“Trevor kept asking me about this ‘rose’ song he’d heard about. Seal was reluctant at first – “I was embarrassed by it so I wouldn’t play it for my producer,” he recalled – though he eventually gave in. Afterwards, he rejected the tune and “threw the tape in the corner”.īut Kiss From A Rose came to haunt Seal, and when Trevor Horn learned about its existence while they were cutting “Seal II”, he asked to hear it. “The song started off as an experiment,” he disclosed to the website Genius in 2015, explaining that he recorded it on a Portastudio, a primitive multi-tracking device that used a cassette tape. Seal had written Kiss From A Rose seven years earlier, in 1987, at a time when he was poor, homeless and living in a squat. “I was embarrassed by it so I wouldn’t play it” Brought to life by Seal’s layered, multi-tracked vocals and arranger Anne Dudley’s lush orchestration, the song sounded different to anything else in the charts at the time.

It’s follow-up, however, was very different compared to the rest of the album titled Kiss From A Rose, it was arranged in waltz times and radiated a medieval folk quality. Also self-titled, Seal’s 1994 album (often referred to as “Seal II”) was again produced by Horn, and its first single, Prayer For The Dying, soon scaled the charts. Three years passed before Seal released a follow-up. With his glossy high-tech production values, Horn transformed Seal into an instant star the singer’s debut single, Crazy, shot to No.2 in the UK charts, paving the way for Seal’s self-titled debut album to rocket to the top of the UK albums chart. The single’s success made Seal hot property, resulting in a record-company bidding war to get his signature he ended up rejecting the majors and instead joined producer Trevor Horn’s art-house label, ZTT, which had been home to Frankie Goes To Hollywood, Propaganda and Grace Jones in the 80s.

The husky-voiced London singer had first appeared on the pop radar in 1990, when he provided a memorable vocal cameo on Adamski’s chart-topping dance track, Killer. The Who’s Pete Townsend cringed whenever he heard Pinball Wizard while Oasis’ outspoken singer, Liam Gallagher, loathed his band’s iconic anthem Wonderwall, once confessing to an interviewer: “I can’t fucking stand that fucking song.” And then there is Seal, who has also had an uneasy relationship with arguably his most famous hit, Kiss From A Rose, despite it causing his career to blossom in the mid-90s. Kurt Cobain ended up detesting Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit, while Led Zeppelin’s frontman, Robert Plant, became weary of Stairway To Heaven. There’s a long history in rock and pop of artists who grow to hate some of the songs that made them famous.

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