No one ever said it was easy to write a hit single. The British group T’Pau made it even harder on themselves with the 1987 song “Heart And Soul”. The track feels like three songs rolled into one overflowing package.
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All the effort paid off with a concoction that hit the Top 5 on both sides of the Atlantic, an impressive feat for a first single. Even though it was their debut, it was actually a culmination of a long road for the duo at the heart of the band.
T’Pau to the Top
Although they’d eventually incorporate many more members, T’Pau’s creative leaders were singer Carol Decker and guitarist Ronnie Rogers. The two met as struggling musicians in the early 80s. They eventually became a couple while they were trying to find a deal to record the music they started making together.
This proved to be a long, arduous process full of rejection. When they finally scored a deal with the demos that Decker and Rogers created, they added other members to fill out the group. That’s when they took the name T’Pau, which they found while watching a Star Trek episode.
Considering that they’d been a long shot to even make a record, T’Pau found themselves in pretty good company once they began to lay down their first album, known as Bridge Of Spies when released in 1987. Roy Thomas Baker, successful producer of classic albums by Queen, The Cars, and many more, was at the helm. Their first single, “Heart And Soul”, stood out for being a little bit of everything all at once.
Have a “Heart”
“Heart And Soul” started to come to life when Ronnie Rogers purchased a new synthesizer. As he was fooling around with it to see what it could do, he stumbled upon a bass line. That’s when Decker started to sing a melody behind it. That tune would eventually become one of several elements in the song’s stew.
She wrote the lyrics based on how she felt when she was away from Rogers for a stretch, embellishing them to make them seem like they came from a breakup. Rogers simply started rapping nonsense words to fill up the open spaces in the track. She eventually went back and added the actual words.
“Heart And Soul” found a home in America long before it did in the UK. Its placement in a jeans ad helped in that regard. Oddly enough, the band would actually struggle to find any success in America from that point forward, although they came through with several more hits in the United Kingdom.
Behind the Lyrics of “Heart And Soul”
You don’t get the full effect of “Heart And Soul” without imbibing every element of it. There’s the main “rap” part. It lets the narrator go into detail about her angst over her missing lover. For example: “I used to have a lover with the Midas touch / I turned to gold, he turned to dust / Left me for another, I turned to stone.”
Then there are the sung countermelodies in between, which waft about on an air of melancholy. “More than an ocean keeps us apart,” Decker laments. “I feel a tearing in half of my heart.” Finally, the chorus allows her to belt out her frustrations to the world. “Give a little bit of heart and soul,” she moans. “And don’t you make me beg for more.”
T’Pau essentially gave up on the US market when follow-up singles that were doing big business in the UK failed to make much of a dent here. But “Heart And Soul”, a powerhouse song that’s even more than the sum of its impressive parts, just couldn’t be denied.
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