He swings back into London, all svelte leather and success; he has his white label pre-release 12” for all his youth to hear.

Yet she has moved on...

I can smell those dank under the railway arches where we used to dance...

He chews on his words in the time honoured soul singer fashion over silly infectious poppy groove and ‘urban’ scratching, ‘jazzy’ piano and guitars, and oh, studio trickery: processed vocals drape like a candy floss pad through the whole piece...

This is pop construction and I am caught on the seventh floor again, in a slew of memories, both of situations like that implied (that I choose to infer), and of days and nights making (this is the right word for the piecing together of samples and loops and bass playing and piano groove) throw-away music like this. Music that makes me want to return to the dance-floor, to the everlasting night of sweat and sound, pressed close to warm bodies, maybe alone, maybe with a special friend, maybe,

‘You lied to me...,’ intones the singer.

’It’s too much like Bobby Brown,’ I can hear Jenny snort derisively, from thousands of miles away.

‘You used to like Bobby Brown!’

‘Me? Never! And this record is foolish!’.

She’s right of course, yet it encapsulates so much. From sexual sub-text, love and ambition, to images of the Diaspora (this constant shuttle between continents), from days in South London to nights in clubs everywhere, to questions about just what might inspire love after all, for even with all the ‘success’ he’s brought to town, she in the video doesn’t respond. So it’s both the fantasy: the boast, the cars, the gold, the Concorde, and the caveat: in the last scene on the one way system, the cars stream out and away from London, away from her....

link Video - Return of the Mack 1996