Swing Out Sister are a British "sophisti-pop" group best known worldwide for their 1986 song "Breakout". Other hits include "Surrender", "Twilight World", "Waiting Game" and a remake of "Am I the Same Girl?" Though album sales in the U.S. and Europe have levelled off since the early 1990s, the group continues to attract a loyal fanbase. The group is also very popular in Japan.

Although Swing Out Sister is currently a duo, they began as a trio in the UK. The group were formed by Andy Connell (keyboards) and Martin Jackson (drums), and were later joined by Corinne Drewery (vocals). The name came from a 1945 movie starring Arthur Treacher, called Swing Out, Sister, and they claim they chose the name because it was the only thing the band could agree on, in that they all hated it. Both Connell and Jackson had been playing in other bands prior to forming SOS, while Drewery was actually a fashion designer and model before she became the band's lead vocalist.

Together with their producer, Paul Staveley O'Duffy, they signed with Mercury Records. Prior to their first album, they released the single "Blue Mood" in the UK in November 1985. However, it did not chart.

It Bites are an English progressive rock and pop fusion band, formed in Egremont, Cumbria, England in 1982 and best known for their 1986 single "Calling All The Heroes", which gained them a Top 10 UK Singles Chart hit. Initially fronted by Francis Dunnery, the band split in 1990, eventually returning in 2006 with new frontman John Mitchell.

Described as "a British band with blues and metal aspirations, but also a strong art-rock tendency" by Allmusic, It Bites are better described as a band composed of voracious pop fans with a parallel taste for progressive rock. The band's musical development can be split into four clear phases - their The Big Lad in the Windmill phase (in which they embraced various varieties of contemporary pop, funk, sophisti-pop, and Queen-style glam rock and processed it through their progressive rock influences); the Once Around the World phase (in which they produced 1970s style progressive rock with a 1980s contemporary producer-pop gloss); the Eat Me in St. Louis phase (during which they produced detailed hard rock songs with elements of heavy metal and glam rock); and the current reunion phase (in which they play a more measured melodic progressive rock similar to that of the Once Around The World phase).

Kirsty Anna MacColl (10 October 1959 – 18 December 2000) was an English singer-songwriter.

MacColl scored several pop hits from the early 1980s to the early 1990s. During this era, she often sang on recordings produced by her husband Steve Lillywhite, notably those of The Smiths and the song "Fairytale of New York" by The Pogues.

MacColl was killed in a controversial boating incident in Mexico.

Kirsty MacColl was the daughter of folk singer Ewan MacColl and dancer Jean Newlove. She and her brother, Hamish MacColl, grew up with their mother in Croydon, where she attended Park Hill Primary School and Monks Hill High School, making appearances in school plays. At the time of MacColl's birth, her father had been in a relationship with folksinger, multi-instrumentalist and songwriter Peggy Seeger since 1956 (a relationship that would continue until his death in 1989), and already had a son with her.

She came to notice when Chiswick Records released an EP by local punk rock band the Drug Addix with MacColl on backing vocals under the pseudonym Mandy Doubt (1978). Stiff Records executives were not impressed with the band, but liked her and subsequently signed her to a solo deal.^{[citation needed]}

Dame Shirley Bassey, DBE (born 8 January 1937), is a Welsh singer. She found fame in the mid-1950s and was "one of the most popular female vocalists in Britain during the last half of the 20th century". In the US, in particular, she is best known for recording the theme songs to the James Bond films Goldfinger (1964), Diamonds Are Forever (1971), and Moonraker (1979) and is the only artist to record more than one Bond theme song. Bassey is also a UNESCO Artist for Peace.

"Born above a brothel in a docklands slum", Shirley Veronica Bassey was the sixth and last child of Eliza Jane Start and Henry Bassey in Tiger Bay, Cardiff, Wales (now called Cardiff Bay), of paternal Nigerian and maternal English descent. Bassey's mother also had four children from previous relationships, two of whom lived in the Bassey household. Eliza had married previously, to Alfred Metcalfe, and upon her marriage to Bassey, Eliza Jane Metcalfe listed Alfred Metcalfe as her father on the marriage registry. It has thus been theorized that she never divorced Alfred, and that her marriage to Bassey was bigamous. Eliza and Henry's second child died in infancy, so Shirley was born into a household of three sisters, two half-sisters, and one brother. A year later her father was arrested and charged with having sex with a minor, was tried, imprisoned for five years, then deported. After Henry's arrest, Eliza and the children moved to the nearby steelworking district of Splott.

Marion Montgomery (November 17, 1934 – July 22, 2002) was a United States born jazz singer who lived in the United Kingdom.

Born Maud Runnells in Natchez, Mississippi, she began her career in Atlanta working clubs, and then in Chicago where singer Peggy Lee heard her on an audition tape and suggested she should be signed up by Capitol Records, releasing three albums for them in the early and mid-1960s. During this early part of her career, she became Marian Montgomery and then later changed the spelling of her first name to Marion, having previously gone by the nickname of Pepe.

In 1965, she came to England to play a season with John Dankworth and met and married English pianist and musical director Laurie Holloway, thus beginning a long and productive association in which they both became very well known to British jazz, cabaret and television audiences. She numbered amongst her admirers Nat King Cole, Frank Sinatra and British chat show host Michael Parkinson, on whose show she became resident singer in the 1970s. She also famously collaborated with composer and conductor Richard Rodney Bennett for a series of concerts and albums in the 1980s and early 1990s.