7 Ways to Love
A dance single by Saint Etienne under the name Cola Boy.
7 Ways to Love, a single by Cola Boy (a Saint Etienne alias), came out on 24 June 1991 via Arista Records. Janey Lee Grace sang lead vocals, and Andrew Midgley wrote the track. It hit number eight on the UK Singles Chart, topped both the UK Dance Singles and UK Club charts, and cracked the top ten in Ireland, the top twenty in Luxembourg and Switzerland, and the top forty in Belgium, Israel, and the Netherlands.
Quick Facts
- Artist
- Cola Boy
- Released
- 24 June 1991
- Genre
- Disco
- house
- Northern soul
- Length
- 3:33
- Label
- Arista
- Writer
- Andrew Midgley
- Producer
- Saint Etienne
Facts from the source article.
Background and release
Bob Stanley and Pete Wiggs of Saint Etienne created the song, with Sarah Cracknell singing on the original demo. After an initial pressing of 500 white label copies sold out, the track was re-recorded with vocals by Janey Lee Grace, a former backing singer of Wham!, because Cracknell was under contract to another label and could not sing on non-Saint Etienne releases. Stanley and Wiggs were inspired by dance hits played in clubs at the time; Stanley told The Guardian in 2025 that after a club tour in early 1991 they heard tracks like DJ H featuring Stefy's I Like It and (I Wanna Give You) Devotion by Nomad and decided to write something that would work in a club, making the song as basic as possible with a memorable hook.
The duo pressed the promo records themselves and drove around London dropping them off in shops. Arista Records picked up the track and wanted to sign them, but they were already on Heavenly Recordings and about to release their first Saint Etienne album, Foxbase Alpha. Stanley and Wiggs adopted the alias Cola Boy and recruited Stanley's friend Andrew Midgley to appear as Cola Boy in clubs and on TV with Lee Grace. Grace recalled that after Stanley and Wiggs called, it took two hours to get to the session and two hours to return, and she was only there for 50 minutes; they asked her to sing 7 Ways to Love and to ad-lib, and that was it.
Critical reception
Seamus Quinn from NME described the track as a modern, uplifting disco number on a one-side only white label, played heavily in clubs and likely popular because of a kitschy flute riff, noting that the only sung line sticks in the head. Another NME editor, Stuart Maconie, named it Single of the Week, commenting that although part of him wanted to dislike it given its club popularity and appeal to certain audiences, it was brilliant, with four meaningless words of dialogue, Balearic conventions as seen by Hanna Barbera, and a slight yearning among the cheerfulness that all fab pop has.
Maconie added that the track has the same freshness and lightness of touch as Saint Etienne's dance tracks, unsurprisingly since they were heavily involved in production, and called it cybernetic Northern Soul with the effect of eating a whole bag of chewy Fruit Salad sweets. James Hamilton from Record Mirror described it as a girl cooed title repeating, with flute tones tootled and airy synth washed ambient breezy skipper at 121.8-122bpm.
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