Chart entered : 9 November 1985
Chart peak : 47
Here we say goodbye to another sixties survivor.
This was actually a comeback hit for Johnny , his first for nearly ten years after a largely barren spell on Epic. In fact it was Johnny's first recording of the eighties.
"Rock Me Baby " is not a cover of the Andy Kim hit but a Johnny original which sets his trademark light reggae lilt against a modern production. Johnny's gorgeous singing offsets the crass drum sound to deliver a smoocher's ballad.. It's not a million miles away from Boris Grdiner's I Want To Wake Up With You which made number one the following year so with a bit of radio support - this is the first time I've heard it - I think this could have done much better. It was a bigger hit in a number of European countries but did nothing in his native U.S. Whether Johnny photo-approved the appalling typeface on the sleeve isn't known.
A new album "Here Again" was released the following year with a follow-up single "Baby You're Mine" which covers similar ground with jarring Fairlight crashes but is much lumpier. It wasn't a hit anywhere . I've only heard a couple of the other tracks, the interminable title track and nostalgic "Never Going Back ", both of which hint that Johnny feels he hasn't much more to say.
And that's how it turned out. Johnny just vanished. He had a minor hit in the UK in 1989 with a Lee Hamblin re-mix of his biggest international hit "I Can See Clearly Now " that he had no active part in ( thankfully ) . There were also two compilation LPs in the nineties that he did nothing to promote. In 2006 he was reported to be working on transferring his old hits onto digital format but there's been no end product from this. He also appeared briefly in the documentary film One Day In Houston in 2007 which appears to be his last public appearance to date. Now 75 , it seems increasingly unlikely that Johnny will come out of retirement.
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