Nan O’Byrne wrote the lyrics for Black Russian’s second single “Mystified” and the flip side of the first single, “Love’s Enough”; and she co-wrote the lyrics for two other songs on the album. Nan O’Byrne also co-wrote “You Might Need Somebody” that was a UK hit for Randy Crawford in 1981, and “You Might Need Somebody” was later a hit for Shola Ama in 1997; “You Might Need Somebody” was first recorded by Turley Richards in 1980, and “You Might Need Somebody” was also covered by Joe Walsh. Nan O’Byrne’s songs have been recorded by Earth, Wind and Fire, the Pointer Sisters, Weather Report, Bonnie Raitt, and Philip Bailey.
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Shortly after Black Russian broke up, Serge Kapustin and Nan O’Byrne worked with French singer and actress Sylvie Vartan, who is of Bulgarian-Armenian ancestry.
Shortly after Sylvie Vartan and Johnny Hallyday divorced in late 1980, Serge Kapustin and Nan O’Byrne collaborated on a song called “Il Me Fait De La Magie” (“It Reminds Me of the Magic”) with French singer Marie-José Casanova. The song appeared on the French album Sylvie Vartan by Sylvie Vartan that was evidently intended to re-establish her identity as a singer. The album is one of several eponymous albums listed in the Discogs site, but in the extensive “List of Sylvie Vartan albums” in Wikipedia, the album is apparently the one also listed as Ça Va Mal (the opening track on Sylvie Vartan is “Ça Va Mal”). The album was reissued on CD in 2013.
(April 2015/1)
