Black Lace _ Mary Ann

Before the Coronavirus lockdown Black Lace were considering honouring Alan Bartons 25 years passing with a live concert, which obviously could no longer happen, but around the anniversary of the death of Alan Barton, Terry Dobson and Ian Howarth were messaging on Facebook, venting their disappointment that a concert cannot happen, when one comments simply said ,it’s a pity you couldn’t get together and sing a song for Facebook’.
Former Black Lace member Ian Howarth took this as a challenge but the problems were many fold!
Firstly Black Lace couldn’t get together, because of Coronavirus, Colin Gibb lives in Tenerife, Steve Scholey has retired from music altogether (and we all respect that) and Alan’s son, Dean Barton, who we were planning asking to sing lead vocals, lives on the island of Gozo near Malta and to add to the problem Dean Barton has been heavily involved recording a new single (better things are coming) along with the singer of Smokie, Mike Craft (which which was released June 1st 2020)
So Ian Howarth laid down a basic track at his home in Ossett, sent it by email to Colin Gibb in Tenerife and asked him to video himself playing live Bass whilst adding Mandolin to Ian’s track of the Eurovision Song Contest song ‘Mary Ann’. (Black Lace came 7th in the 1979 Eurovision song contest)
Terry Dobson added his live drums by email and Dean Barton agreed to sing lead vocals from his home in Gozo - ‘and that’s when the magic happened’.
Deans voice is so strong and unbelievably like his dads, with the addition of Deans voice it suddenly started to sound not only like the original track but a brilliant version too.
Lastly Ian Howarth added his guitar and backing vocals to his live video and the song was complete.
Ian had one other surprise up his sleeve.
Right at the very start of the project, as he was laying the basic track down, he recorded it specifically at 78.8 bpm for a special reason.
Ian wanted to add a short piece of video footage, synchronised to Deans voice, to the completed video of Alan Barton singing ‘Mary Ann’. 42 years earlier.
The result was unbelievable, even though Dean sounds so much like his dad we all know Alan’s voice so well and it is very, very strange to see Alan Barton singing with Deans voice.