‘Simon Says Dance’ was the second single to be taken from Nancy Elizabeth’s album, Dancing. A radically different single version of the song adds drums and a bass-line to the more stately piano-led, percussion-free album version.

“‘Simon Says Dance’ was an accidental song,” says Nancy. “I was messing around with that piano line in the middle of the night, after I’d been out dancing the night before. I was thinking about how easy it is to walk around thinking that you exist in isolation – to feel somehow cut off. When the fact is that we all have an effect on everyone we interact with all the time and vice versa. I wrote a little poem about it, using dancing as an analogy.”

Originally written for a more experimental side-project that Nancy had been tinkering with, the song eventually mutated into the single version, and finally into the stripped down version that appears on the album.

“The rhythmic version didn’t seem to make sense in the context of the album,” she adds, “but I didn’t want to lose either version, to I decided to release both!”

As well as Nancy’s versions, the digital release of the single features an exuberant disco version by Manchester’s Science Girl (formerly of Mighty Mouse, and long before that Chapter And The Verse), and a restrained piano-and-cello version by our own Matthew Bourne.

KNIT 3