Legs & Co - "Up the Hill Backwards"
Legs & Co - "Up the Hill Backwards"
Throw your hands around in a sexy caftan!
They caught my eye after I’d left David Bowie videos autoplaying on YouTube: five women in sexy caftans, dancing both sensuously and robotically to Bowie’s “Up The Hill Backwards” in a haze of stage fog. What. Was. Happening. What was this insane choreography? And who were these beautiful, sultry-eyed creatures?
This was my introduction to Legs & Co, the late-1970s/early-1980s in-house interpretive dance troupe for BBC’s Top of the Pops:
There feels like no better place to start a newsletter about dance videos than with Legs & Co, as there are a plethora of Legs & Co videos out in the thick forest of the internet to encounter. I’m sure I’ll come back to more of them in the future, but for now, let’s look at this gem from the tail end of their reign.
I assume that if you are a British person over 50, Legs & Co is a part of your DNA. You probably have favorite dance numbers and favorite dancers and favorite costumes. (And if I’m wrong about that, please humor me and pick some favorites right now.) As an American who was born a couple of years after Legs & Co’s last televised enchantment, it took me a while to catch up.
Top of the Pops itself probably came into my life the same way, although so long ago that I don’t even know for sure. A British music chart show in the vein of American Bandstand or TRL, Top of the Pops, or TOTP, was the go-to TV show to see popular bands perform (or, for a while, lip sync) their hits from the 1960s onward. Legs & Co was the TOTP dance crew from 1976 to 1981 and in that time they made over three hundred appearances, dancing to top radio hits. They had a rigorous schedule, presenting a brand new routine to whatever trending track was chosen for each week. Like In Living Color’s Fly Girls, Legs & Co danced separately from the live music performances, so it was just them onstage in all their dance glory.
It’s uncanny that “Up the Hill Backwards” was my introduction to Legs & Co as it was broadcast in 1981, their last year on TOTP. Maybe that’s why this dance number stands out to me—I can tell that they’re confident in their abilities as primetime TV dancers, but they also know their tenure is coming to a close and so they don’t need to sell themselves too hard.
I think that’s why they’re all wearing comfy nightgowns. Sure, it might be that they’re all in a cult and they worship this big flat geode thing above them:
But I would like to think that they’re just real tired, slogging their way through their arm-hinge moves so they can get to bed (please excuse the blurry screenshot, this whole video is a smoke-filled blur.):
See? They’re waltzing into the bathroom to do their all-organic face routine.
And now they’re desperately crawling into bed, still looking flawless:
(It could also be the climax of a horror movie. Sorry if it now haunts your dreams.)
I don’t really know how I’m supposed to feel at the end of this, but I suppose it paints the right kind of picture for a Bowie song about stumbling blindly into your future. At least it introduced me to this wonderful world of Legs & Co.
I’m lightly obsessed with these women in the same way that I’m lightly obsessed with anyone who seems to have a really fun job—although I can’t imagine applying for a job where “great legs” is a top requirement, and even in the job title itself. I assume potential Rockettes need to have great legs, but I bet even that job description is more like “legs that can sustain multiple kicklines during multiple performances a day.” Even the name “Rockettes” impliess something cute but grounded in towering architecture. “Legs & Co” implies that the rest of these dancers’ bodies are less important than the fact they have legs. They could maybe even be just disembodied legs. Would we care about the top half? Is that the “Co?”
I’m also jealous. Why didn’t I live wildly like that in my twenties? Why can’t I go back in time and somehow join them, and be 22 but look 16 and my friends and I all dance around in sheer nightgowns and show off our amazing legs?
I recently discovered an extended cut of this “Up the Hill Backwards” performance, with intros and outros from the host (and a cameo from Julie Brown before she was Downtown!). At the end, we cut back to the host and one of the Legs & Co dancers, Rosemary. Rosemary is still in her leggy caftan, but smiling now—beaming, even. The host says “The reason she’s here is it’s her twenty-first birthday today.” The studio audience oohs and ahhs and applauds and they bring her champagne (which appears to taste terrible?). But twenty-first!! Sweet baby Rosemary!
When I was 21, my legs were in their prime, but I didn’t know it. Maybe Rosemary watches this video now and thinks the same thing. Maybe she also sometimes leaves David Bowie videos on autoplay, and this hazy fever dream jolts her back to 1981, and she thinks wistfully of her days as a professional Leg. I bet she loves having videos like these as a record of her youth. I hope she also still has the caftan nightgown.
BONUS: My essay about Jordan Knight is featured in the first issue of Alternative Milk Magazine! I talk about the all the strange feelings his 1999 hit “Give It To You” summoned in me as a teenager, and wow, yes, I will need to dig into the dance moves in that video for one of these posts. SO many baggy cargo and track pants. (Content warning to my parents: that essay has sex words in it. I love you.)
See you next month with more sweet moves!
Love and jazz hands,
Molly