2006 Meck featuring Leo Sayer: Thunder In My Heart Again

I don't think Leo Sayer was on too many minds in 2006. Not mine anyway, and it was with no small degree of incredulity that I found out he was back at number one that year (made all the more incredulous by being 'told' this by Tony Blackburn on the radio. Just for a second, time was out of joint and it felt like I'd slipped through a wormhole back to the seventies). Not with a new song mind - 'Thunder In My Heart Again' is a dance remix of Sayer's 1977 single 'Thunder In My Heart', and while this doesn't sound the most engaging of propositions on paper, it works Godammit! Sayer's vein bulging vocal always sat ill at ease within the polite, tacky mirrorball disco setting of the original where it seethed like a captured lion pacing up and down its cage. Meck's remix opens up the door to let Sayer out by blowing apart its low end glamour and reassembling it in a widescreen cinemascope that gives Sayer the room to roar like a man who's seen the sun for the first time in thirty years. It's not enough to fully exorcise the whiff of cheese that's part and parcel of Leo Sayer per se (it'll take more than this to rid my mind of 'You Make Me Feel Like Dancing' anyway), but it's more than enough to curb its worst excesses and make him sound relevant. Or at least as relevant as he's ever going to be.