, Michèle Richard, Jean Nichol et Chatelaine. Then, in 2016 a documentary about her life titled Patsy was released. She recalls in the film ““I didn’t open the door, I kicked it down. I wanted this so much. I love this so much. I didn’t hesitate. I just understood this was my calling from Day 1.”

August 15, 2020
Ray McGinnis

References:
“Patsy Gallant,” My New Brunswick.ca, June 18, 2019.
Brendan Kelly, “Patsy Gallant Looks Back at ‘Road Map of My Life’ in Documentary,” Montreal Gazette, December 2, 2016.
“Jerry Rix,” Wikipedia.org.
Simon Reynolds, “Song from the Future: The Story of Donna Summer and Giorgio Moroder’s “I Feel Love”, Pitchfork.com, June 29, 2017.
“Northchapel-based Pete Bellotte and his Literary Ambitions,” Sussex Life, November 10, 2016.
“CKLG Top 30,” February 22, 1977.

For more song reviews visit the Countdown.