Friday 9 July 2010

Louise 'Light Of My Life'

Chart Peak: 8

YouTube

Louise's first solo single since her departure from Eternal was this big ballad... It was an immediate success, racing to No 8 in October 1995

You want a really tenuous link? Judging by the video I linked to in the last post, Louise was presenting TotP the week the Beautiful South were on. That aside, this track seems curiously out of place at this point in the sequence, beyond the fact that fits in with the generally quite mellow mood of these early tracks.

In some ways, though, it'd be tough to find a "right" place for this song, because there's not a lot to it. It's the first song on this album that I couldn't have hummed, though I remember it being a hit. Of course, that's partly because it wasn't the sort of music I was interested in at the time, and we're not yet quite in the era when I was listening to chart rundowns every week; but at the same time it seems quite fitting for Louise. On paper she was a major star of the era, scoring eleven consecutive Top 20 singles (most of them in the Top 10) between 1995 and 2001, plus a one-off charity single a couple of years later. Yet few if any of these hits could really be said to have left a major impression on the world.

I did check the title a couple of times, though, so this really is the single they chose to launch her. Somehow, it sounds of its time without having sounded modern at the time. It was co-written by Simon Climie, who of course cropped up a couple of times on Now 12. It has a very off-the-shelf quality about it, as if they just ordered a ballad and got this by return of post, but it's so utterly unmemorable that I've actually managed to forget it while I'm typing this.

Also appearing on: Now 33, 34, 35, 38, 39, 46, 47, 50, 56
Available on: Changing Faces: the Best of Louise

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