Songfacts®:

• Black Box was made up of three Italian producers: Mirko Limoni, Daniele Davoli and Valerio Semplici. They also recorded as Groove Groove Melody. They made "Ride On Time" by chopping up the raw vocals from Loleatta Holloway's "Love Sensation," a #1 Dance hit in 1980, and putting them over a high-energy track. They said they found Holloway's a capella vocals on a bootleg CD and had no idea who the singer was.
  
  They hired a French model named Katrin Quinol to pose as their singer. Quniol couldn't speak English and had trouble lip-synching the song on music shows, but that didn't seem to matter: the combination of Black Box's fierce production, Holloway's powerful voice, and Quinol's striking looks made the record a success, albeit a controversial one. Holloway was none too pleased when she heard the song and saw the video. She took legal action and eventually got credit as the singer.
• On "Love Sensation," Holloway sings, "'cause you're right on time," which Black Box used as the hook. For the title, they changed the line to "ride on time," which doesn't make any sense but is a lot more distinctive.
  
  Another case of a sampled lyric being mistranscribed is "The Bomb! (These Sounds Fall Into My Mind)" by The Bucketheads, who used a Chicago song called "Street Player" with a lyric that's really "street sounds swirling through my mind."
• "Ride On Time" didn't get much attention in America but it was the biggest-selling single in the UK in 1989, spending six weeks at #1. It did well throughout Europe, becoming one of the top 100 best-selling singles ever in most countries there.
• Although this was by far their biggest European hit, Black Box didn't make much money from it because Holloway, who died in 2011, sued them. There was no love lost between them. Black Box claimed that Holloway was crying crocodile tears and pointed out that she got an expensive fur coat out of the compensation money they had to pay her. Holloway maintained she was upset that the group had "stolen her voice," and to add insult to injury, they pretended someone else was singing the song. Even though she won the case, she felt the damage had been done.
• Other producers later sampled Loleatta Holloway's vocals from "Love Sensation," including Cevin Fisher on "(You Got Me) Burning Up" and Marky Mark And The Funky Bunch on the US chart topper "Good Vibrations." Unlike Black Box, both credited Holloway.
• Daniele Davoli of Black Box talked about this song in 1000 UK #1 Hits by Jon Kutner and Spencer Leigh: "People were dancing to the new piano sound, even though it sounded quite different. The piano sound wasn't that big in Italy until after we had the success in England. Mirko came to the club where I was DJing. I would play the keyboard and sampler, but it was such a small sampler, I only had space for two or three lines. The main sound I created was a wah-wah-wah-wah-wah effect and incorporated into nearly every record I played. Mirko said to me, 'I couldn't help noticing that, what was it?' I said, 'It was from this acapella that I got from an old record.' Mirko said, 'Bring it in to the studio and I think we can do something with it.'"
• Apart from this song and two instrumentals, all the songs on Black Box's debut album Dreamland, including the hits "Everybody Everybody" and "Strike It Up," featured vocals from Martha Wash, one half of The Weather Girls. Wash was uncredited and the group still used Katrin Quinol to lip-sync the songs for the videos. Sadly for Wash, this wasn't an unusual experience for her. Around the same time, her vocals were featured on C+C Music Factory's "Gonna Make You Sweat (Everybody Dance Now)," again lip-synched by a different woman in the video.
• A few remixed versions have been released over the years, some with Holloway's vocals removed and replaced by a soundalike session singer, though one was released in 2003 credited as "Black Box featuring Loleatta Holloway."