it doesn't get much better than this

another black British female singer who doesn't belong in the Urban category



lovely song, all the more touching for its sweetly earnest worry that Humanity really did perhaps ascend prematurely beyond Our Proper Sphere, before We were ready

i was living in America when it hit UK #1, and first heard it via a pirate tape, sampled in a hardcore track* that detourned the lyrics so that song-shards like "in the rush", "did we peak too soon", "blame you for the dream that died", "greatest adventure", "did we fly to the moon too soon", were now talking about a different We, who tried to rise above the mundane through the reckless pursuit of collective peak experiences, only to crash back down to Earth, wrecked...

it was only when MTV put "Sleeping Satellite" into light rotation that I realised where the samples came from and what a big hit it had been back home... wonder why it struck such a chord with the U.K. general public, beyond its prettiness and yearningfulness?

* and no, it's not Wishdokta's "Rush Hour", which samples "Sleeping Satellite" and is fine as far as it goes. It might be this tune--DJ Smooth & DJ Energy's "Did We Fly To The Moon Too Soon?" a/k/a "Flying High"--although in my memory the track uses a couple of extra lines from the song and is done slightly more artfully, to more poignant effect.





in all cases probably a case of simply joining the dots between "Sleeping Satellite" and this: