Ebony Alleyne - Walk Away And Never Look Back video

The greatest regret of my entire career is the sad story of the Ebony Alleyne album She was a wonderful nineteen year old singer signed to Sony in 2002. I was brought in to produce her entire album. We did an magnificent album of generic live "real" smooth sophisticated soul music, with a huge orchestra (sixty strings, thirty brass), with a Burt Bacharach/Dionne Warwick flavour overall, and this was well before Nora Jones, Joss Stone, Corinne Bailey Rae, and most particularly Amy Winehouse, all hit with basically the same thing. The Ebony album was utterly utterly wonderful, and I was so proud of it. It took a year and a half to make, and the Sony head of A&R, Muff Winwood, oversaw it personally. This song, "Walk Away And Never Look Back", was the first song we recorded. We introduced her to the soul scene by reactivating the old classic Okeh label, owned by Sony, and pressing up tiny limited editions of three all different singles on the Okeh label on seven inch vinyl, and this song was the first of those three singles. Everything looked wonderful and rosy, and I was already clearing a space on the wall for my Grammy award, when disaster struck. The Chairman of Sony had a very bad falling out with the girl's manager over an entirely different project that he managed, and Ebony was mercilessly and unceremoniously, and in my opinion UNNECESSARILY dropped, without a record ever hitting the shops. And still she sits unsigned to this day, the recordings all went to waste, and ...