1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die: 618. Terence Trent D’Arby - Introducing The Hardline According To (1988)

My recollection of Terence Trent D’Arby was that he burst onto the scene with a string of hit singles – Wishing Well, Sign Your Name and If You Let Me Stay, then pretty much vanished. Some brief research shows that, no, he continued, and continues, to create music and has a load of albums. Around about the millennium he changed his name to Sananda Matreiya but, unlike Cat Stevens/ Yusuf there doesn’t seem to have been any specific religious reasons, nor is it some kind of “shedding the slave name” thing. More, it sounds like it was part of a personal rebirth of identity. Thus, you’ll also find this album listed as The Hardline According To Sananda Matreiya, just to save you the same confusion I experienced. 

D’Arby/Matreiya (I’ll call him D’Arby for the purposes of this album to save time) inserts himself into the same kind of niche occupied by Michael Jackson and Prince – a pop music adaptation of funk, soul, and R&B. Wishing Well with its staccato funk sounds a bit like a Prince track, If You Let Me Stay is more like a Jackson tune (D’Arby even giving it some Jackson-esque “hoo-hoo”’s.  

He’s got a grittier, more soulful, voice than either of those artists, though. The final track on the album Who’s Loving You is a very old-school bit of soul that sounds more like Percy Sledge, and there are some infectious danceable funk in If You Get To Heaven and Dance Little Sister, for example. 

I don’t know why he never quite caught on in the UK. I think perhaps partly because Prince and Jackson had cornered the pop-funk market and he was competing with home-grown artists like Simply Red and George Michael for the soul end of things (and there’s a Sade-like sound to Sign Your Name as well), perhaps he was just pushed too aggressively by the marketers – it felt like for a time you couldn’t escape him. The album is pretty good, but doesn’t stand out compared to others around at the time.