Digging deep into our dusty crates to uncover more overlooked musical goodness from years gone by, this is Pop Essays. This week: the welcome renaissance of one of Britain’s best soul singers via an overlooked 00s dance smash…
- Artist: Jakatta feat. Seal
- Song: My Vision
- Released: 30/09/2002
- Writers / Producers: Seal / Dave Lee / Rick Salmon
- Highest UK Chart Position: #6
- Chart Run: 6 – 8 – 15 – 20 – 28 – 40 – 51 – 75 – 99 – 100 – 100
In the world of dance music, DJs and producers are ever evolving, shape shifting creatures – and not just in terms of the beats and sounds they produce. Very rarely do they go under what their mother named them at birth (more’s the pity, only because of the minor humour of imagining, say, a Mama Goldie or Mama Slim).
Dave Lee is no exception to this rule. Amongst the many monikers he has released records and charted under since 1990, there has been Joey Negro (understandably and rightfully no longer used since the George Floyd protests and Black Lives Matter movement in 2020), Raven Maize, Z Factor, Doug Willis, Akabu, Sessomatto and Agora.
But perhaps his most successful incarnation was as Jakatta in the early 00s. Sampling two Thomas Newman compositions from the soundtrack to the 1999 blockbuster American Beauty, the hypnotic sounding “American Dream” entered and peaked at #3 in February 2001, followed up a year later with the equally hypnotic sounding “So Lonely”, a reworked cover of the Monsoon hit from 1981 featuring guest vocals from Sheila Chandra, which peaked at #8.
A genre primarily focussed on big club tracks, dance music has always been a notoriously tricky sell for artist albums; and this was something that Dave would have to eventually do when the Jakatta project got signed up to write and record a whole album off the back of the success of these singles, called Visions, in 2002. Fortunately, there was a perfect curtain opener, in the form of the third single – which also hailed the unprecedented return of one of the previous decade’s most successful soul singers.
It was somewhat fitting then, that Seal was to experience a renaissance in fortunes via a dance record, given that this was exactly how he’d got his break over a decade previously, providing the vocal on the iconic “Killer” which hit the top of the UK chart for Adamski in 1990. By 2002, it had been five years since his last top 40 hit, and even longer since his last top 10 hit, the impeccable “Kiss From A Rose”, that finally became a hit on its second release, following it’s prominent use on the soundtrack of Batman Forever in the summer of 1995.
In the time since, his third album, Human Beings, in 1998, had been critically well received, but commercially, had underperformed, peaking at #44 and only shipping 60,000 copies – a far cry from the double platinum success of his first two albums. A fourth album, Togetherland, had drifted on and off release schedules in 2000 and into 2001.
Depending on which version of events you believe, it reached a stalemate and was ultimately never released, either because Seal himself wasn’t happy with the results, or it was turned down by his then label, Warner Bros Records, as producers didn’t believe the album would be a commercial success. So “My Vision” ultimately had two hooks in its favour; the potential to cross over the Jakatta project into a best selling albums artist, and also reposition Seal’s career after a few years in record label purgatory.
And it’s a truly magnificent combination: a whispery, unknown female vocal intones a spoken word element over the ethereal opening that bursts into a driving dance beat: “Tonight, wonderful things are about to happen / All of your wildest dreams are about to come true”. But this is not one of those situations where the guest vocalist is merely a visitor on the record.
For despite the fact he takes the “featuring” element of this single, “My Vision” sounds to all intents and purposes like the sort of single a man with one of the finest soul voices of a generation would come back with as their new release: “I feel like the sun / I feel like the rain / I feel like I just found reason for living again / Cause what I’ve been dreamin’ / I know that it’s real / I know there’s just no change in the way I feel”.
It is these verses, all life affirming and re-energised, that build to a beauty of a chorus: “Can you see my vision? / Of a red hot summer in white / When love was the feeling / There’s no indecision / We were turning that key inside / To get in the moment”. It sounded cool, credible and contemporary at the time of release, and it’s a situation that still prevails over two decades on listening to it again.
“My Vision” went hurtling into the top 10 at #6 upon its release in September 2002, giving Jakatta a third top 10 success and Seal a fourth, spending a very respectable eleven weeks on the chart. The Visions album followed for Jakatta, which debuted and peaked at #12, but ultimately wasn’t the massive success that was required of it. Just one more single, the very ambient sounding “One Fine Day”, scraped into the top 40 at #39 in March 2003.
Seal, meanwhile, returned with his most successful album in years, the aptly titled IV, in September 2003, returning him to the top 10 of the album chart at #4, on an album which even nodded to his newfound club inspired renaissance of a year previously by including “My Vision” on the tracklist. Of all the Jakatta tracks Dave Lee produced, it is safe to say that after “American Dream”, this was the most pivotal of the lot.
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