NORTH LONDON’S FINEST BLUE-EYED SOULSTER HAS ROLLED WITH LIFE’S PUNCHES AND RETURNED WITH A CAREER-SPANNING BEST OF
BETH SIMPSON
He was the ex-boxer who became the affable face of early 90s pop soul with easy-on-the-ear hits like Outstanding, Thinking About Your Love and Best Of You. But there’s a lot more to Kenny Thomas than meets the eye. He tells Classic Pop how after getting burnt by the music biz in the mid-90s, he switched careers to become a trained acupuncturist, ended up fronting Living In A Box and how his own daughter’s illness has taught him to live in the moment.
You broke through in the early 90s, the peak of the rave era: music not generally known for its soulful qualities. Did it feel as if you were swimming against a musical tide?
I have to correct you on that. Yes, the dance scene exploded around 1989, but at the same time you also had people like Soul II Soul. It was dance music but it wasn’t house and it was soulful. I came off the back of that. Probably, I was the last blue-eyed solo artist to hang over into the 90s, but retaining an 80s kind of sound.
Was it your idea to cover Outstanding by The Gap Band, which was your breakthrough hit?
No, that would have been a record that I would have left untouched. Remember I knew the soul scene and that was a big record in ’86. But my manager at the time did his research. We asked one DJ in particular which record was a guaranteed floorfiller every time and he said Outstanding. Recording it was brave – you knew you could get shot down in flames by the real aficionados in the soul world. But that didn’t happen. They took it to their hearts and ran with it.
Your first album Voices went Top Three in the UK but the second, 1993’s Wait For Me, didn’t land quite as well. Was that down to the changing musical climate?
The problem was the video for the lead single, Trippin’ On Your Love. It cost loads and in my opinion is one of the worst pop videos ever made. The shows that you need to nudge it up the charts like The Chart Show all refused to play it because it was so shoddy.
You rather disappeared after that album. What happened exactly?
We’d started the third album. But then the whole of Cooltempo and Chrysalis was dismantled overnight and nearly everyone lost their jobs. The album got pulled into EMI and came under the direction of their A&R. The long and short of it was I left and had to let the third album go. It’s never been released.
Did you feel burnt after that experience?
I felt sad and let down, but there was also a feeling of being liber
