Credited to The Requestors featuring Vivienne McKone, "Love Has To Be Easy" is the kind of song built on a single, disarmingly simple idea. "When there's love around, things are easy, that's how that lyric was born," McKone says, "and I feel that resonated with a lot of people in the audience. I was really taken aback!" She was speaking after performing the track live again recently, watching a room full of people respond to a song she wrote years earlier as though they were hearing their own thoughts sung back to them. That is the kind of reaction record labels chase and rarely find. Expansion Records did not have to chase it. It found them.
The song's route to a full release has been anything but conventional, and that is precisely what makes it compelling. "Love Has To Be Easy" started life limited only to DJs, championed within the tight-knit circles of the UK's soul scene long before the wider public had any chance to hear it. From there it earned a limited release on a Luxury Soul compilation, the kind of insider's stamp of approval that carries real weight among soul aficionados. That should have been the end of the story: a well-loved track enjoyed by those in the know, quietly retired to the crates. Instead, demand kept building. Listeners who had only caught it on a compilation or in a DJ set kept asking where they could get hold of it properly, and that groundswell is exactly why "Love Has To Be Easy" is now getting its full worldwide single release. Few tracks are given a second life by their audience like this one has.
And then there is the coincidence that turns a good story into an unmissable one. July's release lands squarely on the 50th anniversary of Bugsy Malone, Alan Parker's musical gangster comedy that captured hearts with an all-child cast playing out a Hollywood-style underworld drama, splurge guns and all. It was a genuine phenomenon on release, and it remains one of British cinema's most beloved oddities, watched by generations of schoolchildren ever since. Among that young cast, alongside a soon-to-be-legendary Jodie Foster, was Vivienne McKone, a child star cutting her teeth on set decades before she would write a song that soul audiences would fight to get their hands on.
The distance between the two is longer than it first appears. McKone trained at the Royal Ballet School as a child, which is how she ended up dancing as Velma, one of the showgirls in Tallulah's troupe, on the set of Bugsy Malone in the first place. Music came later, and it came properly: her debut solo album was produced by Stuart Levine, a name soul fans will recognise from his work with The Crusaders, Randy Crawford and Simply Red, and she went on to tour internationally and support Anita Baker, one of the genre's defining voices. "Love Has To Be Easy" arrived decades further down that road, written by McKone herself and recorded as The Requestors alongside Toby Baker and Gabriel Garrick, son of the late jazz pianist Michael Garrick. It is not the work of a novelty act trading on a childhood film credit. It is a soul record made by someone who has spent a lifetime earning the right to make one this good.
It is a genuinely rare thing for one person to sit at the centre of two milestones fifty years apart. Fewer artists still could claim a childhood credit in a film still celebrated half a century later, and a soul single so in demand that a label had to bring it back for the world. Vivienne McKone can claim both, in the same month, by pure coincidence. That is not a marketing story. It is simply how things happened to land, and it makes "Love Has To Be Easy" impossible to ignore right now.
For those who have followed the song's journey from DJ booths to Luxury Soul compilation to this moment, the full release will feel overdue and thoroughly earned. For everyone else, it is the perfect entry point: a song written from real experience, performed by an artist whose story runs from a 1970s film set to today's soul stages, and a lyric simple enough to hold onto after a single listen. "When there's love around, things are easy." Fifty years on from Bugsy Malone, Vivienne McKone is still making that look effortless.
"Love Has To Be Easy" by The Requestors featuring Vivienne McKone is out now worldwide, available from expansionrecords.com.