Betty Boo - Grrr! It's Betty Boo (1992)

If you, like me, watched the 1990 (and start of 1991) Top of the Pops reruns on BBC Four, seeing Betty Boo stride her way through "Doin' the Do", "Where Are You Baby" and "24 Hours" will have been among your highlights of the TOTP year. The Kensington star was 1990's great pop hope, and her songs made it sound like there was no more fun job in the world than being Betty Boo (and surely, she beat even the Boo Radleys in turning that word 'boo' into a catchphrase/insignia). Like Monie Love, she was one of the early successful British female rappers, but her world wasn't really hip hop – it was combining her plastic raygun raps (about all things Boo! Independence and fun, having a great life) with melting pot dance-pop and the instant appeal of many of the 60s classics she grew up with. She successfully debuted, like Cathy Dennis, in 1989 as guest vocalist to a DJ (the Beatmasters' "Hey DJ") and then proceeded to record an album. Boomania presented everything Betty Boo was about and I won't hesitate to call one of the greatest of all pop albums – just so teeming with life, even on an instrumental (!) like "Boo's Boogie".

Two of its best songs, however, were atypical and laid out other courses. The sublime "Don't Know What to Do", an abrupt move away from rap, remains her best song and a real 90s lost classic; her ethereal vocals would not shame a great shoegaze album, while the music's fanciable streams of house see Pete Tong favourites Futureshock on the horizon (at a decade's distance). Overall it foresees Bilinda Butcher guesting on Collapsed Lung's "Ballad Night" in 1996. The following song, "Shame", is essentially French house being invented years ahead of schedule (in particular the Motorbass end of the spectrum); it is the only thing on the album that wouldn't have made any sense as a single, too ambiguous to be properly commercial – note the "Family Affair" drum machine, remember what that song's about, and consider how the permeating non-clarity here twice makes room for a blunted bit of 'ardkore rave menace circa '92. There is almost some threat there, likewise on the closing "Leave Me Alone", but everything else on the album snuffs it out.

Boomania was ultimately a huge success in Britain. She was a pop and indie darling (Melody Maker's "Completely Faultless Goddess and Pop Genius of the Year") and couldn't have fit more perfectly in 1990, the year of multihued optimism and positivity in pop (cf. Beats International, Deee-Lite, the Beloved, Soul II Soul, De La Soul, Definition of Sound, Snap! and so many others). In the aftermath of our second summer of love (not to mention reception from around the world, i.e. Mandela, the fall of the wall etc.), pop was in its daisy age. As Rebel MC sang in his greatest hit, from March of that year, "let's make this world a better place". Boomania's crayon-drawn world can be heard directly impacting hits like Twenty4Seven's "Are You Dreaming?" and Jason Donovan's "I'm Doing Fine" (which I know you hate, but regardless). It seemed like everything great in pop was in discussion with each other. So what had changed by 1992 for her second album, Grrr! It's Betty Boo, to completely pale in comparison?

Lead-off single "Let Me Take You There" was hopeful enough a success, peaking at number 12 in the late summer. Adopting, and then skewing, the template of the Four Tops' "It's All in the Game", it was a decisive curveball for a 'comeback', happily swooning in an imagined 1960s far more serene than the go-go booted, Ready Steady Go! spirals of 1990 Betty. Born March 1970, she was maybe the first singer or musician to weave 60s psychedelic pop signifiers into her music while completely removed from any memory of the actual decade – although I note Jordan Knight of New Kids on the Block, who recorded an even more unlikely Pepper pastiche "Tonight" as their own entry into buoyant 1990 pop, wasn't a 60s baby either. But unlike their effort (more ELO than anything), "Let Me Take You There" did very much exist in the now now, successfully sprinkling some "Pet Sounds" (the instrumental breakdown apes it wholesale) into one promising emergent strain of American R&B (think "Summertime"), with a post-baggy breakbeat melting into the sun-heated sand below.

The result is some instantly loveable sunshine pop not unlike the sort that Saint Etienne were beginning to make (how about "Avenue" for mining new elements in the fountain of 1967). But perhaps it gave off a more 'adult' façade; on Now 23 it slips snugly between Vanessa Paradis' "Be My Baby" and Sophie B. Hawkins' "Damn I Wish I Was Your Lover" in the downtempo end of disc two, whereas on Now 18 she was in more obviously lively company (even if that company included Bombalurina, but you catch my drift). Not that Now track sequencing means anything, but it's often in pop that great critical weight put into a slight change in image, and the 'new' Betty had long hair instead of a bob cut, leopard prints instead of space age colours (some time before Austin Powers or the bachelor pad lounge 'revival'). 1992 was a brilliant year for pop, but not much about its greatest sound – the lunacy of Altern-8, SL2 and the like – really sounds or even looks like 1990. The KLF had been and gone, Madchester had petered out and pop's heavyweights had changed. Whatever angle you want to try and perhaps hopelessly grasp for, ultimately Grrr! spent its solitary week in the charts at number 62. Vangelis, Izzy Stradlin and the New Fast Automatic Daffodils all had higher charting debuts that week.

Still, the abrupt public disinterest was, no surprise, more the product of bigwigs. WEA had already under-promoted the second single "I'm On My Way", which blindly entered at number 44 and stayed there. If the label hadn't already stopped caring about Betty, they certainly had when they inevitably dropped her months later. In 1994, Madonna (who had the second highest debut that week with Erotica, and there are parallels) wished to sign her to Maverick, calling Grrr! "horribly overlooked" in her Paul Du Noyer Q interview whilst adorned in an outfit of the period given to her personally by Betty. She considered the offer, but (again like Cathy Dennis in due time) found that she had more joy writing for others, and you know how that turned out. Not only that, but her mother fell ill and she naturally spent years prioritising nursing her. Not that it was goodbye forever; in later times she has joined Chesney Hawkes as 90s pop stars on the 80s nostalgia circuit, and there was her brief alliance with Alex James in 2006 as the one-song WigWam (although their typically strained Popworld interview is more memorable than the song itself).

Given that Cherry Red later gave it the deluxe treatment, many side with Madonna on Betty's premature final album, and as is obvious from my covering it here I'm among them. At 39 minutes Grrr! It's Betty Boo was a concentrated refinement of her style; slicker but at no cost to her avidity. Boo's central collaborator was John Coxon, now shorn of production duo King John (who handled much of Boomania) and soon to join Spiritualized as guitarist-keyboardist, and if there's any one new card that's repeatedly played it's his rinky-dink keyboards, just the right sort of cartoon embellishing to further hook you on the songs' affability. It's the very first sound you hear, opening the aforesaid "I'm on My Way". With its human cat noises and "Lady Madonna" piano/sax outro (Ronnie Scott, Harry Klein, Bill Povey and Bill Jackman, the players from the original track, all coming back to re-record it), the song is of course all spark (and provides one of the least obvious new contexts for the Beatles in 1990s pop), enough to show her clingy partner that he can't hope to ever complement it, to ever respect what she wants to do ("It should be understood that I said 'no', it's not my problem if you can't let go"). She's navigating her own way forward, recognising when it's necessary to change things.

Life continues to look up on "Thing Goin' On", and even though "Hangover" and "Curly & Girly" are both about cheating exes, Betty dismisses them a smile – there's no hurt and they're just good stories to tell. The good humour and unassuming confidence are integral to Betty's outlook on life, so even when, mid-way through the album, she spends a song 'wishing you were here', contentment can still be achieved anyway. She could convince you alone but the music makes especially clear how much fun she's having; the chain of human animal noises on "Thing Goin' On" are arranged like a swing rhythm, whilst "Hangover" brings out the synth strings and steel guitars for a chamber-country pop setting (even allowing the guitars to attempt inventing Hawaiian shoegaze in the instrumental break). "Curly & Girly", on the other hand, is a twelve-bar dance-pop blues, "Where Are You Baby" rewritten with harmonicas. The album's gentle creativity, much like that of the first album, should not be overlooked.

"Wish You Were Here", as well as the later "Gave You the Boo" and "Catch Me", reveal her other primary new direction, a sort of Smash Hits-goes-garage house (where the Erotica connection mostly comes in), and while the former two are still a relative hybrid of that with Betty's typical speed raps, the entirely-sung "Catch Me" could have been released on Strictly Rhythm (play back to back with, say, "Partay Feeling"), even with its momentary discursive details (like the icy tickles of 303 acid that run down the second verse). It's an easy fit and it is entirely possible that Betty would have continued this direction and scored a few Loni Clark-size hits if she'd made it to 1994. Album highlight "Skin Tight", on the other hand, is +8 speed electronic ska, including Skatalites/Prince Buster chk-a-chk-as crossed with a rigid video game bassline (and is that Inspiral Carpets' foppish organ put to absurd use in there too?) This is all despite it being a vignette of nightlife, as it was unlikely you'd hear a skank like this in Kensington, insofar as it practically invents its own template. There is the transatlantic comparison of what another 22-year-old woman, Gwen Stefani, was doing to ska via pop earlier in the year with No Doubt's first album, but it closer resembles sped-up Rebel MC & Double Trouble, while in its chronicling of a girl's night out it puts Girls Aloud (you imagine they were all fans) through one voice (appropriately, she co-wrote a few of their early songs).

While her luckiness-in-love has gone up and down for much of the album, she believes she's found it on "Catch Me" and has it confirmed on "Close the Door", the closing song and biggest sonic departure. Sure its speak-whisper and jazzy breaks means Grrr! finishes in a manner not unlike Erotica and "Secret Garden", but in the song's humid meld of trip hop beats and R&B it is remarkable how much it reflects what was not quite yet the blossoming of neo-soul; it could fit easily onto Joi's The Pendulum Vibe, an album from 1994 whose importance, or rather the depths of it, would not yet be apparent for some time. As the final song on the final Betty Boo album it comes off as a final, self-assured 'I'm better than my label anyway' – you dropped a singer doing stuff like this? – and even if the record was ignored, it's confident enough that it being so good matters more. By the time pop came to, say, Lily Allen, you can specifically observe some of her world of agency and merriment, one via the other and vice versa. And listen to her flow on things like "Skin Tight" and then go check your Mis-Teeq CDs. Boomania is ultimately the better and perhaps more prophetic record, but that is to take nothing away from Grrr! It's Betty Boo and its own way of expanding on what made Boo so distinctive. "In case you didn't know," she comments mid-rap on "Gave You the Boo", "respect is free; I gave you enough time to get it on with me".