I wish is one of my favourite Emma Bunton recordings I utterly LOVE it! She sounds divine and the track is just lush lush lush! The whole album was worth it for that track alone to be honest, even if it is a cover!

 

I'm with you on that one! It's so so lush and she sounds divine!!!

#11 Something So Beautiful

 

From album: Free Me

Release year: 2004

Average votes: 8,50

 

 

OK I'm just going out on a limb and say that no other solo Spice does ballads as well as Emma :teresa: She was always the main template for the group's ballads, taking a major lead on most of their iconic ballads from 2 Become 1 to Goodbye to Viva Forever and Headlines where she not only sings her verses but is also the main voice on the chorus and background vocals. It is no different in her own material, where her ballads are often some of the strongest offerings where she sounds best.

 

Something So Beautiful was writen by Emma in collaboration with iconic experimental producer-writer brothers Pete Lewinson and Steve Lewinson. Just so you can understand the QUALITY levels here, they wrote, produced and played drums with the likes of Sade, Amy Winehouse and Simple Red. And a funny note here is that Steve even played the drums in the iconic Never Give Up On The Good Times by the Spice Girls :wub:

 

So naturally, the end result would be this stunning, gorgeous ballad that brings the iconic Free Me album to an end. Including a gorgeous London Orchestra strings and brass sections, the song was highlighted as a standout on the album by critics and fans alike. It was also one of the first ones to leak online after an unmixed demo of it was included in an early promo for the album (sadly no longer available online!).

 

A cute note is that for a while this song was at #7 in this rate, but I guess the competition is so strong now that eventually it fell just out of the Top10 :P

 

Always always loved this song. I remember when Emma mentioned she would like to do a tour with an orchestra back in 2004 to support the album, my first thought was about how this song would sound in particular. LOVE IT! :wub:

Edited January 8Jan 8 by Mr.X

Before we dive into the Top 10 :teresa: here are some data for you!!

 

RESULTS SO FAR

 

 

11. Something So Beautiful

12. I Wish I Could Have Love You More

13. Take My Breath Away

14. All That You'll Be

15. Baby Please Don't Stop

16. Crickets Sing for AnaMaria

17. What I Am (featuring Tin Tin Out)

18. Mischievous

19. He Loves Me Not

20. I Wasn't Looking (When I Found Love)

21. Tomorrow

22. So Long

23. Undressing You

24. Downtown

25. Life in Mono

26. Who The Hell Are You

27. You Are

28. I'm Not Crying Over Yesterdays

29. Amazing (featuring Luis Fonsi)

30. A World Without You

31. I Only Want To Be With You (featuring Will Young)

32. Don't Call Me Baby

33. High On Love

34. Lay Your Love On Me

35. Something Tells Me (Something's Gonna Happen Tonight)

36. You're All I Need To Get By (featuring Jade Jones)

37. Eso Beso

38. Maybe (Latino Mix)

39. Midnights & Martinis

40. Better Be Careful

41. We're Not Gonna Sleep Tonight (album version)

42. Sunshine on a Rainy Day

43. Takin' It Easy

44. A Girl Like Me

45. Por Favor

46. Perhaps Perhaps Perhaps

47. So Nice (Summer Samba)

48. We're Not Gonna Sleep Tonight (single mix)

48. Been There, Done That

50. Santa Baby

51. Emotion

52. Coming Home For Christmas

53. Come Away With Me (featuring Josh Kumra)

54. Spell it OUT

55. Free Up Your Mind

56. Don't Tell Me You Love Me Anymore

57. She Was a Friend of Mine

58. I Know Him So Well

59. Invincible

60. Close Encounter

61. I Don't Know (Emma features on Damage's single)

62. Let Your Baby Show You How to Move

63. Here Comes The Sun

64. Merry Go-Round

65. 2 Become 1 (featuring Robbie Williams)

66. Sometimes (Chicken Shed charity album, 2002)

67. Greatest Day (England's 2014 Official World Cup Song, also including Melanie C)

 

Still in competition:

 

Songs (in order of album release!): What Took You So Long?, Free Me, Maybe, I'll Be There, Breathing, No Sign of Life, All I Need To Know, Perfect Strangers, Take Me To Another Town, Too Many Teardrops

 

Singles: 5

Album tracks: 5

 

Free Me songs: 5

Life in Mono songs: 3

A Girl Like Me songs: 1

My Happy Place songs: 1

B-sides: 0

Other: 0

Take Me To Another Town deserves highest non single !!!

Take Me To Another Town deserves highest non single !!!

 

:teresa:

 

Some random 'facts' from this rate, on how songs kept moving as votes came in:

 

Take Me To Another Town and No Sign of Life were actually outside of the Top15 initially :mellow:

 

So Long was Top5 initially only to fall slowly out of the Top20 :wacko: Since it started to fall, two other songs came in to the Top5 and the order of that Top5 has remained mostly the same apart from a constant swap between two songs in the #4 and #5 positions :teresa:

 

Downtown was initially #11 and What I Am was #13. Crickets Sing for AnaMaria was outside of the Top20 initially, only to jump to #8 for a bit and then fall out of the Top15.

 

I Wish I Could Have Loved You More and Take My Breath Away were initially Top10 as well, reaching #9 and #8 respectively

 

All I Need To Know got as low as #19 at one point :blink:

#10 No Sign of Life

 

From album: Free Me

Release year: 2004

Average votes: 8,50

 

 

Opening up the Top10 is fan and critic favourite No Sign of Life :wub: A stunning and moody track, No Sign of Life was at one point in contention to be Free Me's 5th single and final - at the time in a double-A side release with Breathing. Sadly, the previous single Crickets didn't necessarily sell by the bucketloads so the single release was not green light by the record label.

 

Produced by Simon Ellis - yes the man behind the Musical Direction of some of the most successful pop tours of all time including the Spice Girls and Britney Spears - and writen by him in collaboration with Emma and Steve Lee (of Bananarama and S Club 7 fame!), the song is a long-standing fan and critics favourite that showcases Emma in perhaps her most moody yet! Describing how she both resents her ex but also feels that life is somewhat empty with him.

 

It provided perhaps the first solo moment where Emma's moody and darker side where better explored, something she then expanded on in other tracks such as Too Many Teardrops, I Wish I Could Have Loved You More and So Long. I was quite excited when it was rumoured as a potential single as it could have provided an even more expansive sonic landscape and visual identity to both the Free Me era and Emma's overall profile and public perception. I would LOVE to see her tackle this live, as she sounds f***ing stunning!

 

A technical note: This had the same exact overall votes as Something So Beautiful, although it gets to be at #10 because it had more 10s than that other one.

But if we love a Bunton moody moment, and I surely do … what on earth is Life in Mono doing at number 25? 😅

But if we love a Bunton moody moment, and I surely do … what on earth is Life in Mono doing at number 25? 😅

 

I agree, that was a crime! :teresa:

#9 Perfect Strangers

 

From album: Life in Mono

Release year: 2006

Average votes: 8,53

 

On the wrong train,

In the rush hour,

Busy dreamin' nothin',

Then everything changed,

 

Rumoured to be in contention as a Life in Mono's single (as mentioned in various reports and reviews!) Perfect Strangers provides Emma with what is one of her better and most defined moments: excellent arrangements and melodies, hooks for days, GORGEOUS singing and a story narrative that is often not very much found in mainstream pop music.

 

Whilst not even Life in Mono's highest placing album track, Perfect Strangers was written by Emma in collaboration with Gary Clark (who wrote extensively with Natalie Imbruglia) and Pam Sheyne (who wrote Christina Aguilera's Genie in a Bottle amonts other classics!).

 

The song tells the story of two perfect strangers who meet in the London Underground during rush hour, only to fall in love. The structure of the song and its narrative showcase Emma's writing at her best yet. This type of descriptive storytelling where she tells the story of each protagonist separately, with each verse focusing on each of them only for the third verse and bridge to describe them together, is clever writing for pop music, and it allows us as listeners to imagine the characters, their traits and their surroundings, as well as how they end up together. It's pretty striking writing, in all the good ways!

 

Production-wise, it is the only song on the album that sees another producer, Gary Clark, sharing the space with Simon Franglen, and you can tell that the pop sensitivies of Gary pushed Simon towards a more mainstream arrangement and production. Still, the orchestral sounds incredible and Emma thrives in this sonic landscape.

 

I wish Bunton wrote more of this type of music :wub: I find it indefinitely more interesting than generalised lyrics.

Edited January 12Jan 12 by Mr.X

I love Perfect Stranges. One of her best.

Perfect Strangers is really pretty. Could have had a cute video … maybe a pastiche of an Audrey Hepburn movie.

 

To go back to an earlier LIM track, I never knew that pronunciation of Mischievous to be incorrect. I had thought it was one of those words that was pronounced differently by region (never noticing the spelling). Nice to learn something new!

Perfect Strangers is really pretty. Could have had a cute video … maybe a pastiche of an Audrey Hepburn movie.

 

To go back to an earlier LIM track, I never knew that pronunciation of Mischievous to be incorrect. I had thought it was one of those words that was pronounced differently by region (never noticing the spelling). Nice to learn something new!

 

I would have LOVED a music video for Perfect Strangers with a bit of an old school hollywood movie feel to it. I think I'll Be There's video was GORGEOUS as it felt like a french 70s movie, and Emma could have explored this a bit better had she continued with promo for the album

Well I’m glad All I Need To Know climbed into the top 8 at least!

#8 All I Need To Know

 

From album: Life in Mono

Release year: 2006 (album) /2007 (single)

UK charts peak: #60

UK sales: 7,668

UK chart run: 200-60-147-Out

Average votes: 8,76

 

 

A lot of people don't seem to understand my point of view

It doesn't matter 'cause I love the way I am with you

 

The song that turned it all around (negative!) but is still considered one of her very best to this day. Written by Emma with iconic song writer Jamie Hartman, the song is Emma's own version of All Time Love by Will Young (same writer!), but with a more classical and orchestral approach.

 

“I wrote this with Jamie Hartman just before I turned 30. At that point in my life, I wanted to go for challenges that I wasn’t used to, learn things that I'd usually be a bit scared of."

 

Opening the album, the full song is expansive, beautifully written and invites you to submerge yourself in the sonic landscape of the rest of the record. It's a perfect autumn-sounding song that showcases one of Emma's most soothing vocal performances. It seemed to be one of her better reviewed tracks, with both mainstream and online media comenting positively on the song:

 

'Beautifully tender' - MusicOMH

'Similarly arresting' - Rolling Stone

"Breathtakingly lovely" - The Observer/The Guardian

"Timeless and elegant track" - LadsTash

 

The music video was directed by Dania Pasquini and Max Giwa and was shot during Christmas in London's trendy East End, originally inspired by the photography of fashion photographer Peter Lindbergh. It features Bunton as an angel watching over various lonely people, none of whom can see her. The only trace of her presence are floating feathers that come from her wings, which are only observable as reflections or from a distance.

 

Upon the video's release, observers speculated about the simingly random scene where a little girl is seen jumping and dancing around Emma in a laundrette, many pointing towards the fact that it seemed like Emma might be dropping some hints! Funnily enough, Emma did reveal soon after that she was pregnant with her first child, Beau.

 

Sadly, by the time the single was out, Emma had pretty much given up on her music career, after the success of Downtown and her stint on Strictly Come Dancing didn't help the album to succeed. You could tell she was feeling somewhat defeated by the album stalling so badly and the industry's sudden indiference towards her after she worked so hard during the end of 2006.

 

Aside from the quality of the music itself, the single was submerged in terrible gafs, mistakes and changes in circumstances. The single was released on two fronts - a CD with a single mix of the song and Midnights & Martinis as a b-side. It was also released on digital single with a Bimbo Jones mix as a third track.

 

Emma did some early promotion for it, but mainly on talk-shows and odd gigs without the usual big Top of the Pops/Late Night shows and festival rounds as the timing of the release meant those shows werent on. Sadly, this was also when Emma pulled out of a UK Radio Tour where she would be traveling around the country to perform at radio stations due to a dissagreement with the radio company who was refusing to pay for Emma's production costs. Sadly, she was then also blacklisted by a lot of radio stations and the single didn't get much rotation.

 

A particularly noticeable gaff was when she went on to the Al Murray show (a vile man that looks more like a ham than an actual human) and agreed with him that the song was called 'All That I Need', which was the wrong title alltogether :unsure:

 

This was also a period of time when the UK was just starting to get into the digital downloads of music, and thus the song first entered the charts at #200 as some people downloaded it prior to the CD release. However, it only peaked at #60 before quickly dropping off the charts, which at the time was the Spice-related release with the lowest UK singles charts position! Ultimately, it scared Emma who then dropped her solo career for roughly 13 years!

 

Still, it remains one of the most loved and acclaimed solo Spice releases. One would hope it goes viral one day or is given some Pop Justice, for once!!

 

Edited January 14Jan 14 by Mr.X

^ love this song

 

So mature and gorgeous!

Such a beautiful song and love seeing it get some love here

Another one of my fav. It didn't chart well but who cares. The song is fantastic.

All I Need To Know makes for a good album track, but not a single. It's not radio friendly. There were much better options for singles. I actually think All I Need To Know is overrated in the Spice community. If it never was a single, I don't think fans would think twice about it.

All I Need To Know makes for a good album track, but not a single. It's not radio friendly. There were much better options for singles. I actually think All I Need To Know is overrated in the Spice community. If it never was a single, I don't think fans would think twice about it.

 

Thats an interesting angle, although personally I think the reason why this song doesn't get enough credit is because it did flop :teresa: Although I agree that it was perhaps the wrong single to launch at the time - I would have gone with All That You'll Be if she really wanted a love ballad next - I do think it is a masterpiece of a song.

Lol if I remember correctly she also called it 'All That I Need' on Richard and Judy's show :drama: Great promo, Emma x

 

Such a beautiful song though, definitely a highlight in her discography :wub: