C-Bank

A name on a label, not a line-up

C-Bank began as a credit rather than a group. The record that carries the name, "One More Shot", was released as a 12-inch on New York's Next Plateau Records Inc. in 1982, catalogue number NP 50011, with an eight-minute vocal on the A-side and a seven-and-a-half-minute instrumental on the B. John Robie wrote it, produced it, arranged it and mixed it; Andy Wallace and Mark Berry engineered. The sleeve credited no singer at all.

Robie was already the figure behind the New York electro sound. He came out of the city as the co-writer and synthesiser player on Soulsonic Force's "Planet Rock", and went on to work on "Looking for the Perfect Beat" and "Renegades of Funk". C-Bank sat in the same run of experiments: a producer's project, built to be played loud in clubs and on radio, with session vocalists hired per record and a trade name on the label to hold it together. That is why no two accounts of "who C-Bank were" quite agree — the answer depends on which pressing is in hand.

The voice nobody printed

The lead vocal on "One More Shot" belongs to Jenny Burton, born in New York City on 18 November 1957, and she was left off the credits. The record entered the US Billboard Hot Dance Music/Club Play chart on 23 January 1983, climbed to number five and stayed on the survey for fifteen weeks. It also carried the name onto the R&B chart. Later pressings corrected the omission; reissues and compilation masters now bill the track as C-Bank featuring Jenny Burton.

That single launched a solo career almost immediately. Burton's debut album, In Black and White, arrived in 1983, again produced by Robie and distributed by Atlantic, and yielded the Top 20 single "Remember What You Like" alongside the club sides "Players" and "Rock Steady". Her self-titled follow-up in 1984 was the commercial peak: a number one dance hit and a single that reached 19 on the R&B chart, 24 in the Netherlands and 68 on the UK Singles Chart in March 1985. The same year she contributed two songs to the Beat Street soundtrack.

By the 1990s Burton had moved to inspirational and gospel material, performing regularly around New York, releasing through Watchfire Records, and married to the Broadway songwriter Peter Link. The C-Bank record remains the thing most people know her for, and the thing she was not credited on.

What else came out under the name

The catalogue is thin by design — a handful of 12-inch singles rather than albums. "Get Wet" followed on Next Plateau with Eleanor Mills on lead, and Mills also fronted "Nightmare of a Broken Heart" and "Good Till the Last Drop". Pressings from the later 1980s continue the pattern of a rotating vocal booth over Robie-school production, which is how a project with one chart record ended up with a discography that collectors still sort release by release.

Nothing here resembles a conventional career arc: no studio album cycle, no tour to support a record, no stable membership. The name worked as an imprint for a sound, and when the sound moved on, the imprint stopped issuing new material. What survived was the first record and the genre it is credited with opening.

Why the first record still gets argued about

"One More Shot" is the track most often named as the first freestyle jam, and the reason given is structural rather than sentimental: Robie's non-linear approach to building it, assembling the record as a sequence of machine events rather than a performance captured in a take. Stephen Holden, writing in 1984, described Robie and Arthur Baker as having reinvented the modern dance record as an arcade-like interior soundscape, built from sharply edged synthesised textures and a machine-gun clatter of electronic percussion. That is a fair description of what C-Bank sounds like: drum machine, synth bass, a vocal that has to cut through both.

The lineage ran outwards quickly. Robie's "Body Mechanic", issued under the name Quadrant 6, is cited alongside "One More Shot" as one of the records that defined electro. The C-Bank track's material also fed into "Shellshock", the New Order single from the Pretty in Pink soundtrack, which Robie produced. His catalogue has since been sampled heavily across hip-hop, pop and dance, which keeps the C-Bank riff circulating in places that have nothing to do with 1982.

Standing now: a working name on the freestyle circuit

C-Bank is an active touring credit, filed by Live Nation under R&B, and the booking pattern is the nostalgia-package circuit that sustains freestyle across New York, New Jersey and eastern Pennsylvania. Two dates are currently listed. The first is Freestyle Free For All at Hard Rock Live at Etess Arena in Atlantic City on Saturday 14 November 2026 at 8pm, a bill that runs to well over a dozen acts — Lisa Lisa, TKA/K7, Treach of Naughty by Nature, Judy Torres, Cynthia, Jungle Brothers, The Cover Girls, Coro, Rockell, Joe Zangie, Pretty Poison and the MGM Guarnera Brothers among them, with the promoters still advertising additions.

The second is Freestyle Forever 2027 at the St. George Theatre on Staten Island on Saturday 6 March 2027, doors at 6.30pm and music at 7.30pm, tickets from $39 to $129. The published running order puts C-Bank fifth of nine, between Reina and Soave, with TKA/K7 opening the bill and Coro, Lisette Melendez, Tony Moran of the Latin Rascals, Pretty Poison and Fascination filling it out. Sal Abbatiello of Fever Records and Joe Causi of WCBS-FM host; DJ WhiteBoy handles the music between sets.

What is not available is criticism. No published review of a recent C-Bank performance turned up, and the act has no visible press cycle of its own — the name travels on the strength of one record and the promoters who keep booking it, not on write-ups.