Sometimes, the only way out of your comfort zone is to be pushed out, which is what happened to Olivia Newton-John when the British-Australian singer realized a song she desperately wanted to pull from release was starting toward the No. 1 spot on the charts. Fortunately, these helpful shoves can often come with great reward, and for Newton-John, that’s precisely what happened.
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Newton-John released “Physical” as the lead single off her eleventh studio album of the same name, and despite how glaringly obvious the song’s innuendos are today, the former Grease star said she never thought about that when she was recording the track. Ah, to have a mind not firmly planted in the gutter.
When she finally realized what the rest of us would assume she was talking about when she sang, “Let’s get physical,” and, “Let me hear your body talk,” she panicked. “After it was finished, that’s when I freaked out,” Newton-John told Entertainment Tonight. “I went, ‘I never even thought about the double entendre here!’”
The movie-musical star called her manager to try to stop what was surely going to be quite the scandalous song from being released. But she was too late.
Olivia Newton-John Tried to Scrap Her Most Successful Single
Despite her best efforts, Olivia Newton-John wasn’t able to convince her manager to pull “Physical” from release. “We have to! We have to kill it,” she begged. Newton-John told Entertainment Tonight, “He said, ‘[It’s] already on the charts, doll. It’s doing really well. We can’t stop it.’”
Realizing she was on a not-so-subtly sexual runaway train with no way of stopping it, we don’t doubt her manager’s response was a gut punch to Newton-John. But in the end, she made peace with it. “I’m finding that very often the things you are most afraid of or tentative about doing are the things you need to do. So, I’m very thrilled that I didn’t pull it off the charts.”
Of course, tremendous, career-defining success has a way of soothing even the most frantic of hesitations. “Physical” became Newton-John’s biggest hit by far, topping the charts in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the United States.
Naturally, there was some scandal around the overtly sexual track. Radio stations in the United Kingdom, South Africa, and conservative pockets of the U.S. banned the racy track, which did little to dissuade people who actually wanted to listen.
We find it hard to believe that Newton-John didn’t realize what she was singing about until after the record was out and climbing on the charts (what else could “talking horizontally” possibly be about?), but maybe she was just trying to find a way to ease into this new era while not totally denouncing the bright-eyed ingénue who was singing “Hopelessly Devoted To You” three years earlier. Though, to be fair, even Sandy from Grease was wearing leather and smoking cigarettes by the end of the movie.
Photo by BSR Agency/Gentle Look via Getty Images
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