This request comes from my good lady. We were driving along listening to the new P!nk album which had just been released and as soon as Trustfall came on, she said to me, “I like this song, what exactly is a trustfall?” I replied honestly, “No idea my love.” Within an hour she’d emailed, via the website no less, to ask me to find out and write about it. Of course my dear. Anything you say, especially as it’s your birthday this week. So, here goes.

Alecia Beth Moore Hart was born in Pennsylvania in September 1979. So, first of all, why is she known as Pink? “The whole Pink thing has become way more than it ever was,” she explains, “It was my nickname when I was little and it’s been following me my whole life. At school a boy pulled my pants down, I blushed, everyone called me pink and I ran home crying. Quentin Tarantino came out with the movie Reservoir Dogs and Mr Pink is like the smart-ass character and I guess I am a little bit too. Later on, I did a showcase with the first group I was originally with called Choice, I tied a pink ribbon around my microphone – Steve Tyler style – and introduced myself as Mr Pink.” Choice were signed to LaFace records by its founder L.A (Antonio Reid) and when he saw Pink’s performance he said, “‘I love that, just drop the Mr, they won’t understand that’, P!nk continued, I never liked my name Alecia anyway and then I dyed my hair pink and that’s it.”

She made her debut on these shores in 2000 with the number six hit There You Go which she co-wrote and followed it with Most Girls that went one place better. Arguably, the song that really brought her to the general UK public’s attention was her fourth hit Get The Party Started which was solely written and produced by former Four Non Blondes lead singer and songwriter Linda Perry. Over the next 23 years with almost no let up, she has charted over 40 singles including three number ones and nine studio albums with all-bar-one making the top five. Trustfall is the title of her latest album of which the title track became the second single after Never Gonna Not Dance Again.

So, it’s over to P!nk to explain where she still gets inspiration to keep writing catchy and relevant songs, “Life! I’m married, I’m a mom, the world’s falling apart and there’s a lot to talk about. It was my daughter, Willow, who suggested I write an acoustic poem because she thought it might be easier to choose single words than to write five paragraphs of feelings,” P!nk told Apple Music. The words she chose were, Truth, Reflection, Uncertainty, Security, Terror, Faith, Acceptance/Audio city, Letting go, Love, and it was the initials of those words that gave the album its title. “I think finding words is my life’s work and it doesn’t matter how many you choose, it’s always hard, especially when you want to be deeply seen and understood. You see that I couldn’t choose between acceptance and audio city.”

As for the song itself, P!nk explained that too, “I feel like all of us are walking around at this low-level trauma in our bodies and it takes a lot of trust to be a human being these days, to get out of bed in the morning and go to work and drop your kids off at school, go to public places, participate in elections and have a vagina,” (bit limited that one!), “It takes a lot of trust. I know a lot of teenagers and I think a lot of us feel like we’re falling backwards and we don’t know where the ground is, and that’s what a trustfall is.”

So, its whole purpose is to build trust between two people and is a fairly common practice used at corporate training sessions and therapy sessions. She wrote the song with the songwriter/producer Fred again and former Snow Patrol pianist and guitarist Johnny McDaid. McDaid has also written song for Robbie Williams, Lewis Capaldi and about 20 hits for Ed Sheeran.

She is seemingly fearless, her onstage and video antics prove that, she really wouldn’t be out of place in a circus. “I saw Tina Turner when she was 69 in Christian Louboutins, running around the stage, full choreography, like a crazy person. And I thought to myself, Shit,” she told Chris Willman at variety.com. “So now I have no excuse. I look at the greats and I wanna keep up. I want to keep pushing it and be better — a better human, a better mom, a better daughter, a better sister, a better performer, a better writer. Age works against you, right? But at 43, I’m stronger than I’ve ever been in my life. I could kick my 33-year-old ass.” The story of the hopes and fears portrayed in the lyrics are well exhibited in Trustfall’s accompanying video.

There are a couple of female singers who are held in very high esteem by both the public and their peers, but in terms of chart successful, it eluded them, one prime example of that is Joni Mitchell. So many critically acclaimed albums but only one hit single – Big Yellow Taxi, the other is Helen Reddy. Just two hits she managed in the UK, the best remembered Angie Baby and the minor follow up, I Can’t Say Goodbye To You yet in her native States she charted 21 songs which included three chart-toppers, the aforementioned Angie Baby as well as I Am Woman in 1972 and Delta Dawn the following year. This week’s suggestion was never a hit because it was never released as a single, but it had a massive effect on many people.

Helen Reddy was born in Melbourne, Australia in October 1941, her whole family were in showbusiness, her father Max was a comedian and her mother, Stella Lamond was an actress and she began singing at the age of four. She progressed to performing on various radio and television shows and in her mid-teens entered a talent contest programme called Bandstand. The prize was a ticket to New York and an audition to record a song. She won and went off to New York but the audition was unsuccessful. Not to be perturbed, she moved briefly to Chicago and then on to Los Angeles where she signed a record deal with Capitol records.

Once her career took off in America she was frequently invited onto radio and television shows and in 1973 she was asked to be the replacement for The Flip Wilson Show which she soon made her own. In 1975 and 76 she more often than not hosted the variety show called The Midnight Special and so she became a natural in front of the camera.

This led to being offered film roles which included the 1974 film Airport 1975 that starred Charlton Heston and saw Reddy in the role of Sister Ruth and for which she was nominated for a Golden Globe for Most Promising Newcomer. In that film she performed the song Best Friend which she had written herself.  Three years later she starred as Nora in Pete’s Dragon alongside Jim Dale, Shelley Winters and Mickey Rooney.

That film featured 12 songs all written by Al Kasha and Joel Hirschhorn. Kasha was a New York-born songwriter who had worked in the early days at the Brill Building in New York and has written songs for Aretha Franklin, Neil Diamond, Elvis Presley, Charles Aznavour, Jackie Wilson and Donna Summer. In 1970, he teamed up with another songwriter, Joel Hirschhorn who had also written for Elvis and Roy Orbison. The pair wrote a number of songs from movies and they won two Academy Awards for Best Song: one for The Morning After from The Poseidon Adventure (1973) and the other for We May Never Love Like This Again from The Towering Inferno (1975). For Pete’s Dragon they received two Academy nominations for Best Song Score and Best song for Candle On the Water but lost out to A Little Night Music (Best Original Song Score) and You Light Up My Life from the film of the same name. The pair had also nominated for a Tony award for the 1954 musical Seven Brides for Seven Brothers.

Disney have generally made greats movies and Pete’s Dragon, although slightly under the radar compared to its counterparts, but it’s a heart-warming story. It tells the tale of a young boy called Pete (Sean Marshall) who had been adopted but his parents were brutal towards him and he wanted to escape. He befriends a dragon called Elliott and together the run away and go and live in a lighthouse with its keeper called Lampie (Mickey Rooney) and his daughter, Nora (Helen Reddy) but they were forever trying to avoid Dr. Terminus (Jim Dale) who tries to capture Elliott for medical purposes.

Nora had become engaged to Paul (Cal Bartlett) but he was lost at sea for well over a year and presumed dead but Nora held on firmly to her beliefs that one day he would return but her father has a go at her telling her that he’s gone and is not coming back. Realising his outburst had upset her, he apologised and left the room. Nora then goes out onto the lighthouse balcony and sings Candle on the Water whilst gazing out on the ocean to re-assure Paul, if he would hear her, that she was still there waiting for him.

The song is all about giving hope; its opening verse goes, ‘I’ll be your candle on the water, my love for you will always burn. I know you’re lost and drifting, but the clouds are lifting. Don’t give up, you have somewhere to turn.’ These words clearly resonate with people who have lost loved one but not necessarily at sea. The third verse begins, ‘A cold and friendless tide has found you, don’t let the stormy darkness pull you down” with the song concluding, ‘Here’s my hand so take it, look for me, reaching out to show, As sure as rivers flow, I’ll never let you go.’ The song has a certain spiritual feel to it and Reddy later claimed that the songwriters had said to her that they, “deliberately placed religious and spiritual symbols within the song.”

After Helen’s hits dried up in the late 70s, her film career continued making cameo appearances in Disorderlies (1987) and The Perfect Host (2010). She became a naturalised American in 1974 and as a resident in California she took an interest in community affairs so much so that in 1977 the then-Governor of California, Jerry Brown, appointed her Commissioner of Parks and Recreation which she served three years.

In her 70s she suffered from Addison’s disease and dementia and died in September 2020 at the age of 78.

When this song first came out in 2006, the credit of Peter Bjorn and John seemed a little confusing to many people. Initially you think it must be a duet between Peter Bjorn and John, then you wonder why Peter doesn’t seem to have a surname. But on the other hand it could be a trio of Peter, Bjorn and John, but there is no comma after Peter so probably not. It turns out that this Swedish act are indeed a trio comprising singer and guitarist Peter Moren, bass guitarist, keyboard player Björn Yttling and drummer John Eriksson but hey, what’s a comma amongst folks!

The most striking thing about the song is the infectious whistling which was provided by Björn. “After touring I got to be really good at whistling, but at the beginning I was terrible.” he told The Guardian. “It was worse if I had a slight cold or a hangover, which happened at a lot of those gigs in the early days. People were like, ‘This band sucks – they can’t whistle.’ Also the whistling was pitched up on the recording, which made it harder to do.

In the same interview, Bjorn said, “I had the idea for the tune on the piano and at first thought it was going to be a jazz song, because it sounded like a Duke Ellington track. Then I played it on a guitar and it sounded more like a pop song. I whistled a placeholder for the melody just so we could remember it, intending to replace it with an instrument later, maybe an organ or something. Then we put the whistle through a tape delay machine. We couldn’t afford to record on tape, so we recorded everything with a delay effect. Then it was like: ‘Oh, it sounds good, let’s keep it.'”

The song is all about finding someone you like and then wanting to know that once the feeling is mutual, would it stay that way if they knew the truth behind your past. Although we don’t find out what that past really was, he asks in the song, ‘If you knew about me and what I’ve been through, and what I’ve done, could you still love me? Would you let me into your world? Would you come into mine?’ It has a fascinating amount of candour by saying, let’s find out right now.

Young Folks features the guest vocals of Victoria Bergsman who deservedly gets the credit. She was the singer with another local Stockholm band called The Concretes and in the video she portrays the potential future lover who is on the receiving end of the frank question. “We weren’t young folks at the time,” Bjorn recalled, “we were all hitting 30 or 31 rather than 18 or 19. The song is about people feeling a bit burned out on relationships, and then you meet someone new in a bar, say, and think, ‘Maybe this could be something.'”

Once it was recorded, Bjorn recalled, “I remember the first day we played it in a small disco in Stockholm. It felt like every person in the club came up to ask what it was. I can now look back and see that the song was an antidote to something in the air. It belongs to everyone now, they get their own feelings out of it – it’s not ours any more. We didn’t have a record contract: we took it to some labels in Sweden who passed on it. Things changed when Wichita put it out in the UK and Europe. It came out later in the US, but I think we got on the charts there on import only. We don’t even know how many copies it sold. On MySpace it was played over 100  million times. We haven’t got rich off it, but it’s been good for business. It kickstarted my production career.”

The accompanying video was quite compelling basically showing Bjorn and Victoria in cartoon form having a conversation on a park bench. “At some point we talked about making it a duet.” Bjorn remembered, “We thought it would be cool – like David Bowie and Bing Crosby or Fairytale of New York – to make it like a conversation and give it a filmic feel. We started writing the lyric into that perspective. Then we talked about who was going to sing apart from Peter. We had other voices on the table before Victoria, but her almost childlike voice combined with Peter’s more Beatles-type voice creates a lot of the magic of the song.”

We’d been doing the rounds for about five years trying to get a good slot at some weird festival in Stockholm, building the stage on our own, playing Chinese restaurants and as the opening act on tours for different bands. We probably would have quit if Young Folks hadn’t become the hit that it did.

It first charted in the UK in August 2006 reaching number 35 but then disappeared, seemingly forever, but it was re-issued the following year and peaked at a much more respectable number 13.

The band also have a hip hop connection after KanYe, or Ye as he likes to be known now, sampled it on his song of the same name and was released on his mixtape Can’t Tell Me Nothing. Bjorn: “We performed with him once at a festival in Gothenburg. His DJ, A-Trak, had pitched the whistling up even further. We’d had a gig earlier the same day, so I was already a bit hoarse and it was terrible. I was totally struggling. Kanye made a joke on stage about me, the whistling guy, not being able to whistle.”

The band is still active having released nine albums since 2002 with their most recent being Endless Dream in March 2020. The song has featured in a couple of sitcoms as well as being used in a 2010 UK advert for Homebase and, five years later, in the Air New Zealand Safety Safari surfing video.

Barbarella, an astronaut from the 40th century, lands on Planet Lythion, while searching for Durand-Durand, the inventor of the Positronic Ray, which could destroy the peace of the Galaxy. The 1964 book was made into a film four years later starring Jane Fonda as the female Flash Gordon and Milo O’Shea as Durand-Durand. Around 10 years later in Birmingham, some musicians started playing together at Barbarella’s club; keyboard player Nick Rhodes and guitarist John Taylor are part of a group and they think Duran Duran is a cool name. Which it is. Various changes take place with Nick playing alongside three unrelated Taylors – John (now on bass), Andy (guitar) and Roger (drums) but they did not have a lead vocalist until the barmaid at The Rum Runner suggested her boyfriend, a university drama student, Simon Le Bon. Thinking of Barbarella, they called themselves Duran Duran. Hungry Like the Wolf became their fifth UK hit single and their first Stateside, but what is it about?

“Hungry Like The Wolf was a very easy song to write,” John Taylor told Complex. “That whole album we didn’t have to try too hard. We didn’t have to try at all, actually. That song came about on a Saturday afternoon. I think Nick had a keyboard sequence in line, Andy had a guitar riff and Simon had a phrase. I came in and I started playing bass, Roger came in on drums and the song was written in an afternoon and finished the same evening.”

In the same interview, the band said, “The track was inspired by the fairy tale Little Red Riding Hood” which is something Simon Le Bon has always claimed. The rhyme featured the big bad wolf hence the reference ‘In touch with the ground, I’m on the hunt, I’m after you.’ But John said, “It’s most likely about meeting girls, as well as wanting to have sex with someone”.

The song is catchy, but it might be fair to say the video had a big part in its success. The video was directed by Russell Mulcahy who not only directed Video Killed the Radio Star but who had also directed the video to Duran’s debut single Planet Earth just over a year previous and it was him who  decided on its location which was Sri Lanka. The video begins with members of the band wading their way through the busy streets of Sri Lanka then in a restaurant with Le Bon annoyingly being entertained by a man with a monkey. Le Bon then flips the large round table he was sitting alone at, exits the establishment heads through a busy street market and into a nearby jungle looking for his love. It didn’t all go smoothly, Andy ran into trouble when he accidentally swallowed some water from a lagoon and caught a stomach virus which he had to receive hospital treatment for. He later described the video as “Indiana Jones is horny and wants to get laid”. The love interest in question was painted as a tiger and was portrayed by Sheila Ming, a model from Bermuda.

In 1985, Starship’s hit We Built This City featured the voice of a DJ called Les Garland, but before that Les was one of MTV’s senior executives who recalled, “We had our weekly meeting to hear new music on Tuesdays, back then it was a fledgling industry: we’d get maybe 10 videos a week, and everyone would gather and sit through them all. I remember our director of talent and artist relations came running in and said, ‘You have got to see this video that’s come in.’ Duran Duran were getting zero radio airplay at the time, and MTV wanted to try to break new music. Hungry Like the Wolf was the greatest video I’d ever seen.” The whole shoot was based on the classic film Apocalypse Now.

According to Songfacts, the night before the shoot, Le Bon went to a stylist to get blond highlights in his hair, but she botched the job and his hair turned orange. That’s why he’s wearing a hat in the video.

The final version of the song was recorded London’s AIR1 studio with the producer Colin Thurston. Andy Taylor told Johnny Black, “He was a great organizer and arranger and we gave him far more ideas and music than the track actually needed, and he was important in the process of whittling them down to the essential elements.” Thurston and the band decided to preserve the demo’s original electronic backing track and merely re-record the other instruments and vocals. “AIR1 was a big acoustic room with a very warm ambience, which gave the track a distinctive sound,” says Taylor.

The song features a couple of sound effects; a laugh at the start and some heavy breathing towards the end, these were provided by Nick Rhodes’ girlfriend with Nick explaining, “I taped my girlfriend Cheryl – she was sort of laughing and breathing – and we stuck it right at the start of the track, which gives it a very human quality.”

This request came in about eight weeks ago, but I thought I’d wait until now because this is my 600th Single of the Week story and it ties in nicely with this song being the 600th number one hit in American. It was the first of Madonna’s 12 US chart-toppers, but what is this provocative song which, arguably, turned Madonna into a superstar, actually about? Let’s find out.

Madonna’s debut single, Everybody, in 1982, made little impact and is subsequently now worth a fair few quid. In early 1983, her record company, Sire, released her next single, Holiday with Everybody on the flip side also made little impact. By the end of the year, the record company gave it another go and re-issued Holiday which eventually charted in January 1984 reaching number six in the UK. Apart from her follow up, Lucky Star stalling at number 14, Madonna’s next 33 singles all made the top 10. Now, there was no stopping her.

She had begun working with Nile Rodgers and together they were making her second album, Like A Virgin of which  the title track was set to be the lead single from it, but because her previous single, Borderline, was slow to take off, mainly because MTV were slow to pick up on it, the record company decided to hold back on the new material until November of 1984.

Madonna has had over 70 UK hits, most of which she wrote or co-wrote but Like A Virgin wasn’t one of them.  It was written by the song writing team of Billy Steinberg and Tom Kelly who had just started out. Both those guys were in a band called I-Ten and they had written and recorded the original version of a song called Alone which did nothing until it was covered by Heart in 1987, but other songs they went on to write included True Colors and I Drove All Night (Cyndi Lauper), So Emotional (Whitney Houston), Eternal Flame (Bangles), I Touch Myself (Divinyls) and I’ll Stand By You (Pretenders) among many others.

In an interview with Americansongwriter.com Steinberg revealed that the idea for the song came from his own personal experience and from a male perspective, “I was saying that I might not really be a virgin, but I’ve been battered romantically and emotionally like many people, but I’m starting a new relationship, and … it’s healing all the wounds and making me feel like I’ve never done this before.”

In a Songfacts interview Steinberg explained more of how it came about, “My father was a farmer. He was a grape grower in the Coachella Valley and our vineyards were in a little town called Thermal in California. I had a rock band called Billy Thermal and we were signed to Planet Records, Richard Perry’s label. That band had just split up, so I was working out in the vineyards with my dad. I remember writing the lyrics to Like a Virgin while driving in a red pickup truck that I owned around our dusty desert vineyards. I had been involved in a very emotionally difficult relationship that had finally ended and I had met somebody new. I remember writing that lyric about feeling shiny and new – I made it through the wilderness, somehow I made it through – I made it through this very difficult time.”

Steinberg continue, “I took that lyric to Tom, he knew what I had gone through, he read those first lyrics and he sat down at the piano and tried to write a sensitive ballad to them. He’d come up with a few interesting things, but every time we got to the chorus lyric where it said, like a virgin, it just hit a brick wall – how can you write a tender ballad called Like A Virgin? It just sounded ridiculous. Whereas it was him prodding me with True Colors to finish the lyric, with Like a Virgin I was the one prodding him, saying, ‘No, no, no, let’s not put this one aside because this is a very special lyric.” They recorded a demo with Kelly singing in a falsetto voice imagining it be like a Motown track and Steinberg agreed because when he heard it, he said, “Yeah, that’s it.”

Michael Ostin, the head of Warner Brothers records was invited to Kelly’s house, Ostin said, “I was mostly there to hear what Tom and Billy were up to in their own career, they played me four or five tunes which were nice and then they said, ‘listen, we’ve got this other tune and we don’t really know what to do with it, it’s not right for us.’ They played me, Like A Virgin and it so happened that the day I had a meeting with Madonna to discuss her next album. I just thought it would be perfect for her.” So the following day, at that meeting, Ostin said, “When I played it to her, she went crazy and knew instantly it was a song for her and that she could make a great record out of it.”

Madonna wanted to record it with Nile Rodgers in New York City, but when she played it to Rodgers, he wasn’t keen on the lyrics but like the melody. He later told Billboard, “I couldn’t get the song out of my head, and I said you know, Madonna, I really apologise because, if it’s so catchy it stayed in my head for four days, it must be something. So, let’s do it.” Rodgers brought in his song writing partner and Chic members Bernard Edwards on bass and drummer Tony Thompson to do their thing.

Six years later, Madonna caused controversy with the video to her number one hit Like A Prayer which upset many religious people, but Like A Virgin got there first. Many Christians believed that Madonna was being disrespectful towards their beliefs because Madonna means My Lady in Italian and My Lady is another name for the Virgin Mary, and once they heard the title, they were reeling. Just to rub salt into their wounds, Madonna went on to call her first ‘greatest hits’ package, The Immaculate Collection. God know what they thought about that.

Like A Virgin spent six weeks at the top of the Billboard singles chart and also topped the chart in Canada and Australia, but in the UK,  it made number three and went top 10 in 11 other countries.

The parody singer Weird Al Yankovic covered this song retitling it Like A Surgeon which, according to Lily Hirsch, the author of the book Weird Al: Seriously, was Madonna’s idea.

In December 2007, a number of Virgin Airlines’ employees sang this song to passengers at Heathrow Airport whilst trying to raise money for the Rainbow Trust Children’s Charity. It probably also helped that they were all dressed like Virgin’s boss Richard Branson.

Not too many members of boy bands breakaway for an equally, if not more successful solo career, Ronan Keating, Justin Timberlake are good examples and Michael Jackson is arguably the best example, but former One Direction member, Harry Styles is heading in that (one) direction.

As a member of One Direction he racked up 28 hits between 2011 and 2015 this included 14 top 10 hits and four number ones, but he began his solo career in April 2017 with the chart-topping Sign Of The Times and has followed that with 14 more hits singles.

Exactly five years after his debut number one came his second in the shape of this week’s suggestion, As It Was. You can tell his popularity has grown and so too has the quality of his songs because Sign Of The Times managed just one week at the top whereas As It Was did 10 and became the best-selling UK single in 2022. In the States, its status is even more impressive as it topped the Billboard Singles chart for 15 weeks becoming the longest-running US number one by a British act. It also topped the chart in 33 countries around the world including, Australia, Belgium, Canada, Croatia, El Salvador, France, Germany, Greece, India, Lithuania, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Singapore and Switzerland. There aren’t too many songs in the 21st century that have that kind of appeal, so what is its appeal, let’s find out.

The song is about a relationship, but many of Styles’ fans were confused as to whether it was a relationship with another person, or his relationship with fame believing he sings about how things were (as it was) before he hit the big time.

The song opens with a child’s voice saying, “Come on Harry, we want to say goodnight to you”, that voice belongs to Ruby Winston – his five-year-old Goddaughter whose father, Ben, the British TV producer and director who, in 2014, was the executive producer of The X-Factor and is co-executive producer of James Cordon’s Late Late Show. Ruby would call Harry every night before going to bed to say goodnight and one particular night, Harry didn’t answer the phone and so Ruby left a voice message expressing her dismay that her Godfather hadn’t been there to talk to her. Harry told Radio 2, “I dug it out one day when I was in the studio, put it at the start of the song and I loved it so it stuck and I hope when she’s older she will enjoy looking back on it.”

Harry has often stated in interviews that he likes to keep his private and professional life separate, don’t they all? But in another interview, he did reveal that it was about a personal relationship. He explained what happened following One Direction’s demise, “I try and write from personal experience for almost everything, so, I think over the last couple of years with the forced pause that happened for a long time for all of us. I think I had a lot of time to kind of think about and work out who I was, away from music and get a little more comfortable with that. I think that allowed me to make this album from a very liberated place.”

In 2021, Styles was cast as Jack in the movie Don’t Worry Darling which was directed by Olivia Wilde who also played Bunny in the film. Wilde had been in a relationship with the actor Jason Sudeikis but they had split and within three months of that split, Styles and Wilde began dating. The relationship was never going to be easy what with their own independent work schedules, but also because she had two children aged five and seven with Sudeikis. In the last verse of the song, there a line that goes, ‘Leave America, two kids follow her’ which adds up a bit more. He did actually say in a Guardian interview in 2019, “If a song’s about someone, is that fine? Or is that gonna get annoying for them, if people try to decipher it?”

There was also suggestions made that some of the inspiration is about his parent’s divorce when he was a child with the lines, ‘Ringin’ the bell, and nobody’s coming to help your daddy lives by himself’. Looking at it in reality, it is likely to be a combination of both elements.

As It was became the first track released from the album Harry’s House. It was written by Thomas Hull and Tyler Johnson who had already written his four previous hits Watermelon Sugar, Adore You, Golden and Falling. They had also produced 10 of the album’s 12 tracks.

The song’s sound is very retro having an early 80s synth sound akin to Erasure or OMD giving it added appeal as that pop sound has never gone away.

As It Was has also entered the Guinness Book of World Records for being the most-streamed track worldwide on Spotify in 24 hours by a male artist after accumulating 16,103,849 streams in its first day. It probably won’t be long before that record is broken though and not a record that many will remember either.