It’s-It: The Sugarcubes’ sweetest treat or how Björk re-invented herself in dance
Plus Xylitol, Koreless, The African House Party Project and more
Björk is many and Björk is multitude and I love all of those different Björks. But if there is one Björk I love more than all the others it is house music Björk: Violently Happy Björk; Big Time Sensuality Björk; Björk as remixed by Alan Braxe and Masters at Work Björk.
And to this we must add Sugarcubes Björk, as remixed by Tony Humphries and Todd Terry back in the early 90s. You know the Sugarcubes, I imagine: Björk’s pre-Björk band but also, more importantly, an Icelandic art-pop-punk explosion of a group, who formed in 1986 and blew up with the iconic, eternal Birthday in 1987, released three astounding studio albums before splitting up in December 1992 and being eclipsed by their former singer.
What you perhaps don’t know - and really should - is that in 1991 The Sugarcubes released a promo 12 inch, featuring two remixes apiece of Leash Called Love and Hit, from their forthcoming third studio album Stick Around For Joy, by New York / New Jersey garage don Tony Humphries that would top Billboard’s dance chart in late 1992 becoming New York house anthems in the process.
Inspired, perhaps, by this success,The Sugarcubes would in October 1992 release It’s-It, a remix album, which features the four Tony Humphries remixes, alongside reworks from the likes of Todd Terry, Graham Massey, Justin Robertson, Tommy D, Marius de Vries, as well as the Sugarcubes themselves.
Sigtryggur Baldursson, who played drums for The Sugarcubes and is now in the excellent duo Paddan, says that the dance music link in the Sugarcubes “was pretty much Björk all the way”. “I was more into the world music and jazz scene, as you may decipher from a lot of my work on these Sugarcubes recordings. I did delve a bit into the dance stuff and certainly [the band’s 1991 hit] Hit is also inspired from the scene,” he explains.
(Baldursson is, he stresses, talking from his own perspective, rather than giving any kind of band opinion. Although the idea of a fixed band point of view from a group of people as eccentrically varied as the Sugarcubes seems nigh on impossible anyway.)
It’s-It is an album of wild quality swings. Justin Robertson’s two dub house remixes are very much of their time, while the Sugarcube’s own remixes of the heavenly Regina only really serve to up their Einar quota, which isn’t going to please everyone.
(Einar Örn Benediktsson was the Sugarcubes’ other vocalist, his surreal spoken-word interjections dividing fans who came to the group for Björk’s voice. Personally, I think he added a viscerally surreal air to The Sugarcubes’ music that I would have missed otherwise. But I don’t necessarily want much more of him.)
But when It’s-It is good - essentially those four Tony Humphries remixes and the two Todd Terry takes - It’s-It is fabulous, offering six songs that would fit snugly alongside Big Time Sensuality etc. on your Björk club hits to get out and get moving playlists.
The main Humphries mixes of each song - the “Tony Humphries” mix of Leash Called Love and the “Tony Humphries Sweet & Low Mix” of Hit, which both appear on disc one of It’s-It - do what the best New York house and garage remixes have been doing since the dawn of time: they keep the song intact, using great swathes of the original vocal, but re-build the production around it, replacing guitars and drums with silky keyboard lines, swinging drum machines, low, wandering bass and - in the case of Leash Call Love - a honking midi sax loop that couldn’t be more 90s if it tried.
In doing so, Humphries irons out the Sugarcubes wrinkles from each song - the distorted guitars and lurch beat on Leash Called Love, the dramatic record scratches on Hit - only to add in his own: a soaring organ solo in Leash… and what sounds like a vibraphone vamp in Hit.
Typically New York, the production on each mix is simultaneously soft, with individual sounds borrowed from the funk and disco spectrum replacing the Sugarcubes’ original sharp punkiness, and hard as hell, in their fine-tuned dance-floor oomph. It’s soft music you can go hard to; sweet sounds for 4am resistance.
The genius, though, is that Humphries manages to pull of this radical act of re-contextualisation without abandoning the band’s own personality. You can believe that Leash Called Love and Hit were made in a studio in downtown New York to be unleashed on the New Jersey dance floors, rather than rustled up by Icelandic punk weirdos for their own devices. And so naturally does Björk’s voice suit the garage swing, that if she hadn’t gone on to make house bangers like Violently Happy, you’d be scandalised she’d never taken such a course.
The secondary mixes - the “Mo Nu Dub” of Leash called Love and “Papa Bear” mix of hit - serve as codas to the main remixes, with Humphries in each case pushing elements he has created into extremes, taking the songs one step further removed from the original without severing the link entirely. Björk, for example, barely appears on the “Mo Nu Dub”, with Einar’s stuttering vocal pushed to the fore in a way that might seems slightly erratic but makes a lot of sense when you’ve heard the original remix.
The Todd Terry mixes are different - more adventurous, perhaps, if less precision dance-floor destroying - in that they use the vocals and other musical elements from the original songs. Terry’s take on Gold brilliantly employs Þór Eldon’s snaking guitar riff, while his remix of Dream TV uses both Eldon’s guitar and a hefty lift from Baldursson’s samba-ish drum lines, which he underlines with a solid four four kick drum to create a kind of Icelandic tribal house.
It’s-It is periodically brilliant. But is is a also historically important record, offering a snapshot as Björk as dance artist a year before she released Debut and became a solo star. Debut is often painted as some kind of bolt from the blue from Björk; but it wasn’t really. Not if you’d been paying attention. The singer, for example, had guested on 808 State’s 1991 album ex:el, the first fruits of a long-standing creative relationship with the band’s Graham Massey, who would later produce Army of Me and The Modern Things. And It’s-It is another vital part of this puzzle.
Then there’s the story it offers of The Sugarcubes themselves, a band who embraced dance culture back in the 1980s, its influence bubbling through on their second and third albums.
“Björk started digging the dance scene in England in the autumn of 1987, when we started getting attention in the English press and started hanging in London,” says Baldursson. “That then expanded to the rap and hip hop scene in the States around 1988 if my memory serves me right.”
The Sugarcubes’ first official remix - if we can call it that - actually arrived in 1988, when the Jesus and Mary Chain put their filthy guitar feedback to Birthday, creating the Christmas Mixes, one of which can be heard on the second disc of It’s-It. But dance music didn’t really feature as an influence on the band’s excellent debut album Life’s Too Good, which came out in April 1988.
Baldursson says that Björk’s interest in dance music starting to filter through to the band sometime around 1988 to 1989 “and as we always wrote together as a group, we moulded the songs and they were influenced by whatever we thought worked”.
The drummer says that the influence of dance music would start to be heard on the group’s second album, Here Today, Tomorrow Next Week!, which was released in September 1989 “but there were a lot of influences playing around: world music, industrial, pop, punk and of course the dance scene”. For me, you can hear this influence in the rolling drums of Dream TV or the obtuse funk / disco of Speed Is the Key, which bears traces of of Talking Heads, a band Baldursson says were “most certainly” an influence.
Stick Around For Joy, the band’s third and final studio album, took the idea of dance music even further into the Sugarcubes’ sound. Hit, which became a fairly sizeable hit in the UK, is an indie disco number festooned with oversized record scratches, while Baldursson’s propulsive drumming is a highlight throughout. (He says that the beat on Walkabout, which I suggest is Talking Heads’ influenced, is actually a “backwards samba beat of sorts”, which is a wonderful idea indeed.)
As a band who had pioneered dance music-influenced indie rock, the early 90s should have been a fruitful time for The Sugarcubes, as bands like The Happy Mondays (with whom The Sugarcubes share a certain musical DNA), The Stone Roses and EMF took the indie dance sound worldwide.
And yet it was not to be: by the time that It’s-It was released, in October 1992, the band were no more; and in June 1993 Björk released Human Behaviour, unleashing what would eventually become a monumental solo career on the world. (The French Touch version of Human Behaviour, which was remixed by Dimitri from Paris, is very much of a kind with Tony Humphries’s Sugarcubes remixes.)
Baldursson himself would go on to play with the likes of Ben Frost and Emilíana Torrini, before forming Paddan with guitarist Birgir Mogensen, who, in the early 1980s had played with Icelandic punk band Kukl, alongside Björk, Einar and Baldursson. (The Sugarcubes would play one reunion date in 2006.)
Despite remixing Björk’s Isobel in 1995, Baldursson says he is no great fan of remix culture. “I usually prefer the originals,” he says. “But [I] was always open to hearing different versions of songs.”
“My take on remixes was usually that the first thing people did was to use the vocal and do their own backing track, which I thought tended to be a bit one dimensional, that is conceptually,” he adds. “So I usually was not the biggest fan of that. I did listen to them and liked some but this whole idea of completely reconstructing something that is written within a stylistic element and with certain energy surrounding it can be very hit and miss.”
He’s right, of course. But for all that It’s-It occasionally misses, when The Sugarcubes’ remix album hits it shows how wonderfully transformative a remix can be, lifting a song into heavenly new pastures where different audiences dwell.
It’s-It is a fascinating history lesson, then, for what it tells us of Björk and The Sugarcubes. But, more importantly, it’s an absolute riot of dance energy, when done well, a Transatlantic alliance of dance-floor soul.
Some listening
Metal - Point Vacancies (Hodge remix)
Back in 2016 I fell hard for Gnork’s Chord Tool, a simple piece of IDM-influenced techno that is raised to the heavens by one of those sickeningly perfect, once-in-a-lifetime chord sequences. Hodge’s remix of Point Vacancies by Metal, a collaboration between Cage & Aviary’s Jamie Paton and Teeth of the Sea’s Mike Bourne, gives me similarly sun-coming-up-after-a-long-hard-party vibes, its chord sequence elevating the song’s rattling electro beat and electronic squiggles to divine levels.
By a miracle of good timing, the week I speak to The Sugarcubes’ Sigtryggur Baldursson, Paddan, his duo with Birgir Mogensen, released a fabulous EP of twisted electro-jazz. Splash, my favourite track on the record, was influenced by “electric funk jazz of the early 70s” and you can hear this in a rattling, rolling, twisting backing track that is reminiscent of Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew, to which Eirikur Orri adds a haunting, icy trumpet line.
Prog jungle? Yes please! New Planet Mu signing Xylitol absolutely lands the sweet spot between dance music and vintage electronics on her new album Anemones, which is released in July; and nowhere finer does it land than on first single Moebius, which is like Rick Wakeman being taken down Rage. (Hell, Eat Static played there, so stranger things have happened.) Moebius has twinkling, almost architectural, synth lines, the kind of electronics you would hang from your lampshade, combined with a furious Amen break and I could listen to it for hours.
A kind of tarnished childhood memory appears to be at the heart of Koreless’ Seven. The producer joins an immaculately compact UK Garage beat to a melody that sounds like it was played on a finger piano or perhaps kid’s glockenspiel and the kind of detuned and unstable synth pattern that suggest a severely upset stomach, a guilty mind or perhaps both. Seven is horribly alluring, like a Dr. Who episode you shouldn’t have watched before going to bed, aged nine.
Of all the various Two Shells, weird breakbeat Two Shell is my favourite, which makes gimmi it the song for me, strutting around with a rattling broken beat that is extremely danceable, without ever being obvious. Which is what Two Shell, at their best, excel at, when all the weird theatrics are stripped away.
The African House Party Project - P-coq
I have little idea who The African House Party Project are and information about them online seems pretty scant. As far as I can see, they are a South African collective and released their only album in 1991, which makes African House Party an early example of the house music long player. The temptation is to applaud African House Party simply for existing; but P-coq (which I discovered this week via Kampire’s new compilation A Dancefloor in Ndola) is so much more than merely interesting. It is, in fact, a tear-jerking and exceptionally nifty work of early house that should have topped charts worldwide and - who knows? - may still do so one day. I am far from an expert on South African music but P-coq sounds, to my uninformed ears, like a beautiful meeting point between local music and house’s voracious demand for new sounds.
Bodysync - aka Ryan Hemsworth and Giraffage - describe their music as “dance music with the ethos of 2000s pop punk”, which only goes to show that the duo are far too North American for their own good and really should watch the Eurovision Song Contest. Because Rock It, the first single from the band’s new album Nutty, could have been soundtracking the (eg) Finnish entry for Eurovsion 2024, so outright bizarre, joyous, sugar-sweet and silly is it. The duo claim as influences Todd Terry, Paul Johnson and Daft Punk - which you can hear in the expertly skipping beats and finely-tuned rave signal - but also Venga Boys and Mad Magazine, which gives you some idea of the unlikely sonic combinations going on. (The rest of the album is a lot more far out than Rock It, incidentally.) Frankly, Bodysync’s music is right on the limit of things I can listen to without wanting to blow chunks. And that has to be a good thing.
PS This is not to ignore the controversy over Eurovision. You can read about it here.
Things I’ve done
My guest on Line Noise this week was the abundantly prolific, genre-agnostic, garage, dubstep and broken beat pioneer Zed Bias, who is this year celebrating 25 years of being Zed Bias. I caught up with him to talk about the Milton Keynes Sanctuary, low points, musical genres and Rick Rubin.
Line Noise presents Nitsa 30 - Episode 4 with Ian Pooley
More Line Noise? Why not? As mentioned before, my show is part of the festivities around the 30th anniversary of Barcelona club Nitsa; and as part of that we spoke to German house pioneer Ian Pooley, who was resident at Nitsa in the early days, not to mention the first ever DJ I saw at Nitsa many many MANY years ago. He shared his memories of the club and of the best Barcelona food, and talked about his career, from releasing his first record at 17 to touring with Daft Punk
Girl Radio - Discuteixo sobre GIRLS amb un home de 40 anys
Do you want to watch me discuss Girls, in Catalan? Well now you can. I mean, it’s a bit niche but the possibility is there. And, yes, that’s me, the man of 40 years in the title. I WISH I was 40.
The Quietus
Seeing that The Quietus has had a rather beautiful refresh, I thought I’d link to some of the articles I have written for them over the years. Here’s one on So Solid Crew’s They Don’t Know; Happy Mondays’ Yes Please revisited; and Who Killed Shoegaze? All, hopefully, worthy of your time. All looking rather nice on the new website.
The playlists
“Without music, life would be a mistake.” So said Nietzsche, anyway. And without my two playlists - The newest and the bestest and The Newest and the Bestest 2024 - even more of one. So do, please, follow, for the best in new music.