In 1982, she released Olivia Physical, a VHS offering a video for every song on the album. More strident changes were yet to come: her 1981 album Physical spawned a punchy single of the same name that spent 10 weeks as US No 1 (becoming her most successful hit) and also represented Newton-John adding another medium to her already considerable quiver: the pop video.
The change didn’t scare the horses, with the album eventually going platinum in the US. That year, she released the album Totally Hot, moving away from a purely country sound with the rock-inflected A Little More Love and the sophisticated Deeper Than the Night. The transformation that Newton-John’s character Sandy undergoes in Grease brought on a comparable shift in her public appearance and music career. Alongside Summer Nights, they all made the US Top 5 Grease became the highest-grossing film of 1978, and the highest-grossing musical film worldwide at the time, dethroning The Sound of Music – a title it held until 2012. While she was known for singing of love and devotion, here she explicitly sings about wanting someone. The innocent ballad Hopelessly Devoted to You combined 50s classicism with her distinctive pop-country vocals not only did You’re the One That I Want let Newton-John and John Travolta show off their vocal chops over a rockabilly bass line, it also prompted a major semantic shift in Newton-John’s personal pop persona.
By the end of the 70s, she would become a global star thanks to her role as ingenue turned femme fatale Sandy in Grease, which owed a great part of its success to new original songs written specifically for Newton-John by her longtime producer John Farrar. While she continued to thrive as a country artist, that same year, she won the UK fourth place at the Eurovision song contest with Long Live Love – and the rousing, oompah beat and valedictory message had more than a little in common with Abba’s winning song, Waterloo. It couldn’t stop Newton-John’s almost total pop-cultural domination. By 1974, she had been named female vocalist of the year by the Country Music Association, and not without controversy – Newton-John beat Nashville royalty such as Loretta Lynn and Dolly Parton to the prize, which prompted an industry protest. She cemented her reputation in the genre with the assertive, Grammy-winning Let Me Be There, her first US Top 10 hit, the ballad I Honestly Love You and the plaintive Please Mr Please, which reached No 3 in the US pop charts, No 5 in its country charts and No 1 in easy listening. Newton-John broke out at the beginning of the 1970s as a country-pop singer, with single If Not For You, a Bob Dylan cover, becoming an unexpected hit in North America. While that transformation may apply to her most famous role as Sandy in the musical Grease, it does a disservice to how ably – and convincingly – the chameleonic British-Australian musician shape-shifted between genres and rode the changing moods of pop to become one of the biggest hit-makers of her era and an enduring cult icon. T here’s a limited idea that Olivia Newton-John’s career, whether in cinema or pop, ran solely from “virginal girl-next-door” to “spandex-clad vixen”, as one rather snotty obituary put it.
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