Beverley Knight - 100%

Beverley Knight, 100% (Hurricane)

One night last week I was flicking through the pre-set channels on the radio and stopped for a while on a track that sounded good enough to stay with and it turned out to be our Beverley who was something of a favourite when she did Shoulda Woulda Coulda.

She only enhamced her position a couple of years ago on one of the best ever episodes of Celebrity Mastermind when she beat the sinister Michael Howard who was falling for that tired old politician's trick of showing how much he liked football. Beverley's subject was Prince.

Amazon, for reasons best known to themselves, advertise this album as 2011 but it is ostensibly a 2009 release from all other indications. It hardly matters to me. Being two years out of date on pop music is the most up to date I've been for a long time.

Beautiful Night was the piece I heard on the radio, a highly passable expression of transient romance but, as has happened with so many albums bought on the strength of one track, not all of the rest of it is quite as good. In Your Shoes sounded familiar at track three, possibly because I did actually remember it and not because it samples Orange Juice's Rip it Up riff. I don't know if that makes it 'dubstep'. For the most part, perhaps the album as a whole is more workmanlike than genuinely inspirational. Bare is Beverley in more authentic Aretha-diva mode. Gold Chain brings to mind Aretha's Ship of Fools or when The Temptations went a bit funkier. I just can't tell the echoes from the new ideas any more, like if Moneyback would sound like Patrice Rushen's Forget Me Not to anyone else but me. Painted Pony is nicely forlorn and might have been a good place to stop but Robin Gibb turning up to help on a version of Too Much Heaven presumably kept him in work for a day or two back then. I admire the early Bee Gees as much as anyone and they did a fine job in re-inventing Diana Ross once upon a time but not as good a job as Chic did. Robin has by now left his thumbprint in a few too many places on pop music over the years.

It's not entirely fair to review an album while listening to it for the first time but I can't see this ever persuading me it's as good as 2003's Who I Am. She's a good girl. I can't help thinking that she doesn't quite establish an identity here that her obvious talent and personality should be capable of. I think she would benefit from better songwriters. I'd love to help.