Chart peak : 6
Number of hits : 10
One of the eighties' least loved bands, I think it will be a long time before this lot get rehabilitated.
T'Pau started life at Shrewsbury Art College. Carol Decker was born in Liverpool in 1957. Her family moved to Warwickshire when she was in her teens. Carol went to the college after failing her A Levels. While there she joined a band called The Lazers and hooked up with their guitarist Ron Rogers ( born 1959 ). She did dead end jobs while writing songs with Ron who was a telephone engineer. They sent out demos under the name "Talking America" which gives a clue to their musical direction. When Virgin bit , through their Siren subsidiary in 1986 , they changed the name to T' Pau after a minor Star Trek character and assembled a full band. The drone members were Tim Burgess ( drums ) , Michael Chetwood ( keyboards ) , Paul Jackson ( bass ) and Taj Wyzgowski ( guitar ). Only Michael seems to have had a previous recording history , playing on two prog rock albums by the re-formed Band of Joy ( without Plant and Bonham of course ) in the late seventies. Taj had been working as an in-house musician for the BBC in Glasgow.
Virgin put them in the studio with Queen producer Roy Thomas Baker and "Heart And Soul" was their first single in January 1987. By the time they came to shoot a video Taj had left the band and they were a quintet for a time. It's a medium-paced chugger , synth-led in the verses with the rock guitars coming in on the chorus, very similar to what the likes of Heart were doing at the time. The distinctive feature is that Carol does a sort of slow rap of the verses and then starts crooning over the top of herself. She does have a good voice which lets rip on the chorus. It's a shame that so much of her lyric-writing is trite on this plea to an unsatisfactory lover - "Walking on the water, walking on the air / That was the heart of the love we shared". The song wasn't a hit at first and the band released a follow-up single "Intimate Strangers " ( later a hit as the abysmal "Sex Talk " in 1988 ) in May. Then Pepe Jeans picked up "Heart And Soul" for an ad and it was a big hit in the US reaching number 4. This revitalised the single in the UK where it did almost as well.
I always wondered who was buying their stuff? Even my friend's sister (who would have been 14/15 at the time) who liked dross such as Curiosity Killed the Cat and that ilk wouldn't have touched a T'Pau record...
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