Ebony Alleyne - Have A Little Faith In Me

This is one of my favourite songs from our album, "Northern Soul 2007". This is my protege, Ebony Alleyne, performing a song which I wrote and produced in early 1978, virtually thirty years ago, for my then protege, Evelyn Thomas, and was both a twelve inch and the album title track on AVI Records. Redoing this song, one of my favourites of my entire career, gave me the idea for the album "Yesterday And Tomorrow", having all my current roster of artists reinvent my early classics, starting out with Tahira Jumah redoing "Reaching For The Best". Anyway, back to Ebony. All of Ebony's growing fanbase were delighted by her much acclaimed album, "Never Look Back", on Expansion Records. It's a whole glorious brand new day for Ebony. Her wonderful album finally came out in 2002. I was brought in to produce her entire album. We did an magnificent album of generic live "real" smooth sophisticated soul music, with a huge orchestra (sixty strings, thirty brass), with a Burt Bacharach/Dionne Warwick flavour overall, and this was well before Nora Jones, Joss Stone, Corinne Bailey Rae, and most particularly Amy Winehouse, all hit with basically the same thing. The Ebony album was utterly utterly wonderful, and I was so proud of it. It took a year and a half to make, and the legendary head of A&R, Muff Winwood, oversaw it personally. "Walk Away And Never Look Back", was the first song we recorded. We introduced her to the soul scene by reactivating the old classic Okeh label, owned by Sony, and pressing up tiny limited editions of three all different singles on the Okeh label on seven inch vinyl. Everything looked wonderful and rosy, but suddenly Ebony was set free without a record being released. Now nearly five years later, along with brand new 2007 material, justice finally got served, and the world got to hear what I consider to be my finest hour musically. After releasing her album, we cut four further songs, three for "Northern Soul 2007" and one for "Disco 2008".