FEATURE:
Groovelines
Maxi Priest – Close to You
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I want to include this song…
in Groovelines, as I think it remains underrated and dismissed a bit. Maxi Priest’s 1990 single, Close to You, is one that sounds amazing to this day. I have heard it so many times, yet I love it every time it appears. I am going to bring in a feature from Stereogum that looked at the song and its background. Released from the English artist’s fifth album, Bonafide (1990), the song reached number one on the US Billboard Hot 100, number two on the Australian ARIA Singles Chart and number seven in the U.K. Whilst not a pure Reggae song, it does have tinges of the genre. It is more of a Pop or R&B song. I do feel that it is a really interesting track that should be reappraised. A timeless track that is played a lot today and being discovered by new listeners, it was written by Max Elliott, Gary Benson and Winston Sela. The Bonafide album is also underrated and worth a listen. A definite classic of the early-1990s, Close to You is the sort of smooth, catchy and soulful R&B that you do not really hear much of now. We still have some songs like it, but I wonder why it is rarer. I am going to wrap up with my thoughts. Before then, Stereogum spotlighted Close to You as part of their series where they look deep inside number one songs:
“Close To You” isn’t anywhere near as anthemic as “Back To Life.” Instead, its breezy, improvisatory feel is key to its appeal. “Close To You” scans as a seduction song, and Priest delivers its chorus with a yearning intensity: “I just wanna be close to you and do all the things you want me to.” But on the verses, Priest describes a dangerous temptress: “She was a jezebel, Miss Brixton Queen/ Living her life like a bad sweet dream.” (Americans in the late ’80s and early ’90s loved pop songs about jezebels.) Priest is clearly very into this “devil woman” who spins around like a wheel on fire and walks the tightrope on love’s highwire. He keeps reminding himself that she’s bad news, but he’s drawn in anyway.
Those “Close To You” lyrics don’t exactly hold up to scrutiny. We don’t get a clear picture of this woman, and Priest certainly doesn’t sketch her out as a three-dimensional person. But I kind of like the silliness of the lyrics: “Her blood was hot, she burned so bright/ A neon sign there in the night/ It’s hard to say if I went too far/ My heart still bears a scar.” At any rate, the delivery matters more than the words. Priest sings hard on the chorus, and he half-raps the verses, which might come off as dancehall toasting if Priest had more patois in his voice. Priest sounds a bit like he’s arguing with himself in two different voices, and he also sounds a bit like he’s just making the song up as he goes along.
Recording “Close To You,” Priest returned to Jamaica and worked with a trio of veteran reggae producers: Sly Dunbar, Geoffrey Chung, and Handel Tucker. The track has some skank to it, but it’s definitely not a straight-up reggae song, and Priest knows it. In Fred Bronson’s Billboard Book Of Number 1 Hits, Priest says, “The song was originally more like soul than reggae. I used those producers to swing it back over. I think we got a nice balance between reggae, pop, and soul — it has all three of the elements in there.” He’s right. “Close To You” has a wind-in-your-hair weightlessness to it. The song isn’t hugely memorable, but when it’s on, it floats.
“Close To You” was a global hit, but it was bigger in the US than it was anywhere else. The song crossed radio formats — #2 R&B, #12 Adult Contemporary, #12 Dance Club Songs. That crossover appeal is presumably what took “Close To You” to the top of the Hot 100 for a week. Talking to Songfacts, Priest remembered hearing that he had the #1 song in America: “I was in tears as I called my brothers and sisters, reminiscing about our parents and my brother Osburn that we had lost, wishing they were around to share that news. I was just overwhelmed with joy.”
When “Close To You” topped the Hot 100, reggae hadn’t fully broken through on the American pop charts. UB40, a very different British reggae act, had taken “Red Red Wine” to #1 two years earlier, and a few other reggae-adjacent songs had topped the charts over the years — things like Eric Clapton’s version of “I Shot The Sheriff” or Blondie’s version of “The Tide Is High.” “Close To You” was a lot closer to the London dance-pop hits of the late ’80s — the hits from artists like Soul II Soul and Neneh Cherry and even Fine Young Cannibals. And maybe “Close To You” helped open things up for the Jamaican dancehall songs that would top the Hot 100 in the years ahead”.
I do love Close to You and the fact it was clearly influential and opened up things for others. It is radio friendly, but I also think that it has the potential to be remixed and covered by artists now. A universal and simple message that can be adapted and translated into multiple genres, Close to You is one of my favourite songs from the 1990s. Maxi Priest’s best-known song, it is great revisiting this song. Even if some people feel the song is a bit overrated or watered-down and not hugely important, I think Close to You is…
A true classic