Arthur Baker’s New Documentary ‘Rockers Don’t Stop’ Chronicles a Seminal New York Dance Group Reuniting After Four Decades

Music documentaries are like a jukebox dime a dozen these days but “Rockers Don’t Stop: The Revival of Rockers Revenge” is something of a standout track. The dance group, with elements of reggae and funk, were momentarily at the vanguard of the early 1980s New York music scene, before disbanding and not getting back together until 2018, as depicted in the documentary which premieres tonight at Nitehawk Prospect Park in Brooklyn as part of the Doc’n Roll music film festival.Rockers Revenge was the brainchild of a seminal music producer in the 1980s, Arthur Baker, and reggae vocalist Donnie Calvin who worked with his brother Dwight Fuller in Brooklyn record store Soul Factory. Mr. Fuller was also in Rockers Revenge, along with Mr. Baker’s then-wife Tina B and Adrienne Dupree Johnson. Mr. Baker, who has made acclaimed remixes for New Order, Bruce Springsteen, Fleetwood Mac, Living in a Box, and Pet Shop Boys, focused on the music production while Mr. Calvin supplied the vocals.“I met them in a record shop and we went in a studio and I was looking for a singer,” Mr. Baker said in an interview with the Sun. “Those happy accidents happened alot in New York at that time.”Rockers Revenge’s debut single “Walking on Sunshine,” a cover of a 1979 Eddie Grant song, went straight to the top of the Billboard Dance Charts and was a Top 5 UK single in 1982. The NME at the time described it as, “one of the sheerest, swingingest records about.” Mr. Baker’s trademark innovative production style, fusing different musical genres into a striking single sound, was striking a chord. “My concepts were mash-ups before they were known as mash-ups,” he said. “It was more like the jazz approach where you’d do a song and then quote another song in the manner of someone like John Coltrane.”“It was New York street dance music,” he continues. “The music we were making was responding to what was being played in the clubs and the fact they [Donnie and Dwight] worked in a record shop made them clued in on what people were buying so they could play the stuff in the store and see the reaction.”Usually flushed with initial single success, groups go on to record albums and then go on tour. Not Rockers Revenge. Their follow-up singles “The Harder They Come” and “Living for the Weekend” both commercially underwhelmed and they never made an album, disbanding in 1984.As Mr. Baker depicts in “Rockers Don’t Stop,” a documentary which he also directed, it was the failure to perform on a seminal UK music TV show when they were riding high in the charts that proved a pivotal moment in the band’s disintegration: “Rockers Revenge missed their opportunity first time round because they could have been on “Top of the Pops” but they didn’t end up doing it,” he said. “No-one knew that would be their big shot they thought there would be more opportunities. But after “The Harder They Come” didn’t do that well, they did four more singles that didn’t really hit and then their record label Streetwise went under. That was why they never did an album and stopped making music for quite a long time.”Mr. Baker, something of a polymath, had plenty of other records to produce and remix, notably including “Planet Rock,” a hugely influential 1985 electro-funk song recorded by the American hip hop artists Afrika Bambaataa and the Soul Sonic Force. “That was part of it,” Mr. Baker said. “But it was more the label fell apart and they did stuff, but they never had that other hit and they lost focus.”According to Mr. Baker, his new documentary, which extensively focuses on Rockers Revenge is not merely for aficionados of 1980s music: “It’s a ‘human interest’ story, how people get disconnected for many years and then come together again.”The story of Rockers Revenge also illustrates some important truths about timing. “‘Walking on Sunshine’ was a big hit when the whole club thing was happening and it was probably one of the first big selling 12-inch records,” he recalled. “We sold 50,000 singles in one week in the UK where it blew up very quickly and the band got signed up by London Records. It came out in the summertime and everything seemed to work in our favor. But it happened so quickly and the band wasn’t prepared, and they didn’t take advantage of what could have been a lifetime career. They didn’t realize the potential.”The spontaneous success they experienced papered over a collective lack of self-belief and showbusiness acumen, according to Mr. Baker: “Donnie, the lead singer, didn’t even consider himself a singer, compared to someone like Luther Vandross. They didn’t take it all that seriously because of the way it happened. This is a story about the need to seize the moment.”This carpe diem message seems somewhat ironic given 1980s music is presently being so extensively revisited by young and old alike. “People are discovering old things that sound new,” Mr. Baker said. “The kids are back buying records.”

Arthur Baker’s New Documentary ‘Rockers Don’t Stop’ Chronicles a Seminal New York Dance Group Reuniting After Four Decades

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