This can't work. Three young women who dance their way through London's hottest clubs and decide, hey, let's start a band; who insist on playing their own instruments, even though they regard learning how to play those instruments with the enthusiasm that most of us have for ironing; who waltz through three different producers in the course of a year and a half; and who sing soul covers and their own Motown-style compositions with a world-weariness that contravenes everything the genre stands for. It can't. But it does.

Bananarama aren't the type to sing "Come See About Me": they're hot stuff, they know it, and if you don't, that's your problem. Deep Sea Skiving's best songs were recorded under the aegis of producers Tony Swain and Steve Jolley. Preeminent among those tracks are "Boy Trouble," a languorous lament about the one that won't go away; "Cheers Then," a kiss-off to a love who's gone; and the cream of the crop, "Shy Boy (Don't It Make You Feel Good)," a Swain-Jolley original that sounds like top-drawer Motown and deserves to be a major hit. Conviction? Soul? It ain't here. But is sure sounds like a great party. (RS 395)

CHRISTOPHER CONNELLY