In November, YouTube recommended me, as it often does, an upload of an old mainstream dance compilation, in this instance The Best of Dance 93. It was immediately obvious from the sleeve that this was an old Telstar affair, not least since I have a few other releases in this series. Seeing as I always play them on sight (hence the constant recommendations), and avoid peeping at track lists so the next song can always surprise me (I don’t go to nightclubs, I barely hear radio – this is one spot where this rather base-level element of surprise pockets itself in my life), allowing me to predict the big hitters and the more obscure/forgotten sides that pad out the discs otherwise, this was no exception. Disc one gets going as you’d expect – an inevitable run through the delights of 1993’s poppiest Eurodance. “Mr Vain” and “Exterminate” with their side trickles of menace, “The Key, the Secret” with its bubbly reframing of 80s twee pop charm, “Tribal Dance” going for the stadium KLF/rave gut thrills, “Ain’t No Love (Ain’t No Use)” prophetically striving for a classier, sassier vision of handbag house that would come to pass only several years later.
And then, at track eight, the compilation offered up something ultimately far more unlikely. A record which, in contrast to all that had gone before it, wasn’t a major hit and didn’t sound like it could be. No, this was something very different, a little track doing its own little thing, not disclosing any awareness of the pop around it. I’d heard it before, but couldn’t immediately place the name. This was a record that stood out precisely because it sounds like it’s meant to fit in – that is, with the flow of a DJ set, rather than this mix of radiant Top 40 pop-dance which it is thrown into as though it were an alka seltzer of sorts (one to be immediately nullified by the following songs).
It was “Say What!”, a No. 32 smash from October 1993 by classicist prog-house duo X-Press 2, at the time signed to stylish UK deep house label Junior Boy’s Own. With “Lazy” nine years later, X-Press achieved a genuine pop hit which actually sounded like a nostalgic reframing of 1993 progressive house, but it was a style that never particularly crossed over in 1993 itself, given its less visceral nature than the rave, pop-house and Eurodance that comprised much of the hit landscape that year. “Say What!” – heavily repetitious, single-minded and minimal, reasonably jubilant but not particularly colourful – may underscore why. It’s barely pop music. How was it a hit, albeit a minor one?
It got me thinking about the sort of lineage that, as a Top 40 hit, I’d argue it to belong to. “Say What!” isn’t exactly a unique case of this style of shy, withdrawn dance music crossing over. In fact, there is a whole world of ‘tracky’ (rather than ‘songy’) tracks – cuts which favour structure and repetition, and reinforcement of only a small smattering of ideas, over more outward thrills. But more than that, there are releases within that criteria – X-Press 2’s hit among them – which are ‘functional’, small studies in rhythm and noise meant to keep the flow of the nightclub or rave going, not meaning to draw too much attention to themselves, and generally forgoing melody, fills or major structural changes. They concede little to pop, seem to largely exist outside of it altogether. These ‘functional’ tracks aren’t supposed to crossover into the pop charts, so when they do, they’re real follies.
The infrastructure of the UK singles charts in the 1990s particularly benefitted these sorts of records, where the increasing prevalence of first week peaks (aided through earlier radio releases) allowed gaps for purely fringe music to open up, something which – in the case of ‘functional’ dance music’ – had been on the cards since the acid house boom of the late 1980s (of which more anon) subsided into rave (ditto). And the thing is, little of this music survives. Just as much of the most mainstream dance music at the time struggles in reputation, from ‘purists’ to the sort of critical thinking that leads to guilty pleasure lists/pratfalls, the functional side to top 40 dance resists being made sense of within the populist context that it becomes most popular in.
ACID HOUSE AND RAVE
When house first started creeping through into the national charts, few in the know would have banked on the sound reaching number one in as early as January 1987, only months after Farley Funkmaster Funk’s “Love Can’t Turn Around” became the first Chicago house hit altogether. But while that was understandably a hit – a gorgeously showy pop song with disco and NRG syntax in its blood – Steve ‘Silk’ Hurley’s immortal “Jack Your Body” jacked the signal without any warning or explanation, an enigmatic and futuristic beacon of rhythm that inevitably split the public into those who ‘got’ it and, tragically, those who didn’t and were perhaps doomed never to again. Not only was it the first number one that Radio 1 hadn’t as much as touched in their then-20 years before it climbed the summit, nor only was it the first number one to primarily sell as a 12″, but it was a chart-topper virtually from out of nowhere. Hurley’s face was never seen (as he forewent promotion), his voice was never heard, all that there was is a demure piece extracted from the physical heat of the club.
Still, being a number one, it still owed a fair bit to pop. For starters, anonymously repeating the title in all sorts of semi-formed prisms is an undeniable hook, and more-so even was its central keyboard melody, even if it was more minimal and unshowy than may have been expected from a chart-topper. But it gave a firm, clear warning that from now on, crossovers from house and later its offshoots wouldn’t always make sense to the uninitiated. If you can pinpoint the sea change to any one specific moment, you can pin it to here.
When acid house finally broke through a year later, and became the pinnacle you all know it to be, in terms of the chart exposure it ran a similar path to Chicago house before it. Beautiful pop appropriations like “We Call It Acieeed” and “The Only Way Is Up” played up its giddy erasure of communal boundaries and provided a “Skiing in the Snow”-type introduction (only much better in every respect) to acid house for the great unwashed, while the redder cuts that spilled through, such as “Voodoo Ray”, married its hot-blooded minimalism to simple but killer melodic hooks (and even if the hooks were not melodic – as with Royal House’s “Can You Party” – they would carry a similarly undeniable friskiness).
But as a potentially much more radical sound to the wider population than any dance style with crossover success before it, given its especially narcotic bond and distinctly unrealistic noises that you couldn’t easily place with any ‘live’ instrument, acid house as a format was an open goal for startling the public. Fearful of advocating drug use, the BBC briefly, unofficially banned acid house as much as they could in towards the end of 1988 after Steve Wright’s smiley face get-up on Top of the Pops. This crossfire killed off worthy contenders like Paul Rutherford’s “Get Real”, but not so “Stakker Humanoid” by Humanoid (No. 17 in December 1988), whose success is astounding and could have only confounded and delighted in equal measure. Described by Stuart Aitken as a “harsh, uncompromising slab of raw acid house”, its mainstream success would seem unthinkable without the unexpected help of Bruno Brookes, typically man of much more reserved tastes, treating it to heavy airplay on Radio 1 (on one occasion even playing it twice in a row), as well as a similarly surreal ‘video premiere’ on DEF II. You wouldn’t think you were dealing with a repetitive track which exchanges conventional development for intensification of its unwavering bassline.
However, happening just outside the top 20, eventually peaking at No. 23 in October 1988 after a couple of months lingering in the lower margins, was another domestic acid 12″ in Jolly Roger’s “Acid Man”. Its success was an astonishing feat which has the power to startle even 34 years later. No acid house in the charts ever got further ‘out’ than this – all it really boasts is an ever-wriggling, yet curiously static 303 bass-line, a tinkering top-line synth that is so vague as to barely even be there, and a metronomic beat marching into infinity, alongside buried, distorted vocal snatches of the title here and there. It was druggy, not just a little sinister and made even less sense as a hit single than “O Superman”, seeing as no one was buying this as a novelty, nor did it receive any radio support. It is uncommercial in a way that perhaps no other hit single ever has been, and presents the central paradox of this strain of hit single – it exists to be enjoyed communally by drugged-up bodies, but as a track it is introverted and diffident to the point of almost total obscurity, and “Acid Man” aloofly sharing chart space with Jason Donovan and Gloria Estefan only brought out the sharp edges around its impenetrable sound.
The public image of house, or at this point lack thereof, led to it being offhandedly described as “faceless”, a tag which was aided by Top of the Pops performances where there is no focal centre, no identifiable star. The word stuck even as dance music in pop changed and acts exploited the wide-open possibilities of its public face, with The KLF, Altern-8 and others striking with their own unique and often outlandish presentations. But while at this point dance music – still young and not wholly assimilated – was still hovering in the air, its components not yet designated places to land, the ‘facelessness’ of its less adventurous practitioners just as often led not to spectacle but straight into ‘functional’. Don Pablo’s Animals come to mind with their reading of the Shocking Blue’s “Venus” (No. 4 in May 1990), which although ostensibly a cover of a pop song more or less ignores the song’s essence and focuses only on its organ riff, which it muffles and repeats endlessly while a whole toybox of now-kitschy samples (“yeah! whoo!”, “somebody scream”) are half-concealed so as to not ignite any party. It puzzles even now that it charted higher than any previous version (even Bananarama), while of course now being the most forgotten, but 1990’s Big Tent, daisy-age optimism permitted anything that in the moment felt right.
Indeed, at the turn of the decade, as acid house per the public consciousness shifted into rave, its core sound went back underground and other liminal sounds briefly surfaced before the steamroller of hardcore started seeping through. In this uncertain period crossed briefly cross through the well-loved likes of LFO’s eponymous track (No. 12 in July 1990), a cascading motorway that reimagines Detroit techno in a Cabs-reared Sheffield warehouse that was bound to baffle commercial radio with its Sellafield-amplified sub-bass (and with the awfulness of Steve Wright to consider). Other, unexpectedly charting early Warp sides like Tricky Disco (No. 14 in July) and Nightmares on Wax’s “Aftermath” (No. 38 in October) strengthened to outsiders the sense that pop radio had been infiltrated by some very alien music, namely bleep techno. The latter track, with its similarly punishing bass (FM radio was frankly unprepared to transmit such enveloping, blood-pumping sounds in 1990) and twisted sample of a tripping raver made it a most delirious confection. Although LFO’s central hook was an instrumental melody (albeit a very fractured one), the exclusive gestures of “Aftermath” push it much further from ‘tracky’ into the criteria we’re exploring here.
As rave quickly forewent the glacial structures of Detroit for the ecstasy-fuelled paradises of ‘ardkore – hyperkinetic breakbeats, hip hop bluster, samples gazillion, piano breaks and dousing gloops of white noise – the underground found itself in particular conference with pop simply through the sugar of its ingredients. So when ‘kiddy rave’ came along, it only spotlighted how hardcore fit the best traditions of British whimsy while simultaneously inspiring the ire of purists and eventually pushing the style back under the mainstream as it waited to mutate into darkside and jungle. Before that, very few hardcore crossovers could ever claim to be ‘functional’, given its inherently, incredibly extroverted character. But there’s still one… try for size Toxic Two’s Rave Generator (No. 13 in March 1992), essentially the most reductionist any hardcore hit ever went with its basic, reserved synth ostinato providing a backdrop to, essentially, little else – just some occasional “Pacific” cockerel clucks and rising-and-falling crowd noise. A breakbeat isn’t even used – rather it takes its fickle and decidedly concave rhythmic compulsion from Belgium’s brutalist techno scene. It shows hardcore had by this point become so undeniable that even lesser tracks with much fewer tricks to display could become bona fide hits. Before even that, Digital Orgasm’s “Running Out of Time” (No. 16, December 1991) came within fleeting distance – a basic vocal hook is barely used because spotlighting formless Beltram hoovers is a much more pressing priority (so again, more on the Belgian/R&S side of matters).
COMMERCIAL HOUSE
But as rave’s chart face went back underground, dance music’s subcultural point of entry moved back towards house. This wasn’t something that had ever disappeared – rather, the springboard for such crossovers changed, with the increasing prominence and importance of superclubs (Ministry of Sound, Cream, Renaissance etc.) being essential to pushing certain tracks over, as it to authenticate the occasional whims of any provincial nightclub (which, inevitably, still got their say). Rather than the happening-without-your-permission status of rave, the superclub – with its legion of dedicated followers buying the T-shirts and getting the tattoos – was something far more accessible (more policed, more branded) to the passive public. But their influence – combined with those of the smaller nightclubs that carried on through rave – was always potent. While rave (and, as Simon Reynolds terms it, the hardcore continuum) was where the happening developments apparently were, the mere continued existence of house in the mainstream was for many years at odds with certain tastemakers. And yet, just turn to Discogs and look at a whole community form around certain records, certain DJs, to get just even a glimpse of how these ignored worlds really should be explored, plotted and retold with care.
The basic house template – as proven already in the late 1980s – was ultimately one far more inclusive to the ‘functional’ hit than harder modes of crossover dance music. House was a very flexible framework, ready to carry anything from the most open-throated, sassiest diva anthem to nerdy, introverted studies in rhythm. Through the latter category was how the aforesaid “Say What!” hit the top 40 and how many, many others would as well. These are the wallflowers of pop, the modest guests of the charts. Introverted, unornamented, shy. They feel contextually eccentric through their essential un-eccentricity. Mostly or always instrumental, any included vocal would be some window-dressing chant at the most.
In as early as late 1992, a ‘functional’ club crossover such as TC 1992’s “Funky Guitar” (No. 40 in November) could almost entirely elude radio play. There is little to nothing in the mix that would have caught the ear of the unsuspecting non-clubber, let alone the titular ‘funky guitar’ (which doesn’t look to ignite the party but rather to sit atmospherically in the centre). What may surprise is that it, an acknowledged club classic at the time, could easily have charted higher – and we are speaking about a seven-minute track here (although a shorter edit did make it onto contemporary compilations). It was even possible for a track with an overt novelty, one that rendered it essentially kiddy rave from the outside, to be all inwards-looking and frugal (as was the case with H.W.A.’s Sonic-riding “Supersonic”, No. 33 in 1992).
Also key to many of these tracks are their palindromic nature and negation of build or structural development. Clock X-Press 2’s next tiptoeing into the top 40, “The Sound” (No. 38, March 1996), every bit as unembellished and subdued as their first hit was. By the mid-1990s, the likeliness of the ‘functional’ hit was higher as the megaclub era was in full swing, and some could even chart particularly high, which even now seems unexplainable given their distinctly un-pop nature. The Ethics’ “To the Beat of the Drum (La Luna)” was a most unassuming No. 13 hit in November 1995; at the time a beloved hardbag number, it’d sound impossibly more at home in a club mix given its lack of melody or expansion. Your lot is mostly a distant beat and open-ended synthline, rendering its vocal chant particularly nebulous and squiggles of wah-wah guitar barely noticeable.
Only months later in February 1996, Alcatraz went one higher with “Give Me Luv” (No. 12), a gorgeous US tech-house cut that although typically no-frills still moves in seductive ways anyhow, with its fiesta rhythms and cavernous synths. Radio 1 listeners in almost certainly never got this stuck in their heads, and yet it is classy in all the right, rather than reductive ways. While all these winsome slices of ‘functional’ dance were happening in the most unlikely of arenas, their stage was shared by a few particularly fierce records, like DJ Misjah & DJ Tim’s immortal “Access” (No. 16 in March), which ramped up the tempo and gave the public a flash of unvarnished, grimy mid-1990s acid techno. Both a rave and club favourite (particularly in the north), its lack of pop characteristics (even the vocal edit is Wink-esque cryptic) is almost made up for in that area by the impulse of its speed and oversaturated 303 burbles which were typical to much of the greatest acid from the era. While as ‘tracky’ as these things come, “Access” is too almighty to be considered ‘functional’ per say, but it used the same transmitters as Alcatraz and The Ethics, and surely perplexed radio listeners and TOTP watchers to similar effect.
If any one producer repeated the ‘functional’ trick to great success, it was the prestigious Tall Paul. Under his Escrima guise, “Train of Thought” reached No. 36 in February 1995 off the back of some serious support from the ‘right’ people (Pete Tong, Paul Oakenfold), even though it boasts only the fewest of elements – symmetrical bars of rhythm and SFX trimming with a vague synthline. After cracking the top five in early 1998 as Camisra with the airhorn-laden “Let Me Show You” – rather uncommercial, but more for the wonky, rave-derived power of its imposing, mechanical hooks than because of any meekness – his less successful follow-ups jotted him back into the wilderness. “Feel the Beat” (No. 32 that July) is even less approachable to those not into dance music, containing just a cliched title hook, timid synth vamps and elementary beats – although a shrill string note hangs above the track to give the illusion of suspense. Follow-up “Clap Your Hands” reached No. 34 in May 1999 and once again the rule is bangingness first, pop appeal a distant second. Admittedly there is a slight innovation here – namely that the tempo is fast enough to make this feel like hard house, ditto the pitched-up B-boy hollers – but this is still very undecorated club music. A similarly named minor hit, Big Room Girl’s “Raise Your Hands”, reached No. 40 that February and is Tasteful-with-a-capital-T house groove, stylish if predictable in said style with an alluringly unconvincing vocal.
In fact, chasing the ‘classic’ modes of house was sometimes central to these records, just as they were with the more outgoing house hits. Italian producer Vito Lucente, later of Room 5/Junior Jack fame, achieved a No. 32 hit as Mr. Jack in January 1997 with “Wiggly World”. Seemingly nostalgic for, as the opening sample would have it, “the true pioneers of house music” – an impression aided by its use of the old Chuck Roberts ‘jack is the one’ speech (most famously used on Fingers Inc.’s “Can You Feel It”) – it is ultimately little more than a slightly funky bassline and some minor disco flourishes. This sort of blankness fascinates me to no end (I mean, this was a top 40 hit?) There is arguably a lineage of this in the charts that goes back further than modern house music, right back to what is arguably the first ever ‘functional’ dance hit – Norwegian band Titanic’s 1971 No. 5 hit “Sultana”, a slinky, unassuming near-instrumental of Latin syncopation, hushed bass and the odd chant here and there that was popular in nightclubs in the UK, Europe and America (most notably New York gay disco Tamburlaine). A sense of bassy groove permeates through crossover dance music, and it goes right through Silver Convention and takes us into Mr. Jack and beyond.
Sometimes, a ‘functional’ dance track will achieve its success partly through it being a follow-up to a much more commercial, not to say successful, release. The BlueBoy were probably destined to be a typically faceless house one-hit-wonder with “Remember Me” in February 1997, and so it proved; the prolonged (by six months) sequel “Sandman” managed only to reach No. 25 and it isn’t exactly hard to understand why – making more of its vocal sample than most of the tracks here, it still seems just as impulsively low-key as its functional brethren, never quite knowing how to draw attention to its tasteful soul chants, rudimentary breakbeat or other background paraphernalia.
Or there’ll be one that precedes a big hit. Three years before “Groovejet”, Italy’s own Spiller tasted (minor) success under the alias Laguna in November 1997 with the No. 40 hit “Spiller from Rio (Do It Easy)”, which deploys a casual funk bassline and plenty of favela carnival flavours; although, this being the 1990s, the use of Brazilian batucada as a tropical rhythmic framework was a trope in and of itself – going back to the Good Men’s “Give It Up” (No. 5 in 1993) – none of the others (and there were many) were quite as basic as Laguna, whose brief and gentle tickles of cuíca in the middle distance are the closest it gets to catchy. It corners deep house territory, as does DJ Eric’s “We Are Love” (No. 37 in February 1999), which obfuscates its one love platitudes – ergo only real crossover qualities – under workaday bassiness (which is certainly no bad thing in and of itself. In fact, it compares favourably with practitioners of the deepest ascetic French house, say Motorbass).
ALBUM HOUSE
Not all the pop-resistant dance music in the notional mainstream came from nightclubs. Far more credible to indie kids and mainstream tastemakers were hits from an altogether more open-ended stock – the partial outgrowth of rave into ambient house/dub/techno and related strains. While initially characteristic of ‘chill out’ comedown sets at nightclubs like Heaven during Oakenfold’s Land of Oz nights, by the time ambient dance became surprisingly vogueish in 1992-93 it ran parallel to the concurrent ‘home listening’ techno and birth of IDM; that’s to say, they were both album-oriented, spliff-friendly, plugging themselves into the signifiers of their 1970s forebears and other classic rock music. This all meant that the tracky/functional spectrums of dance music in the charts could be achieved through completely different means, selling to a largely different audience.
As surprising now as it was then, the Orb topped the albums chart in July 1992, helpfully with their best record, U.F.Orb. If you’d place your money on them having either a number one album or single you’d go with the former because beyond live sets that was their inherent orientation (indeed, it was the first instrumental, ahem, “prog” double album at the summit since the all-but-forgotten Sky 2 twelve years earlier). But to release a 40-minute single, “Blue Room”, in a McLaren/ZTT/KLF-ish attempt to catch the charts off-guard – seeing as they had just recently expanded the eligible total-playing length of a single to 40 minutes – played their central mischiefs plainly. It got as far as No. 8, however, because they thoughtfully created a 7″ edit that they were invited to perform on Top of the Pops (I say ‘perform’, they just played chess in spacesuits whilst the beat went on – making it clear the endurance of British fancifulness in pop passed as much to them as it did to kiddy rave). Even in 1992, several years after the emergence of Balearic’s winsome emptiness, specific comedown music and chill-out sets, the idea of a top ten hit that emphasises atmosphere and journey over destination (its hookiest implements are ethereal, wordless vocals, whilst its centre is a deliciously simple Jah Wobble bassline) mightn’t have been bankable. Yet suddenly, ambient dub was in the top ten, having for a time reached audiences far beyond clubbers and music mag obsessives. Yet as with, for instance, the first dub track to breach the top ten (Rupie Edwards’ “Ire Feelings (Skenga)” in October 1974), a clear infrastructure – namely house and rave, rather than reggae – was there to support its appearance, not make it jar to the masses so much (thus allowing the disengaged to spin it as a novelty if they wish).
What makes less sense, however, was the similar reception afforded the Orb’s next single, which in the context of the charts comes across like their true avant-garde ace. “Assassin” may just be the most extreme example of ambient music to ever crack the top 100, let alone the top 20; yet in October 1992, this relatively forgotten impressionist piece reached No. 12. It’s a truly bottomless tonic, not even treating the unwary listener to a plumping, dubwise bassline like the previous single. Its sparseness is underscored by how decisively curious in mood it is, with nothing resembling a hook within miles. Like “Acid Man”, the wholly inaccessible sound of “Assassin”, sounding like it is unaware of anything or anyone else in the world, even the existence of the listener, makes the extent of its success staggering even today. It’s as if secretly tuning into an extraterrestrial ritual.
By 1995, ambient fervor may have passed its peak but the structure of the charts was shifting rapidly, affording fanbase-oriented hits automatic weight, with first week peaks now being the norm given the increasing gestation period between radio release and commercial release. The Orb had a dedicated fanbase and this may explain “Oxbow Lakes” spending a week at No. 38 in April 1995, despite being potentially the most formless hit single in history. Running for seven and a half fidgeting minutes, this anti-epic initially attempts melody – or at least tries to remember melodies are a thing that exist – but instead settles comfortably elsewhere, clinging to a obtuse, somewhat shapeless piano phrase that ultimately gets buried beneath an indecisive groove, before the whole track blooms in an adjacent open-air atmosphere of collaged sound effects. The track ignores club appeal altogether, given its disregard of rhythm or continuity, instead being determined – in its in distinctly meek way – on being one of psychedelia’s unlikely chart triumphs. After all, making the top 40 alone meant Radio 1 had to at least give it the time of day once, during their chart rundown, and to pop ears this was a soundscape at best.
However, higher up the charts that week, at No. 22, was the similarly obtuse “The Far-Out Son of Lung and The Ramblings of a Mad Man” by The Future Sound of London. When FSOL made their chart debut three years earlier with the deathless “Papua New Guinea” – neatly also peaking at No. 22 – they were clearly a rave act, albeit one keeping a very psychedelic eye on atmospherics, texture and the big chill, an angle the track accelerated from the duo’s earlier, more obviously body-minded cuts. Inevitably and quickly, their techno-kinetic elements largely fell off and they became divisive forebears of IDM, or ‘home listening’ dance music, more the reserve of dorm room stoners than E rush ravers. Far from necessary as it is to run-down the history of IDM and intelligent techno just to talk about some esoteric hit singles, I shan’t, but The Future Sound were proggier than most of their apparent peers, or as Simon Reynolds had called them, “pseudo-progressives”. In the eyes of the unsympathetic they apparently did to techno what ELP apparently did to rock, with their wilful abstractions, misapplied pretensions for ‘innovation’ and conscious avoiding of the ‘trappings’ of techno or ‘predictable’ sampling (reflected not only in their music but their Buggy G. Riphead artwork and videos). But I’m inevitably drawn to what now stands as their none-more-1990s iconography and reach/outreach… I mean, the retro-futuristic value you can now attach to a project like ISDN – a compilation of live, nascent ISDN radio broadcasts – is off the charts. They, to be charitable, belong to a multimedia superreality that also factors in the saturated surrealism of U2’s still-dazzling Zoo TV Tour, Billy Idol’s ‘cyberpunk’ meanders, the CD-i/CD-ROM experiments of Todd Rundgren and Peter Gabriel, Jesus Jones’ maligned zeroes and ones recording or, if you go further back, the gorgeous pop culture collision aesthetics of Pop Will Eat Itself, Age of Chance and Sigue Sigue Sputnik.
I mention all of this because it underscores the lens through which I see, to once again give it is absurd full title, “The Far-out Son of Lung and the Ramblings of a Mad Man”. It’s a bit of chart mischief that works in a loosely avant-dub idiom, but belonged to the ISDN experiment so seems wide with possibility in a way that seems quite quaint today. But as a hit single, it makes barely much more sense than “Oxbow Lakes”; an abstract instrumental with a discursive rhythm, “ugh-ugh” bass grunts and shrieks of brass howling from another room. It sounds just as difficult and indrawn as most of these hits do, the difference being its inanely surreal, colourful music video (the style of which is a legacy from member Brian Dougan’s days as Humaniod) and its stupid title exist to contrarily stand out and then some. What the track actually reminds me of, of all things, is A.R. Kane’s “Is This Is?” from 1988, which inevitably makes me enjoy it a lot.
Focusing on two artists rather than especially faceless fly-bys underscores how much these successes were fanbase-oriented, but there were smaller acts that slipped between the cracks. With his ambient house project System 7, Steve Hillage – fresh off his work with the Orb – achieved a surprise No. 39 hit in February 1993 with the Youth-assisted “7:7 Expansion”. The record itself is cautiously, vaguely intense with its billowing beats, textural ambient restraint and trance-adjacent synths and modes, alongside surprising but subdued usage of the Brazilian berimbau. It was arguably an early (and ultimately rare) success for what was soon to be named ambient trance, but its repetitive nature and complete avoidance of pop-friendly characteristics beyond the basic functionality of its beat makes it a text-book example of ‘functional’ – the chiefest, finest such example in 1993 alongside X-Press 2’s “Say What!”
CROSSOVER TRANCE
If anything signals the decline of this style of hit, it’s the arrival of trance and its siblings as something of the dominant – or co-dominant, at any rate – crossover style of superclub dance music in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Where house at its most basically functional could disregard melody and structural development altogether, the showiness of trance was part of its inherent DNA. Melodic, even often melancholic washes of synth were its crux, its rhythmic lexicon centred on the layering of big-room textures, bringing stadium-sized dynamics to even the smallest of provincial nighters.
The writing had arguably been on the wall as early as 1996, when trance in its most recognisable form had started to make gateways into the European pop charts via the proggy ambience (if not total plunge into Pure Moods new age) of dream trance, with its synths at once so glum and euphoric and the classical pianos central to many of its iconic tracks a sort of icy, inverted nostalgia for Balearic beat’s halcyonic chill. And yet, even if the iconographic melody of Robert Miles’ breakout hit “Children” destined it for major success worldwide (and although the UK was one of the only European countries where, amid strong competition, it didn’t reach number one, it still ended up the year’s eighth-biggest seller), once the gates were open, far more open-ended tracks in a similar vein could follow in its footsteps. No greater example existed than B.B.E’s “Seven Days and One Week”, with its vague, echoing ricochets and amorphous sound, managing to break the top three in the autumn. This surprise victory for moody pop-impressionism, which can count ambient techno as a forebear, led the doorway to the less melodic trance hits several years later when the genre as a whole was a chart force to be reckoned with.
But, as hinted, there far fewer such records in the top 40 when trance shared as much chart space as funky house (or, indeed, UK garage and the other defining millennial club pop sounds), the style having this point reached such towering, Steinman-esque sedation that it necessitated the existence of sub-genre names like ‘uplifting trance’ or the repurposed ‘progressive trance’ (originally a synonym of sorts for progressive house, given their corresponding developmental histories in the early-mid 1990s), and there was enough “fake trance”, as it were, in the mainstream to still infuriate purist factions to this day. Really it was the lower-key cuts that could make any sort of edgeway to the ‘tracky’ or ‘functional’ continuum, as evidenced at one point by British DJ Space Manoeuvres.
His solitary hit, “Stage One” (No. 25, January 2000), is a highly modest release from the Hooj Choons staple, focused entirely on atmosphere; the melody, such as it is, is barely scratched in, while sonar bleeps, indecipherable radio logjams and shimmers of cybernoise freely dart in and out of the song’s ambient space like metagalactic dub. By this point, the Cafe del Mar-style chill-out market was not only catering to ageing ex-ravers but was in its boom years, with a flurry of television-advertised compilations going out of their way to appeal to any Briton of the era seeking a certain type of accessory to fit their contended lifestyles – in one way it was deemed a much cooler, hipper upgrade of new age for the more discerning listener, in another way it was undemanding, Grand Designs and Changing Rooms cosy, as though big wigs had been planning a remedy for post-millennium burnout all along. Suddenly, a thriving, highly-exploitable context for understated dance music existed, and a track as barely-there as “Stage One” moulded easily into this age of low-stakes satisfaction.
It was nonetheless a relative one-off. At the other end of the tracky spectrum would be the likes of Sister Bliss’ “Sister Sister” (No. 34, October 2000), an ebbing and flowing, rising and falling record that Bliss referred to as “neural house” since she believed it to be too trebly to be trance. But its far from chill-out, and ergo maybe not quite ‘functional’; front and centre are noisy synth-pads drawing out notes to such an extent that the vague melody they collectively hint at never really coheres. This combination of droning white noise and trance beats is nonetheless exploratory and unresolved in nature, surging ever-onward and never quite peaking or ‘dropping’. With no clear centre, it could curiously be described as somewhat ambient, despite its obviously boisterous facade.
Straddling the hinterland between both ends was Sasha & Emerson’s “Scorchio” (No. 23, September 2000), an Ibizan classic explicitly borne of the ‘progressive’ mindset but also a mutual meeting of two era-defining forces. Maybe Sasha brought the slightly melancholic underlay, and maybe its gorgeously nonplussed melody (which is barely a melody) came at the hands of Darren Emerson (who had just recently left Underworld). What surprises most is how the effect is not entirely ‘functional’ even though its core components are precisely that – rhythm, repetition and more rhythm. This sort of reductionist philosophy usually leads a track straight into the muted, unobtrusive corridors of ‘functional’ dance and yet its overarching, trance-indebted design means comes over very forthright. Perhaps it’s a happy ending for this continuum; having spent the 90s fitting discreetly into the charts, the spartan style of crossover dance music has now reached a point where it needn’t particularly change its skeleton to feel inclusive and assertive.
Chart house was not disturbed by sharing market space with trance, and as the two leading styles of “club music” – as marketers might understand it – at this point, they typically shared compilations. But by 2002 they were mutating; ‘trance’ as it may have been understood in 1997, in the Energy 52 sense, was to be supplanted by labels like All Around the World and brands like Clubland offering the hard house and happy hardcore-influenced thrash of Euro-trance and the closely related Northern house. Concurrently, the strain of house influenced by trance itself – a nebulous but noticeably dark and thrilling patch that also owed as much to techno as either, occupied by such producers as Tomcraft – soon gave way to electro house – the 2000s rebuilding of pop-house with timbres derived from 1980s electro and freestyle, using a dense, big-room production that owes more to trance’s version of melodrama than anything else. Where a primitive, innocuous forerunner to electro house like “Flat Beat” was quite occupied with enjoying its introverted self, the equivalents of the mid-2000s – from “Satisfaction” to “Put Your Hands Up for Detroit” – filled out the sound with tension-building upwards synths and often-unearned builds, crashes and drops, turning even the most basic compositions into mini-dramas with the subtlety of jackhammers.
It’s worth pondering “Flat Beat” though, to end this piece. Even among the ‘functional’ dance hits it stood alone; debuting at number one in March 1999 (and certainly none of its peers came close to doing that), it owed its huge commercial success not to nightclubs, ravers, indie tastemakers, but to a jeans advert featuring a headbanging puppet who spoke in bass frequencies. Far from the sound of club tribalists or Radio 1 Essential Mixes, it was a dance number one that baffled even the domestic substructure and culture that had given dance music a home, let alone the usual Rods, Janes and Freddies who complained that it “wasn’t music”. An endlessly repeating Korg squiggle that had come from French house but instead worked in concise, dry wobbles that struggle for balance, an elliptical masterpiece of tune-resistant ingredients and spaciousness. At the time, this sort of uncompromising minimalism was of an entirely different type of kettlefish to typical club crossovers, and looked to be a one-hit-wonder not only for Oizo but for his timorous style. Yet as the 2000s and then 2010s developed, styles that could and did count “Flat Beat” as a precedent – from electro house to bassline and fidget house – have ensured it a longevity that very little much of this music has.
But for the ‘functional’ hits that have not survived, especially those of the crossover house of the 1990s, they are a formidable reminder of another time, when it seemed any club style could find commercial life – even an inherently fleeting one – if it caught the ears of influential DJs or enough clubbers in the heat of the moment. These are little watercolour études in which a small musical idea is taken to its logical end point without much fuss or much improvisation, innocently cornering the boldness of chart radio like satellites before thinking better of themselves and once again heading for the stars. Tracks that sound too privately obsessed with each new noise or effect they bring to the table to do a song and dance. Music which doesn’t contemplate that anyone could be listening. But placed in the middle of the market, there were – more than their makers may have ever predicted.
Popluck 