Happy 35th Anniversary to Cathy Dennis’ debut album Move To This, originally released August 14, 1990.
In the crowded, often transient landscape of early '90s pop, where image and artifice often eclipsed substance, Cathy Dennis’ Move To This emerged as an anomaly—a vibrant, self-possessed debut that married club credibility with melodic intelligence. Released in 1990, it now stands 35 years later not as a relic of its era, but as a document that predicted, and arguably shaped, the future of dance-pop.
Before she was penning career-defining hits for the likes of Britney Spears (“Toxic”), Kylie Minogue (“Can’t Get You Out of My Head”), and Katy Perry (“I Kissed a Girl”), Dennis was the flame-haired ingénue whose voice first turned heads via D-Mob’s “C’mon and Get My Love” in 1989. It was a seismic introduction: soulful yet effervescent, with enough vocal grit to set her apart from the more processed textures of the time. That single—technically the first of five released from Move To This—wasn’t just a breakthrough for Dennis; it was a signpost that UK dance music was no longer underground. Pop had found a new grammar.
“C’mon and Get My Love” was a collaboration, but it felt like a star’s first breath. Riding the acid-house wave that had begun to permeate the UK club scene, the track was pulsing and immediate, and Dennis’ vocal—simultaneously euphoric and grounded—gave it its emotional center. There’s a certain naivety in the lyricism, but also a knowingness: a woman issuing an invitation on her own terms, at a time when female pop voices were often reduced to being reactive rather than assertive.
This duality—confidence and accessibility—is ultimately what defines Move To This. The album is a masterclass in how to translate club culture into the language of mainstream pop without diluting its essence. “Just Another Dream,” released just a month after “C’mon…,” carries the same urgent heartbeat. It’s wrapped in the same DNA as Madonna’s You Can Dance, but there’s more vulnerability here, particularly in its vocal phrasing. Dennis doesn’t so much belt as she aches, subtly—a voice less concerned with technical showboating than with expression. This was dance-pop with emotional texture, a quality that remains rare.
“Touch Me (All Night Long),” the album’s biggest global hit, is perhaps the most sophisticated moment in this regard. A cover of Fonda Rae’s 1984 club track, Dennis (along with producer Shep Pettibone) transformed it into a glossy, piano-led anthem—pure pop on the surface, but underscored by tension. It’s sleek and sensuous, yet there’s restraint, too; a refusal to descend into the histrionics that so many contemporaries leaned on. The track’s success—a Billboard Hot 100 #2 and a UK Top 10—cemented Dennis not just as a performer, but as a curator of sound. She knew where dance and pop could meet, and she mapped that terrain with surgical precision.
Listen to the Album:
By the time “Too Many Walls” arrived in late 1991, Dennis had stepped away from the dancefloor—at least temporarily. A ballad drenched in melancholy and structural elegance, it was a gamble. Pop albums of the era were rarely allowed to show too much range; cohesion was prized over risk. But here was Dennis, stripping the BPMs and foregrounding her voice and pen. Co-written with Anne Dudley, it’s arguably one of her most affecting performances, both vocally and compositionally. There’s maturity in its stillness, its refusal to rush to catharsis. It proved that Dennis was never merely a mouthpiece for producers—she was, and always had been, a songwriter at heart.
The final single, “Everybody Move,” released at the tail end of 1991, brought the cycle full circle. It returned to the ebullient pulse of her earlier tracks, but now with the benefit of greater control and refinement. While it didn’t replicate the chart impact of its predecessors, its inclusion as the closing single was symbolic: Dennis had traversed genres, tempos, and expectations, and now she was choosing the terms of her exit from that first phase.
The production across Move To This, helmed by a variety of talents including Pettibone and Phil Bodger, is sleek without being sterile. The arrangements are clean and rhythmically propulsive, making ample use of early digital synthesizers and drum programming, while still giving Dennis room to breathe. The mixes respect the vocals—a rarity in club-derived pop at the time—and the record never overreaches for drama. This minimalism, far from being a limitation, is what gives the album its enduring quality.
Culturally, Move To This exists in a fascinating space. It predates the major pop explosion of Max Martin and the Cheiron factory, yet hints at its inevitability. It sidesteps the grunge wave that would soon dominate radio, and instead solidifies dance-pop’s claim to mainstream legitimacy. And while the album didn’t yield the sort of legacy-defining accolades afforded to other releases of its era, its influence can be read in the DNA of countless female-led pop records that followed. Dennis’s work was not designed to dominate—it was designed to last.
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And last it has. Though her public-facing recording career waned after her sophomore album (1992’s Into The Skyline), Dennis’ evolution into one of the most decorated songwriters of the 21st century is more than just a footnote—it’s a statement of versatility and quiet power. Few artists have managed to so seamlessly transition from front-of-stage to behind-the-scenes while elevating both crafts. Move To This was the prelude to that journey.
Three-and-a-half decades on, it’s tempting to frame this album in nostalgic terms—to remember it as a time capsule of neon nights and Top of the Pops appearances. But Move To This deserves more than sepia. It deserves reappraisal. It deserves to be heard as it was always meant to be: not just a debut, but a declaration. A pop album made by someone who understood that the best dance music doesn’t just move bodies—it moves minds.
Listen: