#55: Twist In My Sobriety by Tanita Tikaram

City: Montreal, PQ
Radio Station: CKOI
Peak Month: April 1989
Peak Position in Montreal ~ #3
Peak position in Vancouver ~ did not chart
Peak Position on Billboard Hot 100 ~ did not chart
Peak Position on the Israeli Singles chart ~ #1
Peak Position on Austrian Singles chart ~ #2
Peak Position on West German Singles chart ~ #2
Peak Position on French Singles chart ~ #6
Peak Position on Norway Singles chart ~ #6
Peak Position on Swiss Singles chart ~ #6
YouTube: “Twist In My Sobriety”
Lyrics: “Twist In My Sobriety”

Tanita Tikaram is of Malaysian and Indo-Fijian parentage and is the sister of actor Ramon Tikaram. She was born in 1969 in Münster, West Germany. Her father was in the military, and her family moved to the UK when she was in her early teens. Tikaram started singing in nightclubs while she was still a teenager and came to the attention of  WEA Records. Her debut album Ancient Heart was released when she was 19 and was produced by Rod Argent and Peter Van Hoote. The debut single from the album was “Good Tradition”. The song peaked at #3 in the Netherlands, #4 in Sweden, #9 in Ireland, and #10 in the UK.

Her second single from Ancient Heart was “Twist In My Sobriety”.

British oboist, Malcolm Messiter, plays the oboe on the song written by Tanita Tikaram. The instrument is featured prominently on the song’s chorus, as well as being used on instrumental solos throughout the song. The first line of the song, “All God’s children need travelling shoes”, is the title of an autobiography by American poet Maya Angelou.

The refrain for “Twist In My Sobriety” states:
Look my eyes are just holograms.
Look your love has drawn red from my hands.
From my hands you know you’ll never be,
more than twist in my sobriety.

Tikaram said in an interview with a Polish reporter, “The song is really about not understanding – when you’re 18, you’ve got a very particular emotional relationship with the world, you feel very isolated, and everybody else is so distant and cold. And I think I was singing about not feeling anything or not being moved by things around. I think this is a strong feeling when you’re just after adolescence. There is a very good film called Heavenly Creatures by a director from New Zealand, I don’t know if you’ve seen it, it’s about two girls that kill their mother… but it’s not the murder that matters but their feelings and how you’re feeling at that time. But then it passes by.”

When we asked her what went though her mind when she wrote “Twist In My Sobriety”, Tanita replied that “a lot of the imagery is very bookish,” adding that it’s a “kind of road song. It’s a real song with a landscape, and you feel that someone is describing a landscape.”

Shot on location on the Altiplano Plateau in Bolivia, the music video shows various residents of a destitute village interacting with each other amidst their daily struggles. Interspersed throughout these scenes are shots of Tanita Tikaram singing in a darkened room with only one light shining on her face. With these images, the lyrics in the song “all good people read good books, now your conscience is clear…” are ironic. The “good people” can read almost to congratulate themselves about their new awarenesses, insights, from what they read. But their self-improvement through reading may not be making any difference at all to the people who appear in the music video. There are some books that can shake us out of a culture of contentment. But many books tell us things that people in civilized society can cope with reading about, and still keep them ignorant of real struggles going on in the world beyond books.

In the song Tikarum sings “Look my eyes are just holograms.” A hologram represents a recording of information regarding the light that came from the original scene as scattered in a range of directions rather than from only one direction, as in a photograph. This allows the scene to be viewed from a range of different angles, as if it were still present. In the case of the singer eyes, we see the image of them from different angles, but the eyes are technically not present, even though it seems they are. Lyrically, this offers the singer as a presence with an absence who has moved on to some other place than the place she appears to still be. The phrase, “look my eyes are just holograms,” can also point to a sense of alienation and the obstacles in custom, language, politics, and religion that impair authentic connection with one another.

Liza Minnelli covered the song on her 1989 album Results. Tanita Tikaram told Songfacts that she was “deeply honored that Liza Minnelli sang that.” Tanita added that she thinks that Minnelli, “understood the song in an American way,” as “sobriety has a very specific meaning in America, about recovery… and alcohol.” However as a Brit, the word had a different connotation to her, meaning “just to be very serious and sober in your behavior.” The song title “Twist In My Sobriety” offers a number of possibilities. For people in Alcoholics Anonymous (and related groups), sobriety means giving up alcohol, including alcoholic beverages often served (at least in cocktails) with a twist of lemon or lime. When one attains sobriety, there can be new challenges faced by the newly sober person, new demons to wrestle. Though, as Tanita Tikaram relates, in the UK “sobriety” pertains simply to someone with a serious and sober demeanor. In any event, “a twist” is something novel or unexpected, like a twist in the plot in a novel, play or film. Often a twist requires a shift in how one proceeds, and it is a kind of wake-up call to alert the protagonist regarding what they are facing.

“All God’s children need traveling shoes” reflects an understanding that once you are born you are set on a path. Whether you achieve greatness, genius, artistry, courage or some other quality, each of God’s children have to get on their “traveling shoes” to get to their destination.

In verse three, Tikarum sings “Cup of tea, take time to think,” offering an image of domestic respite. However, the next lyrics urge “time to risk a life.” For the discerning, time taken to think culminates in daring action. There are distractions in the way, perhaps gluttony, lust and sloth: “Sweet and handsome, soft and porky. You pig out ’til you’ve seen the light.” Once a discerning person sorts through this they may be ready to “risk a life.”

She writes “Half the people read the papers, read them good and well.” It seems Tanita Tikaram is commenting on the shallow consumption of news, where being “in the know” about the latest headlines is a source of esteem instead of a catalyst to deepened perceptions. And who are many of these people? According to the song they are “pretty people, nervous people.” And some of these pretty, nervous, people are the ones who have news to sell you: the news anchors and A-list journalists who get top dollars in their professions: think Anderson Cooper, Dianne Sawyer, Bill O’Reilly, Matt Lauer, Rachel Maddow, and Sean Hannity, for starters.

Tanita Tikarum references what happens when you question assumptions and beliefs, sacred cows, people hold dear. You can be playful in raising a topic: “we just poked a little empty pie.” However, just bringing up a topic and questioning something small as a “little empty pie,” gets you in trouble. It exposes how uncomfortable many people are with any form of dissenting opinions. But the singer tells us “I don’t care about their different thoughts, different thoughts are good for me.”

“Twist In My Sobriety” peaked at #3 in Montreal, and #28 in Portland (OR). Internationally, “Twist In My Sobriety” peaked at number-one in Israel, #2 in Austria, and West Germany, #6 in France, Norway, and Switzerland, #10 in Ireland, and #14 in Finland. It was also a Top 30 hit in Australia, Belgium, the Netherlands, and the UK. The music video was filmed in Bolivia. In 1986, the song returned to the UK singles chart reaching #82.

Both the single “Twist In My Sobriety” and Tikaram herself were nominated at the 1989 Brit Awards for Best British Single (losing out to “Perfect” by Fairground Attraction, and Female Artist (losing out to Annie Lennox).

“Twist In My Sobriety” was viewed by pop critics as an example of the sophisti-pop genre. The basic definition of the genre is that it is a smoothed-out jazzy style of post-New Romantic new wave with strong Roxy Music and Steely Dan influences. Roxy Music’s 1982 swan song Avalon and its enduring hit “More Than This” are sort of the blueprints for what sophisti-pop would become: Lush, layered, suave, and the kind of music that feels like it’s been tinkered with in a studio for days. The early ’80s Britfunk genre also provided an influence as well as the mix of American R&B, funk, jazz, disco, and soul that would come to be integral to sophisti-pop, as heard in hit singles like 1981’s “Southern Freeez” by Freeez. The genre encompasses “Something About You” by Level 42, “Hang On To Your Love” by Sade, “Holding Back The Years” by Simply Red, “Long Hot Summer”, “My Ever Changing Moods” and “Paris Match” by the Style Council, “True” by Spandau Ballet, “The Captain of Her Heart” by Double, “Wishing I Was Lucky” by Wet Wet Wet, “I.G.Y.” by Donald Fagan, “Human” by Human League, “Mary’s Prayer” by Danny Wilson, “Each And Every One” by Everything But The Girl, , “Why” by Annie Lennox, and “Fortress Around Your Heart” by Sting.

In 2001 “Twist In My Sobriety” in a remixed version was featured in the film and Soundtrack for the crime-comedy-drama Bandits, The film starred Bruce Willis, Billy Bob Thornton, and Cate Blanchett. In 2021, the song was covered in an English-language version by Russian singer Diana Ankudinova.

A third single from Ancient Heart was “Cathedral Song”. She was nominated for a Design and Art Direction (D&AD Awards) “Most Outstanding Pop Promo” award for the song. “Cathedral Song” climbed to #2 in the Netherlands, and #17 in Finland.

The album, Ancient Heart, was the number-one album in Norway for seventeen consecutive weeks.

In 1990, she released The Sweet Keeper. The debut single was “We Almost Got It Together”. It was a Top 40 hit in Belgium, Finland, Ireland, Italy and the Netherlands. However, her followup releases were less commercially successful. In 1991, she released a third album, Everybody’s Angel. The album cracked the Top 20 album charts in eight countries. Both this effort and her fourth album, Eleven Kinds of Loneliness, struggled to sustain the response of the broader public to her first album. NME wrote of the fourth album, “You could be fond of this record if you were a fan of the acoustic meander, the obscure but personal lyric and the Tikaram voice.” While the Calgary Herald wrote “Tikaram’s lyrics can be muddled or melodies occasionally tedious, but there’s a poignancy to her music that draws you in. Eleven Kinds of Loneliness is delivered like a diary in which she deals with the pain that comes with life and love.” It was only in Austria and the Netherlands that she earned modest record sales from her fourth effort.

In 1995, her album Lovers In the City earned more praise from the music critics. She also earned several D&AD Award nominations for a track from the album titled “I Might be Crying” (in the Photography and Individual Video categories).

In the years since, Tanita Tikarum has sustained interest from her fan base. She released her ninth studio album, Closer to the People, in 2016, and a compilation album in 2019.

Tikaram has played cameo roles on two films, first on the 1994 lesbian film Erotique. She plays a secretary interrupting a sex scene of her boss. In the 2012 French film Goodbye Morocco she plays a restaurant singer. In her scene, she sings the jazz standard “Blue Gardenia”.

May 12, 2025
Ray McGinnis

References:
Tanita Tikarum, “Twist In My Sobriety remix“, Bandits, MGM, 2001.
Liza Minnelli, “Twist In My Sobriety“, Results, 1989.
Ryan Gibbs,”An introduction to Sophisti-pop,” In Between Drafts, November 15, 2022.
Diana Ankudinova, “Twist In My Sobriety“, 2021.
Garrett Parker, “20 Richest News Anchors in the World,” Money Inc., November 14, 2024.

CKOI 96.9 FM Montreal (PQ) Top Ten | April 21, 1989