80s brit soul - big hair, smooth grooves

uk soul artists in the 80s were not obviously from these shores on first glance. sure, if you listened carefully or read smash hits you would find out soon enough that they were from basildon or wigan rather than minneapolis or atlanta. they didn't go out of their way to represent britain, maybe because the music wasn't as distinct as it is today. they dressed like their us counterparts, sounded like them and some even had as much success across the pond.

many of these acts embraced jheri curl soul in all its aesthetic glory, and so visually you probably wouldn't realise say, that loose ends and midnight star were from different parts of the world. they wore the same metallic suits and piled their hair high on one side (the girls, mostly).

others, well they just did their thing and some endeared themselves to the american record buying public more than the home crowd. critics often believe british artists make cynical attempts to crack the us market by adopting a us-style persona and sound, and that this is the secret of their success. the truth is, they stick out like a sore thumb over there.

what the british acts did have though, despite copycat images and sounds, was a certain sweetness and honesty that shone through their lyrics. most preferred to sing about relationships and avoided the overconfident posturing that captured the essence of the soul glo genre so well.

ten brit soul classics from the 80s - download here

loose ends - hanging on a string (1985)

loose ends are still held up as shining examples of 80s soul - both here and across the atlantic. this 1985 hit from their second album 'so where are you' was one of their many chart successes. one time vocalist trish lewin's daughter, lisa roxanne, has carried on the family pop legacy in recent years.

royalle delite - i'll be a freak for you (1983)

not that much is known about this group, although they had several other club hits which I don't remember but would love to find. great squelchy bass, nonchalant vocals and stop-start percussion.

princess - say i'm your number one (1985)

princess was part of the saw stable...but a million miles from kylie, jason and er, big fun. in 2005 she resurfaced on 'hit me baby one more time', miming. vernon kay barely hid his disgust...wish i hadn't seen it. this was my jam and i nagged my way to a '1' earring like she had in the video. even though it would be another 5 years (of rows) before I was allowed to get my ears pierced.

mica paris - my one temptation (1988)

mica was only 19 when she released her debut album 'so good' in 1988 inlcuding a duet with will downing. never quite hitting the big time, her sound heralded a more sophisticated late 80s, like the aural equivalent of a glossy coffee table book, an ideal background to dinner parties and wine bars nationwide. don't get me wrong, i like mica, but i've never been as surprised at her lack of lasting crossover success as she seems to be.

jaki graham - round and around (1985)

jaki was perhaps best known for several duets with david grant. the former ub40 backing vocalist had a long run of solo hits between 1985 and 1988, of which this was the first. i can remember making myself sick trying to recreate the dizzying spinning dance she does in the video.

errol brown - your personal touch (1987)

he is of course, known primarily as the lead singer of 70s soul band hot chocolate, and this track was released from errol's first solo albun in 1987. after being somewhat ubiquitous around london in the 90s, charming his way around the club and bar scene, he's now living a more settled life with long-suffering wife ginette in the bahamas.

cool notes - in your car (1985)
this south london group started life as a lovers' rock act in the late 70s, morphing via disco to true eighties jheri soul artistes. their biggest hits were this track and 'spend the night' in 1985, from their much sought-after album 'have a good forever'. band couple steve and lorraine mcintosh are the parents of bradley from s club 7. tsk, it's always a shame when the parents are so much cooler than the kids...

pasadenas - enchanted lady (1988)
the pasadenas were a band that paid homage to 60s/70s soul greats - hence 'tribute' in 1988. despite a lot of covers and straight jacking the o'jays, they were decent songwriters, as evidenced by this 1988 track. ok, one of the reasons i like it is also because it featured in the episode of only fools and horses when rodney and cassandra get it together, in the nightclub under the watchful eye of mickey pearce and jevon.

sade - the sweetest taboo (1985)

sade, whilst a respected and successful artists amongst the soul fraternity, was also a favourite of estate agents and dinner party hosts. especially her first album in 1984 'diamond life'. if it ain't broke, don't fix it - she carried this theme through her next five albums. she also invented (or reinvented) the 'croydon' facelift' ponytail . except she looked good in it. she found her work extensively remixed, covered and sampled in the 90s.

billy ocean - caribbean queen (1984)
lazy 80s music journalists labelled billy ocean the uk's answer to michael jackson. i don't remember this ludicrous comparison but i did always dance to 'caribbean queen' in a line with my friends at school discos after one too many cherryades. hilariously, in current chris rock sitcom, 'everybody hates chris', his younger sister tonya is a huge billy ocean fan, and claims that he invented the moonwalk not wacko, who stole it. it would have been great if that were true.

forgotten soundtracks of the 80s

a long time ago in a galaxy far away (let's say, circa 1985), the internet didn't exist.

music wasn't free, it was only available in record stores, for those who had cash. those that didn't would spend hours hovering over the red record button on their ghettoblaster waiting for the songs they wanted to come on the radio. this could take days and you always missed the intro.

clever editing was required to keep as much of the song as possible before the dj started smarming again, usually bruno brookes and mark goodier on radio 1, the former last seen presenting a fishing show on sky sports 3. what if the tape ran out before the end of the song, and this was before 1987 when tapes didn't flip over to the other side automatically? don't smirk, generation y, that was the height of convenience and technology back then!

add this to the equation - there were some songs that were never played on the radio. you'd have to fork out for the whole tape to get one song. there were even some songs that weren't commercially available because they were used on a soundtrack which didn't get released. so what did you do? you waited three to four years until the movie arrived on tv, that's what you did, then you recorded it to video. then you played it back and shoved your ghettoblaster right up to the tv speakers. repeat process until someone didn't interrupt to yell at you for doing/not doing something. if you were smart you locked the living room door.

for all of the 80s kids nodding along to this post, here are some of those songs in glorious, convenient mp3 format...

ten hard to get 80s soundtracks - download here

can't buy me love (1987)
atlantic starr - one lover at a time
randy hall - all night
the best john hughes movie that never was, and i think, the most underrated of all the 80s teen movies. the atlantic starr track is from the scene near the beginning when the cheerleaders are practising. i wanted this song so i could copy cindy mancini and co's dancing. the second track is the setting for ronald's public premiere of the infamous 'african anteater ritual' dance. a truly legendary moment - think david brent's ill-advised office high-kicks set to a high school dance.




mannequin (1987)
belinda carlisle - in my wildest dreams
alisha - do you dream about me
everyone knows the big tune released from this movie - soft rock singalong 'nothing's gonna stop us now' by starship. it went to number one across the world but this wasn't enough to warrant a full release for the soundtrack. belinda carlisle provided an unreleased track for the memorable cartoon intro that sees emmy transformed from egyptian spinster to 80s department store dummy. the second track is from 80s pop star alisha's second album, and was used in the scene where andrew mccarthy and kim cattrall scamper around the department store after hours. which i was so jealous of.

coming to america (1988)
levert - addicted to you
michael rodgers - i like it like that
back then, eddie murphy was a comic genius. as soon as you'd stopped laughing at his standup tales of ice cream vans and drunk uncles, he introduced you to soul glo, crazy barbers who argue about boxing champions and that reverend, jacked by countless comedians since (richard blackwood, i am talking to you). the first song is from the club scene where akeem and semi find out that every woman in queens is severely unhinged. the second is from the scene where lisa receives the $500,000 earrings. while her sister prances about in big plastic earrings worthy of pat butcher, oblivious to the injustice.

cocktail (1987)
leroy gibbons - this magic moment
jimmy cliff - shelter of your love
by the time this movie was released, tom cruise was invincible. (oh, this was way before he discovered scientology...) which was just as well because as much i love it, the plot is sketchy at best. from what i can gather, tom visits an old bar colleague in jamaica and also meets elisabeth shue. then they dance and drink a lot. fair play to them. both of these songs are from scenes in balmy, outdoor clubs.





vision quest (1985)
madonna - crazy for you
madonna - gambler
fortuitously (or not, for the rest of the cast) this release coincided with the exact moment when madonna blew up in the uk. in the hot summer of 1985 holiday', 'crazy for you' and 'into the groove' were simultaneously in the uk charts. i would boom them out of the living room as i kicked, spun and crawled across the carpet in leggings and fingerless gloves. i used to think my mum hated madonna. it turns out she was similarly impressed by her music, but was afraid of her effect on my behaviour. can't think why...oops, we haven't talked about the movie. despite her brief cameo as a nightclub singer, it was and still is, all about madonna.

the uk's answer to the jackson five...??

five star - a family r&b group comprising five siblings - were touted as the uk's answer to the jackson five. in 1985. come on, back then there was definitely a delayed reaction as we responded to musical and cultural missives from across the atlantic, but 16 years?

deniece, doris, lorraine, delroy and steadman were just teenagers when they burst onto the scene in 1984 with their brassy bleached hair (the girls) and jheri curls (the boys). plus braces all round. their first single, problematic, failed to make an impression despite landing the plum performance spot on pebble mill at one. actually maybe that was the problem...

before they enjoyed chart success and proved the old adage that money can't buy taste, five star, despite their tender ages (ranging from 14 to 21) produced classic 80s brit soul a la loose ends. seriously, that good. they had their own label, tent records, and ok, like the jackson five and later beyonce, their dad, buster pearson, was pulling the strings.

the obvious family schtick aside, their careers took off because deniece had a great voice. the others found roles for themselves beyond backup, 'why don't you' style. delroy was the, er, baby. (actually this is sounding more like the spice girls). steadman was the oldest and 'looked a bit like michael jackson'. doris was the choreographer and 'looked a bit like janet jackson'. lorraine, brainwashed by blue peter, felt compelled to make mock ups of their video sets out of old cardboard boxes. and dated eddie murphy, briefly. you can decide which of these achievements is greater.

so their first album, 'luxury of life' was a triumph of slinky mid 80s electro soul replete with bubbling basslines, sweet vocals and summery instrumentation. so much so that an unprecedented seven singles were released, with moderate success right up until the last one, a song about being mechanically manipulated - 'system addict'. someone in a&r (probably buster) had finally noticed that in 1985, we were obsessed with futuristic gadgetry and convinced that by the year 2000, computers would rule the world.

but soon they were bonafide popstars and commerciality struck resulting in the music becoming more hit and miss quality-wise. they bought more cars than their romford home could accommodate and started wearing matching catsuits. yep, including the boys.

so, if you're too young to remember what they looked like, don't look too closely at the image at the top of this page. it'll only put you off, just listen to the music...

ten five star tracks you need to own - download here

hide and seek
lots of people think this is a new edition song that five star covered - in fact its the other way round. this was their first proper single and the dancing in the video is hilarious....

let me be the one
the five star track most likely to be mis-labelled as loose ends if you try to download it from limewire.

all fall down
a big hit stateside and a popular choice to accompany majorettes (remember wanting to be one of those?) and aerobics classes nationwide.

love take over
hmmm. either five star's music videos are intended to have nothing to do with the song or there is a genius undercover message that I can't decipher. five star gatecrash an empty country house and prance about.

find the time
actually, I seem to remember the video for this track had lots of clocks in it, cos of the time thing. there goes my last theory.

if i say yes
another upbeat track that I didn't appreciate at the time. I think partly because in the video they wore awful oversized grey suits and pranced about a haunted house.

show me what you got for me
best track on their second and most successful album, 'silk and steel'. perhaps because as a non-single, it was not sullied by live performances in matching shoulder padded frightsuits with a dance routine in which poor delroy looked increasingly unwieldy, what with him being in the throes of puberty and all.

whenever you're ready
the first single from 1987's 'between the lines' album. more polished, but still good with nice bubbly sound effects.

strong as steel
a great slow jam from 1987 that has been covered by gladys knight amongst others.

rock my world
from their last commercially successful album in the UK, 'rock the world'. different again, but worth a spin.

miss jackson if you're nasty

ok, let's get this out of the way first. janet jackson is not the best singer in the industry. but the standard appears to have now been set by artists who employ rampant melisma and the technically brilliant yet incredibly unappealing christina aguilera.

janet's breakthrough was in 1986 with the 'control' album produced by jimmy jam and terry lewis, previously members of prince's group, flyte time. no vocal gymnastics necessary, this album was anchored by janet's confident delivery and the precedent set by electro funk/soul such as shannon's 'let the music play' and cherrelle's 'i didn't mean to turn you on'.

the album was short - 8 tracks - but it was a crash course in being a young woman in 1986 and beyond. female assertion at a time when destiny's child were trying to colour inside the lines at elementary school (subject to age verification, cough). janet instructed young girls to take control, cut family ties, kick your boyfriend into touch and make him wait for it.

these were ideas that resonated with my pre-teen group, and even more so with the teenage community, who appreciated further reinforcement of the guidance from girls' magazines like just seventeen and mizz on dealing with sex. in 1986, the media didn't dare portray 12 year old girls getting pregnant and carrying on happily with their lives in the way coronation street and eastenders would have us believe is possible in recent years. they put out messages about safe sex and waiting until you were older, because society had a spiralling aids epidemic to combat before it even dealt with teenage mums. janet, in her own way, made it cool to say no.

hmm. twenty years ago, no one went online to find that 21 year old janet was in the process of divorcing first husband james debarge, whom she had married at 18. i've listened to the 'control' album differently since the 2005 claims that they in fact had a baby during their short marriage. back then, you got your info from magazines like smash hits and the one-off interview with parky or terry wogan, and so precious few people even realised she had been married.

of course, its entirely possible that some of the bitterness and icy resolve that made 'control' such a great album was a reflection of the fact that janet's first two albums, released in 1982 and 1984, flopped. actually they contained some great tracks but failed to inspire, the first merely reflecting the waning disco sound and the second lyrically damper but equally funky as 'control', let down by an ill-advised duet with cliff richard. yes, that's cliff richard.

by the time janet followed up her successs with 'rhythm nation 1814' in 1989, social consciousness was the order of the day and this album's title track remains the only credible plea for unity to date. almost making up for several self-indulgent cheesefests unleashed by her brother.

in the 90s she trod the safer, summery r&b route, to great effect, then lost her way slightly in the 00s by failing to live up to the standards she set for herself. however, in today's gossip and scandal obsessed culture, surfacing rumours of an 80s baby with then teenage husband james debarge and that wardrobe malfunction have ensured her profile remains high regardless.

and you know you want to look that good when you hit 40. so here is some lesser known janet, enjoy!

top 10 lesser known janet tracks - download here

making love in the rain
the first collaboration with jazz artist herb alpert released in 1987 , this is a sultry chillout track in a similar vein to 'funny how time flies'.

diamonds
the second, and better known herb alpert track, following a similar path to the upbeat 'control' numbers.

he doesn't know i'm alive
quintessentially 80s and often overlooked 'control' track. ok yes, i used to sing this into a hairbrush.

one more chance
1993 b side to 'if' from the 'janet' era. probably left off due to the proliferation of slow jams making the album.

pretty boy
cool electro funk from the 1984 'dream street' album. production-wise, a preview to things to come.

don't mess up this good thing
janet was too young, and jumped on too late to be a disco pioneer. but this standout track from her self titled debut in 1982 was a taste of what might have been.

where are you now
mid-tempo remix of a melancholy 'janet' track, made sunnier for the 'janet:remixed' album by nellee hooper.

70s love groove
'janet:remixed' track originally on the 'you want this' single. similar to 'any time, any place'.

you need me
included on the re-released cassette version of 'rhythm nation 1814'. a 'miss you much' clone (never a bad thing).

accept me
mid-tempo grower released as a b side to 'every time' from 'the velvet rope'.

purple music

so, for my first post i'm tackling the big one. prince.

well, prince himself is rather small but his catalogue of work is...a monstrosity. with another artist, a prolific output could amount to countless filler, mediocre demos and alternate (ie. crap) versions of their better known work. but with prince, not so much.

some of prince's b-sides, leftover album tracks and unreleased gems are as popular amongst fans as his hits. and just when you think there can't be any more, he unleashes yet more lost jams - seriously, from 1976 to 1990 this man must have only have been let out of the studio to perform.

I'm going through a serious prince moment right now. 2007 has seen a return to his patented minneapolis funk style amongst the r&b community in particular. p diddy and fergie's press play reject 'all night long', ashanti's 'my number babe' and unklejam's 'love ya' to name just three.

one of the disconcerting things about growing up listening to prince was that at an early age, you suspected that you were already taller than him. his songs had cute, girly titles like 'pink cashmere', 'peach and 'kiss' that failed to alert your parents to the rudeness that lied beneath. and like most little girls he loved purple and was unashamedly crazy. he loved to dress up and act like a diva - we identified.

during the 'symbol' era, many thought he had taken self-obsession a step too far - he thought he was unique, and therefore untouchable. the critics disagreed but guess who ended up being right?

one of great things about prince is that he was happy to share the limelight. to give up some of his best songwriting to other artists such as chaka khan (i feel for you), the bangles (manic monday), and sinead o'connor (nothing compares 2 u), was an inspired move that ensured his longevity. back in the day, when you literally bought the album and hoped for new b sides, his output was consistent rather than overwhelming and you never had the opportunity to get tired of him (beyonce, take note). whilst his latest protege or composition, liberally sprinkled with his signature style, wowed the public, he was backstage plotting his next move.

he remains to this day the daddy of the protege business, using his purple magic to launch the albeit short-lived careers of taja sevelle, vanity 6, jill jones and sheila e amongst others, and the various bands he performed with over the duration of his career - the time, the family, the revolution and the new power generation.

this is my current hard to find prince top 10 - it changes daily. i have more prince on my mp3 player than any other artist - about 150 tracks. ok, so these days you can download anything but these are non-album tracks, at least.

top 10 hard-to-find prince mp3s... download here

17 days
originally written for vanity 6 sequel project appollonia, prince eventually released this as the b side to 'when doves cry' in 1984. amazing bassline, almost as good as the a side.

wonderful ass
classic prince circa purple rain. no idea why it didn't make the cut - maybe warner bros. couldn't handle the concept of a song with 'ass' in the title? well, it was 1983.

sex
again, prince tells it like it is and this gem doesn't make the cut for the 'batdance' soundtrack released in 1989. just before color me badd moved the boundaries of acceptability...

tell me how u wanna b done
remix of 'the continental' from the 'symbol' album. but much better.

cindy c
1987's controversial 'black album' was pulled due to concern over the overt eroticism of the lyrics...uh...had they been listening to the other lyrics up until this point? prince apparently had a huge crush on cindy crawford, despite her towering over him by a good nine inches.

erotic city
ok, so prince is obsessed with sex. but this b side to 'let's go crazy' is a fan favourite and still tears up the dancefloor.

love or $
hard to find track featured in the film 'under the cherry moon' that failed to make the cut for the accompanying soundtrack, 'parade'. only ever officially released as the b side to 'kiss'.

last heart
an album track from the 1985 'dream factory' project that got shelved when prince was forced to streamline the content to create 1987's 'sign of the times' album.

18 and over
1991 diamonds and pearls-era reject that picks up where 'gett off' and 'cream' left off...

underneath the cream
a track from 2004's 'chocolate invasion' album which was only available via the npg music club.

expect more prince in future posts...