Ian Levine

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Record producer Ian Levine.

Ian Levine is a portly English songwriter, producer, and DJ. He is also a well-known (and often controversial) fan of the long-running television show Doctor Who. He was born on 22 June 1953 in Blackpool, Lancashire.

Music career

Levine is most noted for his work in the music genres of pop, soul, disco, and Hi-NRG. He and songwriting partner Fiachra Trench were among the main figures in the development of the Hi-NRG style and its moderate success in North America, writing and producing "So Many Men So Little Time" by Miquel Brown (two million sales), and "High Energy" by Evelyn Thomas (seven million sales). During the 1980s and 1990s he mixed a number of dance-pop hits for artists, including Pet Shop Boys, Erasure, Kim Wilde, Bronski Beat, Amanda Lear, Bananarama, Tiffany, Dollar, Hazell Dean and founded his own groups: Seventh Avenue which featured two members of Big Fun, Optimystic and Bad Boys Inc. He also wrote and produced for the successful UK boy band Take That, and for The Pasadenas. He has written and produced several TV themes including "Discomania", "Gypsy Girl", "ITV Celebrity Awards Show", "Christmasmania", and "Abbamania".

Earlier in his career he was a disc jockey at the Blackpool Mecca, and became an avid collector of soul, R&B, and Northern Soul records. In the mid-1970s he also produced for disco, leading into the genre's evolution into Hi-NRG.

Levine was also a resident DJ at the legendary gay disco Heaven, which was considered London's answer to the New York nightclub The Saint.

In 1987, Levine began recording some former artists from Motown. By 1989 the project had grown in size and a reunion of 60 Motown stars in Detroit, outside the original Hitsville USA building, attracted attention from several media outlets. Motorcity Records was launched as a record label, initially distributed by PRT and later Pacific, then Charly and finally Total/BMG. By the time the project ended in the mid 1990s, over 850 songs had been recorded by 108 artists who had all been formerly signed to Motown. As an album range, the project continues to be released to this day, but the most successful single was by an artist who hadn't recorded for twenty three years, Frances Nero, with "Footsteps Following Me", co-written with Levine and Ivy Jo Hunter, the man who wrote "Dancing in the Street". According to her website "Her dream was short-lived - after recording constantly and receiving no royalties from Ian Levine, she severed her relationship and pursued other ventures." Other than that, the project was not successful commercially.

In 2007, Levine formed the label Centre City Records, on which he has released four albums: Northern Soul 2007, Disco 2008, Yesterday and Tomorrow (a collection of his 30 greatest hits, re-interpreted by his current roster of artists) and Northern Soul 2008.

Doctor Who

Ian Levine is well-known as a fan of the BBC science fiction television series Doctor Who, on which he allegedly acted as an unofficial continuity consultant during the early 1980s.

In recent years he has claimed that he co-wrote the Season 22 story Attack of the Cybermen with series script editor Eric Saward, although the writer's credit is officially given to “Paula Moore”, a pseudonym for Saward's then girlfriend, Paula Woolsey. Levine's claim is that he wrote the story outline and that Saward wrote the script, with Woolsey contributing nothing.

This version of events was flatly denied by Eric Saward in a Doctor Who Magazine interview, as well as by Woolsey herself when she was interviewed by David J. Howe, Mark Stammers and Stephen James Walker for their series of Doctor Who reference books.

Some critics have speculated that the Abzorbaloff monster played by Peter Kay in the Doctor Who episode "Love & Monsters" was based on Levine and reflects his role in fandom.

Ian at one time worked in close collaboration with the Doctor Who Restoration Team on various DVD releases of classic Doctor Who serials, though he no longer produces documentaries for them.

Doctor in Distress

In 1985, when the BBC announced that the series would be placed on an eighteen-month hiatus, and the show's cancellation was widely rumoured, Levine gathered a group of actors from the series, together with a number of minor celebrities, to record a protest single called Doctor in Distress. The participants included the series' two lead actors, Colin Baker and Nicola Bryant, as well as other actors associated with the series such as Nicholas Courtney and Anthony Ainley. Also involved were members of the bands Bucks Fizz, The Moody Blues and Ultravox. Hans Zimmer was one of the musicians involved in the record's production. Levine has since claimed that the song was originally the brain child of Gary Downie, a production manager at the BBC and partner of John Nathan-Turner, the producer of the show at the time.

The single was released under the name “Who Cares?”, and was universally panned. Levine himself said later, "It was an absolute balls-up fiasco. It was pathetic and bad and stupid. It tried to tell the Doctor Who history in an awful high-energy song. It almost ruined me.”

Missing episodes

There is a long-standing fan rumour that Levine secretly owns copies of missing episodes of the series that were destroyed by the BBC after their original broadcasts, but there is no known basis in fact for this rumour. Levine, in fact, was responsible for the return of a number of missing episodes of the show to the BBC's archives, and was instrumental in stopping the destruction of further serials after he learnt that they were being discarded.

Levine's efforts to locate the other missing episodes continue to this day. On April 20, 2006, it was announced on the BBC children's show Blue Peter that Levine would purchase a life-sized Dalek for anyone who would return one of the 108 missing episodes; details were provided on Blue Peter's website.

DVDs

Ian Levine has also been responsible for producing a number of extras on the Doctor Who DVD releases: the documentaries "Over the Edge" and "Inside the Spaceship" were included on the 3-disc set "The Beginning", while "Genesis of a Classic" appeared on the release for Genesis of the Daleks. Levine has also contributed to many other classic series DVDs, appearing as an in-vision interviewee on occasions, and by allowing the Restoration Team access to his private collection of rare studio footage and off-air recordings.

K-9 and Company

He also composed the theme music for K-9 and Company, a pilot for a never-made Doctor Who spin-off series featuring the robotic dog. The pilot was released on DVD in 2008.

American comic books

Ian Levine also possesses one of the world's great collections of American comic books. He claims to have the only complete set of DC Comics in the world, with at least one copy of each DC comic book sold at retail (i.e., not including promotional or giveaway comics) from the 1930s to present. The last vintage comic book he obtained for his collection was a copy of New Adventure Comics #26, which he acquired at the San Diego Comic-Con in July 2005.

Although Levine's complete DC comic book collection does not include all of the hundreds of different promotional (non-retail) and giveaway comic books that DC released over the decades (the particular indentifying information for many of them has been lost due to DC not retaining decades-old licensing information), his DC promotional and giveaway collection contains the vast majority of all of the DC promotional and giveaway comic books currently known to have existed, and is perhaps the most complete DC promotional and giveaway collection currently in existence.

Other information

Ian attended Arnold (House) School in Blackpool from 1963 to 1970. In 1996 Levine traced over 660 members of his own family on his mother's side and organised the enormous Cooklin family reunion, on July 21 in London. This has been called the biggest family reunion of all time, and was covered on the BBC Evening News, and, extensively, in The Jewish Chronicle.

Between 1997 and 1999 Ian Levine produced and directed the documentary film The Strange World of Northern Soul, an anthology of the underground music cult. This was a video box set, containing over 12 hours of footage with booklet and CD, and incorporating 131 performances by the legendary American soul acts who have, in most cases, never been filmed before. The event premiered at the King George's Hall in Blackburn to an audience of 1300 in July 1999. The Strange World of Northern Soul was released on DVD as a six-disc box set, replete with extras, in 2003.

In May 2000, Levine organised the reunion of his entire school class from the 1960s at Arnold School in Blackpool. All 30 members of class 3A were found and brought together to experience lessons, P.T. in the gym, a rugby match, and an assembly with their original teachers, all in original style school uniform. The reunion was filmed and shown by the BBC.

External links

• Ian Levine at IMDb
• Official site (Centre City Records)
• interview by Bill Brewster