"Enjoy this trip, enjoy this trip... and it is a trip"
This slice through YouTube focusses on UK danceish music from 1980 to 1991. Why this subject? Well, in the last two weeks this is what I've been surfing. Simple as that.
Let's start with 1980 and David Bowie's Ashes to Ashes. Arguably the last decent song he did. Trippy song, trippy video. But who's that with Bowie? Why, it's Steve Strange of Visage!
While Bowie went on his way to make China Girl (oh dear!), Visage released Fade to Grey in 1981. This song was the simultaneous kick-off and apotheosis of the New Romantic music movement. The crystalline synths, grim outlook and euro-trash French bits are brilliant, and the video features Steve Strange remaking the Ashes to Ashes video only with him starring! Cheaper than the original, but all the same they must have spent a fortune on makeup.
As well as being the cornerstone of New Romantic foolishness, Fade to Grey lived on undead in the electroclash 'revival' of the early 2000s. Note Ladytron's Seventeen, and Kelly Osbourne's litigation-worthy (Visage won) facsimile of Fade to Grey, One Word. While I can't help feeling a certain fondness for electroclash in that it sounds like the stuff from the 80s, I really prefer the real thing. I mean, why wouldn't I?
Did Visage do anything else? There were a few other singles, but the only one I like is Damned don't Cry from 1982. All this track needs to be house is hi-hats on the off beat. It feels like Erasure could have built their career out of just this song.
The mid-80s was a bit of a drought, quality-wise. Spandau Ballet, Duran Duran, Culture Club, Wham! are the sort of groups only fat 40something 91ZM mums could still enjoy unironically. I'm still baffled why anyone gave it credence at the time. There are numerous examples of this tosh on YouTube, but the most egregious I found was Gold by Spandau Ballet. Makes Careless Whisper look gritty.
(Although it should probably be lumped in with this nonsense, I do rather like Style Council's Shout to the Top)
Something more basic and more interesting came with the growing influence of black dance music on British pop. As I remember it, the first inkling of a sea change was Paul Hardcastle's Nineteen in 1985. Admittedly it sounds as much descended from Harold Faltermeyer's Axel F as from Cybotron's Clear or Herbie Hancock's Rockit (great video!), but the use of samples and the political nature of the track was refreshing and relevant compared to say Duran Duran's Rio.
1987's Acid Tracks by Phuture was the start of Acid House, which revolutionised British dance music. (You can view a documentary about the making of that track, featuring grave Scots narration. Rather disingenuously, the music on the doco, while being acid house, is not Acid Tracks itself. Indeed, Acid Tracks is rather a plodding work, notable only for its (perhaps too) extensive use of the TB303. Instead, they've used a more uptempo Acid House number, thus giving the false impression that Acid House sprang fully formed from the combined heads of Phuture. Not so.)
When Acid House got to England, the charts went kerraazy. Check it out: S Express's Theme From S Express and Hey music lover, A Guy Called Gerald's Voodoo Ray, Beatmasters' Rok Da House, M.A.R.R.S's Pump up the Volume, 808 State's 'Pacific, and the KLF's mighty warhorse 'What Time is Love?' (either the 1988 'Trance' original, or the 1990 pop single update). Admittedly some of these tracks do have a certain *ahem* gay disco sound (not the KLF though, oh no, they're rugged), but I find them uplifting and sincere.
I remember watching Pump up the Volume in early 1988 and being extremely impressed, although watching it now I may just have been taken with all the footage of space missions.
In my view the dance revolution was completed (or at least stopped having anything new to say), in 1991, the year of the Orb's Little Fluffy Clouds, FSOL's Papua New Guinea, and the Shamen's Move any Mountain. This latter might seem an odd choice, but while its production is dated, and Mr C's rapping hardly compares favourably to Flavor Flav's, the song's druggy utopianism is rather wonderful. Simple self-affirming lyrics like "I can move, move, move any mountain" may have become a cliche staple of trance hippy culture, but when this came out the message was new (at least for that generation).
When I say that the revolution was completed, I mean it in the sense that by 1991 the social musical and political foundations of the music were fully developed. New things were brewing, like jungle and IDM, but these flowed out from what had come before. They were rarefications of the genre, rather than new developments.
There's not really a conclusion to any of this (or if there are any conclusions to be made, I leave it up to you to make them).
Posted by stuart at June 23, 2007 9:49 AM