Tin Tin Out featuring Espiritu 'Always Something There To Remind Me'

Chart Peak: 14
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Tin Tin Out are Darren Stokes and Lindsay Edwards... 'Always...', due for release on 13th March '95 features the vocals of Vanessa from Espiritu and is a dance reworking of the Bacharach-David classic.

The title is given as 'Always...' on the sleeve image in the booklet too, but elsewhere the full title seems to be used. Perhaps the publishers insisted. This is also the first track on this particular disc I have no memory of from the time.

An odd little phenomenon in 90s music, Tin Tin Out were successful remixers and had a decent crop of hit singles of their own (this is one of six from their debut album) yet seem little-remembered and little-noticed even at the time; I never heard of anybody identifying themselves as Tin Tin Out fans. Indeed, the success and low profile might almost have been part of the same thing; they never seem to have tried to develop a strong identity of their own, treating each single as a one-off commercial effort. The parade of different vocalists fronting different tracks didn't make Stokes and Edwards any more famous either.

The other problem for posterity might be that they were trying so hard to create tracks that suited the dancefloors of the time, and however well that worked then it's not a recipe for making a song that would make sense years later. Nowadays this just sounds like the chorus of the original song being sung over generic dance beats, except that once it's sung in Italian for no apparent reason. I hesitate to be negative but it does nothing for me now.

After the duo's success, Edwards apparently became an academic physiologist. You can download his paper on The Reproducibility of 31-Phosphorus MRS Measures of Muscle Energetics at 3 Tesla in Trained Men, which is something I heartily approve of from an open-access perspective.

Tin Tin Out also appear on: Now 39 (with Shelley Nelson), 44 (with Emma Bunton)
Available on: Always

Tin Tin Out featuring Emma Bunton 'What I Am'

Chart Peak: 2

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I was quite surprised, when I first got a chart reference book to look it up in, to discover that 'What I Am' by Edie Brickell & The New Bohemians only got to Number 31 in the UK. It seemed to be everywhere when it was out, but maybe it was disproportionately popular in London.

Either way, it probably looked like an opportunity to Tin Tin Out, the low-profile production act who managed no fewer than nine Top 40 hits between 1994 and 1999. And what better way to help this single along than to enlist Emma Bunton, for her first release outside the Spice Girls? Well, I'm sure that was the plan, but it flounders on the sheer familiarity of the original, which emphasises how little imagination seems to have gone into this, right the way down to the note-for-note replication of the original guitar solo. Anybody who didn't like the one version wasn't going to like the other; and this is probably why you don't often hear this one now.
However, since EMI decided to release this and the Geri Halliwell record on the same day to launch the inevitable Spice battle, it's hard to resist the comparison. Against that, this can at least claim to be a memorable (if potentially irritating) song, and Bunton's vocal, though not outstanding, at least projects more personality and some sense of enjoyment instead of heavy breathing. Nonetheless, an air of pointlessness pervades the whole exercise, which is as good an explanation as I cna think of for this one coming in second.

Tin Tin Out also appear on: Now 30 (with Espiritu) 38 (with Shelley Nelson)
Emma Bunton also appears on: Now 48, 50, 55, 56, 57
Available on: A Girl Like Me