Pearly Gates - Fading into the Night - long lost disco / soul album of 1979 - produced by Ian Levine

This should have been her first album, released on RSO Records in 1979.

Here is the Tracklist:

1. No Two Ways About It 10:38

2. Caught in a Love Trap 9:47

3. Fading Into The Night 10:02

4. The Race Is On 6:20

5. Home Is in the Streets 6:07

Here is the story:

Alabama-born Viola Billups formed The Gypsies with sisters Earnestine & Shirley Pearce from New York in the 60s. They landed in England in 1968, changed name to The Flirtations and recorded the classic soul album Sounds Like The Flirtations with the hit singles Nothing But A Heartache, Someone Out There, and Need Your Lovin'. By 1973 Viola left the group to go solo. Her first single Sad Old Shadow was released under the name Vie, after that she adopted the stage name Pearly Gates in 1974 for the single Johnny & The Jukebox. She became a well-known TV persona, starring alongside Cliff Richard in his BBC shows, and was also a regular in the series Hi Summer. By 1979 she teamed up with Ian Levine to record the album Fading Into The Night, an album that had originally been scheduled to be recorded by an American songstress called Cobie Jones who could not make it to the UK to record her vocals on time. The completed album ended up being one of four disco albums that Levine completed that year, only to see them left unreleased by the record companies due to the disco backlash. 

Levine revived his career 4 years later when he had million-selling hits with Miquel Brown's So Many Men, So Little Time, and Evelyn Thomas' High Energy. In 1986 he launched his own label Nightmare Records and the sub-label Nightmare Gold where he released some 12"s of his unreleased 70s recordings. Pearly's Fading Into The Night and No Two Ways About It were released, while the track The Race Is On became the B-side of her 1989 Hi-NRG release One Less Bell To Answer. In 1995, Hot Productions released all five tracks off the unreleased 1979 LP together with Pearly's Hi-NRG recordings and some new tracks as the album The Best Of Pearly Gates.

  I was fortunate to befriend Pearly Gates when I accidentally met her at London's Jazz Café in 2006. I could not believe it was her as she has barely aged! She was surprised that I recognised her and knew her recordings. The following year I was in the studio with her and Levine when they recorded the track For Crying Out Loud, and in 2008 I recorded my own tracks Stop For Love and One Time Too Many with her which eventually led us on to recording a full album On A Winning Streak which we released in 2010.