Rozalla 'Faith (In The Power Of Love)'

Chart Peak: 11 (original version 65)

YouTube

You remember Rozalla and her huge worldwide hit 'Everybody's Free (To Feel Good)'? Yes, so do I. But evidently either they couldn't get the rights to that one or they passed over it because there hadn't been a Now album over the summer of 1991. Instead here's the follow-up single, which had admittedly been released first but reactivated off the back of her biggest success.

This is a perfectly OK piano-led dance track with some decent singing on it, but it feels very like a product of its time now.

Available on: Ultimate Woman

Prince & The New Power Generation 'Gett Off'

Chart Peak: 4

YouTube [it's there at the time of writing!]

And again contractual complexities give us another act slightly curiously represented on the series. To be sure, this track was a huge hit (so much so that an imported remix single even went Top 40 on the album chart) but he'd already had a great many of them and with hindsight, the bulk of his best work was probably already behind him, no innudendo intended. His one other appearance in the series was with a song I've never even heard of.

OK, so we're back into sex territory here, so to speak, and even if the word itself isn't used it's another song that's slightly uncomfortable to hear on the car radio with your parents (or with your children, I presume). Indeed, this is almost the exact opposite of the Color Me Badd song; it doesn't use any ruder words than "ass" - at one point Prince even says "you ain't you-know-what" but the song and performance are rampantly sexual, if not necessarily sexy. Even if you couldn't understand the language he was singing in, and weren't familiar with Prince already, it shouldn't be too difficult to work out what he was singing about here.

What it does have in common with that song is that it's a bit ridiculous, but I think the difference is that he knew and decided to play along with it, as exemplified by the scene in the video where he wields his guitar in the style of a penis. Judging by the various other Prince tracks I've been listening to in order to write this post, it's unlikely that he didn't notice: a little like Serge Gainsbourg he clearly enjoyed being provocative (in both senses of the word) but unlike Gainsbourg he chose to play up his own sexiness. Indeed, it's hard to think of anyone else who's ever had the same combination of machismo, androgyny, irony and seriousness. It's easy to find people who wish they were Prince though.

PS - some releases of this track also give flautist Gary Leeds an artist credit. He does indeed do an excellent job on this track, but so do all the other contributors really.

Also appearing on: Now 22
Available on: The Hits/the B-Sides

Kenny Thomas 'Best Of You'

Chart Peak: 11

YouTube

One of those odd anomalies you sometimes see where somebody makes only one Now appearance, and not with their biggest hit. In fact, though he's little-mentioned now, Thomas was the British soul singer of the time, and managed as many as eight Top 40 singles between 1991 and 1995, of which this reached the second highest peak. 'Best Of You' is not some premonition of the Foo Fighters hit, but it is a cover of a relatively little-known solo track by Booker T. It's a fairly competent effort, truth be told, but if I'd ever heard it before this month it hadn't made much of an impact on me and it rather pales alongside the original version; admittedly, this is more the fault of the production than Thomas himself. And leaving no memory is probably better than the rather painful recollection of the Color Me Badd track.

As with almost every track I look up on YouTube for this blog, there's a comment on at least one instance of this complaining that this is vastly superior to today's music and making particular reference to Simon Cowell. Which is ironic because he sounds to me exactly like the sort of act who'd stand a good chance of winning the X-Factor, although whether his career beyond the second single would have been any different is anyone's guess. In fact, had this single come out on RCA you could easily have convinced me that it was Cowell who signed him up anyway.

Available on: Outstanding - The Essential Collection

Color Me Badd 'I Wanna Sex You Up'

Chart Peak: 1 [3 weeks]

YouTube

Even when the albums aren't in my personal collection, I always make the effort to seek out every track I have to write about so that I know what I'm writing about. Rarely in the history of this blog have I been more tempted to cheat than now. It's not just that this is a bad record (although it undoubtedly is) but it's a really sick-making sort of bad, where the slight discomfort at the word "sex" that I mentioned in the previous post hasn't dimished one jot. With all due respect to New Kids On The Block it's almost the template for boyband music in the rest of the decade, an awkward combination of loverman posturing and half-baked attempts to sound funky. Plus extra falsetto vocals because if you can't sing soulfully, singing high is the next best thing.

I'd forgotten, or possibly never even seen, the creepy video before, but I did remember that one of them looked a bit like a low-rent George Michael. Even he'd be ashamed of this though.

Available on: C.M.B.

Salt-N-Pepa 'Let's Talk About Sex'

Chart Peak: 2

YouTube

Another of the many runners-up to the aforementioned Bryan Adams single (which, I'm pleased to report, isn't going to show up on this blog). 'Let's Talk About Sex' is sometimes described as a controversial single, although I don't personally remember that much fuss actually being made about it. Certainly I heard it on the radio a lot at the time, even though I was at the sort of age where I couldn't really hear an adult say the word "sex" without feeling faintly embarassed.

Musically, this is actually a pretty decent track for its time, heavily based on the Staple Singers' 'I'll Take You There', but the lyrics don't entirely live up to the billing. They actually spend more of the song talking about talking about sex than actually getting around to the point, as if they're more excited about claiming the credit for raising the subject at all than having anything much to actually say about it. Admittedly, there exists a harder-hitting version of the song called 'Let's Talk About AIDS' but that was obviously a bit too far into a taboo area to be released as a single.

Also appearing on: Now 12, 13, 21, 28 (with En Vogue)
Available on: It's Like That! [Explicit]

Zoe 'Sunshine On A Rainy Day'

Chart Peak: 4 [original version 53 in 1990]

YouTube

Discounting Vic Reeves, Zoe Pollock is the the first act on Now 20 who hadn't had at least a Top 20 hit in the 1980s. I know we're not that far into the decade, but it does seem to say something about the way they sequence these Christmas-market Now albums. And almost as if to labour this point, she proved to be pretty much a one-hit wonder: perhaps following this up with a song with the chorus "lightning never strikes twice" wasn't a great omen.

As is often the case with songs that seem destined for compilations called things like Ultimate Best Feelgood Anthems Ever For Your Mum, I'm too much of a natural grouch to remember it fondly. Coming back to it now, though, I realise that she was actually a fairly good singer, possibly a bit too good for this song. Certainly the power of the vocals is rather undercut by the generic tendency of the lyrics and that same programmed percussion that seemed to be on 60% of singles in the early 1990s; admittedly, this is only on the remix that ultimately made the Top 10, whilst the original mix is a little more interesting.

Apparently she subsequently married briefly-hyped performance poet Murray Lachlan Young. And even more subsequently split up with him.

Available on: Ultimate Dance

Lisa Stansfield 'Change'

Chart Peak: 10

YouTube

There was always something a bit classier about her than most of the other soul singers around that time, wasn't there? And yes, I do include Mick Hucknall in that. Perhaps that's why she manages to make a decent job of that most difficult tasks, a song about contentment. It's difficult to sound pleased with your life without just sounding pleased with yourself, but she comes closer than most, although it's at least as long as it needs to be even in the single edit - I don't think I'd really want to listen to the longer album version, thanks.

One of her greatest strengths is that she doesn't try to oversell the vocal in this song, and this makes her performance all the more believable. She sounds entirely committed to the material, although that may not have been a great imaginative leap since she co-wrote the song with her husband and as far as I know they're still together almost twenty years later. What she doesn't do is sound like she's protesting too much. Probably the best track on here so far.

Also appearing on: Now 26
Available on: Biography - The Greatest Hits