Unchained Melanie

Although she passed away two years ago this month, Melanie Safka, an artist forever known by her Christian name, best known for her 1972 global hit, Brand New Key, still entrances fans of the late 60s/early 70s West Coast singer-songwriter scene. A new compilation unearths rarities and neglected material – much of it the casualty of bad record deals and unresolved creative wranglings – that further enrich our appreciation of a highly underrated talent. Dave Thompson, who knew her well, tells her story.

- By Dave Thompson

Melanie entered 2024 with higher hopes for the future than she had entertained in years. A new album was underway. Second Hand Smoke, she explained, was a collection of covers that even she never expected to hear herself record, let alone an outside world that still thought of her as the girl who sang the bicycle song.

A US tour, her first outing since a short Dutch visit in late 2022, was coming together; and two record labels, Cleopatra Records and Easy Action, were preparing to return her entire post-1971 catalogue to the shelves, together with a slew of previously unreleased albums, live shows and more. All designed to Melanie's own specifications.

Then, just a few days into the new year, Melanie was hospitalised, and there she passed away on 23 January, tragically, unexpectedly and (although her family has still to reveal the actual cause of death) wholly unnecessarily.

The reissues were already underway and enough were scheduled that her family agreed to maintain the momentum of those first issues. Fragments of Second Hand Smoke, too, crept out: a raw, impassioned version of Trent Reznor's Hurt, the last song she ever recorded; a playful take on Morrissey's Ouija Board, recorded for Boz Boorer's Morrissey Reimagined tribute album; and, most unexpected of all, her son Beau Jarred's recreation of The Adverts' I Will Walk You Home, dubbing Melanie's trial vocals onto the punk icons' original recording. (Another of the album's projected inclusions, David Bowie's Everyone Says Hi, would be recorded by Beau Jarred alone, to mark the first anniversary of Melanie's death.)

Together with a still-unreleased upending of The Moody Blues' Nights In White Satin, those were the last recordings Melanie ever made - a fitting counterpoint, then, to the early 2026 release of