80: 80’s 28: Al B. Sure!

Of all of the songs that I played on my radio show in Kilkenny as a teenager the most played song was not a Madonna song or any other very poppy song but was actually a New Jack Swing song. That song was Nite And Day by Al B. Sure!. It got to number 7 on the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart in 1988. I loved Al B. Sure!’s voice, the fact he had an exclamation mark in his name, the ‘who me?’ female vocal, that ‘night’ was spelled ‘nite’. It is one of those 80’s songs that I will never tire listening to.

I remember finding his album In Effect Mode, on cassette and loving it. That album had 4 other singles too; Off on Your Own (Girl), Rescue Me, If I’m Not Your Lover and his cover of Killing Me Softly long before the Fugees reinvented it. It only seemed proper that I found the CD version of the album in the Virgin megastore on Times Square on my first trip to America years later.

Al B. Sure! has worked as a producer, writer and dj since the 1980’s and accorded to the wizard of Wikipedia was also involved in the early careers of Jodeci, Tevin Campbell and Usher.

Here is Nite And Day.