Lisa Stansfield

British singer Lisa Stansfield found success with her retro R&B stylings while also embracing dance music and other sounds. She’s perhaps best known for her soulful 1989 international smash “All Around the World”. • When she was 14, Stansfield won a talent contest sponsored by the Manchester Evening News. Her debut single, the ballad “Your Alibis”, arrived in 1981, when she was just 15. • Amid this early success, she became a cohost on the children’s pop show Razzmatazz. • With former schoolmates Ian Devaney and Andy Morris, she formed the group Blue Zone. They released their sole studio album, Big Thing, in 1988 after a few middling singles. • In 1989, Stansfield cowrote and sang on the Coldcut dance track “People Hold On”, which reached No. 11 in the UK and No. 6 on Billboard’s Hot Dance Club Songs chart in the US. This led to a solo deal for Stansfield on Arista Records. • Stansfield’s 1989 debut album, Affection, features “All Around the World”, which reached No. 1 in the UK and No. 3 in the US. While it proved her lone Top 10 hit in America, Stansifled managed seven more in her home country. • Affection sold more than five million copies worldwide and earned the singer Grammy nominations for Best New Artist and Best Female Pop Vocal Performance. (She lost both to Mariah Carey.) • A 1992 live recording of Queen’s “These are the Days of Our Lives” featuring Stansfield, George Michael and Queen appears on 1993’s Five Live, a charity EP that reached No. 1 in the UK. • Stansfield made the UK Top 5 with each of her next three albums: Real Love (1991), So Natural (1993) and Lisa Stansfeld (1997). • She made her acting debut in the 1999 UK film Swing. She also cowrote four new songs for the soundtrack and performed a number of jazz and swing classics.