Eighties star Sam Brown has opened up about her surprise return after the devastating loss of her singing voice.
The singer-songwriter scored massive success in 1989 with her hit single Stop! and was known for her powerhouse vocals, but in 2007 the musician experienced issues with her voice that left her unable to sing.
The cause remains unknown, but in November Sam shocked fans who’d come to accept her record-releasing days were over by announcing her new album, ‘Number 8’.
“It’s been so long since I was able to sing and I suppose there’s an amount of melodrama attached to that – but I’m not really a very melodramatic person,” she tells Retro Pop’s January 2023 issue.
“I was speaking to my friend Danny [Schogger]; he’s a typical North London bloke and a fantastic keyboard player and programmer. He said, ‘Shall we do some writing?’ So, every Tuesday we did some writing and I sang everything very low, and then used Melodyne, which is an auto tune programme, and tuned everything up.
“I really enjoyed it and realised how much I’ve missed being creative. I’d been a bit frightened of being creative up until then.”
Clocking in at 12 tracks, ‘Number 8’ is an album like nothing Sam has released before and features modified vocals that have been artificially pitched, enabling her to perform once more.
“The moment I thought actually this could work was when I started to put things into the auto tune programme, because they were just about in tune – I can’t really sing in tune, but they were OK – but when I tuned everything up, it was like, ‘Oh, this really works with the whole electronic kind of vibe’,” recalled Sam.
“Everything is fake on the album – everything! I just thought, ‘Fuck it, if I’m going to do that I might as well go all the way.’ My friend Ren Brocklehurst did the pictures with all of the articulated limbs and actually, it really works. I think it’s a great, kind of arty idea.”
‘Number 8’ is available January 20 on Dunmore and available to pre-order now.
Read the full interview in the January 2023 edition of Retro Pop, out now. Order yours or subscribe via our Online Store, use our Store Finder to locate your nearest stockist, or get Digital Copies delivered direct to your devices.
