Thinking About Your Love - Kenny Thomas (1991)

This underrated UK soul singalong was released weeks before I was born and later became a favourite from my dad's vinyl collection

My love for music can be traced back to being a toddler, and the ritual of leaning over the cushioned arm of the sofa in our family home in Claygate, Surrey, to help my dad choose from his record collection.

If I try to think of my earliest memory, I always come back to this. Thumbing through the plastic cases, scanning their artwork, being taught to delicately slide the vinyl out, support its labeled centre and place it with care on the turntable. There was process and patience required, a payment of respect in exchange for the pending crackle and boom that duly emanated from the speakers.

I was born on 2nd July 1991, and exactly two weeks earlier, on 20th June, a 22-year-old soul vocalist called Kenny Thomas from Islington, north London, had performed what would become his most successful song, Thinking About Your Love, on Top of The Pops. By the mid-1990s, it had established itself as one of the most recognisable songs in my limited, strictly analog repertoire. Its vocal harmonies and piano chords still evoke in me the type of carefree joy that might only be possible in the throes of the carefree childhood that I remain grateful to have experienced.

It interests me how music seeps into and binds with our soul, consciously or not. Nostalgia for the 1990s is no secret. But for those of us who were born into the early stages of the decade, its unique, celebratory brand of pop culture — buoyed in Britain by the long-awaited end of Conservative governance, proliferation of rave euphoria and heady embrace of multiculturalism, as the new millennium approached — feels native and inbuilt. Whether it’s jungle or soul or hip-hop, if music is from the early-1990s, I overstand it, even if I can’t explain it.

In the video for Thinking About Your Love, which exists on Kenny Thomas’s debut album Voices, he struts through London, pining after a woman. The city is open and hazy, red buses cross the Thames and sparse streets are walked upon by purposeful workers with thin ties and oversized suits. Thomas and his love interest end up indoors in a studio flat where rain pours. Its dark electric blue hue and moody atmosphere channels Michael Jackson’s shirt and the urban scenery in the video for The Way You Make Me Feel, if with a polite British twist. Its sound sits under Soul II Soul’s global influence. Its message speaks to passionate, romantic hope.

I turn to this track to escape: to forget about the stresses and responsibilities of adulthood for a few minutes and put a spring in my step.

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