Suzette Charles Releases Her Debut Album, 34 Years in the Making

That Suzette Charles, a singer and performer for over four decades, should be releasing a debut album at the age of 63 is remarkable enough. That it should be completing an album she first began recording in 1992 is more remarkable still. At a time when the music and fashion of the 1990s is the subject of increasing cultural dissection, Ms. Charles bringing back to life an aborted project from that era demonstrates a fiercely determined and dedicated artistic spirit. “This is my first complete album that has been released,” said Ms. Charles, who lives in Manhattan. “It’s amazing.” First, the backstory. By 1992, Ms. Charles, had featured on the soundtrack of Milos Forman’s 1979 film adaptation of the musical “Hair,” and been signed to Capital Records, under the auspices of Barry Manilow’s Stiletto Management, though no record ever materialized. Having entered the nationwide beauty pageant as Miss New Jersey, she had also been crowned Miss America 1984 for a few months, being upgraded from runner-up, after Vanessa Williams notoriously got disqualified following publication of a nude photoshoot in Penthouse magazine. Suzette Charles in 1984. Michael Ochs Archives/Getty ImagesThis led to Ms. Charles touring with Frank Sinatra and Sammy Davis. Jr. and sharing a stage with Stevie Wonder at multiple venues. But Ms. Charles’s long-term goal remained a record. Inspired by the sound of Rick Astley’s pop classic “Never Gonna Give You Up,” she sought out that song’s production team Stock, Aitken and Waterman (SAW), a UK trio who had achieved incredible success in the late 1980s, crafting and producing songs for the likes of Mr. Astley, Bananarama, and Kylie Minogue.“I had never been to London prior to that moment,” Ms. Charles tells the Sun about her quest in 1992 to work with SAW who were based in a studio in South London, nicknamed the “Hit Factory.” “I found the studio and sat in there for hours,” Ms. Charles said. “The young receptionist goes, ‘Maam, you don’t have an appointment, nobody’s going to see you here.’ I thought, ‘I’m not leaving. I have nowhere to go.'”Eventually, Ms. Charles met the company’s business impresario, Pete Waterman, who introduced her to Mike Stock, the primary musical producer and songwriter. At that time Stock, Aitken and Waterman were unravelling as a musical force. SAW had achieved phenomenal chart success in the late 1980s, especially in the UK and Europe with their prolific brand of infectiously catchy high-energy pop music — I was an adolescent enthusiastic consumer. But by the early 1990s, their fortunes, both in the charts and in their relationship, were waning.“I was just about to walk away from Pete Waterman,” Mr. Stock tells the Sun about his former business partner. Matt Aitken had left over musical differences in 1991 with Mr. Waterman increasingly focusing on dance music imports rather than SAW’s homegrown pop. “I was left with a question mark over Pete’s motives and the way the company was going,” said Mr. Stock. “I lost it with Pete — we’d built up something so brilliant and he just destroyed it.” Enter Ms. Charles. Her sudden arrival at PWL was comparable with the logistical mix-up over Kylie Minogue’s studio arrival that resulted in the Australian singer’s breakthrough song “I Should Be So Lucky,” being written and recorded by SAW in little over half an hour, a story recounted in Kylie’s new Netflix documentary.“Suzette was as persistent [as Ms. Minogue] and hung around,” recalled Mr. Stock. “She breached all the protocols, flying herself here, knocking on the door and not going away. We didn’t really believe what she was saying and got on the phone to RCA America and said, ‘Is this girl signed to you?’ It turned out it was all true.”By way of an audition, Ms. Charles recalled Mr. Stock “said, ‘sing the song ‘You Are My Sunshine.’ Maybe 5 or 10 minutes later he said, ‘OK here’s the song for you.'” That song — “Free to Love Again” — would later be released as a single. Ms. Charles returned to London to record six songs with SAW and again in 1993 to promote “Free to Love Again.” Despite extensive promotion, the single stalled at 58 in the UK charts. Ms. Charles recalled, “There was a launch party that Pete hosted and I met Simon Cowell, who was a dear friend of his, and he said, ‘She’s amazing.’ I kept thinking this is going to happen. When everything went silent, we were very disappointed.”Through making her spontaneous visit to see Messrs. Stock and Waterman, Ms. Charles had ruffled feathers at RCA. “They were upset that I went to London but to me it was a no-brainer,” she said. “This was a “Hit Factory” and you have a person that can sing and has some notoriety at the time. Why wouldn’t it be a good idea?”Ms. Charles’s mooted “Hit Factory” album was nixed. “We were all ready to go,” Mr. Stock said, “but RCA UK said they couldn’t fund it and RCA America said, ‘We’re not funding it from over here to give you a hit over there.’ It became a silly thing and it got shelved.” The recording with Ms. Charles, he added, “was the last thing that I did at that studio with Pete Waterman.”Ms. Charles moved on, signing up with another heavyweight music producer David Foster on Atlantic Records. But the album she recorded with Mr. Foster also went unreleased. Ms. Charles then married and had two children, placing her musical career on hold. “My career was technically over,” she said. “My then-husband didn’t want me to sing. Then in 2015, when I knew that the marriage was not working for many reasons, the first thing I said was, ‘I’m going to email Mike Stock.’ I wasn’t thinking about the completion of the album but possibly doing a single with him. But I’d been out for so long that I didn’t realise people don’t do singles anymore.”Mike Stock Wikimedia CommonsSeemingly now adopting “Never Gonna Give You Up” as a mantra, rather than merely a musical inspiration, Ms. Charles re-connected with Mike Stock and finally completed the album, re-recording the old pop-soul numbers and singing new material: “Mike said, ‘Let’s just try one song,’ and then one song became the six previously unreleased songs. Then he said, ‘Since you’re here, let’s try these out,’ and we recorded five more.”Meantime the 1990s recordings Ms. Charles had made with Mr. Stock had leaked online, acquiring cult status among SAW devotees. “It was the fans, it was Suzette’s persistence and there were these strange coincidences that led me to record with her,” said Mr. Stock. One sign he said was that one of his employees, Paul Smith, had loved a ballad Ms. Charles had recorded with Mr. Stock, entitled “After You’re Gone,” so much, since it reminded him of his late mother, that he’d had the song’s title tattooed onto his arm: “I hadn’t touch the song in thirty years but on the day we re-recorded that song with Suzette, I got a message from Paul saying his dad had died that same day.”After years of being dismissed by critics — as opposed to the record-buying public — Stock, Aitken and Waterman are belatedly being given their due in the form of renewed exposure such as on the brilliant Australian podcast A Journey Through Stock Aitken Waterman. Ms. Charles says years later Mr. Stock’s songs acquired added poignancy for her. “We spoke very briefly before he wrote the music and the lyrics but I guess he felt my situation,” she said. “I am free to love again, free from all the confines I didn’t even know I had or had coming. There’s some spookiness, some spirituality, to Mike, because his music stays with you and gets to you in your soul.”As with “Never Gonna Give You Up,” and “I Should Be So Lucky,” Mr. Stock had crafted pop songs that would go on to define the performer’s emotional core. “She told me a few stories of her life,” Mr. Stock said of his songwriting process. “I don’t know where the idea came from but I know the bittersweetness of the lyrics does suit her. She wasn’t married at the time so this all happened after I knew her.” He quipped: “I’ve tuned into the future again psychically.”Ms. Charles speaks of Mr. Stock as a “genius songwriter,” and this writer agrees with that assessment; contrary to what the music press wrote in his heyday, history will record him as one of the best songwriters of his generation. At the age of 74, Mr. Stock, ably assisted by his son James, is still going strong as a producer and songwriter, working with The Fizz, formerly Bucks Fizz, in addition to Ms. Charles. There is talk of a second collaboration between Mr. Stock and Ms. Charles but for now Ms. Charles has an album to go with her rich seam of anecdotes which range from Stevie Wonder promising to write her a song — he never did — to attending Frank Sinatra’s legendary Easter weekend party and meeting Gregory Peck and Cary Grant. “It was magical,” she recalled. “Frank was cooking; he was trying to establish a tomato sauce because he was upset Paul Newman had a tomato sauce. He showed us bottles, cooked us pasta dinner and had us all try it. Who’s gonna tell him that it’s not any good?”Suzette Charles. Simon FowlerMs. Charles would also like to perform on Broadway. A starring role in the musical “42nd Street” collapsed in the late 1980s following producer David Merrick’s costly divorce. Ms. Charles further disclosed that producer Barry Weissler sought to re-unite her with her Miss America competitor Vanessa Williams for “Chicago” on Broadway: “Barry said what would be fantastic is if Vanessa did one role and you do another role and I could bill that as a tremendous opportunity. He said, ‘Would you do it with her?’ I said, ‘Absolutely.’ When he called her [Vanessa Williams], she said, ‘Absolutely no!’ That would have been fun. What’s the problem? She’s fabulous and I’m fabulous.”For now, Suzette Charles’s recently-released eponymous album has reached number one in the Heritage Chart, a chart ranking of new songs by veteran artists, and risen to number 35 in the UK album charts. Mike Stock, this time taking care of unfinished business with Suzette Charles, has scored yet another hit.

Suzette Charles Releases Her Debut Album, 34 Years in the Making

Suzette Charles Releases Her Debut Album, 34 Years in the Making

More from the New York Sun

El-Sayed’s Radical Half-Sister Creates Headaches for Democrat’s Senate Campaign

Progressives Blast Mamdani for ‘Escalating’ Arrests of Black and Brown New Yorkers for Low-Level Offenses

The Return of ‘Billy Liar,’ a Timeless Classic About a Recognizable Fantasist

Author Joyce Carol Oates Calls It Hard To ‘Feel Sympathy’ for Suicidal USS Lincoln Sailors Who Helped Elect Trump

Gavin Newsom’s Slicked-Up Origin Story

Cuba’s Young Castros, a Generation Beyond the Reach of American Law, Woo Washington

Revisiting the Literary Past From the Open Road

With Senate Control at Stake, Expect Obama To Campaign in Michigan and Urge ‘the Brothers’ To Back El-Sayed

More from the New York Sun

El-Sayed’s Radical Half-Sister Creates Headaches for Democrat’s Senate Campaign

Progressives Blast Mamdani for ‘Escalating’ Arrests of Black and Brown New Yorkers for Low-Level Offenses

The Return of ‘Billy Liar,’ a Timeless Classic About a Recognizable Fantasist

Author Joyce Carol Oates Calls It Hard To ‘Feel Sympathy’ for Suicidal USS Lincoln Sailors Who Helped Elect Trump

Gavin Newsom’s Slicked-Up Origin Story

Cuba’s Young Castros, a Generation Beyond the Reach of American Law, Woo Washington

Revisiting the Literary Past From the Open Road

With Senate Control at Stake, Expect Obama To Campaign in Michigan and Urge ‘the Brothers’ To Back El-Sayed