Fan The Flame!

Jessie Ware has just released a new single, Freak Me Now, featuring "Queen Of Disco" Róisín Murphy, which was enough to make me sit up and pay attention.

 

I'll be honest, I see Jessie on TV a lot - she seems to be a semi-permanent guest on Sunday Brunch, for one - but I'd be hard pressed to name any of her songs. A quick check of my collection reveals the sum total of three songs featuring Jessie: one solo, one with Disclosure, one solo and remixed by Disclosure. 

Róisín on the other hand is someone whose music I've followed with great interest since Moloko arrived on the scene in the mid-1990s and, to these ears, has just got better and better and better since going solo in the early 2000s. She has an album of all-new material, cheekily-titled Hit Parade, out on Ninja Tune in September and I for one will be straight on it.

Freak Me Now is a reworked version of a track from Jessie's album That! Feels Good! which came out at the end of April. Both the song and the video are an explosion of colour and it looks like Jessie and Róisín had great fun raiding the dressing up box. The exuberance and joi de vivre burst from the speakers and will have you shaking your booty before you know it, for which I will apologise in advance to those who may be witness to this on my commute to and from work.

Very few mentions of this in the video credits or other parts of t'internet so I'll do my bit and give a shout out to the song's other guest vocalist Clarence Coffee Jr. (nice titfer, Clarence). He co-wrote Freak Me Now with Jessie and super-producer Stuart Price (who I recall with much affection from his early work as Jacques Lu Cont / Les Rhythmes Digitales).

 

All in all, Freak Me Now is three minutes and thirty three seconds of irresistible sunshine pop. If that's not enough for you, Jo Disco has supplied a promo extended mix, stretching it out to a cool five minutes. The single remix is available digitally in all the usual places.