We proudly bring you, here on You-Tube, the premiere of a totally brand new song, from our brand new album, "Soul Steppers" - due for release in late February 2009. A delectable new album of "Modern-Room" style Northern Soul. Classic retro soul, owing more homage to Gamble and Huff and the sound of Philadelphia and the mid 1970s rhythms, than to the usual Sixties style. Midtempo and Uptempo soulful sizzlers to warm the embers of your heart, and take your feet totally out of control. Just as the legendary Blackpool Mecca building gets pulled down, the "Soul Steppers" album shows that they can pull down the building but they can never take away our music. And in this recession, in times of darkness and uncertainty, as the opening track gloriously proclaims - "I know there's better times ahead for us". Onward to a brighter day. Music can lift us and make us forget what the world has to throw at us, and this album is designed to do just that. The new album has songs by Rosetta Hightower, Noel McKoy, Odette Adams, Tahira Jumah, Jay Harvey, Pearly Gates, The Flirtations, Janine Johnson, Michael Lloyd Pinq, Kitty Corbin, Judy Duff, The Concentrations, Jimmy James, and a few major surprises. Here, Jay Harvey sings "Walking In The Dark", another song bursting with hope for the future, the main theme of this album. This boy is going to go far. He almost made it through to the finals of the last series of the X-Factor till Louis Walsh intervened. But if Jay's classic good looks and appearance suggest some kind of boyband type pop singer, think again. The boy has black blood running through his veins. His father, Gary, manages Kenny Thomas, and also brought us a most amazing new artist, Delroy G. Pinnock, for this new album, and Jay himself was brought up with soul music all his life, and has made quite a name for himself already on the London R&B circuit. I first met him through Holly Harrison, and Jay sang with her on the backing vocals for "Bright Lights Of The City" and there and then I vowed to use him on my next album. He sounds amazingly like Michael Jackson, but with a new freshness all his own. "Walking In The Dark" is a stunning classic soul song, and Jay has also performed a duet with our wonderful diva Tahira Jumah, called "My Oh My", a Marvin Gaye type, seventies type, classic protest song. Jay is just so fabulous, so willing, so lovely, so co-operative, and such a warm hearted person, and it makes me proud to have artists of this calibre on Centre City Records. He and I co-wrote this fabulous smooth uplifting future soul classic with my long time producing partner Clive Scott. And the new album, for the first time, is being distributed by Wienerworld, who have put out all our Northern Soul DVDs, and this time we look certain to get it sold in all the remaining major record shops around the country. And remember the whole theme of this special album - "I know there's better times ahead for us".
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Music