Heather Small Sang The “Ride On Time” Single

“Ride On Time” the single, by Black Box, came out in 1990. The album “Dreamland” was released the same year. I hadn’t yet heard of the rave/party scene, since I was mostly attending crappy school-band events held in local church halls and community centres (remember those?). Every week Top Of The Pops would present the edges of the world of pop music, and back then there was a variety of genres in the charts; new-wave next to new-rave(acid) next to stadium rock next to comedy hits (if you consider Jive Bunny ‘funny’).. and then came Ride On Time.

I’d already started going down to Our Price or HMV every Saturday with my pocket-money, and one weekend in 1988 I picked up Numero Uno by Starlight; there was something infectious about the italo-pianos, and the blues-ey dance bass line. Listening to it now, it was definitely the strange chorus and vocals which caught my attention.

Those same guys formed Black Box. They wrote some songs, paid Martha Wash (a session singer at the time) to record vocals to ‘demo’ the tracks; another vocalist, we assume, was always planned to perform the final releases. But they ended up using the demos, which wasn’t in the original agreement signed with Martha and her management, so the band were sued, and settled out-of-court in 1990.

The vocals for “Ride On Time”, however, were constructed from an a cappella of Loleatta Holloway’s “Love Sensation”. This quickly became a problem for Loleatta and Dan Hartman (the writer) which was resolved with an out-court-settlement. The vocals were re-recorded by Heather Small for the single version but the original sampled vocals remain on the original album release.

Black Box released Positive Vibrations in 1997 but didn’t quite have the same success as Dreamland. Superbest arrived in 2018 and is a great compilation of a few of the best mixes of that old material, and a few newer style remixes.

But earlier this fine year (2021 - one of the best humanity has enjoyed so far, I’m sure you’ll agree) Black Box released “Dreamlanders”; a remake of the first album, recorded with new musicians and often a very different style to the originals. Most interesting to me are the new mixes of “Ride On Time”, with the full-cleared original Loleatta Holloway vocals, and “I Don’t Know Anybody Else”, my favourite track from the first album. If you like classic late-70’s disco, you’ll love these two tracks, and others are beautifully constructed, almost abstract, remixes named after ancient analog equipment, like the CR-78, Ritmo-20 and the old favourites, TR 808 and 909.