Coronation Street scriptwriter Damon Rochefort is featured in today's Guardian in an article all about the UK's biggest rave anthems. Damon was in a band called Nomad (which is his name spelled backwards) and their hit (I Wanna Give You) Devotion reached No 2 in 1991. The Guardian calls it a pop-dance earworm that launched the careers of super-producer Steve McCutcheon, Olivier award-winner Sharon D Clarke and Corrie scriptwriter Damon Rochefort.
Damon telsl the Guardian about what happened after the record topped the charts.
“I made my first-ever record with Sharon Clarke in 1986 by borrowing five grand from an Iranian club owner. I think it got to about No 92 after Tony Blackburn played it. It was thrilling but precarious. I also did an acid tune called Don’t Believe the Hype by Mista E which featured Steve Coogan – before he was famous – doing impersonations of Prince Charles and Alistair Burnet. I liked the acid stuff but I also liked all those big vocal tunes around at the time, so I put all that together and I came up with Devotion. When it became a hit, my life changed completely. We toured for four or five years, we did America, we did Australia, we supported Kylie on her UK tour. It was great fun. Then I grew up a bit and became a producer, making records for all sorts of people – Bad Boys Inc, Michelle Gayle, LaToya Jackson, Kim Wilde – but by 1996 it had all become a bit workmanlike.
Damon Rochefort and David Neilson (Roy Cropper)
I decided I needed to shake myself up so I went on a scriptwriting course taken by Laurence Marks and Maurice Gran, who created The New Statesman and Birds of a Feather. They took me under their wing and I ended up writing for Birds of a Feather. I’ve been at Coronation Street for 11 years now. I wrote Blanche’s funeral, which was lovely – it’s a great honour to bury an icon. A few years ago I went to Mardi Gras in Australia and they opened the parade by blasting out Devotion. You do feel a great surge of warmth. It was my 50th birthday party recently and as a surprise Sharon and I came out and did Devotion for about the first time in 20 years with half the Corrie cast pointing and laughing at me!”
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