From all of the sadness, the tears that I've cried

3rd Party-Waiting For Tonight The Original
Jennifer Lopez-Waiting For Tonight The Cover
Alex Gaudino and Jerma pres.LilLove-Waiting For Tonight Excellent new nu-ItaloPop Cover
Jennifer Lopez-Waiting For Tonight/Walking On Sunshine Brilliant live performance of JLO's two greatest pop recordings. The Girl should really tour more! This is stunning
Jennifer Lopez-Una Noche Mas The Spanish version with better vocals IMO...
3rd Party-Pop Muzik Excellent cover of the first post-modern pop song...

Keeping this one small today. Primarily because I know very little about this band other than that they were one of my favourite bands of 1996. Thats 10 years ago! Ten years!!! I feelz so old! The band consisted of Maria, Karmine and Elaine. Maria is also one of the key songwriters on 3rd Partys one and only album 'Alive'. The album is absolutely poptastic and was probably just a bit before its time. It pre-empted the rebirth of pop music which we saw in the form of the Spice Girls, Cher and Britney and the band vanished only popping up on some cd soundtracks now and then. They were an American band doing Europop which was highly unusual and had jumped the gun.

In time, the songs they'd picked to release like Love Is Alive would be covered by artists like Anastacia and Joan Osborne. However today we're concentrating on the 3rd Party classic album track Waiting For Tonight. Many will remember this song as J:LO's most poptastic moment. The video was hot and the sound was ever so 'now'. When Kylies On A Night Like This came out many screamed 'copycat' without realing that the Lopez version was already 2 years old.

The Lopez version went on to become a signature song for Lopez. Selling over a million, a top 10 single in the US, UK and most of Europe. Crucially it managed to grab Lopez out of the Latino fad that was very quickly losing its grip on the charts and thus secured her longevity which has now spanned over five albums.It ripped through the clubs landing on most dance charts at the top end. All of which, despite seeing a song that could have made her band huge, pleased Maria no end as she wrote it!

In fact Maria has written quite a lot for pop acts we all know. Celine Dion and N*Sync stand out but its the Lopez track that has bankrolled Marias first solo album which you can check out for yourselves over at her official website.

Included today we have the quite rare original by 3rd Party, the monster Lopez hit, a very recent brilliant cover by an Italian dance group which is doing very well in the clubs of Rome & Florence, an amazing live version taken from Jennifer's one and only time shes staged a concert and the Spanish version of the song. For the sake of celebrating 3rd Party's ten year aniversary I've also included their rather brilliant poptastic cover of Pop Muzik that sounds very PAY-TV...