Animotion— “Let Him Go”

Entered Top 40:  July 27, 1985
1 week 
Peaked at: 39

The 1983 potboiler-ish film A Night In Heaven, in which an uptight married college professor (Lesley Ann Warren; no, not Susan Sarandon) has a fling with a cocky failing student who’s also a stripper (Christopher Atkins), was a flop at the time, and is known most of all now for spawning two hit songs. “Heaven,” the Bryan Adams power ballad, started life on A Night in Heaven’s soundtrack, and eventually topped the charts in April 1985. And the film featured “Obsession,” a Holly Knight/Michael Des Barres song that wasn’t a single at the time, but the LA pop band Animotion covered it in 1984, and took it to #6.

So after a song about being, well…obsessed with someone, Animotion’s followup “Let Him Go” is a motivational poster about giving your man his space. Well which is it, Animotion?

Animotion’s followup album had a little euro success with “I Engineer,” but had no US Top 40 hits (hurt, in part, by it being the last album from Casablanca Records before the label folded). Co-lead singers Bill Wadhams & Astrid Plane would leave the band in 1988, along with bassist Charles Ottavio. Animotion’s new vocalists became Cynthia Rhodes, from Staying Alive and Dirty Dancing; and Paul Engemann. They’d have one more US Top 40 hit with the new lineup, 1989’s “Room to Move” (#9), before splitting in 1990. Wadhams & Plane would reunite with “Obsession”-era members Greg Smith and Don Kirkpatrick in 2001; in 2017 they cut an album of new material that also included a new version of “Let Him Go.”