HEATHER SMALL COLOUR MY LIFE
WARNER MUSIC
★★★
It seems appropriate that Heather Small, the big-larynxed voice of none-more-90s act M People, should have launched her comeback at June’s Big Jubilee Street Party. Like the nation during the Queen’s Platinum year, Small’s first solo album since 2006 celebrates and burnishes former glories, and there will be some who argue it has little place in today’s world. Others, meanwhile, will embrace this hook-up with the London Metropolitan Orchestra, in which she slaps strings onto her Top 10 hits – as well as a cover of Paul Weller’s 1995 Top 10 song You Do Something To Me – like bunting hung from lamp posts. Biggest hit Moving On Up, like One Night In Heaven, sticks rather pointlessly to the original’s template, but as always in this busy time for orchestras, it’s the quiet ones you need to listen to.