11 May 1989
If you’d asked me in 1989 which we would have in 2022, flying cars taking us to the moon or Kylie elevated to icon status with a slew of brilliant hits, I would have said… the Kylie one, obviously. She was clearly a great pop star, her then-suppliers Stock, Aitken and Waterman had already made some genuinely good records in among their more notorious cut n’ paste jobs, so it was always likely that even in the short term those planets would eventually align. Et voilà: stepping up from the lo-quality hi-NRG of ‘I Should Be So Lucky’ and ‘The Locomotion’, and then the adequate stunt-casting romantic duet of ‘Especially For You’, ‘Hand On Your Heart’ is a good Kylie-SAW single at last.
Okay, the verses are a bit aimless and meandering, with a melody that has Kylie straining to reach a high shelf in parts. However, ‘Hand On Your Heart’ has a bright and catchy chorus. Something sounding like an actual piano can be heard here, shoring up the track and providing a welcome taste of the Italo-disco sound that SAW clearly liked, usually did well, and really should have done more often. Even better are those two strong pre-chorus lines (“I want to hear you tell me you don’t want my love” and “Look me in the eye and tell me we are really through”) which Kylie delivers with assertive confidence. Given that she was their biggest star and effectively their Dionne Warwick-esque in-house muse, you’d think SAW would have given Kylie more material of this quality. But no. (They slightly redeem themselves the following year when Kylie gets the best SAW single of all, ‘Better The Devil You Know’).
Stock, Aitken and Waterman will also feature on the very next number one in the Irish singles chart, but in radically different circumstances.
