Maxine Nightingale

Maxine Nightingale (born 2 November 1952) is a British R&B and soul music singer. She is best known for her hits in the 1970s, with the million seller "Right Back Where We Started From" (1975, UK #8 & 1976, U.S. #2), "Love Hit Me" (1977), and "Lead Me On" (1979).

One of the three children of Guyanese-born comedian Benny Nightingale and his wife Iris (they also had daughter Rosalind and son Glenn), Maxine Nightingale first sang with her school band: she attended Bryon Primary (in Gillingham, Kent), Ealing Grammar School, and Guildhall School of Music and Drama. At age thirteen, she and a friend visited a neighbourhood house where the band Unisound was rehearsing. They asked her to sing with them and she joined them in performing extensively on the British cabaret circuit. The manager of one of the clubs where they performed asked Nightingale to cut a demo and shipped it to Pye Records, for whom Nightingale made her first recordings. Despite being overseen by label A&R head Cyril Stapleton, Nightingale's three Pye single releases—issued in June and July 1969 and 26 March 1971—went unnoticed.

In 1969 Nightingale began a tenure of roughly 18 months in the West End production of Hair, playing a supporting role and understudying the female lead role of Sheila; she then relocated to Germany, having formed a relationship with an actor from the German production of Hair whom she had met when he visited the West End production. In Germany, Nightingale continued her stage musical care…