Belmont Has a Link To An R&B Hero

It may not be a song you’ve heard in a while, but one listen to the hit “Poison”—as dozens of attendees did at last week’s Dancing with the Belmont Stars—and you may very well time travel back to the music group Bell Biv DeVoe’s heyday.

What you may not know, however, is that Michael Bivins, better known as “Biv” in the group, was a student at Belmont High School in the 1980s. Through the METCO program, he commuted between Roxbury and Belmont until his sophomore year, when he left to pursue music.

Before joining Bell Biv DeVoe, Belvin was a founding member of the Boston-based R&B group New Edition. The group disbanded in 1989, reuniting more than a decade later. Late last year, New Edition announced a Las Vegas residency the first week of March, according to Billboard.com.

Belmont resident Annie Helgason graduated a year ahead of Bivins’ class but remembers the excitement of hearing a classmates’ voice on the radio.

“We heard he was in this band called New Edition, [the radio station] Kiss 108 would play it,” Helgason recalled. “Back then, we had cassette tape recorders, so when a song would come on the radio, we would run over with our cassette tape recorder and put it next to the speaker, and be like, we’re going to tape “Candy Girl.””

In 2018, Bivins received an honorary degree from the Class of 1986, according to a report from WHDH.