#69: Whose Side Are You On by Matt Bianco
City: Montreal, PQ
Radio Station: CKOI
Peak Month: May 1985
Peak Position in Montreal ~ #7
Peak position in Vancouver ~ did not chart
Peak Position on Billboard Hot 100 ~ did not chart
YouTube: “Whose Side Are You On”
Lyrics: “Whose Side Are You On”
You may think Matt Bianco is the name of a guy. But in fact this is a British sophist-pop, jazz-funk, and Latin-flavored music group. The group’s name suggests that Matt Bianco is a person, often assumed to be an alias for the main member and front man Mark Reilly. According to Reilly, “when we were forming the band, we loved the spy movie theme tunes from the fifties and sixties with lots of bongos, quite jazzy and slightly kitsch. So Matt Bianco was a character invented that would fit into that genre, a made up spy, a secret agent. We thought it was hilarious. We loved spy TV themes and film scores. We were really into that 60s spy movie image.” Reilly adds, “ever since then people who don’t know the band ask ‘So, who’s Matt?'” Mark Reilly was born in 1960 in High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire, England. In 1981, Reilly joined Blue Rondo à la Turk which was a floating collective of jazz and salsa oriented musicians. In this band Reilly met keyboard player Danny White, and bass guitarist Kito Poncioni. White was born in 1959 in Letchwork, England. Poncioni was born in 1958 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.