Patrick Hernandez - Born To Be Alive (1979)

Patrick Hernandez was born 1949 in Le Blanc-Mesnil, France, to a Spanish father and a half-Austrian/half-Italian mother. Growing up in the 1960s, he became interested in music. He toured dancehalls and ballrooms of southern France with a number of groups over the next decade. Patrick met his music partner Hervé Tholance, an arranger, guitarist & vocalist, during that period. The two formed a duo and started achieving local success backing French musicians such as Francis Cabrel, Laurent Voulzy, and the French group Gold.
In 1978, Patrick met producer Jean Vanloo and, with disco music at its peak, signed a recording contract. Hernandez went to Waterloo, Belgium to work on songs to record. After working for about a year, an album was released November that year.
The first single that was released was the disco song Born to Be Alive. Its success was immediate: the track spread throughout Europe, where it hit #1 in France in April 1979 and remained there until July. By then, the US had caught on, and after some remixing, the track was released, peaking at #1 in the US Billboard Hot Dance Club Play chart and crossed over to US#16, selling over one million copies in the US alone.
By year's end, Born To Be Alive had racked up 52 Gold and Platinum from more than 50 countries worldwide.

While touring the US, Patrick was accompanied by Vanloo and his friend Jean-Claude Pellerin. Vanloo and Pellerin held auditions in New York that spring for dancers to accompany him on his worldwide tour. The chosen dancers included a young Madonna.
Patrick's follow-ups to Born to Be Alive did not fare as well.
In the 1980s and 1990s, Hernandez toured and had occasional appearances on other artists' albums in Europe. Another remix of the track appeared in the nightclubs in 1987. Since its release, Born to Be Alive has sold more than $25 million worldwide.

Patrick Hernandez - Born To Be Alive (1979)
FR#1, IT#1, DE#1, AT#1, SWE#1, NOR#1, AUS#1, NZ#1, BE#1, CAN#1, CH#5, UK#10, NL#12, US#16, BRZ#32