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The Sound Of A Suspicious Summer: “Too Late To Turn Back Now” by Cornelius Brothers & Sister Rose

By Marcello Carlin



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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