Idly watching TV, channel hopping, dipping into a sweet and nostalgic The Good Life, and when this finished I dropped into a Top of the Pops from 1987, saddened to be reminded of the demise of two genuine greats since – Whitney Houston and Prince – and then they had a brief clip of someone called Sherrick who I don’t recall at all: and what a wonderful singer with a wonderful falsetto on the track snippet Just Call.
So now listening on YouTube to his one and only eponymous
album from that year, not entirely to my liking as mid-80s formulaic
slap-bass funk, but that vocal is exquisite and sublime and phenomenal, lost
sometimes in the lavish production values of the time. I am reminded of Luther
Vandross in many of those same elements – how the vocal excellence rises above
the punching synths and the rest.
What a tragic life, however, this his only album, an
adulthood plagued by what has been described grotesquely as a ‘gorilla-esque’ cocaine
habit as well as compulsive philandering – these you can take or leave as
negatives – but by all accounts, and not surprisingly, having a detrimental
impact on his musical career which struggled to get to this one high point but
didn’t survive beyond.
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