Few house records have a backstory as strange as Look Right Through. In November 2013 the MK remix of Storm Queen’s single went straight to No. 1 in the UK, and the man singing on it was a busker from the New York subway who most of the crowds singing along had never seen. His name is Damon C. Scott, and for years his stage was the platform at 86th Street.
From Chicago Streets to the 86th Street Platform
Scott started out performing outside the Art Institute of Chicago before moving to New York, where he took a drum down into the subway and started singing for tips. The 86th Street station on the Lexington Avenue Line, on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, became his regular spot. Commuters heading uptown and downtown got a full soul vocal with their morning train.
That platform is also where his music career changed direction. In an interview with Songfacts, Scott explained that he met producer David Levy at the East 86th Street station. Levy offered him paid studio work and later introduced him to Morgan Geist, the New York producer known for the Metro Area duo and the Environ label.
Storm Queen and the Original Look Right Through
Geist ran a side project called Storm Queen, and Scott became its voice. He went to Geist’s studio in Queens, where he says he was paid around $50 to $60 to sing on tracks, and he appears on earlier Storm Queen releases such as “Let’s Make Mistakes” and “It Goes On.”
Look Right Through came out on Environ in October 2010. At the time it was, in Scott’s words, just another song. He told Songfacts he cut the vocal in two takes and never felt it sounded as good as it could have. The original is a warm, deep house record that did well with DJs but stayed in the underground for three years.
The MK Remix That Beat Eminem and Rihanna
Everything changed when Marc Kinchen, better known as MK, remixed the track. The Detroit producer had built his name in the 1990s with his MK dubs, and his rework of Look Right Through turned Scott’s vocal into a bouncy, chopped up hook built for big rooms. Ministry of Sound released it in the UK on November 3, 2013.
A week later, on November 10, the MK Vocal Edit entered the UK Singles Chart at No. 1 and topped the UK Dance Chart at the same time. As FACT reported that week, it finished ahead of Eminem and Rihanna’s “The Monster” by about 9,500 copies. It was MK’s first chart success under his own name, and the record later went platinum in the UK.
Scott did not hear the news from the studio. He has said he found out through phone calls from people in England, and that he then asked Geist why nobody had told him.
The Voice Nobody Could Put a Face To
The chart run created an odd situation. The record was credited to Storm Queen and MK, and Scott was not in the music video, which follows a man in an eyepatch through a London hotel. So when he flew over to perform, audiences only realized who he was once he opened his mouth.
He toured the UK and Europe off the back of the hit, with shows in Denmark, Spain and Ireland, and he returned to Gibraltar in 2015. He has also said he could not perform under the Storm Queen name. The suggestion he got was to tour as Damon C. Scott or, half jokingly, as “Storm King.”
Back Underground: Damon at 86th Street
The No. 1 did not turn into a fortune. Scott has explained that he signed his vocals as work for hire, and in interviews he has said he saw little money from the song or from the gigs it brought him. In 2015 filmmaker Emily Sheskin made a short documentary, Damon at 86th Street, which FACT published that May. It showed him exactly where the story started: on the subway platform, still singing for commuters.
He has kept making music on his own terms since then, cowriting “Carry On” with the London group Mob Culture and setting up his own company, Great Scott Records. Yet more than a decade after it topped the charts, Look Right Through is still a guaranteed reaction on any dancefloor, which makes the story behind it hit even harder.
Why the Look Right Through Story Still Matters
House music has a long history of hidden voices, from session singers to uncredited divas whose vocals carried other people’s hits. We have covered similar stories before, like how Sam Smith sang Disclosure’s Latch on a lunch break and how a remix turned Show Me Love into a classic. Damon C. Scott’s story belongs on that list. The next time Look Right Through drops in a set, remember where that voice was found: on a subway platform, with a drum and an open case.
