Black Box was made up of three Italian producers: Mirko Limoni, Daniele Davoli and Valerio Semplici. They also recorded as Groove Groove Melody. They made "Ride On Time" by chopping up the raw vocals from Loleatta Holloway's "Love Sensation," a #1 Dance hit in 1980, and putting them over a high-energy track. They said they found Holloway's a capella vocals on a bootleg CD and had no idea who the singer was. They hired a French model named Katrin Quinol to pose as their singer. Quniol couldn't speak English and had trouble lip-synching the song on music shows, but that didn't seem to matter: the combination of Black Box's fierce production, Holloway's powerful voice, and Quinol's striking looks made the record a success, albeit a controversial one. Holloway was none too pleased when she heard the song and saw the video. She took legal action and eventually got credit as the singer.
On "Love Sensation," Holloway sings, "'cause you're right on time," which Black Box used as the hook. For the title, they changed the line to "ride on time," which doesn't make any sense but is a lot more distinctive. Another case of a sampled lyric being mistranscribed is "The Bomb! (These Sounds Fall Into My Mind)" by The Bucketheads, who used a Chicago song called "Street Player" with a lyric that's really "street sounds swirling through my mind."
"Ride On Time" didn't get much attention in America but it was the biggest-selling single in the UK in 1989, spending six weeks at #1. It did well throughout Europe, becoming one of the top 100 best-selling singles ever in most countries there.
See your Spotify stats (with number of plays and minutes listened) and discover new music.
Music data, artist images, album covers, and song previews are provided by Spotify. Spotify is a trademark of Spotify AB.