It is hard to explain to anyone who wasn’t there, and that is rather the point. The early nineties kept no permanent record of itself. There were no phones held aloft, no stories to post, no grainy footage waiting to surface a decade later and embarrass everyone involved. What happened on the dancefloor stayed on the dancefloor, mostly because there was no way of getting it off there. You remembered it, or you didn’t, and either was fine.
Looking back now, with a mortgage and a dodgy back and a much clearer idea of what the comedown was actually costing, the thing that stands out is how cheap it all was. Cheap drinks, cheap drugs, cheap entry if you knew the right number to ring. You could lose a whole weekend for the price of a tank of petrol, and plenty of us did, and we had a tremendous amount of fun doing it. Money was not yet the barrier it would later become.
It was free in the way that counted, too. The music was busy breaking every boundary it could find, house running into techno running into hardcore running into whatever the lad in the corner had pressed up (and did a sly hand to you) that week, and nobody much minded the borders.
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Submit your Mix of the Month DJ Competition entryNone of it was built to last, and it didn’t. But it left a sizeable pile of records behind, and those we can still play. This is part one of many. Consider it a long way from finished. Please don’t stab us!
1. Opus III – It’s a Fine Day
Kirsty Hawkshaw’s vocal arrived more or less unaccompanied, which was a brave thing to do on a dancefloor in 1992, and somehow it worked. The bones of it went back to Jane and Barton’s a cappella from the early eighties, here wrapped in just enough production to keep the floor occupied without ever crowding the voice out.
The lyric promised that the weather would hold and everything would be lovely, which, given it was Britain, was either touching optimism or a clear case of false advertising. Either way it became the sound of the room going quiet for a moment before everyone remembered themselves.
2. Nomad – Devotion
Properly titled “(I Wanna Give You) Devotion” and built around a piano riff that did most of the heavy lifting, this was piano house at the point where it stopped being underground and started turning up on Top of the Pops. Sharon Dee Clarke supplied the gospel-flavoured vocal and MC Mikee Freedom supplied the shouting, and between them they shifted enough copies to reach number two.
It is the sort of record that gets sniffed at by purists and adored by everyone who was actually there, which is usually a sign that a track has done its job.
3. Transformer 2 – Pacific Symphony
An Italian production from 1992 that tipped its hat to a certain Manchester classic without ever quite copying it. Piano led, faintly melancholic, more interested in atmosphere than in battering you about the head. The kind of record that turned up in the cooler corner of the prog house tent while everyone else was off chasing the hoover noises.
Slightly overlooked then, slightly overlooked now, which is a shame because the opening couple of minutes are about as pretty as the genre got.
4. M|A|R|R|S – Pump Up The Volume
Yes, we know, 1987, so technically it gatecrashed the party a few years early. We are letting it in because without it half of what follows does not happen. Colourbox and A.R. Kane bolted together a record almost entirely out of other people’s records, and the lawyers had a field day, and it went to number one anyway.
It is the sound of the sampler arriving and nobody being quite sure what the rules were yet. Mostly because there weren’t any.
5. Liberty City – Some Lovin’
Sampled as fucked this tune….The Miami end of things, courtesy of Oscar G and Ralph Falcon under one of their many aliases. Deeper and warmer than the rave material it shared shelf space with, all rolling bassline and a vocal that sat just behind the beat rather than on top of it.
This was the stuff the after-hours crowd held in reserve for the point in the night when the hands-in-the-air business had run its course and people actually wanted to dance.
6. The KLF – Last Train To Trancentral
The KLF spent the early nineties making enormous pop records that were also, if you squinted, fairly sharp commentary on the business of making enormous pop records. This was the third of their so-called stadium house run, and it did exactly what the title suggested, which was leave the station at speed and not stop for anyone.
They later set fire to a million pounds on a Scottish island, which rather puts a chart position into perspective. Few acts have left the building with more style.
7. S’Express – Theme from S’Express
Another early arrival, from 1988, and another number one, and we are including it for the same reason as the M|A|R|R|S record. Mark Moore built it out of a Rose Royce sample and an attitude, and the result was acid house with a sense of humour, which was not always a given at the time.
It is camp, it is daft, it is enormous fun, and it announced that this music did not have to take itself terribly seriously to be taken seriously.
8. Bizarre Inc – Playing with Knives
Breakbeat hardcore at the moment it briefly became a chart concern, with a piano line that could lift the roof off a leisure centre and a title that sounded considerably more menacing than the record itself. Reached number four, which tells you how far this stuff had travelled from the warehouse in a very short space of time.
Put it on now and you can more or less smell the dry ice. A Carl Cox favourite!!
9. GTO – Pure
Lee Newman and Michael Wells were a one-couple cottage industry, releasing under so many names that even they probably lost count, and as Tricky Disco and later Technohead they made plenty of noise. As GTO they made this, a 1990 record that proved rave did not have to come at you swinging to land a punch.
It is dreamy, almost gentle, which is funny coming from a pair who once performed in metal robot suits attacking each other with angle grinders. Different sides of the same coin, presumably.
10. The Prodigy – Everybody In The Place
Before the leather and the snarling, Liam Howlett was an Essex teenager with a sampler and an unusually good ear for what would empty a chemical generation onto a dancefloor. This was off Experience, it went to number two, and it remains a near perfect distillation of what the hardcore end of rave sounded like before it splintered off into other things.
The whistle samples alone could trigger a flashback in anyone who owned a pair of white gloves.
11. Olive – You’re Not Alone
A slight outlier on a rave list, edging into the more contemplative, downtempo territory that the decade grew into. Ruth-Ann Boyle’s vocal carried it, the production stayed restrained, and it eventually went all the way to number one.
This was the comedown record, the one for the cab home and the kitchen at six in the morning, and every good night out needs one of those as much as it needs the bangers.
12. Joe Smooth – Promised Land
Straight out of Chicago and strictly speaking a few years ahead of our window, but its long shadow falls right across the decade, so in it goes. A gospel house record about deliverance and better days, sincere in a way that dance music rarely allowed itself to be, and so widely loved that even Paul Weller had a go at covering it.
When a room of strangers sings the same words back at a DJ, this is the sort of record that tends to be playing.
13. Felix – Don’t You Want Me
Built on a borrowed Jomanda vocal and a piano figure designed to detonate at exactly the right moment, this was big-room rave-pop with no interest in subtlety whatsoever, and all the better for it. Number six in 1992, and unavoidable for most of that year.
There is a particular kind of record that exists purely to make a large group of slightly overheated people lose their minds in unison. This is the textbook example.
14. Mory Kante – Yeke Yeke (Hardfloor Remix)
The original was a Guinean pop record that became a continental hit in the late 80’s. Then Hardfloor got hold of it and ran it through their famous mangle of Roland 303s, and the result was one of those remixes that respects the source while taking it somewhere it had no business going.
West African vocal, German acid squelch, and somehow it holds together beautifully. Proof that the crate was a global concern long before anyone thought to call it that.
15. Goldie – Inner City Life
The point at which Jungle stopped being a rumour from the pirate stations and turned into something the broadsheets felt obliged to write about. Diane Charlemagne’s vocal soared over a rhythm track of frankly alarming complexity, and the whole thing announced that this music had ambitions well beyond the dancefloor.
Taken from Timeless, and rightly regarded as a turning point. Nothing in this corner of the music sounded quite the same afterwards.
16. Joey Beltram – Energy Flash
The blueprint. A 1990 record built around a bassline that seemed to crawl up from somewhere unpleasant and a whispered vocal that everyone of a certain vintage can still recite. Stark, mechanical and faintly sinister, it drew a line between the warmer house material and the harder techno that was coming, and just about everyone who made the latter was taking notes.
Not a record for the faint of heart, then or now, which was rather the appeal.
17. Underworld – Born Slippy (Nuxx)
Released to general indifference in 1995, then resurrected by a certain film about Edinburgh heroin users and turned into one of the defining records of the back half of the decade. Karl Hyde’s stream of barside consciousness should not work as a lyric and somehow does, and the build remains a thing of genuine engineering.
We are placing it here as a bridge to part two as much as anything, because this is roughly where the first chapter ends and the next one begins.
We told you at the top that this was never going to be the whole story, and it isn’t. Twenty records cannot hold a decade this busy, and the ones we have left out could fill a good few more features without breaking a sweat. So consider this part one of many, and consider the comments section open. Tell us what we missed. The good suggestions go in the next one, the bad ones we will quietly pretend we never saw
18. CJ Bolland – The Prophet
By 1997 Christian Bolland had been making serious techno for years, much of it on R&S, the Belgian label that more or less wrote the rulebook for the harder European end of things. The Prophet was the one that crossed over, a number nineteen hit built around Willem Dafoe’s voice lifted from a Scorsese film about Jesus, which is not a sentence you get to write very often.
It is driving, faintly menacing and entirely unbothered about being liked, which is precisely why people liked it. Proof that you could land a chart single without sanding off any of the edges.
The drive home at first light, foot down on an empty dual carriageway, this rattling out of the speakers while the rest of the world slept.
19. Da Hool – Meet Her at the Love Parade
A German record named after the enormous parade that used to take over Berlin every summer, and it carried a fair bit of that crowd’s energy with it. Frank Tomiczek, formerly trading as DJ Hooligan, built a synth line so direct it barely needed anything else around it, and the Nalin and Kane remix turned it into one of 1998’s unavoidable club records.
By this point trance was getting bigger, shinier and rather more commercial, and this sat right on the line between the underground that made it and the daytime radio that adopted it. No shame in that. Some records are simply built for very large numbers of people in one place.
A street full of people who all seemed to be heading the same way, strangers, sunburn, the party having spilled out of the club and quietly taken over the town.
20. Push – Universal Nation
Push was Mike Dierickx, another product of the Belgian scene, and Universal Nation was about as pure a shot of euphoric trance as the decade produced. A riff that climbs and climbs and refuses to come down until it absolutely has to, designed for the exact moment when several thousand people decide to lose it at once.
This is where the story we started telling at the top arrives, the better part of a decade on, in the big tent with the lasers. Some would say that is where it lost the plot. Others kept their hands in the air and could not have cared less for the debate. We will let you decide which camp you were in.
Back in that abandoned house with our own rig, the room full and the riff going up and up, the night we put on ourselves and somehow pulled off.
We told you at the top that this was never going to be the whole story, and it isn’t. Twenty records cannot hold a decade this busy, and the ones we have left out could fill a good few more features without breaking a sweat. So consider this part one of many, and consider the comments section open. Tell us what we missed. The good suggestions go in the next one, the bad ones we will quietly pretend we never saw.
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