UB40 'Can't Help Falling In Love'

Chart Peak: 1 [2 weeks]

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Formed back in 1978, UB40 have charted consistently ever since... 1993 has been a great year for the band and has seen them record their 3rd UK No.1 with this cover of the Elvis Presley/Andy Williams standard.

Yes, a new month, a new album and a new format. As you can see from the illustration on the right, for the first time in the history of this blog we come to you through the medium of cassette. We can thank a work colleague of mine for supplying this and other tapes, as 26 is an album I'd been planning to cover for a while - it was the last Now album of 1993, which as you might not have spotted was the last year remaining between 1983 and 1999 not covered on this blog. That's partly coincidental, but it's also probably the year I was least conscious or aware of pop music after my toddler days, and even now there are a good few hits on here that I'd never heard before I got this tape home.

Sadly, this track is not one of those. And whilst it might seem slightly out of place to be covering a compilation aimed at the Christmas market in the height of summer, this actually hit the top of the chart 19 years ago next week, so it should have been within the catchment area of Now 25. It later did the double and became their second transatlantic Number One, managing a seven-week stay at the top of the US chart thanks to its appearance in the film Sliver. I've never actually seen that but as the video suggests, it has a strong motif of CCTV voyeurism, and in that context you might expect this to have been a darkened version, somewhat along the lines of Urge Overkill's version of 'Girl, You'll Be A Woman Soon' (at least I assume that was supposed to sound creepy, it always did to me anyway) - at least that's what you might expect if you weren't familiar with UB40, who had by this point already released two entire albums of covers and had 13 previous chart singles with other people's material. What you'd expect from them by this point is more or less what you get, cheap sounding karaoke with none of the gravitas of Elvis. 

Also appearing on: Now 1, 4, 6, 7, 9, 13, 17, 18, 41, 56
Available on: Promises And Lies