"Anyway You Wanta" by HARVEY

Popcorn started in a barn in Belgium where couples touch danced to slowed-down R&B. It was the last great underground scene in Europe.

In a converted barn 10 miles outside of Antwerp, couples twirled around the dancefloor, touch dancing to a midtempo mix of American R&B, soul, and Latin records. The club De Oude Hoeve (“The Old Barn”) started in the fall of 1969 with DJs playing hard funk and soul — the first record on the club’s first night was James Brown’s fierce  “Mother Popcorn” — but evolved their sound to fit this style of “slow swing” dancing, often pitching records down to hit the right tempo for the dancers. As many as 3000 would come for Sunday dance contests, and when the dancefloor became too full, couples (straight and gay) danced on the bars. When the bars, too, filled, they danced in the parking lot, sometimes on the parked cars. Flemish newspaper Het Nieuwsblad wrote in 1972, “On Sunday afternoon, this discotheque has turned into a place where moral norms no longer exist.” By then, the club was known as The Popcorn.

The Popcorn scene started with DJ Freddy Cousaert spinning U.S. soul and Jamaican ska at The Groove in Ostend, Belgium. He quickly bored of the popular American soul records he found on record shopping trips to the U.K., hounding shop staff until they tired of him, saying, “We have some trash in the back.” Those records, selling for 25p each, were too slow for the flourishing Northern Soul scene, which demanded banging dancefloor fillers over 100 bpm, and mostly by artists who had faded into obscurity. “That’s where we found one good record after another,” he said. He joined forces with original De Oude Hoeve DJ Gilbert Govaert, and the sound of Belgium was born. By the mid-’70s, there were clubs playing Popcorn music in every city and village. 

“Anyway You Wanta” was always a dance song. Harvey was Harvey Fuqua, who had crossover hits like “Ten Commandments of Love” as lead singer of the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame-inducted Doo Wop/R&B group The Moonglows¹, but those smooth vocal stylings are nowhere to be found here. Instead, the song is largely instrumental, with the horns doing most of the work. Released in 1962, the single was among the era’s many R&B one-liner dance tracks, which had no real lyrics, just a few identifiable phrases thrown in so that kids knew what to play on the jukebox. Over a heavy hip-swaying beat that’s like an R&B take on the cha-cha, Fuqua shouts out dancefloor commands like “Do the Popeye!” and “Shake it!” when not chanting out the song title, growling “sookie sookie,” or letting loose with with jungle bird calls. It’s ridiculous and, on the right dancefloor, sublime.

What makes “Anyway You Wanta” a perfect Popcorn song is that it begins with the heavy drum roll DJs favored, has a rhythm fit for slow swing dancing (even if it was likely pitched down; Cousaert estimated that only 2% of what they played was at its original tempo), and that it was obscure. Fuqua released the song on his own Tri-Phi label, which he formed along with its sister label Harvey in 1961, signing artists like The Spinners and Junior Walker & The All-Stars. He took those artists with him to Motown after he married Berry Gordy’s sister Anna and began developing and producing artists. His own singles between The New Moonglows, for which he recruited a young Marvin Gaye, and his time as a Motown exec were exactly the sort of forgotten releases that filled the 25 cent bins. It was these songs, by artists who’d mostly gone on to take day jobs, from which Popcorn DJs created their own sound. 

The actual sound of Popcorn is hard to pin down, which is partly the point. DJs started with ‘50s and ‘60s American R&B, but after exhausting cut out bins of those records, would play anything that kept dancers twirling around the floor – Latin Jazz, Broadway show tunes, Italian Exotica. Much like early Hip-Hop DJs, they often covered the labels of their records so competitors couldn’t see what they were playing. The scene was what the DJs made it. It was also uniquely Belgian. The sound, now known as Popcorn Oldies, has spread internationally, but it will forever have a Flemish accent. As Bob Stanley of the group Saint Etienne wrote, it is “the last underground music scene in Europe.” 

Cousaert arrived at The Popcorn one Sunday to learn that he had been replaced as DJ. He returned to Ostend, where he bought a hotel with a music venue. In 1980, he met Marvin Gaye in London. The singer was deeply in debt, dropped by Motown, and in the throes of cocaine addiction; back home, he had been reduced to living in the back of a bread truck. Cousaert saw his suffering and invited Gaye to move in with his family. Gaye expected to live in the quiet Belgian fishing town for a few weeks but stayed 18 months, taking long runs along the North Sea coast as he recovered. Healthy, he started writing music again in Ostend and eventually started performing as well. His solo gigs at Cousaert’s club were the talk of Belgium. 

Fuqua, for his part, was Motown’s head of artist development until about the time the label moved to L.A. in the early ‘70s. In his time there, he brought Tammi Terrell to the label and produced her duets with Gaye, including "Ain't No Mountain High Enough." He then took a production deal with RCA, where he discovered Sylvester and his backing group Two Tons o’ Fun (a k a The Weather Girls) and produced his disco hit “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real).”

In 1982, Harvey Fuqua reunited with Marvin Gaye to produce his album Midnight Love and its breakout single “Sexual Healing,” written while Gaye lived in Belgium with the DJ who created Popcorn. 

66 Song Playlist

Yes, 66 songs, almost three hours of music. If that seems a bit much, I heartily recommend the compilation Follow Me to the Popcorn, which is where I first dove into the scene I would most want to go back in time to experience.

Stop Look Listen*

(*a reference to Marvin Gaye’s duet with Diana Ross by that name on their 1973 Diana & Marvin album. I always loved “My Mistake” from that record.)

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1. The group was originally known as The Crazy Sounds, but their manager, famed DJ Alan Freed, changed their name to reference his nickname, Moondog. They had a minor hit with “Sincerely,” which was a bigger hit for the McGuire Sisters. They later signed to Chess records, where Fuqua asserted himself as the group’s leader for hits like “Ten Commandments of Love.”