"He Ain't No Competition" is a

1988 File:1988 Events Collage.png, From left, clockwise: The oil platform Piper Alpha explodes and collapses in the North Sea, killing 165 workers; The USS Vincennes (CG-49) mistakenly shoots down Iran Air Flight 655; Australia celebrates its Australian ...

single released by British boyband

Brother Beyond Brother Beyond were a British pop band who had success in the pop rock genre in the late 1980s. Biography The group's first four singles, "I Should Have Lied", "How Many Times", "Chain-Gang Smile" (produced by Don Was), and an early version of ...

. It reached No.6 in the UK charts in September 1988. The song was written by its three producers, the

Stock Aitken Waterman Stock Aitken Waterman (abbreviated as SAW) are an English songwriting and record production trio consisting of Mike Stock, Matt Aitken, and Pete Waterman. The trio had great success from the mid-1980s through the early 1990s. SAW is considered ...

trio. The song is considered the follow-up to the highly commercially successful " The Harder I Try".

Background

Record label

EMI EMI Group Limited (originally an initialism for Electric and Musical Industries, also referred to as EMI Records Ltd. or simply EMI) was a British transnational conglomerate founded in March 1931 in London. At the time of its break-up in 201 ...

decided the band should work again with Stock Aitken Waterman following the major success of "The Harder I Try". The strategy was aimed at making the band's album marketable ahead of the Christmas period, but singer Nathan Moore felt the track fell short of its predecessor, believing it to be more "bubblegum" pop than its Motown-inspired counterpart. The band had felt they wanted to move away from the poppy sound of "The Harder I Try", so they adopted novel techniques to develop this new sound blending elements of jazz fusion and hip hop, overdubbed with synthesized pop focus. Brother Beyond's album ''

Get Even ''Get Even'' is the debut album by British boy band Brother Beyond, released on the EMI/Parlophone label in two different editions, both in 1988, generally referred to as ''Get Even I'' and ''Get Even II''. The second edition of the album include ...

'' (from which the track is taken) had by the time of the release of the single already been released in

Japan Japan ( ja, 日本, or , and formally , ''Nihonkoku'') is an island country in East Asia. It is situated in the northwest Pacific Ocean, and is bordered on the west by the Sea of Japan, while extending from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north ...

. It was repackaged for its release in the rest of the world, including the two SAW-produced tracks, and omitting two of the band's self-penned songs from the original release. This version was released in November 1988, and the album was also a top 10 hit.

Charts

References

Brother Beyond songs 1988 songs 1988 singles Songs written by Pete Waterman Songs written by Matt Aitken Songs written by Mike Stock (musician) Song recordings produced by Stock Aitken Waterman Parlophone singles {{1980s-pop-song-stub