Jan Johnston

Jan Johnston (born 21 February 1968, Salford, England) is an English professional singer, best known for collaborating with some of the world's top trance music DJs and producers.^[1]

Career

In the early 1990s she was signed to Columbia Records as part of the pop duo JJ (with fellow Mancunian Tony Kirkham), which gained some recognition while touring the UK with the #55 minor UK hit "If This Is Love".^[2]

However, when the band project failed she continued as a solo artist; turning down the opportunity to sign to Deconstruction Records and instead signing to A&M Records. In the mid 1990s she came to the attention of trance producer, Brian Transeau, when he purchased one of her singles from a bargain bin in Manchester.^[3] Impressed by her vocals, he decided to collaborate with her recording the track "Remember."

Following this, Johnston was in demand to vocal for many other trance tracks, notably for Alan Bremmer and Anthony Pappa's "Freefall" project. Upon being given the instrumental, Jan came up with the lyrics resulting in "Skydive (I Feel Wonderful)" which despite being a club anthem, never translated to a commercial hit, finally hitting the top 40 at No. 35 on its third release in 2001. Paul Oakenfold signed her to his Perfecto Records label in 1999 to record an album. Jan's first Perfecto release was a track she recorded with BT years earlier entitled "Flesh", rather than an actual track from the album, which reached No. 36 in the charts. The original version of "Flesh" has never been released, only remixes. A cover of The Carpenters' song, "Superstar", was lined up to be the album's first single, with remixes produced by Todd Terry and Bill Hammel, but would ultimately go on to be unreleased. The resulting album 'Emerging' was delayed numerous times due to disagreements with Perfecto's then parent label Mushroom UK due to its lack of dance tracks and then later due to Mushroom's sale by NewsCorp and was ultimately unreleased following Mushroom UK's subsequent acquisition by Warner Music.^[4]

Remixes of one of the album tracks, "As The Cracks Appear", emerged on a Perfecto promo release , as did a remix of "Superstar", and a remix of the album track "Unafraid", appeared on the soundtrack to the film, Swordfish.

Following the cancellation of the 'Emerging' project, Johnston continued to write and record with trance producers, contributing five tracks to Paul van Dyk's Grammy Award nominated, Reflections album,^[5] amongst other projects though once again the majority of them went unreleased.

In 2008, new solo tracks by Johnston began to emerge, with two of them "Sleeping Satellite" and "Obsession", released digitally in 2009 by Perfecto however there have been no further solo releases since. She continues to provide guest vocals on a number of trance music tracks, most of which have been released.

In 2016, a previously unreleased album of Jan's entitled "When Everything Was Possible" that was recorded with Jamie Myerson in 1998 ahead of her signing to Perfecto was released on Jan's Bandcamp page^[6] and a few months later Johnston's music as part of the duo JJ was digitally re-issued by Sony Music. A digital re-issued of "Naked But For Lilies" followed in April 2017.

In June 2017 Johnston released the song "Falling Away", the first song from "The Travelling Vixen", a collection of previously unreleased material written and recorded with DJ Manolo following the "Emerging" project.

Discography

• See also: Jan Johnston collaborations and unreleased works

References

External links

• Official site
• Jan Johnston discography at Discogs