57%User score 57 percent
Sacrée soirée
1987 · Talk
Ivor Neville "Nick" Kamen (15 April 1962 – 4 May 2021) was a British singer, songwriter and model of mixed Burmese, Irish, Dutch and French descent. He was best known for the singles "Each Time You Break My Heart" from 1986 and "I Promised Myself" from 1990, as well as for appearing in a 1985 Levi's advert.
Kamen was born in Harlow, Essex, England, where he attended St Marks RC Comprehensive School. He was the seventh of eight children, with four sisters and three brothers, Ronald Kamen, Chester Kamen and Barry Kamen.
In 1982, Kamen appeared in the video for The Damned Don't Cry by synthpop band Visage. He first came to the public's attention in 1984 when Ray Petri featured him on the front cover of The Face. The cover showed him wearing a ski-hat, lipstick, orange roll-neck sweater and aviator sunglasses.
He is widely known in the UK for his role in the 1985 Levi's "Launderette" commercial, where he stripped to his boxer shorts in a 1950s-style launderette while he waited for his blue jeans to wash, one of a series of Bartle Bogle Hegarty advertisements that increased sales of Levi 501s. The commercial ranked sixth in The 100 Greatest TV Ads in 2000.
Kamen's musical success was mainly in Europe. His first single was the 1986 UK Number 5 hit "Each Time You Break My Heart” from his eponymous début album. The song was written and produced by Madonna and frequent Madonna collaborator, Stephen Bray, with Madonna also singing background vocals. Her original demo remains one of many unreleased Madonna songs by the artist herself. Kamen also had a Number 16 follow-up in the UK with his second single, "Loving You Is Sweeter Than Ever" (a cover of the Four Tops' 1966 hit), although his later singles were less commercially successful in the UK but more so in the rest of Europe, particularly Italy, France, Germany, and Spain.
His second album Us (1988) was produced by another Madonna frequent collaborator, Patrick Leonard. Madonna again made an appearance with background vocals on the song "Tell Me", this time without contributing to the songwriting or production. The song was a hit in Italy in the summer of 1988, spending nine weeks at Number 1. Later in 1988 a WEA Italiana compilation Loving You, containing mainly extended versions of previous singles, reached number 7 on the Italian album charts. In 1989, Kamen performed the song "Turn It Up" on the soundtrack to the Disney film Honey, I Shrunk the Kids.
