Burn It Up - or how Hans Zimmer, Rick Astley and Steinski ignited British dance music (with Bill Brewster)
Plus San, Nikki Nair, µ-Ziq, Lankum and more
Side one, track one, of Burn It Up, Bill Brewster’s new compilation of the best British dance music from 1986 to 1991, is Coldcut’s Beats + Pieces, a song by one of the UK’s most respected and long-standing electronic duos. Side one, track two, is the house mix of System by Mel and Kim, a London pop duo most commonly associated with the brain-rottingly ear-worm-ish single Respectable and their work with pop overlords Stock, Aitken and Waterman. And nothing, I think, could better sum up the weird dichotomy of British dance music from 1986 to 1991 than this contrast.
“The most interesting years for dance music are often when there isn’t a genre that’s dominating the landscape,” Brewster told me, when I interviewed him recently for Line Noise (full podcast coming soon). “From about 1990 onwards, house music just became this massive behemoth. Whereas in ‘86, you had electro, you had hip hop, you had all kinds of left-field electronic records coming out on Factory Records, for example, and you had early house records as well.”
When house music hit the UK, in the mid 1980s, it hit hard - and not just in the underground clubs and Orbital raves of legend, either. The first British house hit, Farley “Jackmaster” Funk and Jesse Saunders’s eternal Love Can’t Turn Around, reached number 10 on the singles chart in September 1986, with Jack Your Body by Steve “Silk” Hurley climbing all the way to number one in January 1987.
In Brewster’s introduction to Burn It Up he claims that British people were primed to love electronic music by the mainstream work of the BBC’s famed Radiophonic Workshop, which produced eerie proto-electronic music for hit TV shows like Doctor Who.
Synths, then, are in our veins and it wasn’t long before British people started to make house music. There is, as you might imagine, some debate about what the first British house music record was but the most likely answer is On The House by Midnight Sunrise With Nellie ‘Mixmaster’ Rush Featuring Jackie Rawe, a collaboration between Northern Soul DJ Ian Levine, Hans Zimmer - yes that Hans Zimmer - music journalist Damon Rochefort and session singer Jackie Rawes that was released in 1986 and features here.
Also released in 1986 was System, the B side to Mel and Kim’s huge hit Showing Out (Get Fresh at the Weekend), produced in a conscious parody of the Chicago house style by Stock, Aitken and Waterman. And if neither On The House nor System are particularly worth writing home about on a purely musical level, they do show how rapidly Britain latched onto house - and decide to make some dirty cash from it.
“There are a few Mel and Kim records that had a little bit of credibility,” Brewster said. “Stock Aitken and Waterman obviously became incredibly successful ripping off hi-NRG and Italo disco but there are a few credible records in amongst the massive catalogue.”
By 1987, dance had exploded in the UK. MARRS’ Pump Up the Volume - the major omission on this compilation - followed Jack Your Body to the top of the UK charts in autumn 1987 and there were further chart hits for Krush’s House Arrest and Beatmasters feat. Cookie Crew’s Rok Da House, both of which feature here.
Hell, Rick Astley even had a kind of house hit in 1987, with his debut single, When You Gonna by Rick and Lisa, a number 11 Billboard Dance chart hit, which features here in its Home Boy mix.
Is the song any good? Now there’s a question and one that hangs pretty heavily over this compilation. Like many of the 50 songs over the four discs you can certainly question the ethics of a British production team ripping off Black American music for their own commercial gain and SAW, Astley and Lisa Fabien aren’t exactly contributing to musical evolution with their sprinkled-with-pop Chicago tributes.
You can probably say the same about most of the songs on disc one of Burn It Up. Some were designed to cash in; some did cash in (see: Krush’s House Arrest); most were done in the spirit of amateur curiosity, inspired by a genuine love of house music and the UK’s magpie approach to Black American culture.
There is some excellent music on CD one, notably T-Coy’s surprisingly Latin-sounding Cariño. None of it, though, offers anything particularly new or essential, although it is interesting to see the conflagration of scratching and house music on songs like Beats + Pieces and House Arrest, as if British people in the 80s filed hip hop and house away in the same part of their brains, to be later recycled.
At times there’s a very British strand of humour to the music, too, such as on Jerk Your Body, an innuendo ridden cover of Jack Your Body by English reggae artist Judge Dread, or the crisp-sampling Born In The North by Us, AKA A Guy Called Gerald, Edward Barton and Chapter And The Verse
By CD two things have changed, as we arrive in 1988. Songs like Bomb the Bass’s Beat Dis, S-Express’s Theme From S-Express and The KLF’s What Time Is Love? are fantastic pop songs but also show a certain British dance sound arriving, one that leans heavily on sample collage and UK electronic pop. It’s not really house music - note that the compilation promises British dance music - and it doesn’t sound like the work of Chicago, Detroit or New York, but it’s not really rave either, being just too pop.
Interestingly, Brewster said that a lot of early British dance records were heavily influenced by cut-and-paste pioneer Steinski. “Steinski had a massive impact on Coldcut and Tim Simenon [Bomb The Bass] and people like that,” he said.
“I think a lot of people [dance producers] had come from hip hop in the first place,” Brewster added. “So it’s not really surprising that you might have used the same breaks, for example, on hip hop records, or stolen an a cappella from a hip hop record, or made a hip house record. I think all of that mashed up a little bit, especially in the early years.”
There’s other innovation, too. The Pure Trance mic of What Time Is Love? points towards trance music (especially on the Pure Trance 1 version, which is included here); Humanoid’s Stakker Humanoid and Baby Ford’s Ooochy Koochy are examples of the kind of acid techno rave that could only have come out of Britain 88; and The Moody Boys’ Acid Rappin is like that but with more rapping.
The disc finishes off with songs by model-briefly-turned-popstar Samantha Fox and former Frankie Goes to Hollywood member Paul Rutherford, which showed how entirely Acid House crazy Britain had gone by summer 88. (I’ve just looked it up on Discogs and it appears that Kevin Saunderson mixed the Samantha Fox tune. What a strange world 1988 was.)
Disc two is the best of the compilation, sitting not that far from a greatest hits of British acid house, while disc one is the most important historical document. Discs three and four, however, might be the most interesting, as the cook, the thief, his wife and her lover decided to jump aboard the British dance bus, with results that were sometimes brilliant, sometimes terrible but generally eye-opening.
And so we have slamming acid techno from poet Anne Clark (Our Darkness); rolling piano house from 2 Men, A Drum Machine & A Trumpet, a Fine Young Cannibals offshoot off all things (Tired of Getting Pushed Around); Mr. Fingers-ish deep house gone breakbeat from The Blow Monkeys’ Dr. Robert as Professor Supercool (If You Love Somebody); cardigan indie shamblers gone chill-out gods in the form of The Beloved’s classic The Sun Rising; remixes of both The Cure (Lullaby) and - yea gods! - Midlands grebo outfit Pop Will Eat itself; chart-troubling hip house from Monie Love (Grandpa’s Party) and Double Trouble & Rebel MC (Street Tuff); Latin-influenced Balearic house from Richie Rich (Salsa House - a song I would never have imagined was British); and creeping proto hardcore from Urban Hype, a group who would soon climb the charts with their Cartoon rave classic A Trip To Trumpton.
It’s a vertiginous, head-spinning mixture that produced both classic music and terrible rip offs, a mixture of massive chart hits, long forgotten B sides and songs that would go on to be foundational for British music.
The British didn’t invent house, techno, acid or disco. But they did help to popularise it, by packaging it all up into a weird, all-singing, all-dancing package called rave, which they then flogged back to the rest of the world.
Rave was, at the same time, the coolest thing on the planet and also kind of corny, home to Mel and Kim, Pop Will Eat Itself and Cabaret Voltaire. And this compilation demonstrates this brilliantly, as the British music industry chucks a whole load of dance music at the wall to see what sticks.
You can also see the innovations in British dance music that were soon to come - hardcore, bleep and jungle - creeping out of the corners of the Chicago house rip offs, the innovative nerve just starting to twitch on songs like Nightmares on Wax’s Let It Roll, Orbital’s Chime, N-Joi’s Techno Gangsters and more.
Brewster explained that it was important to end the compilation with the first shadowings of hardcore, as this was when dance music in the UK started to fragment.
“The big split in dance music was around the end of the summer of 1991,” he said. “Essentially everyone was playing from the same palette of records until about ‘91 and then suddenly there were these differences emerging that were basically the start of hardcore, the start of happy hardcore and obviously drum & bass.”
1991, then, was a big turning point in British dance music, when local producers started to play a serious role in driving electronic music onwards. But that is for another compilation. What Burn It Up delivers is a fascinating portrayal of a time when British dance music was finding its feet, balanced precariously between under and overground and propelled along on a wave of sheer enthusiasm.
Burn It Up is also basically my childhood. I was too young to go to raves. But this - the chart hits that came about from Chicago house and early rave music - was the music I grew up on.
I’m not sure I could give an objective review or Burn It Up, then, any more than I could tell you which one of my children I prefer. But this compilation - perhaps more than any other this year (with all due respect to Boccaccio Life 1987-1993) - has left me gasping for breath at the sheer, audacious and often unlikely brilliance of a musical scene. And I will never look at Rick Astley in the same way again.
Some listening
Remember when jungle was the future? San does. The elusive producer, who has only three records to his name in five years, is dedicated to “jungle futurism, breakbeat terrorism and hardcore sub-bass gangsterism”, which the In Plain Sight EP delivers in magnificence, over four technical, funky rollers, which split the difference between Photek and techstep.
The title track is the stand out for me, thanks to a beat that strikes and coils like an angry viper, riveted in place by a growling tech bass and all kinds of spectral effects, which speak to the record’s release on Samhain, the Gaelic festival that marks the beginning of the “darker half” of the year. Samhain was, apparently, once marked by huge feasts when ancient burial mounds were opened, as portals to the Otherworld, and if you’re looking for a soundtrack, then San has you covered.
Nikki Nair and Foodman - Sorry I Lost My Glasses in the Public Bathhouse
Making music can sometimes be a pretty torturous affair, I imagine, as you edge into your fourth hour editing the snares and your eyes start to bleed. At other times, though, it must be an absolute blast - and Sorry I Lost My Glasses in the Public Bathhouse, the first fruits of the collaboration between Nikki Nair and Foodman, sounds like just that.
The two-track EP was born when Nair visited Foodman in Nagoya, where they hired a studio to lay down some tracks but also went out to eat Miso Nikomi Udon, have drinks and visit a local bathhouse. In the studio the two producers played live drums, which form the basis of the awesomely named Sorry I Lost My Glasses in the Public Bathhouse, the percussion wobbling around like jungle on jelly, over which they ooze a melted melody, equidistant between creepy and playful. Is it dance music? I guess, in the widest sense of the word, but the glorious truth is that Sorry…. basically exists in its own sweet firmament.
Progressive house on Balmat? Looks like it, in the shape of Floatation [sic], the stand out song from µ-Ziq’s second album for the renowned Spanish label, 1979.
But don’t worry. As I argued a few years ago, progressive house in its early 90s form - see: Spooky, Leftfield, The Drum Club etc - was a serious musical delight, far from the clichés of fluffy bras and expensive shirts it would later descend to, mixing far-out melody with dubbed-out bass lines and thoughtful house beats to produce dance music that was deep, expansive and always very clean. This is the music that Floatation - almost certainly unconsciously, looks back to, packed with hooks, emotion and the vague air of mystery.
Ah, the old collision between an unstoppable force and an immovable object, represented, respectively, by Lankum, a band who can do no wrong, and Ghost Town, The Specials’ eternal single and one of those songs that I really can’t see any point in covering, given how perfectly the band nailed it the first time round.
Truth be told, there’s no real winners or losers here. Lankum’s cover is intriguing and drone-y, especially in its spectral opening minutes when Radie Peat’s immaculately dead-eyed voice is to the fore, true in spirit to The Specials’ original without treading on its dread ska shoes. But I can’t really see myself ever choosing Lankum’s cover over the original and the song’s second half, when a chugging electro beat starts up is vaguely annoying.
Synth nerds unite! On McLeyvier, Canadian musician and musicologist Rich Aucoin has become the first person EVER to record and release a track using the McLeyvier synth of the title, of which only around eight were ever completed.
The McLeyvier - and I am very much quoting from Electronic Music Fandom here - is a kind of precursor to the much more famous Fairlight synth, “A computer-controlled polyphonic analog synthesizer originally designed by film-score musician David McLey, circa 1975.” Aucoin got to use one during his visits to the National Music Centre in Calgary and Vintage Synthesizer Museum in Los Angeles, with the results of his research emerging on his new - and utterly epic - Synthetic quadruple album, the fourth and final Season of which was released last week. Season Four also includes Aucoin’s excursions on the Buchla 200a Electric Music Box, the E-mu Modular System and the Ondes Martenot.
I’m not so much a synth nerd. (A nerd, yes, but not so much for synths.) But this is a great story. And the track itself is a joy, a kind of Air-style lunar ramble that, rather unexpectedly, breaks into drum & bass one minute in because… well why not? It turns out Air / drum & bass was the crossover I didn’t know I needed.
Things I’ve done
Line Noise podcast - Naya Beat Records with Turbotito and Ragz
I spoke to Turbotito and Ragz from Naya Beat Records about Punjabi Disco, cult classics, South Asian dance and electronic music and digging in India. It’s a fascinating story, so give it a go.
The new Disco Pogo is out! Do go buy it! I wrote three things for it: an interview with Daniel Vangarde about disco days, Daft Punk and rollerskating!; a list of THE BEST remixes, from the golden days; and an interview with the ever fabulous Nicolette!
Daft Punk: We Were The Robots. Un homenaje de Disco Pogo
Mis amigos hispanohablantes: el libro Disco Pogo sobre Daft Punk se publicará en español el 19 de noviembre. Escribí cinco capítulos y la buena gente de Contra ha transformado mis divagaciones en el lenguaje de Cervantes.
The Playlists
Available via Apple Music: The newest and the bestest and The newest and bestest 2025.
And Spotify (for the moment): The newest and bestest 2025 and The newest and the bestest.
Paid subscribers get bonus podcasts, you know.
1987: Steve 'Silk' Hurley, Coldcut's Eric B. & Rakim remix, M/A/R/R/S, Bomb The Bass. What a year.
Enjoyed this read... especially the last part; feels almost breathless in enthusiasm. Might get the comp for the last disc.
My Sam Fox realisation (that I read cant 'member where!) is that she was once part of DJ Harvey's crew / collective / band (?). Don't know why that surprised me, but it did.