While parents encourage children that, if they believe in themselves, they can be whatever they want, it’s rarely true in reality. Just ask John Smith and Valerie Day, the husband and wife behind Oregon’s colourful Nu Shooz. They’ll surely concur that luck, often sizeable, is similarly vital to prosperity. After all, without a sequence of unlikely coincidences, not only would I Can’t Wait, their dancefloor classic, never have existed – not to mention Poolside, its parent album – but nor indeed would the band.
Take the couple’s first meeting. That day in 1975, Smith, only 19, was hitchhiking from Olympia to Los Angeles, having travelled the opposite direction 24 hours earlier for a date with a high school sweetheart. Their reunion was fruitless but, on his journey home, he encountered…
