Pliers hails Murder She Wrote actress
ANGELA Lansbury, the British actress whose Murder She Wrote series provided inspiration for Chaka Demus and Plier’s hit single of the same name, died peacefully at her Los Angeles home on Tuesday. She was 96.
The series was aired on the CBS Network from 1984 through 1996, and saw Lansbury solving murders as crime novelist Jessica Fletcher. Murder She Wrote was a hit globally.
“Mi used to watch it when mi was a youth, but that was a long time ago. That was a whole heap ah years ago. Angela Lansbury was a good little actress,” Pliers told the Jamaica Observer on Wednesday. “She lived a full life. Let me just offer my condolences to her family, friends and fans. May her soul rest in peace.”
Pliers recalls how he wrote the hook for the international hit song Murder She Wrote.
“I was about 18 or 19, and I was at a mechanic shop and heard a breddin of mine deejaying the lines: ‘Murder She Wrote, Murder She Wrote’. I had written my song already but it was not yet recorded, but when I heard the breddin, I said to myself: ‘That would fit my punchline’. So I changed my song around… instead of deejaying it, I sang it. Mi breddin used to watch Murder She Wrote too,” he told the Observer.
Recently, Pitchfork named Chaka Demus and Pliers’ Murder She Wrote 92 in their list of 250 Best Songs of The 1990s.
Released in 1992, Murder She Wrote, a certified gold record in the United Kingdom, launched the global careers of Chaka Demus and Pliers.
The song peaked at number 57 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1992, number 39 on the publication’s R&B table and number five on Hot Rap Songs chart. It rose to 27 on the British charts and opened the floodgates for five follow-up singles by the duo which made that chart.
“Any country you go, any club the song gets played in it gets a big forward, even today. I went to Russian about 1995-96 and was surprised at a concert we were performing when I heard everybody singing the song word fi word; Dubai, anywhere, everywhere. It’s not a joke song. The song will help keep Angela Lansbury memory alive,” he said.
Lansbury heard the song for the first time in 2019 in a CBS interview, according to Billboard.
“Oh, reggae! Oh, I’m thrilled to be part of reggae,” she was reported saying.
In addition to Murder She Wrote, Lansbury — whose career span over seven decades — starred in the Broadway musicals Mame and Gypsy and sang the theme song for the animated movie Beauty and the Beast.
Lansbury won five Tony Awards for her Broadway performances and a Lifetime Achievement Award. She earned Academy Award nominations as supporting actress for two of her first three films, Gaslight (1945) and The Picture of Dorian Gray (1946), and was nominated again in 1962 for The Manchurian Candidate.
She is survived by three children.
