YouTube [warning: contains John Barrowman]
Cathy hit big in the early 1990s with tunes such as 'Just Another Dream', 'Too Many Walls' and the Top 5 smash 'Touch Me'... She returned to the UK Top 20 in 1997 with this cover of the Ray Davies classic 'Waterloo Sunset'.
It's not on YouTube, but the original video for this single actually featured a cameo appearance from Ray Davies, so presumably he had no objections to this version. I recall reading at the time that they'd met up at a songwriting retreat or something, and presumably Dennis got her money's worth from that as she has of course become a hugely successful songwriter.
Here we find her at the tail end of her career as a pop star, when she'd made an unexpected swerve into sixties-styled pop, with original material as well as covers. Presumably this was to at least some extent a reaction to Britpop, but commercially it didn't pan out brilliantly for her even here (and needless to say, it made no impact at all in the US, where she'd been more successful than I expected before this). This is, in all fairness, a perfectly respectable version of the song but it lacks some of the depth of the original, not really conveying the mixed emotions of the Kinks version. I'm open-minded enough not to hate it but I can't really see the point.
Also appearing on: Now 16 [D Mob introducing Cathy Dennis], 20
Available on: Am I The Kind Of Girl ?
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