Eternal 'Angel Of Mine'

Chart Peak: 4
YouTube

'Angel Of Mine' was Eternal's 3rd Top 5 smash of 1997 and their 14th consecutive Top 15 hit overall since 1993.. It made No. 4 in October 1997 as the follow-up to their first No. 1 single 'I Wanna Be The Only One'.

I've no idea how many of the people who read these blog posts actually click through to the YouTube videos, but for any who don't I shall reproduce the uploader's description of this one: "THIS SONG WAS ORIGINALLY RECORDED BY UNITED KINGDOM PHENOMENAL ICON OF R&B SOUL 'ETERNAL' BACK IN 1997 AT THE SAME MOMENT DIANA PRINCESS WAS GONE BY CAR ACCIDENT AND TERRIBLE CRISIS ECONOMIC IN ASIA.HIKS!!!" Hope you feel more enlightened now.

As we all know now, there was only to be one Number One single for them and in fact 'Angel Of Mine', the new song on a well-timed Greatest Hits album, was the end of that run of Top 15 hits - only one more single emerged, by which time the act had been reduced to a duo of the Bennett sisters, and they were dropped at the turn of the century. Thus we see their last appearance (chronologically) in the Now series and really it's none too soon because I feel like I've ploughed though hundreds of Eternal songs on this blog, and now there are at most only another four to go. By and large my experience has been one of disappointment because I thought they were largely OK at the time and yet I'm mostly bored by them in retrospect. The only difference is that I hated 'Angel Of Mine' from the start, always finding it so sickly and sanctimonious it makes the Backstreet Boys sound like Tom Lehrer. The closest I come to having a positive memory of it is that I remember some of my fellow cast members in the university German drama group singing it in rehearsal - and even then the positive part of the memory is the togetherness rather than the actual performance. The girls (both Eternal and my fellow students) harmonised well but couldn't make up for the poor song. In fact the song was so bad it was a US Number One in 1999; in fairness it knocked off the actually rather good '...Baby One More Time' but this was hardly a golden era at the top of the Billboard chart. It was of course not a hit over there for Eternal but for the RnB singer Monica. Her version was understandably shunned in the UK, peaking at a more deserved 55.

Also appearing on: Now 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 32, 33, 35, 36, 37
Available on: The Best Love...Ever!