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HeatUK Evolution: Natural Selection — a look at dance music’s gone-but-not-forgottens
Reported by e99
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Submitted 04-12-06 23:54
As HeatUK celebrates another night of timeless classic tunes with Evolution: Natural Selection at Koko in London on December 9th, we took a look at some bits of dance music’s past that didn’t survive the evolutionary cull — for better or for worse!
Speed garage
In 1997, speed garage blew up. The name referred to the beats, which were often a speeded-up form of skippy, percussive US garage beats, but it was the basslines that really grabbed everyone’s attention. Huge, warped, droning basslines that sound like jungle b-lines pitched down or reggae b-lines pitched up combined with girly or raga vocals were usually the order of the day, and the sound was an unashamedly fun, dirty one that came across like pumping house with a firecracker up its bum. Big tunes like Double 99’s ‘R.I.P. Groove’ and Armand van Helden’s remixes of the era still sound hot (e.g. Sneaker Pimps’ ‘Spin Spin Sugar’), and you can hear influence from this era in contemporary producers like Switch. The genre disappeared from the wider clubbing realm as umpteen formulaic tracks came and clogged up the nation’s record stores, and the evil cousin of speed garage 2-step began to emerge with an untoward connection with gangs and violence.
What’s that? Midlands-originating bassline house is just speed garage with cheesier vocals? Let’s just pretend that doesn’t exist shall we...
“Tune” signs
A very popular clubbing accessory around the zenith of the so-called Golden Era of Trance music. Very probably originating in Gatecrasher circa 1998, the craze started when young trance addicts made homemade signs that simply said “TUNE!” on them, to be held up on the arrival of a track which they deemed to be rather “large.” The fad became so widespread that Ministry of Sound printed “TUNE!” signs as adverts for some of their compilations. These possibly died out as people realised you could make the letter T using your hands, arms, or your whole body — who needs to carry around a bit of paper when you’ve got clubbing body semaphore?
The wider dance music print press
Hey, I’m not saying that the dance music press is dead — but it’s certainly a hell of a lot smaller. Remember the days of Muzik (awesome!), Mixmag Update, Wax, Jockey Slut, Ministry, Club On... there used to be loads of publications to choose from. Now for dedicated dance music all we have as DJ Mag, I-DJ, Mixmag, M8 and One Week To Live. A sign of the times or just a cull of the weakest? Either way, we are definitely at a loss.
Space writers
Quite a nifty little idea, but ultimately worthless. Space Writers have a series of red LEDs in them that can be programmed to show any message you want. You then wave the Space Writer from side to side and the message appears to “float” in mid air. Cool huh?! A step up from the “TUNE!” signs but ultimately one whose widespread lifespan was rather short.
Tiger Balm
Mostly replaced by its more readily available and less fierce relative Vicks, Tiger Balm was one of those things that wide-eyed clubbing newbies would get introduced to by some keen new best friend insisting that it would give them a “rush”. They would then proceed to rub the Tiger Balm into their palms, cup the innocent’s face with anointed hands and blow into the space between them and the recipient. Cue the feeling that your face is experiencing a strange blend between burning and freezing that can only be described as rather unpleasant. The next few hours would be spent trying to remove the remainder of the balm from your face — unsuccessfully — and ending up getting it into your eyes. Ouch. But it did make you rush didn’t it?
Tribal Gathering
The first legal festival to show the world that dance music was a major currency. The event started off as a 25,000 capacity mash-up in 1993 at a farm in Wiltshire featuring the likes of Laurent Garnier, Carl Cox and Pete Tong, and ran every year for the following five. It laid the prototype for the likes of Creamfields, Global Gathering, and Homelands, but was less commercially slanted and more credible that any of them are now. They put on truly superb line-ups of DJs and live acts from around the world, and started an exciting new chapter in the history of UK clubbing. According to one website, highlights of Tribal Gathering 1996 included “John Peel playing Status Quo’s ‘Rocking All Over The World’, which leads me on to...
John Peel
Anyone who can get away with putting a Nu Energy 175BPM freeform hardcore track on a FabricLive album is automatically a fucking legend (Marc Smith vs Safe ‘n’ Sound’s ‘Identify The Beat’ in case you were wondering). OK so technically he doesn’t belong in this list as his presence is still very much with us and it would be a bit crass to say he didn’t survive the evolutionary cull — but he still deserves a mention as a keen supporter of dance music from the past!
Twilo (New York)
Post 1980s, it’s fair to say that the USA didn’t have much to shout about in terms of dance music. Twilo was however, an exception — a brilliantly designed and programmed club in the Chelsea area of NYC that became the club’s most talked-about venue since Studio54. Junior Vasquez’s Saturday residency at the cosmopolitan club made him one of the biggest (and most overpaid) DJs in the world, and Sasha and John Digweed were regular guests — which no doubt helped them to obtain the legendary status that they have amongst American dance music aficionados. The venue featured the world’s first custom built club soundsystem, made by Phazon, who also designed the Ministry Of Sound’s thumping main room rig. New York City’s mayor Rudy Giulliani closed the club down in 2001 as part of his “quality-of-life” campaign, ending a golden era for the city’s club scene.
Minidiscs
OK there’s a few of you who still use these but come on — this format never really took off did it? No-one sells music on minidiscs any more, and MP3 recorders have rendered these devices more or less obsolete. They were a great format to use before the i-Pod revolution, like a more advanced version of cassette tapes — but now they are just bulky and awkward.
The mix tape
Hey DJs? Remember laboriously dubbing from tape to tape to make copies of your latest demos to give out to promoters? Those were the days! The race is on to convert all your tapes to MP3 before every cassette player in the country either disappears or ceases to work. Now where’s my tape head cleaner when I need it...
Home
When Darren Hughes split from his co-founder of Cream James Barton, he decided to build a multi-million pound club bang in the middle of London — in Leicester Square. Very impressively decked out, with top-of-the-range production values and some very tasty DJ line-ups, the club ran for the best part of two years before it got closed down by the authorities on the rather hilarious grounds that it was “knowingly allowing drugs to be sold in its venue.” An example was made out of them, and in all honesty it was bound to attract unwanted attention given its location. If the club had kept going, it could have been a serious rival to the Ministries and Turnmills of the scene...
Big beat
This genre was massive for much of the late nineties. Pioneered by the likes of Fatboy Slim, Jon Carter and the legendary Big Beat Boutique club, it took old hip-hop and funk breakbeats, upped the tempo and give them some more oomph (hence the “big”). It was always party music which never took itself too seriously, and the way it embraced elements of rock and hip-hop really struck a chord with the dance music buying public — and even the mainstream. As with speed garage (and in the same era), too many copycat tunes adhered to the big beat formula and drowned the genre with weak, unimaginative material. Cue the big-beat backlash and the rise of the less brash, more “respectable” nu skool breaks. In fact the most popular strains of breakbeat would eventually fall somewhere between the fun attitude of big beat and the more polished production values of nu-skool. Allegedly big beat is back in 2006 — but evidence is scant.
Dungarees
There are few people who can pull off dungarees in this world in a public environment. It’s basically because they are a pretty naff item of clothing that bring back painful memories of The Village People. Worn by far too many people at raves in the early ‘90s, this is one bit of dance music past that should stay there. Thai-dye can stay there too...
The Millennium Dome
Ah the Millennium! Such immense pressure and fear have never been created by a New Year’s Eve, and in the blind panic in the years leading up to this utterly insignificant event, our wonderful Labour government thought it would be a great idea to build the largest single-roofed structure in the world — and make it very ugly. Those ambitious types at Ministry of Sound decide they would throw a NYE bash in it. They did a couple with people like Anne Savage, Paul Oakenfold and Dave Pearce in the main arena, and I was unfortunate enough to attend their event there in 2001. It was like being in hell, but it was bitterly cold rather than burning hot.
Why would you want to go to a venue where it takes 20 minutes to walk the entire circumference, which has no heating, which has no indoor cloakroom (so you had to queue outside in freezing January temperatures) and that is so big you have absolutely f*ck all chance of finding your friends after you lose them? Bodies were strewn across the floor amidst piles of rubbish, the music was awful and the atmosphere non-existent. Surprisingly they went back the following year too before realising it was actually quite a nightmare.
The Dome cost around £798 million pounds to construct.
The Sanctuary, Milton Keynes
This was a proper rave venue. Several big warehouses in an unpopular area of roundabout-infested Milton Keynes that by day were used for go-karting and indoor golf made up The Sanctuary, and for big rave-ups — you couldn’t do much better. Slammin’ Vinyl and Accelerated Culture regularly held huge events here as well as Wildchild and Godskitchen at various points, and they all attracted people from all over the country. It’s now the site for the new football stadium for the MK Dons — formerly known as Wimbledon FC.
Chill-out rooms
There was a time when the chill-out room was an essential element in most clubs. A time before venue owners realised that they could fit more people into their clubs by turning the chill-out room into another room of music. Much hilarity ensued in these back rooms where mashed-up clubbers would go and mong out and give each other massages and generally forget where the hell they were. Remember the café at The Fridge? Sure it was a little bit cramped but those air vents, those slices of cake, those cups of chai.... magic! Clubs should be a place for socialising as well as dancing — and not enough of them these days have anywhere suitable to get away from the music and cool off.
Dance music feuds
There used to be an abundance of feuds in dance music, compared to now when many savvy individuals realise that it’s more profitable to work with your competitors than against them. Remember Tricky vs Finlay Quaye? (Finlay Quaye claimed to be his uncle or something)? Or Junior Vasquez vs Danny Tenaglia (battle of the Queens)? Home vs Cream? Hardcore vs Jungle? Bob Sinclar vs Spacedust in the whole ‘Gym Tonic’ rip-off debacle? Such arguments are few and far between now, and although that’s probably a good thing, they did provide some good entertainment!
Make sure you get down to HeatUK Evolution on Saturday 9th December at Koko to hear the tunes from 1995–2001 that still cut the mustard in 2006. Hard dance music has evolved a fair bit since those years, but the DJs on the night will show that good dance music always stands the test of time...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tribal_Gathering
http://www.fatreg.com/Tribal96.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twilo
http://wwp.millennium-dome.com/
All photos courtesy of e99. Not to be reproduced without permission.
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Other Features By e99:
Fergilcious: PunchFunk & Excentrik take over The Key
Baklash take over the IceBox at HeatUK Aftermath '07
Goodgreef take on Frantic at NYE-NEC
Trevor Rockcliffe — Proactive — HeatUK & The Gallery NYE — 'nuff said?
Tasty’s 5th Birthday and the battle of the brands
The views and opinions expressed in this review are strictly those of the author only for which HarderFaster will not be held responsible or liable.
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by the way its tie-dye not Thai-dye
! didn't know that