I was initially resistant to the dance music takeover in the late Eighties and the replacement of guitars with laptops, synths and samplers. But I was converted by songs like Pump Up The Volume, S Express – and this.
When I went to some dance music awards ceremony in 1989 or 1990 and a prize was awarded to Black Box I excitedly anticipated seeing its stunning singer accept the trophy. Instead two or three middle-aged men in suits ambled towards the stage to collect it.
It turned out that the vivacious Katrin Quinol had played no part at all in the song’s success, which was wholly created by an Italian production team, using vocal samples.
Quinol, a French Caribbean model, was hired to lip-sync in music videos and TV appearances, miming to the vocals of the real singer, Loleatta Holloway, whose 1980 song Love Sensation provided the main part of the retitled Ride On Time.
The recording was created by blending a two-second sample of Love Sensation (which DJ Davoli had found on a 12-inch single he bought in New York) with a sample of Love Unlimited Orchestra’s 1973 song Love’s Theme and added piano chords for that signature Italo house sound.
Unfortunately Black Box – Italian DJ Daniele Davoli, clarinet teacher Valerio Semplici and electronic musician Mirko Limoni – had licensed the vocal sample around which the song was based. And when the copyright owners took legal action, the single was reissued with rerecorded vocals by the then unknown Heather Small, who would go on to find fame as the singer of M People.
The Black Box trio, who had previously enjoyed a top ten hit with Numero Uno under their previous name Starlight (aka Groove Groove Melody), said they were trying to combine the power of Led Zeppelin and Deep Purple with a dance beat.
Aided by the livewire performance of the vivacious Quinol, it topped the UK singles chart for six weeks and became the bestselling single of 1989 – not bad for a song that Davoli initially expected to sell around 1,000 copies to clubbers.
It’s been streamed nearly 110 million times on Spotify alone, and the video (below) has been watched almost 50 million times on YouTube.
Ride On Time initially flopped in clubs but was championed by British DJs Paul Oakenfold and Danny Rampling after they heard it on a trip to Italy in search of Italo house music and bought all the copies to bring back to England.
The claim for copyright came because Davoli had mistakenly believed Loleatta Holloway was dead and that sampling less than two seconds of copyrighted music without permission was legal. Dan Hartman, the composer of Love Sensation, asked for a third of the royalties – even though he could have asked for 100 per cent.
While they haggled, Heather Small was brought in to re-record her vocals, though she was not told what the purpose was and the record label kept her identity secret, refusing to confirm Small had provided the vocal even after M People became successful.
Holloway later reached a settlement for the use of the sample and was paid damages, saying later: “I’ve been around for years trying to get this one hit record. It annoyed me knowing that Black Box were number one and I was not getting any credit for it.”
She also expressed frustration that Black Box were paid more for performances than her, even after she was billed as “the voice of Black Box”. More recently, Davoli said he regretted not meeting Holloway before her death in 2011 and would have liked to apologise.
Black Box hired Katrin Quinol to mime the vocals on TOTP, as “none of us three blokes from Italy would be convincing replacements for Loleatta Holloway” though she was not the most convincing replacement.
Davoli said: “You could tell those vocals didn’t come from a slim girl like her. But she had a great influence on the public – she had the moves on stage and looked great and of the time.”