Five singers turned the song down before Sandra Cross agreed to £100.
The rhythm had already been cut at Ariwa Sounds, Neil Fraser's studio in Peckham, built from just drums and the bass of Fraser's regular player, known only as Preacher. Fraser had the melody in mind, a version of the Stylistics tune the Mighty Diamonds had already carried into reggae, but no one to sing it. When Cross eventually said yes, the result, Country Living, became the record Ariwa built her solo career on: it opens Country Life, the 1985 album that carries her name and gave lovers' rock one of its more durable individual statements.
Cross was no newcomer to the studio by then. She had grown up in south London the only girl among seven brothers, started out singing in her local Pentecostal church, and was brought into Ariwa's orbit by her own brother, the keyboard player Garnett Cross, who worked sessions there under the name Sgt Pepper. That family connection matters more than it might elsewhere: so much of Ariwa's mid-Eighties catalogue runs through the same handful of south London households that the label can feel less like a business than an extended one.
What made Cross's voice suit lovers' rock so well is exactly what let Country Life push past it. The genre had a reputation, not always fairly earned, for softness, for a single-minded devotion to romance over the harder, more political concerns of roots reggae. Fraser's view, stated plainly and often, was that the distinction was mostly a matter of nerve rather than ability: give a lovers' rock singer a heavier rhythm and she would find the harder edge in her own voice easily enough. Country Life is the proof. Cross's phrasing, so carefully turned on ballads, holds up just as well against Ariwa's bass-forward production, the kind built on a studio that had grown from a four-track in Fraser's front room in Thornton Heath to a twenty-four-track operation by the time this album was cut.
Behind her, the credits read like a roll call of Ariwa regulars: bassists Bernard Cumberbatch and Preacher again, drummer Billy Cross, the guitarist and utility player known as Black Steel turning up on guitar, piano and backing vocals alike. It is a small, self-sufficient world, and Country Life is one of its clearest results: a singer given a song nobody else wanted, and a studio that knew exactly what to do with her once she said yes.
