“7 Ways to Love” by Cola Boy
You may notice that the lyrics of Cola Boy’s “7 Ways to Love” are very simple and repetitive – your quintessential 1990s’ club hit, so to speak. But they were very much composed so on purpose.
In fact as far as Cola Boy (aka Saint Etienne) was concerned, this track was intended to be something like a parody of other tunes that were dominating the club scene at the time. That’s why the group didn’t even bother attaching their own name to it, a shtick that came back to sort of bite them in the behind once “7 Ways to Love” actually blew up.
So if you’re expecting to be enlightened on what the “seven ways to love” actually are by listening to this piece, then you are likely to walk away disappointed. In fact all we’re dealing with here is fundamentally the phrase “seven ways to love” being repeated over and over.
So if nothing else, the listener will at least walk away knowing that there are “seven ways to love” even if such ways, from the standpoint of the vocalist, are never revealed.
Cola Boy and “7 Ways to Love”
Cola Boy is actually a pseudonym an English pop band known more commonly as Saint Etienne used during the early 1990s to drop a couple of tracks, including this one, which came out as a single in 1991.
Ironically enough, they took on said moniker because they considered this and the other single issued as such, “He Is Cola”, as being “too cheesy for Saint Etienne”. And the reason we say such is ironic is because “7 Ways to Love” actually stands as the highest Saint Etienne reached on the UK Singles Chart, peaking at number 8 and marking the only instance where they made it onto the top 10.
And its success also resulted in Saint Etienne, who were newbies on the scene at the time, signing a one-shot deal with Arista Records, who would be the label behind this song.
At the time Saint Etienne was already signed to another record company. So they employed two other individuals, vocalist Janey Lee Grace – who was primarily known as a backup singer for Wham! – as well as one Andrew Midgley, who was actually employed as a tax officer at the time, to serve as Cola Boy’s front.
Saint Etienne, who began releasing music in 1990, are made up of the same trio of core musicians now as it was then. And they are lead vocalist Sarah Cracknell alongside instrumentalists Pete Wiggs and Bob Stanley. And again, no song they ever released has charted as well in their homeland as this one.
However, “7 Ways to Love” was a non-album single, and Saint Etienne has actually come out with nine studio albums between 1991 and 2017. And out of them their third effort, 1994’s “Tiger Bay”, can be considered to be the most-successful.
