Songoftheday 5/14/17 - I saw you standing in the corner and I pretended not to see, you were looking over your shoulder then you turned away from me...
from the album Trust (1990)
Billboard Hot 100 peak: #27 (one week)
Weeks in the Top-40: 4
Today's song of the day comes from British "boy-band" Brother Beyond, who originally came together in the mid-1980's. They had their first chart appearance in their home country in 1987 with "How Many Times" (#62), when the band was led by brothers Eg and David Ben White, along with synth player Carl Fysh. They had a couple more minor hits, but after their label, EMI, bought the services of HI-NRG pop producing team Stock, Aitken, and Waterman (Rick Astley, Kylie Minogue), Eg left the group, as they reformed the unit behind a new lead singer, Nathan Moore. The first single from this creation was "The Harder I Try", which climbed to #2 on the UK chart in 1988, and topped the list in Ireland. A follow-up, "He Ain't No Competition", made it to #6 in the UK. Another track from the set, "Be My Twin", got success in the clubs in America, reaching #10 on Billboard's Dance chart. In 1989, the act, without Stock Aitken Waterman, put out their second album, Trust. The first British single from the set, "Drive On", became the act's last top-40 hit at #39. After a couple of low-charting singles, the act moved their promotion across the Atlantic, with America getting a new version of the album which included a song that eschewed the teeny-bopper disco pop. "The Girl I Used To Know", written and produced by another hot pop production team of Evan Rogers and Carl Sturken (Donny Osmond's comeback work, their own band Rythm Syndicate), was a more white-boy soul offering (like Robbie Nevil), and mainstream radio here took notice...
"The Girl I Used To Know" became Brother Beyond's sole American chart success, getting into the top-40 in August of 1990. It would be issued as a stand-alone single in the UK, and peaked at #48. Unable to recapture any ground, the band split up shortly after, with Moore going on to join another boy-band, Worlds Apart, that was really hot in France for awhile, landing four top ten hits in the 1990s. The others have worked behind the scenes, but most notably was Eg, who has gone on to be an in-demand writer/producer, doing the latter for Adele's first breakthrough hit "Chasing Pavements".
Up tomorrow: Hip-hop "supergroup" gets together to fight street violence.
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