Track Listing

1. Place In My Heart
2. I Will Be With You
3. Bridge Of Spies
4. Valentine
5. Secret Garden
6. Promise
7. Hold On To Love
8. Strange Place
9. No Sense Of Pride
10. Only The Lonely
11. This Girl
12. Road To Our Dream
13. Sex Talk
14. Heart And Soul
15. Only A Heartbeat
16. China In Your Hand
17. Whenever You Need Me

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #10129 in Music
• Released on: 1998-08-28
• Number of discs: 1
• Dimensions: .21 pounds

Customer Reviews

There's no need to be ashamed....
You can't really ADMIT to liking T'Pau anymore can you? There's something a bit David Hasselhoff about them - and yet I mis-spent my own youth dancing to 'Heart & Soul' and waving my lighter to 'Only the Lonely'.

This was an era when Whitesnake got in the charts and pop was either a bit rock (Bon Jovi, The Pau) or scottish 'lite' soul (Wet Wet Wet, Deacon Blue, Hue & Cry)and frankly a gobby red head singing about Monkey Houses and Frankensteins monster won hands down in our house.

It's a BIG, multi tracked vocal, shiney/whiney lead guitars and synths doing orchestral stabs kinda sound, as 80's as Thatcher in a rah-rah skirt; but the songs? You know these songs really are pretty cool...

'Heart & Soul' has a hyper catchy plinky plonk riff and those sexy 'rapped' vocals, a proper POP record that sounds leagues better than the efforts of many feted 80's revivalists currently getting rose tinted kudos. 'Only the lonely' has a lovely vocal melody & some top 'bored housewife' lyrics:
"& here we go spending our money, filling the house with the things we hope will bring us happiness again,... well you can have anything these days I'm sure"
Ok it's not Dylan but it's not The Cheeky Girls either.
The big ridiculous number one ballad 'China in your hand' is here of course with it's horrible Sax break but then so is 'Road to our dream' (their first 'flop' single) that has a much classier saxophone line and actually sounds genuinely moving instead of overblown.

Although every hit(& almost hit) single is here, with the excellent brassed up, stomping b side 'This girl' (which should have been a single really) the rest of the tracks are confusingly taken from their 3rd and weakest album.'Hold on to love', 'Strange place' and 'place in my heart' are all nothing much and although the title track 'The Promise' is a good rocker, the only actual corker from that album 'Soul Destruction' has been left off.

Tracks from other albums ('Monkey house', 'Island', 'Arms of love') would have made a much better best of. Oh!& early b side 'No sense of Pride' is rubbish why is it here at all?

The packaging and track selection are inferior to the other best of (Subtitled 'Heart & Soul') but there is still a place in my heart that loves these songs and wants to see T'Pau rememebered as something better than the times they came from.

Tedious other than the singles
Sounds great at first, but rapidly fades into boring. T'pau, (a daft name for a band, Spock's Grandmother as Trekkies will know) pulp 80s pop at it's finest. This has not aged well for me.

After you've remembered the singles and how good Carol Decker looked on TOTP, well, that's about it. Listen once and consign to the back of the CD cabinet. In a few years time someone will drag it out at a party, play the singles, chuck it back in the box, and then there it will stay for another 5 years (hopefully).

Play Bridge Of Spies, Heart And Soul (with the naff spoken bit) and China In Your Hand and that's about the good bits done. Yawn.

Don't bother. Steve Wright will trot 'em out occasionally on Sunday Love Songs for the over 40s, that's all the listening you need to this.

80's nostalgia
I just saw the guitarist from Tpau Dean Howard on tour with Toby Jepson and will be seeing him again in September and I had to have a nosey at his early work.
Nic