How Five Star's 'Rain Or Shine' Got Made
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- Billy Livsey co-wrote "Rain Or Shine" with Peter Sinfield for Five Star's second album, with Sinfield dictating lyrics by phone from Spain ("You got a pencil and paper? Write this down.") after Livsey sent him a rough track of the melody.
- Session singer Tessa Niles — who later toured with the Police and sang on Eric Clapton's "Layla" on the Unplugged album — recorded the original demo of "Rain Or Shine," and Pearson used her vocal as a guide to follow in the booth.
- Deniece Pearson had braces during recording and over-articulated the lyrics to stop them sticking to her lips, on direct instruction from her father and manager Buster Pearson.
- The track was cut at Mayfair Studios in London, where George Michael, Tina Turner, and A-ha also recorded; Livsey stole a sequencer feel from Donald Fagen's solo track "New Frontier" (Steely Dan).
- Pearson still closes her solo sets with "Rain Or Shine" as her encore, and the song remains a fan-singalong that, in her words, "brings a tear to my eye."
Why it matters: For Five Star, "Rain Or Shine" marks the high-water mark of their late-80s live reach — Top of the Pops, the Royal Variety Performance, and Miss World — and the fact that Pearson still uses it as her encore, four decades on, shows the song functions as a living legacy rather than a catalog entry for the group's fanbase.
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