Robbed hit of the week 8/15/16 - Surface's "Closer Than Friends"...

"Closer Than Friends" - Surface
from the album 2nd Wave (1988)
Billboard Hot 100 peak: #57

This week's "robbed hit" comes from the smooth R&B trio Surface, who surfaced on the pop radio scene in the summer of 1987 with the second single from their debut album, "Happy". They followed that up with the mid-tempo ballad "Lately", which climbed to #8 on the R&B chart, but missed the pop list altogether. The safe fate awaited the lead track from their second release, 2nd Wave, as the  new-jack jam "I Missed" did miss the Hot 100, though it came in at a respectable #3 on the soul chart. The second single from the set was "Closer Than Friends", a classy mid-tempo jam written by members Bernard Jackson and David Townsend that was not unlike "Happy" that was huge on R&B stations...

While "Closer Than Friends" became Surface's biggest soul radio hit, spending two weeks at the top of Billboard's R&B chart and sticking around for 23 week, the song stopped short on the pop Hot 100 at #57 in May of 1989.

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Here's the trio performing "Closer Than Friends" live in concert...

And in 1997, rapper Ms Lydia reworked the song into her own new single, with Surface singing backup, and it spent a couple of weeks on the R&B chart peaking at #91...