( * Coldcut featuring ... )
Chart entered : 25 March 1989
Chart peak : 11
Number of hits :18
Rochdale's finest finally made the chart in 1989 but it took her nearly a full decade.
Lisa was born in Rochdale in 1966 and was weaned on her mother's soul collection. She started singing in local nightclubs in her early teens. In 1980 she won a national talent contest Search For A Star and her long ascent to fame began. Her career was followed diligently by the Rochdale Observer ; those of us who lived in the area were saying "give it up love" long before this broke through.
In 1981 she recorded her first , locally-recorded single "Your Alibis" locally with her first collaborators Dave Pickerill and Paul O' Donoghue , a curiously old-fashioned folk rock song harking back to Mary Hopkin. Lisa's voice is attractively untrained and squeaky but there's definitely something there. The single made no impression on the chart.
The following year she appeared on a TV variety show Bring Me The Head of Light Entertainment and a contract with Polydor soon ensued. Her first single for them "The Only Way" was released in November 1982 and got Single of the Fortnight from David Hepworth in Smash Hits . I think that was over-generous for a very dated synth-pop ditty with the cheesy synth lines far too high in the mix and Lisa sounding like a chipmunk.
The following March she released the much better "Listen To Your Heart" which has a nice New Wave guitar line and a vastly-improved vocal although it's still a little over-produced. Great legs on the sleeve too.
Her fourth and last single for Polydor was a cover of The Four Tops "I Got A Feeling", released in October 1983 to coincide with her short-lived stint as a presenter on kids' pop show Razzmatazz. Lisa didn't enjoy the experience and lasted only one season after kicking one of the children. Polydor gave up on her. When she became successful Lisa went to court to try and stop them re-releasing the material she recorded for them saying it was unrepresentative.
In hindsight , the break with Polydor and Pickerill/ O'Donoghue was the best thing that ever happened to her. In 1984 she got together with former schoolfriends Ian Deveney* and Andy Morris to form the trio Blue Zone and started to write her own material with them. They eventually got a deal with Arista offshoot Rockin Horse and released their first single ,"Love Will Wait" in March 1986. It's a heavy piece of electro-disco with sweeping strings, dramatic backing vocals and an engagingly throaty vocal from Lisa. I think there's a decent song in there but it's too overwrought and cluttered to work as a single. It's certainly more interesting than the follow-up "Finest Thing" which sounds like an SOS Band B-side though I suspect they'd have taken that as a compliment at the time.
The band then went on a hiatus as \Lisa got married to Italian designer Augusto Grassi after a holiday romance in Tunisia and went to live in Italy. The marriage was over in a matter of months and Lisa returned to Rochdale. A new Blue Zone single "On Fire" was released in October 1987. A blistering funk pop number about sex which amply demonstrates Lisa's vocal range, it looked to set to do well and a video was filmed in which Lisa took a leaf out of Mel Appleby's book and danced around without wearing a bra. Unfortunately the King's Cross fire disaster then occurred and Arista felt obliged to withdraw the single. It was a minor hit in the Netherlands.
At the start of 1988 they released their fourth single "Thinking About His Baby" a Motown pastiche which Lisa sings in too high a key for comfort . It narrowly failed to chart despite the B-side "Big Thing" attracting some club attention .The band then became involved in a protracted struggle with Arista over the release of their album "Big Thing", the record company wanting to wait until they'd had a bona fide hit single. In July 1988 they recorded a song written by the proven US songwriting team of Steinberg and Kelly that had previously been recorded for Elisa Fiorillo for the Summer School soundtrack . "Jackie" is a belting Europop number and seemingly a sure fire hit. It was in the US, reaching number 54 and it also reached the Swedish Top 20 but still couldn't break the UK duck. The album was released everywhere but Britain in November 1988.
However Blue Zone had attracted the attention of their peers and they were invited by the guys in Coldcut to collaborate on their debut album "What's That Noise ?" They contributed in the writing and performing of two tracks "People Hold On " and "My Telephone"* The former was chosen as their next single.
Like Promised Land , "People Hold On" taps into house music's utopian bent. Lisa provided the vague and woolly lyrics but she sings them with conviction. Coldcut provide the ubiquitous electronic house rhythms that had already served them well with Yazz with some sweeping string samples and synth squelches to keep things interesting. And so Lisa finally had a sizeable hit. She may have been regarded as a bit of a joke in Rochdale by this point but elsewhere she was hailed as an exciting new talent.
* My mum told me that Deveney was at her pre-school playgroup at the same time as me but I've no personal memory of him.
** Strangely, they neglected to give Lisa a credit on this one when it was subsequently released as a single.
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