Fifty years ago this July, a film unlike anything British cinema had produced before opened in London. Bugsy Malone, Alan Parker's gangster musical played entirely by children and teenagers, premiered on 23 July 1976, and it went on to become one of the most fondly remembered British films of its era. Among its young cast, dancing as Velma, one of the showgirls in Tallulah's troupe at Fat Sam's Grand Slam Speakeasy, was a young Vivienne McKone. Half a century on, McKone is back in the spotlight, this time as a soul vocalist, with the worldwide single release of "Love Has To Be Easy", a track that has spent the past few years quietly building a devoted following on London's soulful airwaves.
Bugsy Malone remains a genuine curiosity of 1970s film-making. Parker cast the film entirely with actors under seventeen, playing out a Prohibition-era gangster story with tommy guns that fire whipped cream instead of bullets. The cast included a young Jodie Foster as Tallulah, Fat Sam's chanteuse and gun moll, Scott Baio in the title role, and John Cassisi as the crime boss Fat Sam. The film was a genuine hit in the UK, went on to earn eight BAFTA nominations (winning three, including Best Supporting Actress and Most Promising Newcomer for Foster), and has been screened in British secondary schools for decades since. It remains a rite of passage for generations of children discovering musical theatre for the first time. Vivienne McKone, then a young dancer trained at the Royal Ballet School, was part of that ensemble of showgirls bringing the speakeasy to life on screen.
McKone's career did not end at Pinewood Studios. She went on to work in British television, including an appearance in the BBC's Casualty, and built a parallel career as a singer-songwriter. Her debut solo album, "Vivienne McKone", was produced by Stuart Levine, a name well known to soul fans for his work with The Crusaders, Randy Crawford and Simply Red. She has performed in concert around the world and supported Anita Baker, one of soul music's most respected voices, giving her a grounding in the genre that runs through everything she has recorded since.
More recently, McKone has been the vocalist behind The Requestors, a trio she shares with Toby Baker and Gabriel Garrick, son of the late English jazz pianist Michael Garrick. Their debut single, "Love Has To Be Easy", written by McKone herself, first appeared in October 2023, a warm, mid-tempo soul song built around the simple idea that love, when it is right, should not be complicated. "When there's love around, things are easy, that's how that lyric was born," McKone explains, "and I feel that resonated with a lot of people in the audience. I was really taken aback!" She was speaking after a recent live performance of the song, where the reaction reminded her just how far it has already travelled.
That journey began modestly. "Love Has To Be Easy" was initially serviced only to DJs, picking up plays across London's soul and funk radio scene before Expansion Records included it as an exclusive track on the label's Luxury Soul 2024 compilation, a three-disc collection that each year gathers the best independent soul releases of the previous twelve months alongside bigger names in the genre. Sitting alongside artists such as Will Downing, Con Funk Shun and Narada Michael Walden, "Love Has To Be Easy" found its way to a wider and more discerning soul audience, and demand for the track has continued to grow ever since. Now, that demand has caught up with the song's ambitions: "Love Has To Be Easy" is finally getting its full worldwide single release.
The timing is not something anyone planned, but it is hard to ignore. The July release of "Love Has To Be Easy" lands in the same month as the fiftieth anniversary of Bugsy Malone's London premiere, tying together two very different chapters of the same career. It is a rare thing for an artist to have a foothold in two entirely separate cultural landmarks fifty years apart, first as a child performer in a film that has become a genuine piece of British cinema history, and now as a soul singer-songwriter whose own composition is reaching audiences well beyond the DJ booths and compilation shelves where it started.
For long-time followers of the UK soul scene, "Love Has To Be Easy" is likely already a familiar name, having spent the best part of two years working its way through the circuit the traditional way: word of mouth among DJs, a spot on a respected compilation, and a steadily building audience who kept asking where they could get hold of it properly. That patient, organic route to a single release says something about the song itself. It was never chasing a moment. It has simply been waiting for the right one, and the fiftieth anniversary of the film that first put Vivienne McKone in front of an audience feels like exactly that.
Whether you are coming to "Love Has To Be Easy" as a long-time Expansion Records listener who already knows it from Luxury Soul 2024, or discovering Vivienne McKone for the first time through this new worldwide release, there is a satisfying symmetry to the story: a Royal Ballet-trained showgirl from Fat Sam's speakeasy, fifty years on, telling us in her own words and her own voice that love, when it is real, should never be hard work.
"Love Has To Be Easy" by The Requestors featuring Vivienne McKone is out now worldwide. The track originally featured exclusively on Expansion Records' Luxury Soul 2024, available now, along with various mixes and edits, from expansionrecords.com.
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