So I’ve gotten a bit obsessed with this song the past week, which anybody of the right age will of course recognise as one of the first house megahits, Coldcut featuring Yazz with Doctorin’ the House, from that great 1988-1990 period when suddenly house broke into the pop charts. I turned fourteen the year this was a hit so at the perfect age to appreciate this revolution in music, had I not been a teenage metalhead already. Real appreciation for house would only come years later and it was only by going through the Popular archives that I realised what a golden age the late eighties and early nineties were for electronic dance music. Take this for instance:
That’s the other song that’s been obsessing me, the one that seemed to kick it all off at the time. The first acid/house song I’d ever heard and which set the pattern for all those other hits that would follow:
(That’s Krush, with house arrest, briefly making Sheffield fashionable). Danceable beat, preferably using some old soul classic as the base, lots and lots of samples, some electronic weirdness and a pretty woman doing the vocals. Though of course the woman in front may not actually be doing the vocals you hear on the record. Case in point:
No, that’s actually the voice of Loleatta Holleway, whose vocals from minor hit Love Sensation were chopped up and moved about to create a much tighter. arguably better song, the only problem being that she wasn’t credited for it until she made a fuzz about it; a later mix of Ride on Time would have Heather Small sing instead. Let’s end on a high note though, with the most mellow hit of 1990, about halfway through the transformation of ex-Housemartin’s Norman Cook into Fatboy Slim, Beats International with Dub be Good to Me, which took the formula of reworked soul classic with danceable beat, crazy samples and female vocals and perfected it:
EDIT: is this really already twentyfive years ago? But that would mean the Second Summer of Love is now older than the original Summer of Love was at the time. Which would mean I’d be turning forty this year and that’s clearly wrong.