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Curiously enough, this is a single I remember for non-musical reasons: a Saturday-morning children's programme held a competition to take a cover photo for this single, and I recall them showing a film of the winner getting to meet the band and professional photographer who took the picture they actually used with the same model and location. I thought the original version was better, though. Whilst I must have heard the song itself at the time, I had no memory at all of it until I listened back to it on Now 12, and I was quite surprised to discover that, as my adult self can tell, it's blatantly a song about a prostitute, a sort of 'Roxanne' with synth-brass (er, no pun intended!). That possibly makes appearing on the cover less of a prize for the competition-winner's friend than it seemed at the time...
This story seems to encapsulate something about JHJ, caught between teenybop and the soul music they seemed to want to make (although one of them was Mickie Most's son, so possibly not determined to stay in the musical underground). The pitfall is, though, that when they tried to write about serious subjects their lyrics struggled to rise beyond the most obvious clichés, and this song suffers pretty badly from that. It's musically solid but no more and (in my experience at least) not very memorable, and moderate success seems about right for it. In fact this was their fourth Top 20 hit in a row, but they were never again seen in the Top 40.
Also appearing on:Now 10, 11
Available on: The Very Best of Johnny Hates Jazz
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