Tammi Lavette - Take A Chance On Love

I just LOVE this song and got Tammi to film some footage singing it while messing around in the studio in the summer of 2007. This is another one of my favourite Northern Soul songs I have ever cut. We first recorded it in 1999. I co-wrote it with John Reid of The Nightcrawlers. It came out twice, once in 2002 on the "Don't Wait Around" CD, and also on "Ian Levine Presents Northern Soul Memories - Volume Four" which was released on Goldsoul. Tammi also sang that huge 1970's Northern Soul classic recorded by Bettye Swann on Atlantic, "Kiss My Love Goodbye", as great a Philly song as you could ever wish to hear. It had such a dreamy, timeless, smooth orchestrated feel, that I always planned to cut it on someone one day. When I first met Tammi in 1993, we cut a song called "My Heart Keeps Saying No", and I initially named her Tamla Tyrrell, which, on reflection, sounds quite nice in itself. But in the end we settled on Tammi Lavette. I discovered Tammi in time for the Blackpool Mecca Reunion in 1998, and we took her up there to perform on the Saturday night in the Highland Room in front of a thousand people. She comes from New York but lives in England, and at the Mecca, she performed "You Tore Apart My Broken Heart", and also sang the actual theme song for the massive DVD box set "The Strange World Of Northern Soul", a song called "Seven Days". You can find the video for that here on my YouTube channel. We also cut a song called "Too Much Too Late" with her, a song which was discovered by my mentor Chris Hill when he was head of Arista records. It was an obscure single in the early nineties by a group called Rufus Doors, a brother/sister act, but he left Arista before ever signing them. I snatched up the song and did it with Tammi. That video can also be found here on my channel. We cut a whole album on Tammi, but it's never yet been released on CD although it is on iTunes.