19 November 1988
This was the year that the European Court of Human Rights ruled that Ireland’s existing laws making homosexual acts illegal were in contravention of the European Convention on Human Rights. Those laws were eventually repealed in 1993. In the UK, homosexuality had been decriminalised in 1967 but the 1980s AIDS crisis had unleashed some pretty appalling public commentary and articles in the British media. I was too young at the time to be aware of this issue, and I may be reading too much into it from today’s vantage point, but using her new-found pop stardom to follow up the biggest hit of the year, ‘The Only Way Is Up’, with a song called ‘Stand Up For Your Love Rights’ seems to me to have been a decent thing for team Yazz to do. It got to number one here and number two in the UK, so it was another big hit for her.
Where ‘Stand Up For Your Love Rights’ doesn’t have the strong hooks of its hi-NRG predecessor, it makes up by sounding less cluttered and forced; to my ears it’s a more agreeable listening experience. I like the more spacious house-plus-soul production, and I hear touches of another huge dance hit of 1988, ‘Theme From S’Express’. Yazz herself sounds more comfortable here, and her voice is certainly clearer. It may not be a particularly memorable track, but its heart is in the right place.
