Tammi Lavette makes a fabulous new version of my 1976 Disco classic, and Northern Soul floorfiller, originally sung so wonderfully by Doris Jones, "No Way Out". It came out on United Artists in both England and America, and then was also remixed and featured heavily on the hit disco album by Doris Jones in 1979 on AVI Records. This version of "No Way Out" is my favourite track off "Yesterday And Tomorrow". There are very few singers around who can do justice to that particular jewel in my crown. Tammi was a teenager when I first discovered her, way back in 1993 and I have watched her blossom into the most fabulous soul diva. Tammi also sang that huge 1970's Northern Soul classic recorded by Bettye Swann on Atlantic, "Kiss My Love Goodbye", as great a Philly song as you could ever wish to hear. It had such a dreamy, timeless, smooth orchestrated feel, that I always planned to cut it on someone one day. When I first met Tammi in 1993, we cut a song called "My Heart Keeps Saying No", and I initially named her Tamla Tyrrell, which, on reflection, sounds quite nice in itself. But in the end we settled on Tammi Lavette. I discovered Tammi in time for the Blackpool Mecca Reunion in 1998, and we took her up there to perform on the Saturday night in the Highland Room in front of a thousand people. She comes from New York but lives in England, and at the Mecca, she performed "You Tore Apart My Broken Heart", and also sang the actual theme song for the massive DVD box set "The Strange World Of Northern Soul", a song called "Seven Days". You can find the video for that here on my YouTube channel. We also cut a song called "Too Much Too Late" with her, a song which was discovered by my mentor Chris Hill when he was head of Arista records. It was an obscure single in the early nineties by a group called Rufus Doors, a brother/sister act, but he left Arista before ever signing them. I snatched up the song and did it with Tammi. That video can also be found here on my channel. We cut a whole album on Tammi, but it's never yet been released on CD although it is on iTunes.
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