Born in Germany to Indo-Fijian parents and raised in Hampshire, in 1988 Tikaram burst on to the music scene with her Top 3 debut album Ancient Heart. Produced by Rod Argent and Peter Van Hooke it went on to sell over 5 million records, yielding two Top 10 singles in ‘Twist In My Sobriety’ and ‘Good Tradition’. The following year, her second album, The Sweet Keeper also peaked at No 3 but both the accompanying singles stalled outside the Top 50. The third album, 1991’s Everybody’s Angels just scraped into the Top 20, but the critically undervalued self-produced follow-up, Eleven Kinds Of Loneliness failed to chart at all and her final for East West, Lovers In The City, ended the major label association at 75, Tanita going on to release The Cappucino Songs on Mother in 1998 before taking a break until 2005.
The decline on her chart success, however, is no reflection on her musical quality, the songs throughout her career have always been complex, catchy and thoughtful, indeed ‘Elephant’, off Loneliness is, as per the title a magnificent, gracefully lumbering number that addressed the confusions of identity, both racial and sexual, she was feeling at the time.
A longtime fan, Peter Paphides released the To Drink The Rainbow anthology in 2019 with two bonus tracks, but now Cherry Red have pulled together all of her major label albums in one box set along with various bonus tracks. To be honest, the latter are mostly not something to get too excited about, Ancient Heart offering instrumentals of ‘Cathedral Song’ and All The Years’, an edit of ‘Twist’ and the demo of ‘Valentine’ while elsewhere you get the French single edit (but in sung English) of ‘Sunset’s Arrived’, an alternative take of ‘This Stranger’, early guitar and voice recordings of the playful ‘Hot Pork Sandwiches’ and ‘I Love The Heaven’s Solo’ alongside edit and reconstructed (a slightly faster shuffle rhythm) versions of ‘Wonderful Shadow’ plus ‘And I Think of You’, her cover of Lucio Battisti’s Italian hit ‘E penso a te’ (for which she wrote the English lyrics) that had only ever appeared on earlier compilations and the Japanese version of The Cappuccino Songs.
Of more interest are the inclusion of non-album single B-sides ‘Only In Name’ from ‘Heaven’s Solo’; ‘Over You All’ and ‘Rose on Wood’ from ‘We Almost Got It Together’; ‘Five Feet Away’ and ‘Not Waving But Drowning’ off ‘I Might Be Crying’, the latter a setting of the poem by Stevie Smith commissioned for the BBC series Texts In Time: The Picture In The Poem’; piano ballad ‘Friends’ from ‘Sobriety’; the sparsely picked introspective ‘Rock Me Till I Stop’ and the even more minimalist ‘Me, You & Lucifer’ off ‘Make The Whole World Cry’ and the 13-minute tempo shifting instrumental ‘Have You Lost Your Way’ from ‘Wonderful Shadow’. There’s also two new recordings (though no info as from when), of ‘I Love The Heaven’s Solo’ with a gospel infused vocal intro and ‘Thursday’s Child’, though any differences there are hard to discern.
The booklet contains extensive and honest commentary on the albums and their tracks (though not the bonus material) from Tanita who is currently putting the finishing touches to her new, tenth album. This is an ideal opportunity to remind and catch up.
Mike Davies
Artist’s website: www.tanita-tikaram.com
‘Twist In My Sobriety’ – live:
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