Let me tell you, Now Is The Hour is a glittering prize indeed. Echoes Love isn't a million miles off Alexandra Burke's All Night Long (it has a funkadelic dreamy quality to it anyway) via the sturdy dance sheen of Living Proof or Gloria Estefan getting lucky, and the comedy dance remix was one of her more successful face-lifts.
The dense dance drama was a brilliant reinvention for her, and the fact that they are absolutely insane is merely a bonus: Dream Awake, Just This Way in particular blows my disco socks off, Down On My Knees and Eyes of a Woman. Head Above Water is very Celine Dion circa A New Day Has Come. The soggy ballads have never worked their way into my consciousness so I can't really comment.
Same goes for the rest of her back catalogue. However, there is one corker of a Kim Appleby style house track called I Can't Say No that's in debt to PWL with its slinky and propulsive energy (it was a real one off at the time sadly). She did tour the record, but ultimately it was only a minor presence on the German charts, which has been her main market for years. I hope she comes back.
Yes, she chose to get even more beautiful with age and has the staples to prove it. Yes, her chart positions froze and so did her face. Yes, it looks like someone slapped her with a trout. 20 times in a row. Stop being horrible: Pete Burns can't get all the attention you know (and as of 2003 they share the same skin-graft doners anyway - a poor Russian family who will do just anything to put their son through medical school).
