In between his career-defining albums Purple Rain and Sign o’ the Times, Prince had a relative drought on the singles chart. For most artists, having four Top-40 hits over a two-year period—with three placing in the Top 10—would be a career highlight. For Prince, it was a substantial comedown after his nonstop barrage of heavy-rotation singles between early 1983 and early 1985.
For a few months in 1986, Prince and the Revolution dominated the airwaves once again with “Kiss.” As the lead single from their Parade album (which was the soundtrack album for Prince’s film Under the Cherry Moon), “Kiss” spent two weeks at the top of the Billboard Hot 100, and it went Gold exactly three months after its release. Its popularity hasn’t faded over the ensuing decades, as it is Prince’s second-most popular song on both Spotify and YouTube. “Kiss” has also been covered by more than 100 different artists.
One cover of “Kiss” wound up being an important single for the two artists that collaborated to make it—namely, Tom Jones and the Art of Noise. Artists as disparate as Joan as Police Woman, Richard Thompson, and Kelly Clarkson have also made compelling covers of Prince’s hit. You might think that the original is so good that we don’t need to hear any other versions. However, each of these four covers makes for a worthwhile listen.
Tom Jones and the Art of Noise
Not long after Prince released “Kiss,” the versatile Welsh crooner Tom Jones made the song a regular part of his setlists. In 1987, he performed his version of “Kiss” on The Last Resort with Jonathan Ross on the UK television network Channel 4. Upon viewing his televised performance, members of the British synth-pop group the Art of Noise contacted Jones about recording a cover of the song with them. They created a version of “Kiss” that not only brought two generations of artists together but also featured a percussion sample from Steely Dan’s “Do It Again.”
The collaboration was included on the 1988 album The Best of the Art of Noise, and it became the Art of Noise’s highest-charting single, peaking at No. 31 on the Hot 100. It also put Jones back on the Hot 100 for the first time since he went to No. 15 with the country-tinged “Say You’ll Stay Until Tomorrow” in 1977. Jones has not returned to the pop chart since landing there with the spare-but-danceable version of “Kiss.” However, he had a pair of dance hits in 1994 with “If I Only Knew” and a cover of Yaz’s “Situation.”