Songoftheday 5/28/16 - You don't have to be beautiful to turn me on, I just need your body baby from dusk till dawn...

"Kiss" - The Art Of Noise featuring Tom Jones
from the album The Best Of The Art Of Noise (1988)
Billboard Hot 100 peak: #31 (two weeks)
Weeks in the Top-40: 6

Today's song of the day is by the British art-rock collective the Art Of Noise, who had landed a left-field top-40 pop hit in the U.S. with the novelty single "Paranoimia" in the fall of 1986. Two years later, with just Anne Dudley and J.J. Jeczalik remaining as active members, the act recorded a new track for a "greatest hits" collection with Welsh superstar pop singer Tom Jones. Jones, who had racked up a truckload of hits in the 60s and 70s, had spent most of the 80s recording country albums, and hadn't been in the pop top-40 in the U.S. since "Say You'll Stay Until Tomorrow" over a decade before in 1977. Their new collaboration was a remake of Prince's "Kiss", which had gone to #1 only a couple years before. The Art of Noise treatment, which admitted was ghost-white compares to the inherent funkiness of Prince's original, nevertheless was sold by Jones' earnest delivery, along with some fun horn callbacks to the band's previous hits like "Paranoimia" and "Peter Gunn"...

The Art Of Noise's version of "Kiss" reached the American top 40 in January of 1989. The single also climbed to #14 on Billboard's Modern Rock radio chart, and the remix hit #18 on their Dance Club Play list. Internationally, the single peaked at #5 in the artist's own UK (one notch higher than Prince did in 1986), #1 in Norway and Spain, and top-10 in Australia (#8), Sweden (#5), Austria (#4), Belgium (#5), Ireland (#8), and the Netherlands (#6).

The Art Of Noise released a new studio album, Below The Waste, later that year, but managed only to have a minor hit in the UK with the African-styled "Yebo!". They decided to split up by the start of the new decade. In 1992, on the collection The FON Mixes, an instrumental track "Instruments Of Darkness", with a remix from the fave group the Prodigy, slipped in at #42 on the American dance chart and almost made the British pop top-40 at #45. Dudley reunited with former Art members Trevor Horn and Paul Morley along with 10cc's Lol Creme in 1999 for the Seduction of Claude Debussy album, scoring a minor hit in the UK with "Metaforce" featuring rapper Rakim (#53). Meanwhile, Tom had a renaissance of sorts, first in the clubs, where he went to #4 in the US dance chart in 1994 with "If I Only Knew". In 1999, his totally awesome Reload album landed him five top-40 hits in the UK, with "Sexbomb" going to #3 in the Britain and #11 on the US dance list. As recently as 2006, Tom hit the top 10 in his homeland with "Stoned In Love" with Chicane. He now is beloved as the most level-headed judge/mentor on the British version of The Voice.

Up tomorrow: Freestyle new-wavers trot on.