(Translated from my original Italian text by ChatGPT and Piero Scaruffi)

Swing Out Sister were formed in 1986 in Manchester by former A Certain Ratio keyboardist Andy Connell, former Working Week singer Corine Drewery, and former Magazine drummer Martin Jackson. The album It's Better To Travel (Fontana, 1987) is a smoky nightclub pop-jazz for late beatniks in the vein of Sade. Its ballads (Breakout, the hit that catapulted them into global charts, Twilight World, Blue Mood, Fooled By A Smile) are all of good quality, but none is particularly memorable. Kaleidoscope World (Fontana, 1989) continues to focus mainly on the single format: You On My Mind, Where In the World, Forever Blue, Waiting Game. Once again, however, none of the songs are of particular importance.

Despite the addition of funk and hip hop, Get In Touch With Yourself (Mercury, 1992), with tracks like Am I the Same Girl, Get In Touch With Yourself, and Notgonnachange, and The Living Return (Mercury, 1994), from which singles like La La (Means I Love You) and Better Make It Better were taken, could not revive a sound that, blending the essence of Manchester, was already dead before it even started.

Preceded by The Big Elsewhere (1996), it was perhaps Shapes And Patterns (Mercury, 1997) that succeeded in doing so, with the help of an army of collaborators, presenting Corinne Drewery as a 1950s pop diva (Somewhere In the World was the single).

Paul Stavely O'Duffy's electronic arrangements complemented Connell's keyboards on Filth and Dreams (Mercury, 1999).