DESCRIPTION:
Penny McLean started her life on November 4, 1948 as Gertrude Wirsching Bertschinger in Klagenfurt, Austria. Musically talented, she is proficient on the piano, flute and guitar as well as vocally. 1965 saw her start on a solo career, but in 1966 she began performing with her soon to be husband, Holger Munzer under the name "Holger & Tjorven" and married in 1967. The couple divorced in 1972 and Gertrude changed her stage name to Barbi Munzer, then just Barbra. Producer Michael Kunze signed her along with a male singer and was known as "Barbra & Helmut". She changed her stage name one more time to Penny McLean. At this point, Michael Kunze was looking for three female vocalists to replace the three original singers for a band known as Silverbird Convention. Once in the studio the band name changed one more time into Silver Convention, so as to avoid any legal wrangling with another band already named Silverbird. Of course, Silver Convention went on to international fame with "Fly Robin Fly". One song their next album, "Lady Bump" , didn't seem to work and was pulled from the album and given to Penny to record. A supremely familiar marketing move....think about it! I don't think this song would have been the hit it was if it had been sung by three women. It needs one voice to make it work. Penny recalls that the music track was already down, along with the spoken intro (done by Lucy Neale) and the scream recorded by Gitta Walther, that time was money and the company wanted to get this song out there, NOW. The scream was a very distinctive part of the song, and so Penny learned to recreate that scream herself. Now, she says she gets requests just to do the scream to tune of 16 to 20 times a night! Now back to this bump dance. It was not the sideways butt cheek to butt cheek move we all know and love, but when it first started it was much more overtly sexual (the dancers were front to back and while the one in the front was usually bent over forward, the one behind was making gyrating motions. So the twerk is nothing new, Miley...should call her Rerun Cyrus since nothing she does is actually new). "Lady Bump" aspired to the booty bumping dancers all in good fun, and it peaked at #2 for FIVE weeks! Penny could not keep the dance floor packed after that and eventually became an author of books on numerology. She lives in Munich and is on the lecture circuit there.