Vega Takes a Spin On the Dance Floor

Has Suzanne Vega been getting down? Shaking her booty? Working the funk?

Strange but true-- almost. The waif-like pop songstress, best known for “Luka,” a beguiling tale of child abuse, has suddenly become the queen of London’s trendy club scene, thanks to her sinewy, Soul II Soul-style dance hit “Tom’s Diner.”

But here’s what really makes the song, already at No. 2 on the British singles chart, such an oddity: Vega’s original version of the record (from her “Solitude Standing” album) was performed a cappella. In fact, Vega was just as startled as her record company, A&M; Records, when they discovered club deejays touting the new dance version.

What happened along the way is one of those wonderfully loopy pop escapades that recalls the fly-by-night excitement of the music industry’s misspent youth. According to A&M; execs, a pair of British club deejays, who go by the moniker DNA, were such fans of “Tom’s Diner” that they simply recorded a bootleg version of the song, adding their own funk-style backing track. The deejays were selling privately pressed copies when they found a music fan who was particularly intrigued with the record--one of A&M;’s London A&R; staffers.

“The first conversation we apparently had with the deejays was our informing them that what they were doing was completely illegal,” explains Al Cafaro, A&M;’s senior vice president and general manager. “But the second conversation was, ‘Let’s make a deal.’ We essentially bought back our own record from them.”

By then A&M; realized it had a potential hit on its hands. “It’s like found art,” says Cafaro. “It’s a totally new song. It sounds so wild--and so different--that I couldn’t believe at first that it was really Suzanne, because it was in such a different context.”

After getting the blessing of Vega and her management, A&M; struck a deal and officially released the song--but not without certain reservations. “Our U.K. people obviously thought long and hard about this, because it’s an unusual precedent to pay someone money for something you originally owned,” says Cafaro. “But we’ve chosen to use this to our advantage. It gives people a chance to hear Suzanne in a way they’ve never heard her before. And any time you can give your artist a new spin--and give their audience a new sense of their possibilities--that’s an opportunity that’s hard to pass up.”

Cafaro says Vega happily endorsed the idea. “(A&M;) asked me what I thought of it and I told them it was really kind of nice,” Vega recently told a British columnist. “So I said, ‘Go ahead and release it.’ I wasn’t expecting it to be successful--I never thought it would be that popular. It just seemed very charming.”

So far A&M; is treading lightly when it comes to handling the song’s U.S. release. Several key modern-rock stations, including KROQ-FM, have been playing an import version of the song. A&M; is sending radio promo copies and is issuing a CD single (and 12-inch) to record stores--but Cafaro says the label is holding off taking out trade ads and other marketing ploys until it sees how much response the song gets. A&M; has also shot a video of the song (without Vega), which it has given to dance clubs, but hasn’t yet shipped over to MTV.

“At this point we’re waiting to see what happens,” says Cafaro. “We think the song could end up on urban-contemporary radio or even (Top 40) stations like KIIS-FM or Power 106. We know it’s not what you’d expect from Suzanne, but if radio programmers have some success with a Suzanne Vega record because of this song, then we’d be ecstatic.”