Happy 30th Anniversary to Shara Nelson’s second studio album Friendly Fire, originally released September 25, 1995.
For a certain musical demographic, Shara Nelson’s voice is inextricably associated with one of the greatest songs of all time. Consequently, she also features in one of the most influential and important music videos of all time. Walking down West Pico Boulevard, in Los Angeles, she owns the streets (tracked in one continuous shot) and sings the era-defining song that she co-wrote with Massive Attack, surrounded by the assorted waifs and strays who inhabited that part of town. With “Unfinished Sympathy” and her instantly recognizable voice, her place in musical history is assured.
But there is more to her story than that. Two years after “Unfinished Sympathy” and the rest of Blue Lines (1991) introduced her in such mesmerizing fashion, she released a debut solo album in 1993. What Silence Knows is a really good record, but you wouldn’t know it from its sales. It peaked at #22 on the UK album charts, #32 in Austria and a bewildering #122 in Australia. I’ve pulled these figures from Wikipedia so they are, as ever, offered with caveats, but the point stands. It should have been much more successful than that, as her nomination for the Mercury Music Prize that year suggests.
The singles fared little better, with absolute belter “Down That Road” doing best of them all, ascending to a paltry #19 in the Top 40 chart. Of course, that year British music was bursting at the seams—the burgeoning Britpop movement was gathering momentum, boybands like Take That abounded and dance music was exploding in the mega clubs in cities up and down the country. Where was the space for a talented Black vocalist singing a version of soul music?
By the time she released her follow up in 1995, that space had shrunk even more. Friendly Fire was welcomed almost as well as her debut by critics. The Irish Times and The Independent “got it,” but the record buying public did not. In the UK, it limped to #44 on the album charts and in Australia it barely registered a blip at #222. Lead single “Rough With The Smooth” did make it to #30 in the UK but second single “I Fell (So You Could Catch Me)” reached the less than dizzying heights of #76. I am proud to say that somewhere in the dusty nether regions of my loft, the CD single of “I Fell” nestles proudly in my collection.
From that point on, her commercial career pretty much stalled. She continued to provide vocals and co-writes for various projects, but the next time she hit any kind of headlines it was for decidedly unwanted reasons. In 2011, she was convicted of harassing DJ Pete Tong and ordered to carry out community service and, in the process, she became a side bar on page 9 of all the tabloid papers in the UK.
Her talent deserved much better.
Listen to the Album:
The lessons of her success with Massive Attack were clearly learned. “Friendly Fire” has varying degrees of hip-hop inspired beats—there is the straight up hip-hop beat of “Poetry,” the New Jack Swing sound of “Exit 1” (complete with crunching electric guitar riffs!) and the bass-heavy trip hop beats that she helped drive to success with Massive Attack (like “After You”). Although album opener (and lead single) “Rough With The Smooth” offers an element of joy and acceptance of a relationship, the main theme that runs through is broken relationships. The song titles alone tell that story, from “Keeping Out The Cold” to “Friendly Fire,” the dissolution of relationships looms large on the horizon.
There are three songs in particular that really thrill though. “I Fell (So You Could Catch Me)” has stayed with me since I bought the aforementioned single all those years ago and it is divine. It builds so beautifully to climax with its wonderful strings, while her voice is straining at its highest end and it conveys such hopelessness in the face of lost love that it renders me useless for at least a minute afterwards.
And then there’s “Footprint,” which contains more great ideas in its first minute than most songs manage in their entire duration – it is chock full of invention and interest and changes several times. From plangent, mournful piano to melodramatic strings, with rattling percussion it twists, turns and squirms at every turn. Finally, there’s a straight-up ballad “Keeping Out The Cold” that pops up at the end just to remind you that the glory of her voice requires barely any accompaniment to shine.
I can’t tell you why this album didn’t get the love it warranted, but you can add it to a very long list of Black British artists whose work deserved more. You can add Nelson’s albums to Young Disciples’ Road To Freedom (1991), Ephraim Lewis’ Skin (1992) and every album Omar ever made to the list of albums that deserve wider love. I can’t quite put my finger on why they might not have had the success they merit, but I have some theories.
Listen: