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‘You can’t go wrong if you have your own sound and make sure you do
something different to what everyone else is doing’ – T-Boz

Such was the quality of TLC’s 1995 album Crazy Sexy Cool that its appeal
stretched far beyond the R&B community to make the year-end favourite
records lists of pundits as diverse as Edwyn Collins and Brian Eno.

Since then fans, not to mention the band’s record company, have had to
wait a long time for new material. And, now that it is finally imminent,
there is a palpable last-minute rush to finalise its launch.

"It took a year to prepare and a year to record. We only finally
finished it yesterday," LA Reid, the LaFace Records CEO who also A&Red
the project, admitted last week.

All of which has not made the set-up easy for Arista, which has only had
a four-track sampler and a US promo-only single Silly Ho to work with
until it received its first full copies of the album FanMail last week –
less than three weeks before its worldwide release on 23 February.

"It’s very much the American way of doing things, but this is the way it
was last time and we ended up selling half a million albums here," says
BMG UK head of R&B repertoire Mervyn Lyn. Crazy Sexy Cool sold a hefty
10m copies worldwide.

There were a number of reasons for the lengthy four-year delay between
albums, among them a well-publicised split with manager ‘Pebbles’ Reid,
a law suit – settled out of court – with LaFace and subsequent
contractual renegotiations. TLC’s de facto leader T-Boz says, "The
political stuff took a long time to sort out. But even so it doesn’t
seem that long to me. Thank the Lord our last album lasted two years so
that makes the time go a lot faster."

Reid says, "I’m all in favour of artists taking care of their business
but I think it took more time than it should have. It was a distraction
from the creative business. It all took two years but at least all’s
well that ends well."

And there was also the question of whether the band members wanted to
remain together as a group. "They had spent time away from each other
building their own lives and they had to decide whether they were going
to come back together and be TLC again," says Reid.

Now in their late twenties, the women have taken a bigger hand in the
new record, with T-Boz providing lyrics to five tracks on the album –
some adapted from a book of poetry she is going to publish called
Thoughts: Volume One. She says, "Each girl has her own individuality and
that’s expressed on the album. It’s almost three solo performers in one
group."

FanMail reunites TLC with producers Dallas Austin, Babyface and Jermaine
Dupri, who all worked on Crazy Sexy Cool, as well as introducing
relative newcomers Kevin ‘Shekspere’ Briggs – who produced the first
single No Scrubs – and Rico Lumpkins, plus veterans Jimmy Jam and Terry
Lewis (their first project with LaFace).

Conspicuous by their absence are Organized Noise, who produced the last
album’s smash single Waterfalls. "I didn’t feel they had any songs that
would add to the project," says Reid. "I think it was a lack of focus.
After Waterfalls they had every record executive on the phone offering
deals."

Among the stand-out tracks on FanMail (so called because the cover
artwork includes the names of fans who had written to the group during
their absence) include the Austin-produced Automatic and Unpretty ("I
love that track. I think it’s one of the most profound songs they have
had so far," says Reid), Babyface’s Dear Lie and I Miss You So Much, and
Jam & Lewis’ War-sampling I’m Good At Being Bad.

No Scrubs, which is being taken to UK radio this week, follows the girls
trademark pattern of backing sassy, empowering lyrics with
radio-friendly production – a "scrub" being a man who "acts like he’s
big but still lives at home", according to T-Boz.

Mervyn Lyn says that No Scrubs also follows TLC’s desire for their songs
to work in their own right without much tampering. "It was important
last time that we didn’t have to do loads of remixes to make the record
palatable to a UK audience, which in this day and age is pretty unique,"
he says.

T-Boz concurs, saying that the group’s philosophy has always been
simple. "You can’t go wrong if you have your own sound and make sure you
do something different to what everyone else is doing."

The new album also reflects the group’s growing sophistication, with
FanMail’s packaging – which they devised themselves – exuding a
futuristic, "hi-tech with fashion" feel. This theme extends to the
inclusion of a computer-generated fourth ‘virtual’ member called Vicki,
who will feature in videos and rapping on the album. "She sort of
directs the album but she’s very sexy. I’m going to have to push her to
the curb," says T-Boz.

Awareness campaigns will run in key specialist retailers to coincide
with the album’s release, but the TLC campaign proper will kick in with
fly posting and radio advertising to back No Scrubs’ release on March
15, two weeks after the group visits the UK for promotion.

By then Arista will have had a chance to convince the industry that the
album matches up to their previous work. And, having finally heard
FanMail, it can even start to think about some of those end-of-year
favourite albums lists.

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