She finished in 16th place when she represented the United Kingdom at the 2000 Eurovision Song Contest in Sweden with the classic Don’t Play That Song Again, but Nicki French considered a return to the show with a song from her new album ‘Who, What, Where?’.
Released this summer, the LP is the follow-up to the Eurodance diva’s 2023 ‘Eurovision’ covers collection and 2018’s ‘Glitter To The Neon Lights’, and ranks as the vocalist’s most diverse body of work to date.
Amongst songs that incorporate elements of Motown, electro-pop, Latin, disco and synthwave is Dare – a lush ballad that the singer considered entering into the running for next year’s Eurovision.
She tells RETROPOP: “I shouldn’t really say this, but I kept on saying to the guys, ‘You know what, I think that this could be a UK representative at Eurovision.”
But, the Did You Ever Really Love Me hitmaker sighs: “Would they really go for a 60 year old singer… again? And would they want me singing it? I’d have to give it to someone else and, actually, I’m so proud of it that we thought, ‘No – let’s just keep it on the album’.”
The remainder of ‘Who, What, Where?’ is an amalgamation that results in her most ‘pop’ effort to date, with Matt Pop producing ten of the 12 songs, and Project K (Falling For An Angel) and Dan Scholes (Dare) taking one each.
A glance at the writing credits sees one name appear often; having co-written On Your Marks, Get Set, Go Away on ‘Glitter To The Neon Lights’, Gordon Pogoda – whose credits include tracks for Sonia and Steps – contributed to the bulk of the record.
“He just kept sending songs and I thought, ‘Right, I’ve gotta be really frugal here’, so I was putting them in ‘Yes’, ‘Possibly’ and ‘No’ branches – and the ‘Yes’ list just kept getting longer,” the Total Eclipse Of The Heart singer cackles. “I kept listening to them and thinking, ‘Come on, I’ve got to filter out some of them…’ – but I couldn’t. I loved them all too much!”
First single Haunted Heart arrived back in 2020 and is the kind of dark, electro-pop stomper that would have fit right in on Steps’ ‘What The Future Holds’ (2020) album, while this spring’s Nothing Is Impossible is a neat ABBA homage that tied in nicely with the 50th anniversary of the Fab Four’s 1974 Eurovision victory with Waterloo.
Opening the set is an extended version of recent single High Hopes & Heartaches; the Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus song originally recorded by Swedish singer Josefin Nilsson on her 1993 album ‘Shapes’.
“I love her version and it took a long while for me to agree to do it, but when I did it was just fabulous,” she smiles. With a superb electro-pop production, it’s markedly different to the original, maintaining its essence while allowing Nicki to put her distinctive spin on the number. But while many embraced the track as a tribute to the late vocalist, others took umbrage with the decision.
“The reaction was very weird,” she admits, “because on the one hand there were people absolutely going mad for it, but then you had – mainly in the Scandinavian region, it seemed – people hated it. I mean, we had death wishes. My poor manager spent the whole day trying to either hide them or delete the comments from me.
“I don’t understand it – it was a tribute. We weren’t trying to be better than the original – you can’t better the original, you just have to do your own thing – but I hope you can tell the love that’s gone into it, because we all love the song so much.”
Even bolder is the closing song, a full seven-and-a-half minute rendition of Donna Summer’s Last Dance, which was originally released as a single mix in 2022. “I insisted that we did the full version and in the studio, I insisted that I did it as a full performance. There was no stopping halfway through and saying, ‘Oh, can I redo that bit?’
“Each take I did was seven-and-a-half minutes long and I have to say, I did actually cry at the end of each take. It really does take you on a huge emotional journey.”
The result is a body of work that captures the essence of Nicki who, despite decades of success – with her share of highs and lows thrown into the mix – has kept pushing forward, doing what she loves.
“We’re not trying to break any ground or go down a different direction,” she insists. “I’m a pop singer. At the end of the day, I like to put emotion in and I like to have fun, and I like to put a smile on people’s faces. So hopefully – hopefully – that’s what this album will do.”
The Is There Anybody Out There singer adds: “The fact that I’m still able to earn my living from singing – I mean, no one earns money from record sales anymore, unless you’re Taylor Swift, of course – but I earn my money from gigs and I’m so lucky to have all these tracks to perform, and also lucky that people still want to book me.
“And that’s not trying to downplay it, it is a fact.”
