Cola Boy - 7 Ways To Love (12" Original Version)

Cola Boy - 7 Ways To Love (Original Mix) / 12 Inch Extended Remix (HQ Audio)

7 Ways to Love is Saint Etienne's highest-charting UK single, though it was released under the pseudonym Cola Boy.

Saint Etienne were a new name on the UK indie-dance scene in 1991 and were yet to release an album.

Over the previous year, they'd released three respected but relatively low-profile singles: Only Love Can Break Your Heart (#39), Kiss and Make Up (#80), and Nothing Can Stop Us (#54).

"We were itching to put out an Italo house–style record, but I guess the timing wasn't right to do it as Saint Etienne," says Pete Wiggs. "So we released it under the Cola Boy name and made up a character called Jesse Chin to be the songwriter."

The band pressed up 500 white label copies and distributed them to record shops, and the track quickly became a club hit.

Arista wanted to sign and distribute the track, but Saint Etienne were signed to Heavenly Recordings, as was original vocalist Sarah Cracknell. And Heavenly didn't want to release the track as a Saint Etienne record, as it didn't fit with the planned direction of the band. So Pete, Bob and Sarah assembled a new band to record and promote it.

"Sarah suggested her friend, Janey Lee Grace, could sing on it," explains Bob Stanley. "We came up with the alias Cola Boy, but when the song took off we realised we’d have to do personal appearances in clubs to promote it. So I got my mate Andrew Midgley, who I’d met when I was working in Virgin Records in Peterborough, to be Cola Boy."

The track spent five weeks on the UK chart, peaking at number 8, which left Pete, Bob and Sarah in the unusual position of watching their friends appear on Top of the Pops, performing their first ever hit.

Grace says the project was quite an experience for her too: "Andrew and I went straight into doing PAs in the clubs. I know how lucky I was that I got to go to all the raves without being the person driving up and down the country. I’d swan in to all these places, including Ministry of Sound and Heaven, only have to stay for an hour and then I’d get paid."

On some nights, Midgley and Grace were supported by a very young Take That, who even asked for their autographs.

Grace later became a BBC Radio 2 presenter, first as a member of Steve Wright's on-air team, and later as a presenter in her own right. She sang on the only other Cola Boy track, He Is Cola, also released in 1991, though it was not a hit.

The re-recorded and remixed version of 7 Ways to Love was produced by Ian Catt, who would become a regular collaborator with Saint Etienne and other Heavenly Recordings artists.

The 12-inch features two main mixes by Catt: the Straight to the Cola Boy Head Mix, which is an extended version of the 7-inch, and the I Pour the Cola Mix, which is more of a dub version.

Featured here, however, is the third track on the 12-inch - the Original Mix - which is very close in style to the white label that became a club hit, but with Grace’s vocal replacing Cracknell’s.

Saint Etienne produced a further version of the track in 1993, for Japanese artist Nokko, who added lyrics to the song in both Japanese and English.

Saint Etienne have gone on to create a glorious back catalogue, of course, and are now into double figures for studio albums, and have released over 30 singles to accompany them.

Yet for all their commercial and critical success since, they are yet to have a single chart higher than Cola Boy’s 7 Ways to Love did, back in 1991.

Year: 1991 Label: Arista Cat no: 614 526