T’Pau — “Heart and Soul”
(from Heart and Soul: The Best of T’Pau
In an attempt to test out the much-fussed-over Shazam app — which purports to identify any song via the five or ten-second snippet to which you expose it — on my new iPhone, I cued up VH1 Classic’s horrifyingly ill-researched series One Hit Wonders on the DVR, and A — who has yapped ad nauseam about this application since he first learned of its existence, and who desperately needs technology such as this, because no fewer than ten times a day , he hears a song (on the car radio, at the gym, in the supermarket line!) that he fails yet desires to recognize — was duly impressed as Shazam correctly identified each tune it heard. And while we were having a nice laugh about the wonders of the modern world in which we happily and blessedly live, T’Pau — a British band named for a Star Trek character and fronted by the crazy-brilliant Carol Decker, whose ferocious pipes should have become feted the world over — came onto the television screen with their one and only American hit, and I knew at once that I had just heard my next song of the day candidate. An unstoppable smash during the unforgettably spectacular summer of 1987, this one — surely one of its decade’s twenty-five best tracks — still brings me to my feet whenever I hear it, and I still know how to blow out my voice singin’ it at full blaring blast. Absolutely a classic.
