Biography
Holly Beth Vincent served as the vocalist, drummer, and guitarist who fronted Holly and the Italians, launching her career with various local acts in her hometown of Chicago throughout the 1970s. While in California she assembled the initial lineup alongside drummer Steve Young, whose legal name was Steve Dalton, and bassist Mark Sidgwick. The ensemble moved to London in 1979, where guitarist Colin White joined, and the group issued its first single, “Tell That Girl to Shut Up,” that November, securing a contract with Virgin Records the following year. Although the track itself failed to register on the charts, Transvision Vamp’s 1988 cover version succeeded commercially. The band spent the bulk of 1980 on the road across England before entering the studio to cut The Right to Be Italian, during which Young departed and was succeeded first by Mike Osborn and later by John LaForge. The album appeared briefly on the lower tiers of the U.S. charts in summer 1981, yet the unit dissolved by year’s end. In early 1982 Vincent recorded a duet of the Sonny and Cher standard “I Got You Babe” with Joey Ramone, and later that same year she issued the solo album Holly & the Italians under her own name despite the band’s prior dissolution. Over the ensuing eleven years she participated in several projects, among them a stint with the Waitresses and a short-lived group called Bikey alongside her brother Nick that performed only once, though none of these ventures yielded recorded material. In 1993 Daemon Records, the imprint founded by Amy Ray of Indigo Girls, signed her, resulting in the album America under the name Oblivious. Two years afterward she collaborated with Jonette Napolitano of Concrete Blonde in the duo Vowel Movement, which released a self-titled record.
Singles
