Songoftheday 5/3/19 - If you want to leave I won't beg you to stay, and if you gotta go darling maybe it's better that way...
from the album The Sign (1993)
Billboard Hot 100 peak: #4 (four weeks)
Weeks in the Top-40: 28
Today's song of the day comes from the Swedish pop group Ace Of Base, who had already scored two massive pop hits in the United States by the spring of 1994 with "All That She Wants" and the #1 Billboard hit of that year "The Sign". The third American single (and sixth overseas) would be a remake of a song originally recorded by Tina Turner as a single's "B-Side". "Don't Turn Around", written by Albert Hammond and Diane Warren, it was the other side of her #2 hit "Typical Male", and didn't even appear on her album. It was produced by Bryan Adams and Bob Clearmountain as a straightforward rock song...
But it was another version that inspired Ace Of Base. In 1988, the British band Aswad, probably the biggest reggae act in the UK after UB40, took the song and transformed it to a swaying jam which ended up going all the way to #1 on the British chart and even climbed to #45 on the American R&B chart...
Ace of Base took the harmonic phrasing of the chorus from Aswad's version and darkened up the atmosphere a little and what resulted is a pop masterpiece...
Ace Of Base's version of "Don't Turn Around" became their third top ten pop hit in America in June of 1994. The song also climbed to #7 on Billboard magazine's Adult Contemporary (or "easy listening") radio chart (their second and final top ten hit there). Internationally, the single was their third consecutive #1 in Canada, and reached the top ten in their homeland of Sweden (#2), as well as in Finland (#3), Denmark (#4), the UK (#5), Germany (#6), The Netherlands (#7), Ireland (#8), New Zealand (#8), Austria (#8), and Iceland (#10).
(Click below to see the rest of the post)
Here's the band appearing live on British TV in 1994, with a much more reggae vibe like Aswad...
They also used that arrangement for this studio produced version for German TV...
Ace of Base and Aswad weren't the only acts to have success with "Don't Turn Around". In 1987, Luther Ingram climbed to #55 on the Billboard R&B chart with his cover, which supposedly inspired Aswad...
In 1992, Neil Diamond released "Don't Turn Around" as a single from his 1991 album Lovescape, and rose to #19 on the Adult Contemporary chart...
And finally, here's Ace Of Base in concert in 1996 (before the Berggren sisters left)...
Up tomorrow: An alternative rock band from Berkeley sing about getting famous, and subsequently get famous.
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