🚗💋 Grace Jones – Pull Up to the Bumper: How a Jamaican Rebel Rewired the Dancefloor

The Twelve Inch 187 : Pull Up To The Bumper (Grace Jones)

It was September 27, 1981, and a bunch of us had splashed out on (rather expensive, as I recall) tickets for Grace Jones’ concert in Antwerp. Grace was our hero. Nightclubbing, her fifth album, had dropped just before summer, and by then you couldn’t escape her on the radio. “I’ve Seen That Face Before (Libertango)” had topped the Belgian charts in May and June, and by august the third single, “Pull Up to the Bumper,” was everywhere.

We went in with sky-high expectations. Sure, the concert hall wasn’t exactly the sexiest venue in town, and dancing wasn’t allowed, you had to sit down, but that didn’t matter. We were about to see Grace Jones live.

Our seats were on the balcony, great view, but not exactly close. When she appeared on stage wearing only a jacket (just like on the Nightclubbing cover) and seemingly nothing underneath, one of my friends grabbed his binoculars. When he realised Grace was indeed wearing nothing visible beneath the jacket, he started shouting that anyone who wanted to borrow the binoculars would have to pay him, in cash. A few moments later, we all saw that she was actually wearing sculpted breastplates under the jacket, so the shock value was a little less dramatic than we first thought. 😁

The show itself was one of the shortest concerts I’ve ever attended, barely forty minutes, and not everything seemed fully live. Still, it didn’t make us love Nightclubbing or Grace Jones any less.

The summer of 1981 was, without question, the summer of Grace Jones and “Pull Up to the Bumper.” Equal parts disco, dub, funk, and danger, the track wasn’t just a hit, it was a manifesto in stilettos. But to understand how that boundary-pushing anthem came to life, we have to follow Grace from the strict pews of Jamaica to the sensual pulse of Compass Point Studios in the Bahamas.

So get your car ready (or was it something else? 😃) and let’s start the “ride”

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👋 Welcome, I’m Pe Dupre, thanks for stopping by.

This is The Twelve Inch, my newsletter about the history of dance music from 1975 to 1995, told one twelve-inch record at a time.

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🌴 From Spanish Town to Studio 54

Grace Beverly Jones was born in 1948 in Spanish Town, Jamaica, into a deeply religious family that forbade makeup, dancing, and even laughter in church. In her 2015 autobiography “I’ll Never Write My Memoirs”, she recalls harrowing, repressive experiences where every small act of disobedience was met with punishment.

As Grace explains:

“Being found in a barrel at nine years old with a boy, not knowing what I was doing but knowing there was something to be done and really wanting to find out, led to a two-week deliberation about how exactly I should be punished. It was like the convening of a monstrous system for an inquest into my insolence. How extensive should the beating be, how long in duration, how public the humiliation. Punishment was their way of keeping us in line. After all, we got beaten a lot. Serious abuse”

Reading that, you begin to see how crucial these early experiences were in shaping the “Grace Jones” the world would come to know. Repression became the spark for her rebellion.

Another key element was her androgyny. In her memoir, Jones reflects early and often on her unconventional gender identity, describing herself as possessing two completely distinct selves, a split mirrored in her close bond with her brother Chris. He was as feminine as she was masculine.

“He played the organ at church, and I would call him ‘church gay,’ or perhaps it should be ‘church feminine.’ I think of Prince that way. A whole new gender really.”.

Grace with her brother Chris in 1985

One of the most influential figures in her life, Jean-Paul Goude, would later explore that duality through the striking visuals he created for her, including the album covers from Warm Leatherette onward.

When her family moved to Syracuse, New York, Grace was a teenager with an accent, a will of iron, and cheekbones that could cut glass.

Modeling became her first escape route. In early-’70s Paris, she shared flats with Jerry Hall and Jessica Lange, walked for Yves Saint Laurent and Kenzo, and became a fixture at Le Sept, the legendary club where fashion, disco, and decadence collided.

It was only a matter of time before she stepped out from the runway and took command of the disco stage.

💿 The Island Connection: When Image Met Sound

Island Records founder Chris Blackwell, Jamaican-born and always tuned to cultural crosscurrents, saw in Grace Jones something rare. She embodied both Caribbean roots and a global, androgynous mystique that fit perfectly with Island’s adventurous spirit. Blackwell was fascinated by her ability to “scare audiences without frightening them away,” sensing in her theatrical flair the potential for a new kind of pop icon, one who could challenge conventions of gender, race, and genre all at once.

Before Island entered the picture, Jones had already released a handful of singles between 1975 and 1976, none of them hits, but each hinting at the persona to come. Her striking look, commanding energy, and nightlife notoriety made her the ideal artist for a label eager to fuse fashion, nightlife, and pop culture into something new.

For Blackwell, signing her wasn’t about chasing chart hits. It was about creating a multidimensional cultural figure. He paired her with Tom Moulton, and together they crafted Portfolio (1977): pure disco elegance, all shimmer, attitude, and precision.

Probably her best song from the disco period

But by 1979, with her album Muse, the mirror-ball glow was dimming. Disco was being declared dead in America, and Jones, ever restless, razor-sharp, and disillusioned by Studio 54’s hollow glamour, was ready to make music that could bite back.

🎛️ The Compass Point Revolution

To truly make her mark as a singer, Grace Jones had to shatter the disco ball. So she turned to her label boss, Chris Blackwell. He gathered a diverse group of musicians and hung a massive portrait of Jones on the wall at Compass Point Studios. Shot in black and white, arms folded across her chest, her sleeves stuffed to suggest muscular biceps, Jones looked like a coiled spring, charged with restrained power.

The portrait would be used as the visual of the Warm Leatherette album

As Grace Jones remembers:

“We did some photographs, and I showed them to Chris. Chris would say, Blow up that image. We blew up this photo that was eventually used for the cover of Warm Leatherette, me as an ominous, hard-eyed samurai filtered through something occult and African, the killer clown interrupting some mysterious ceremony. It was huge and covered the whole wall of the studio. Chris said to the band, Make a record that sounds like that looks. So we started playing with that photograph in front of us. Then we made sure the music suited the photo.”

At Compass Point, three strange, funky, and beautiful dance records would give that image the sound it deserved, and, as Jones later put it, make her “the me I had worked so hard to be.”

Blackwell urged her to reconnect with her Jamaican roots and musicians. Most of the players were strangers to each other, with no time to rehearse. But Blackwell believed that with Alex Sadkin, a producer revered for capturing raw, live sound, the group could create something unique. “Make music that sounds like you really are,” Blackwell told Jones. “All that international input, the different energies, but at the heart of it, very Jamaican.”

The Compass Point All Stars became the ultimate rhythm chemists:

• Sly Dunbar (drums) and Robbie Shakespeare (bass) — the Jamaican architects of dub’s pulse and pop’s groove

• Wally Badarou (keyboards) — the French-Beninese sonic painter bringing futuristic synths and airy textures

• Mikey Chung (guitar) and Uziah “Sticky” Thompson (percussion) — grounding everything in island rhythm and texture

• Barry Reynolds (guitar and songwriting) — the rock outsider adding structure and lyrical bite

They assembled in Nassau, on what guitarist Barry Reynolds called “such a dull island,”

The sea is beautiful, you can go swimming, but there’s really nothing to do.”

That, in fact, was the point. Surrounded by turquoise water and isolation, there were no distractions, only the work. As Blackwell later told Caribbean Beat magazine, the island’s stillness made it “a very good place to go and work, if you have done all your own creativity where you live,”

The Compass Point approach would result in: “Warm Leatherette” “Nightclubbing” and “Living My Life”. The first two form a perfect pair.

🎙️ Warm Leatherette & Nightclubbing: The Twin Sessions

Contrary to what many assume, Warm Leatherette (1980) and Nightclubbing (1981) weren’t recorded months apart, they were more like two sides of the same bold experiment. The sessions often overlapped, with ideas bleeding from one track to another.

Keeping the band in the dark about the full picture was part of the plan. Each musician contributed his own distinct sound. “There was a tension between each faction in the group that gave the music both its tightness and its looseness,”Blackwell told Jones. “Everyone was responsible for one’s own arrangement, improvising and perfecting it throughout the takes”, says Badarou, and that difference was deliberate, creating a kind of musical dissonance. It sounded dangerous, the way Grace Jones was dangerous: simmering, unpredictable, and otherworldly, rather than shocking or chaotic.

My favorite of the Warm Leatherette album

Chris Blackwell recalled:

“Tom Moulton had been recording the instrumentation and then having Grace come in later, but I wanted her to feel as though she were a member of a band, and record her the way bands used to make albums, with the singer and the players doing their thing all at once.”

Blackwell’s approach fused two instincts he knew well — Caribbean ease and British audacity.

“I wanted a rhythmic reggae bottom, aggressive rock guitar, atmospheric keyboards in the middle, and Grace on top,”

The sessions moved quickly and intuitively.

“If Grace or the group hadn’t nailed a song by the third take'“, Blackwell recounts, “it was dropped and they’d move to the next number.”

Jones wasn’t singing over the band; she was inside it. Out of that fusion came something genuinely new: half-dub, half-disco, with the sensual danger of punk and the precision of funk. Keyboardist Wally Badarou remembered how deeply involved Jones was throughout:

“Grace was there even during most instrumental overdubbing sessions. She was a part of the sound and the spirit that came out almost from nowhere. We all knew we were in for something quite experimental.”

By the time the sessions wrapped, they had enough material for 1980’s Warm Leatherette and the beginnings of what would become 1981’s Nightclubbing.

Upon release, Warm Leatherette puzzled nearly everyone. It was too authentically reggae for the New Wave crowd, too slow for disco, too strange for radio. But a year later, both New York radio and the club scene had changed. The dance floor had opened up, thanks to punk-funk hybrids like Yoko Ono’s “Walking on Thin Ice” and Taana Gardner’s “Heartbeat.” The world was finally ready for Grace Jones, and for the daring new sound she and Compass Point had invented.

🚦 Pull Up to the Bumper: The Scandal and the Spark

“Pull Up to the Bumper” emerged from the Compass Point sessions, written primarily by Grace Jones, Sly Dunbar, and Dana Mano. The track wasn’t included on the first Compass Point album, Warm Leatherette, because it didn’t quite fit with the rest of the material. But there’s another story, one suggesting that Island Records found the song a little too “suggestive.”

The rhythm first surfaced as “Peanut Butter” on the B-side of Junior Tucker’s “The Kick (Rock On).” But Jones, eager to claim it, co-wrote new lyrics. A summer smash, “Bumper” became one of the last unabashedly sexual dance records before a new virus began to shadow that kind of freedom.

So yes, it’s a double entendre wrapped in chrome. On the surface, it’s about cars and cruising: “Drive it in between… the lines.” But the beat, the bassline, and Jones’s sly delivery made it clear this was about bodies, not traffic.

Grace Jones explained it herself:

“I had the track for “Pull Up to the Bumper” from something Sly and Robbie had written called “Pour Yourself over Me like Peanut Butter.” My friend Dana Mano came up with the idea of “pull up to the bumper, baby,” which sounded nicely naughty, and we started to write some silly stuff that sounded good to go with it. There was a double meaning to it, and I liked to write lyrics that had double meanings, but I wasn’t conscious at the time that you could interpret these lyrics as being about anal sex. If you want to take it that way”

Despite radio hesitation, many U.S. stations refused to play it, “Pull Up to the Bumper” exploded in clubs. DJs championed it, and in 1981 it hit #2 on the Billboard Dance Chart, later climbing into the UK Top 20 not once but twice, first in 1981 and again in 1986. In Europe it followed hot on the heels of her number 1 with “I’ve Seen That Face Before”.

🪩 Why It Mattered: More Than a Club Hit

Grace Jones and “Pull Up to the Bumper” left a deep imprint on generations of musicians, visual artists, and performers, reshaping the boundaries of pop, dance, and fashion culture. The song, and the Nightclubbing album it came from, became blueprints for how to fuse musical experimentation with unapologetic sexuality, visual art, and performance, not as separate worlds, but as a single, defiant expression of identity.

Its mix of funk, reggae, and new wave, foreshadowed the genre-blending future of pop and electronic music. The song’s sly eroticism and avant-garde imagery turned subversive sensuality into a form of empowerment rather than exploitation. It also helped to normalize gender fluidity, binding dance music to the liberation narratives that would soon define LGBTQ+ club culture.

Jones’ fearless fluidity earned her an immediate LGBTQ+ following. She wasn’t a diva in the traditional sense, she was something rarer: a shapeshifter who made identity itself her art form. By gleefully bending masculine and feminine conventions, she gave queer audiences a mirror in which they could see their own sexual and personal freedom reflected. “Pull Up To The Bumper” distilled that essence, playful and aggressive, ironic and sincere all at once. It’s a masterpiece of double entendre, and with its elastic reggae-disco pulse and Jones’s wicked, vehicular puns, it ultimately demands just one thing: that you move.

You can trace her influence across four decades of pop culture. Madonna and Lady Gaga both drew heavily from her template of control and provocation, though when Gaga approached Jones for a collaboration, Grace famously declined, calling her work too “derivative” (of course she did 😄). Annie Lennox’s androgynous poise and cool glamour were direct descendants of the Jones aesthetic, while artists as varied as Róisín Murphy, Björk, Rihanna, Beyoncé, Massive Attack, and Gorillaz have all cited Grace Jones, Pull Up to the Bumper, and Nightclubbing as inspirations.

Looking back, even Sly Dunbar recognized how deeply the Compass Point sessions rippled through later music. Their influence was everywhere, sometimes in a rhythm, sometimes just in a mood, but always unmistakable.

As Sly put it:

Sure, some records you can hear a kind of influence, sometimes just one sound, sometimes the whole feeling – but that’s no surprise, because so many people still say that those are the best records they ever heard, those Grace Jones collections that we did. And yes, I’m proud of them. If you listen back to those tracks, how smooth the vocal is, how each part fits in, you can hear that everybody was just grooving, even the engineer – he could balance the song perfectly, even while we were playing it live. It shows you how everyone feeling good in the studio makes a good record. I still listen to the tracks myself all the time, I’ll still grab people, say “listen to this track!”

The Compass Point sessions didn’t just shape a sound, they planted the seeds of trip-hop, downtempo, and the darker, more sensual side of modern pop.

🚀 After the Bumper: Becoming the Icon

After Nightclubbing, Grace Jones became a living sculpture, a figure as much seen as heard. She moved into film, stealing scenes in Conan the Destroyer and A View to a Kill, where her presence was as magnetic as ever. Her next album, Living My Life (1982), pushed the Compass Point sound to its outer limits, though she never quite recaptured the alchemy of that first, fearless fusion.

She still had hits, of course, Slave to the Rhythm, the sleek Inside Story with Nile Rodgers, but after that, the momentum faded. A forgettable 1989 album followed, and then silence. It would take until 2008 for her to return, older, sharper, and still utterly herself.

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💬 Your Turn: What’s Your Bumper Memory?

Where were you when you first heard Pull Up to the Bumper?

Was it a late-night club track, a radio shock, or a rediscovered groove years later?

Share your memory below — and if you’ve got the original Island 12-inch, tell us how that bassline feels on vinyl.

Further reading (or should I say watching)

There are a number of interesting video’s/links :

1. The promo video

So You Wanna Hear More ?

I thought you would !

It’s fun to write about music but let’s be honest. Music is made to listen to.

Every week, together with this newsletter, I release a 1 hour beatmix on Mixcloud and Soundcloud. I start with the discussed twelve inch and follow up with 10/15 songs from the same timeframe/genre. The ideal soundtrack for…. Well whatever you like to do when you listen to dance music.

Listen to the Soundtrack of this week’s post on MIXCLOUD : The Funk Edition

Listen to the Soundtrack of this week’s post on MIXCLOUD : The No-Wave Edition

Or on Youtube :

So what’s in this week’s mix ?

I’ve got not one, but two mixtapes for you this week.

Pull Up To The Bumper sits right at the crossroads of what was happening in the early eighties, after the disco backlash. Black music evolved into a funkier, leaner version of disco, while another wave of artists took disco’s pulse and pushed it into something more alternative, call it New Wave or No Wave (as I did back then). It was different, adventurous, and full of edge.

Grace Jones’s Pull Up To The Bumper was one of those perfect crossover records — the kind that could bridge the dancefloor between these worlds. To show that, I’ve made two companion mixtapes, each exploring one of those diverging turns.

🎧 Take the Funk off-ramp and you’ll hear Grace followed by Skyy and Sharon Redd’s excellent Can You Handle It. Chic, Kool & the Gang, Odyssey, and Slave keep the groove going, while a few less-obvious gems — Empress’s Dyin’ To Be Dancin’, Gwen McCrae’s Doin’ It, and Heatwave’s Lettin’ It Loose — bring real flavour to the mix. The set closes with Unlimited Touch and one of my favourite early-eighties dance tracks, T.S. Monk’s Bon Bon Vie.

🎛️ Take the No Wave off-ramp and Pull Up To The Bumper leads into a completely different set. Konk and the post-disco Rolling Stones anthem Emotional Rescue complete the opening trio. From there, it moves through late space disco and early electro (Gina X Performance, The Nightmares), some early Italo (Koto, The Venus Gang), and synth-pop brilliance from Hook, Shelley & Godwin. Blancmange’s Feel Me and Yazoo’s State Farm (a B-side that deserved A-side status) round things out, before The Members and Ministry close the tape with Boys Like Dub and Work For Love.

Enjoy the ride — wherever you take the off-ramp. 🎶

Next week, I’ll be diving into French disco, and one of the key figures who helped turn it into the juggernaut it became: Jacques Morali. I’ll be looking back at the early years of his career, and how he made his first big mark on US dancefloors with The Ritchie Family.