Stevie Wonder – ‘Part-Time Lover’

5 October 1985

This sounds like it’s a Hall and Oates single; that’s how bad Stevie Wonder’s ‘Part-Time Lover’ is. It’s bland ’80s synth-pop with no soul, no personality, and no distinctive features, made purely to cash in on name recognition and the market for cocktail-bar sonic wallpaper.

We can state as fact that it’s less insultingly trite than ‘I Just Called To Say I Love You’, but that’s a bar so low a slug could vault it. Unless subsequent evidence reveals it to have been made under extreme duress, ‘Part-Time Lover’ is another ugly and unfunny chapter in Stevie Wonder’s astonishing 1980s dereliction of his talent.