28 September 1989
Quick recap. At first, up to early September 1989, you were hearing the voice of Loleatta Holloway as sampled from her 1980 single ‘Love Sensation’. Since then, once Holloway and other interested parties had a quiet word with Black Box about the niceties of copyright and clearance, you have apparently been hearing the voice of future M People singer Heather Small, drafted in quickly to re-record the vocals. (One way to tell them apart is that Small drags the phrasing of “what you do, what you do to me” in the second verse of her version.) At no point were you hearing the voice of Katrin Quinol, the striking French model hired by the Italian producers behind Black Box to front their project. Miming, lip syncing and other sharp practices would feature again in pop music controversies over the next couple of years. Not that Black Box learned their lesson; their next two singles featured the uncredited vocals of Martha Wash from The Weather Girls, and soon again it was raining lawyers.
At the risk of appearing to be wilfully contrarian, the reasons I love ‘Ride On Time’ don’t include the vocals; Holloway and Small are honours graduates of the ‘loud = soulful’ school of singing, which isn’t my thing. Instead, it’s those great Italo-disco piano chords and euphoric beats that do it. In fairness, the slices of Holloway-Small add to the overall energy, but were they worth all the trouble they caused? Not for me.
I suppose now is an opportune moment to reveal that I’m not really writing this; the real author is a struggling freelancer who is a dinger on the typewriter but, alas, not photogenic enough to front this project, which is where I was called in. I trust this doesn’t come between you and your enjoyment of these lines going forward.
