Description
The Winner is the fourth full-length album by the British dance/pop group Heartbeat, released in the UK on Myrrh Records in 1988, and as well as on the British mainstream dance label Priority. Also released in the US on DaySpring International the following year. Despite the band’s appearance on BBC’s TV show Top of the Pops with the pop single “Tears From Heaven”, it peaked at 32 in the UK and failed to become the substantial hit hoped for.
Heartbeat features Sue Rinaldi on lead vocals, Su Reeves-Bassett on vocals, Dave Bankhead on keyboards, Ian Townend on guitar and vocals, Steve Bassett on bass, and Clive Urquhart on drums.
This group was recently on Myrrh’s collection of ‘Twelve New Faces‘, but has since been signed to Dayspring. Their first album release, ‘The Winner’ is a dance/pop smorgasbord with all the right ingredients. Solid songs are treated to heavily sequenced arrangements and some first-rate vocal performances. Fans of Taylor Dane and Rick Astley will want to check this one out. With their aptly-titled first release, Heartbeat is sure to carve out a niche for themselves with dance-deprived Christian music lovers everywhere. [Jon Woodhams, CCM, April 1989]
The band were going through more personnel changes. Ray and Nancy Goudie stepped back from performing with Heartbeat to become pastoral guiding lights. Clive Urquhart (son of famed charismatic Bible teacher and author Colin Urquhart) took over as the band’s new drummer. And the weakest element of the band, the bland vocal sound, was overcome with the introduction into the group of Sue Rinaldi – a Southampton-born singer/songwriter with a quality pop voice and Su Reeves-Bassett (who’d previously sung with New Beginnings). When ‘Voice To The Nation‘ was released by Kingsway in 1986 it was striking, not only for the outspoken call to repentance of its theme, but also for its thoroughly contemporary production values, with Friends First producer Joe Arthur introducing thudding fairlights and surging synth sequences into the pop harmony sound.
Ray Goudie didn’t think it missed the point by putting the record out on a label which distributed entirely within the limited confines of the Christian subculture. “The album was a prophetic voice to the church”, emphasises Ray. “The whole message of that album was to the church, not to the media. We had a companion book that went with it which highlighted the needs of our nation. Some of it written by Clive Calver of the Evangelical Alliance and some of it by ourselves saying: church listen! We’ve got to do something here, God’s stirring us.”
By now the band had evolved into a team that was, musically at least, quite commercial. Sue Rinaldi had an expressively immediate pop voice, the synth-pop sound into which they had fallen was flourishing in the pop mainstream and an idea, taking the Christian message into the pop charts, began to germinate. Heartbeat, once the most insular products of the cosy Christian subculture, began to plan a single. “The idea wasn’t so much taking the message of Jesus Christ into the Top 50” comments Ray. “It was, ‘How can we be a prophetic voice to the nation?’
The release of the «Tears From Heaven» single was put together in a deal, typical in its wheels-within-wheels record biz complexity. Word Records MD Ian Hamilton introduced the band to Stuart Ongley, who ran music publishing company, Peer-Southern Music, and Barry Evans, who had had both a promotion company, Bullet plus his own record label, Priority Records. Joe Arthur produced the single and, on its release in 1987, it began to climb the charts. For one exhilarating moment it looked like it was going to go all the way, but, despite an appearance on Top Of The Pops, it peaked at 32 and failed to become the substantial hit hoped for. What wrapped «Tears From Heaven»’s chart place forever in controversy was the accusation of ‘hype’ muttered by many and articulated in print in ‘Strait’, the Greenbelt magazine. The basis of the accusation was a gushing exhortation in the Heartbeat newsletter, which was by then being circulated to tens of thousands of evangelicals, to buy the record. Some even took Goudie’s advice and prayed and fasted for the success of the single. Ray is adamant, however, that hype was the wrong word.
“We talked to secular record companies and said ‘Do you think what we’re doing’s wrong?’ And they said ‘You’re not doing anything that we don’t do.’ So they said ‘Hype is if you instruct someone to go in and buy 50 or 100 copies of a single in a chart shop. What you’re doing is instructing what we would call your fan club to go and buy your single.’
[Excerpt from the article “Heartbeat: Charting the history of Britain’s pop-evangelists-cum-praise-band”, written by Tony Cummings and published in Cross Rhythms Magazine #7, August 1991]
LP tracklist:
Side One
A1. “The Winner” (7-inch version)
A2. “Common Language”
A3. “Dancin'”
A4. “The Only One”
A5. “Ain’t That I Breathe”
Side Two
B1. “Tease Your Media Mind”
B2. “Tears From Heaven”
B3. “People With No Direction”
B4. “One True Love”
B5. “The Winner” (12-inch version)
Note: Simultaneously released on cassette, 12-inch vinyl LP, and CD.
“Tears From Heaven”, recorded for BBC’s Top Of The Pops in 1987.
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