Dancing Tight - The Best of Phil Fearon & Galaxy

Album Review

They made short albums in the mid-'80s, Phil Fearon & Galaxy's eponymous effort a prime example, nine tracks taking only just over half an hour from beginning to end, but who needs long meandering album tracks when one can have great fun pop songs like the ones here? Five of the nine songs were released as singles with three of them going Top 10 in an era when it was the norm to release track after track to keep the album in the public eye, and although the album's chart run was short (only eight weeks) it made a suitable impression, carrying on from where Kid Creole & Coconuts and Modern Romance had left off with a series of bite sized funk-pop-dance songs, all sounding as if the band were having great fun, which they probably were. "Everybody's Laughing," "Dancing Tight," and "What Do I Do" were the three Top 10 singles and are all squeezed onto the first half of the album, which is certainly the side with the better tracks, with only "Fantasy Real" slowing the pace down to a midtempo. Side two has the four tracks not released as singles, two filler dance songs with "Head over Heels" and "Anything You Want," neither with anything like the memorable melodies of the singles, sandwiching the two smoochy ballads "Before You Throw Love Away" and "Still Thinking of You." Phil Fearon makes good use of his female backing vocalists Julie Gore and Dorothy Galdes who were not only given the harmony duties on most of the track,s but lead duties on most of the choruses.