Some records you really need to hear in summer for them to
make full sense. The sunny optimism (at least on its surface) of “Too Late To
Turn Back Now” is best experienced strolling down a hot avenue on a warmly blue
afternoon. The family group were from Dania Beach in Florida and the song had
been released locally in 1970 without major success – indeed a fourth group
member, one Cleveland E Barrett, may be on the record, though was sadly killed
in a road accident before the group hit the charts (their first hit was 1971’s “Treat
Her Like A Lady” – no relation to the eighties Temptations song). By the time "Too Late" hit, a fourth sibling, Billie Jo Cornelius, had joined the group; the song was written by Eddie Cornelius himself.
The 1970 date stamp makes sense in itself, since “Too Late”
must have seemed something of a quaint anomaly even in 1972; its canter is reasonably
old-school in a Friends Of Distinction type of way but its gathering ecstasy (“I
believe, I believe, I believe I’m falling in love”) is hard to resist. Most of
the song is based on the same see-sawing two chords which formed the foundation
for the music of the Style Council (oh all right, they are G major seventh and
A minor seventh). The “mama told me” scenario goes right back to doo-wop, but
the song’s underlying paranoia is diffusely unsettling – the singer has been
swamped helplessly by the whirlpool of love, but to the extent that he’s ringing
her ten times a day and doesn’t even know if she loves him? A quarter of a
century later, the song’s “too late”ness would make a more sinister kind of
sense as part of the soundtrack to Ang Lee’s gently unrelenting The Ice Storm.
Date Record Made
Number Two: 15 July 1972
Number Of Weeks At
Number Two: 2
Record At Number One: “Lean
On Me” by Bill Withers
UK Chart Position: None
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