Weird 90s - Summers Magic / Kyiv’s resistance

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As I mentioned in a recent Substack on LFO, I started writing a book a couple of years ago looking at the rave hits of my childhood, what happened to the people who made them and how listening to these weird electronic smashes influenced a generation of British kids.

The book didn’t materialise in the end. There was some interest from publishers but it came to nothing and the idea got shelved. I’m working on another book now but I thought I would publish some of the rave book - provisionally titled Weird 90s - here.

The previous chapter I published was about LFO, a classic British dance duo. And that, perhaps, made it the perfect introductory chapter, given LFO’s status and credibility.

This chapter, however, is more representative of the whole book, as it looks into Mark Summers’ Summers Magic, a UK hit in 1991 that is often considered to have kicked off the whole cartoon rave phenomenon. It’s a great song. But it’s not LFO’s LFO. And it’s not the kind of song that people often write about. Which, for me, makes it precisely the sort of song I should be writing about.

As you will see, Mark Summers, who made Summers Magic, has had a fascinating life and was living in Kyiv in February 2022, leaving just before the Russians launched their brutal invasion. We go into this here, as well as his life in music, how he got to Summers Magic, pop stardom The Prodigy and how that song helped to set up the rest of his musical career.

This was the chapter I sent to the publisher, who subsequently went off the book. Maybe it was the wrong chapter to send.

But I would ask you, seriously, to give this chapter a go. I think you will enjoy it, whatever your views on Summers Magic and rave as a whole. It’s about music, war, resistance and a whole lot more. I thank Mark for telling me my story.

Mark Summers - Summers Magic (January 1991)

Released: January 1991

UK chart peak: 27

Top of the Pops performance: N/A

It’s hard to think of a more jarring contrast than the horrors of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the sunshine euphoria of the early 90s rave scene. But life is rarely a case of rounded corners and snugly fitting jigsaw puzzles; and so, one day in early 2023, I found myself speaking to Mark Summers, author of proto-cartoon rave classic Summers Magic, about what it was like to live in Kyiv in November 2022, nine months after Putin launched his barbaric invasion, in a world of power cuts and killer drone attacks.

It was a jarring experience, to say the least. And yet, in a way, it gave me hope. Summers had been living in Kyiv in February 2022, leaving on one of the last flights out of the city days before the Russians invaded. And he returned to the Ukrainian capital in summer 2022, showing the kind of bravery and determination I can but dream of, only leaving Kyiv when the power cuts made his work all but impossible. When we spoke, he was living in Romania, keeping as close as he could to his Ukrainian fiancee, who was trapped in the Russian-held Donetsk region.

Despite all of this, Summers was excellent company over Zoom. He seemed happy even, optimistic that the people of Ukraine would prevail in Putin’s barbaric war and he would be able to return to his adopted home. Soon, the nerves that I felt about talking to a person in such an extremely serious position about something as inconsequential as a rave song dissipated.

I decide to ask him how he felt about this kind of emotional dissonance. Did he, when faced with the day-to-day reality of the Russian invasion, ever wonder what on earth a former rave star was doing, dodging killer drones in Eastern Europe? 

He smiles. “Yeah, that thought has been in my mind many times in the last 11 months, probably even prior to that even even when I first moved to Ukraine, to Kyiv,” he says. “I was thinking: what what am I doing? Why am I doing this? But I'm a bit of a nomad or I like a change of scenery. The idea of being based somewhere new every once in a while, I think that stems from the fact that I've always kind of moved around since leaving school. I've always had this idea of going from one place to the next and not really staying rooted to any particular place.”

The same desire to move on has applied to Summers’ music career. Summers Magic was a big hit in 1991, reaching 27 in the UK charts. But there was to be no follow up: Summers departed his label 4th & Broadway soon after and Summers Magic was the last single he released under his own name. 

You won’t even find Summers Magic on streaming services, although anyone who was over 10 years old in January 1991, when it was released, will undoubtedly remember its combination of cheerful - if slightly haunting - fairground organ riff, taken from the classic children’s TV show The Magic Roundabout, chirpy breaks, acidic splatters and Lonnie Liston Smith bass line. It is both utterly psychedelic and utterly peaceful, the sound of hot summers, ice cream and staying out all night with not a care in the world.

The Magic Roundabout sample, of course, is key to the song. In the UK the programme (which, bizarrely, used the footage of the French show Le Manège Enchanté with completely different scripts) ran from 1965 to 1977 attracting audiences of eight million at its peak. But repeats continued way into the 1980s and, like so many of my generation, I remember seeing it regularly on television as a child.

So The Magic Roundabout had considerable nostalgic pull. But it also had a vaguely anarchic and definitely psychedelic edge that appealed to the ravers in all of us. The action took place in a wood of brightly coloured trees and stylised flowers, while one of the lead characters was a suspiciously dopey looking rabbit in flares called Dylan - after Bob - who played guitar and was rarely more than a quarter awake. Alain Legrand’s theme tune for the show (used both in France and the UK) had some of this too, comprising a bouncy and suspiciously fuzzy organ riff that brought to mind both the roundabout of the show’s title and - for me at least - the swirling psychedelia of The Beatles’ Being For The Benefit Of Mr. Kite!, (actually released four years after Le Manège Enchanté made its debut on French TV).

So Summers found perhaps the perfect sample for his song, one that seems perfectly obvious in retrospect. But he also had the production skill to make it into something special, his patchwork use of samples  - Whosampled claims there are 13 - reminiscent of the sampladelic approach of De La Soul, whose 1989 album 3 Feet High and Rising was a big hit with UK ravers. (In a neat coincidence, when I spoke to Summers he had recently recently replayed the backing track of De La Soul’s classic Me Myself And I, in advance of the group’s catalogue being released to streaming for the first time.) The Magic Roundabout sample demanded to be used with respect; and Summers did that, creating an elegant cushion in which the sample could comfortably sit.

Sampling would, as we will later see, be hugely important in Summers’ musical career. So it makes sense that it was the sampler that first altered his to the joys of music production. 

“When I started making music the sampler to me was was my bread and butter,” he explains. “I can make tunes from any particular sound or anyone's track and twist up the sample: make it slower, faster, change the pitch and do all those things. To me that was was the real magic involved. And that's what inspired me to make my own tracks. Because I could take any sound I wanted and I could create something out of it.”

By this point Summers had already been DJing for years, playing disco, soul, funk, electro and eventually house music in London clubs. His first solo release, 1989’s Melt Your Body, a sample-heavy late rave tune with a hint of the elegant clank of Sheffield Bleep to it, reflected this background, sampling the soulful vocal from Ralphi Rosario’s You Used To Love Me. 

It sold well and he landed a deal with 4th & Broadway, a US-based dance label established by Island Records that was home to the likes of Dream Warriors and Mica Paris, a strange home for an electronic music producer from Colchester but a sign, perhaps, of the way rave had shaken up the certainties of the British music scene. 

Summers’ first single for 4th & Boadway, Party Children, saw his sampladelic approach really move into focus, as samples from songs as diverse as Suzanne Vega’s Tom’s Diner and Snap!’s The Power created a thrilling patchwork effect that zipped by with the cheeky energy of youth. It charted at 85 and the stage was set for Summers Magic. “I just thought, ‘Okay, I'm gonna try and better that if I can.’ But if not: what the hell, I was going to make a crazy track.”

Summers Magic is often credited as the first dance track to sample a children’s TV theme tune. And it may be. Although Summers remembers it differently, claiming he was inspired by other songs of the era. 

“I was still DJing, playing out at raves and even some clubs that had rave nights. So I was I was picking up white labels and hearing things from people, just getting the general sort of vibe of what's going on,” he says. “This DJ friend of mine, by the name of Ben Howard, I went round to his place one day and I'm pretty sure he had a white label with Rainbow or some children's TV theme tune, it might have even been Grange Hill [both Rainbow and Grange Hill were British children's TV shows in the 1980s]. And I remember saying to him, suddenly thinking of different theme tunes, and I said, ‘You know, what would be really crazy would be something like the Magic Roundabout.’ The light bulb went on, suddenly, in my head.”

Far from the simple (and, in fact, rather annoyingly garish) sounds of the Rainbow theme tune, Summers says that the Magic Roundabout theme has a certain “haunting” quality to it that appealed to him. 

“I think [that comes] primarily because of the the age of that particular piece of music,” he says. “It's not pop music. It's not something that you can easily put together today. It comes from this other sort of era. And I think also because of the type of instruments that they used: the hurdy-gurdy, Wurlitzer thing, whatever it was, that they used back in the early 60s, when they first put it together.”

And this, ultimately, came across to the ravers. “There is a melancholy feel [to Summers Magic],” Summers told me, when we first spoke for a Guardian article in 2017. “It would have been something for people of my age, who could relate to growing up with that memory, probably being haunted by that theme tune. It had a sort of mystique and that stayed with people. The illegal substances people were taking at raves at the time made them feel happy and light. I suppose when they heard something like Summers Magic, that sense of euphoria comes flooding back, [reminding] them of that bygone age when they were innocent.”

First of all, though, Summers had to make the track. His first point of call was Colchester library to find a record with the Magic Roundabout theme - he remembers hiring a BBC double album for about £1, which also yielded the 1944 BBC Home Service recording, It’s That Man Again: Army Edition, which gave Summers Magic its wordy intro. 

“The way the guy was talking so fast and using big, elongated words that nobody ever uses in normal day-to-day vocabulary, using things like ‘immense tangibility’, throwing these words into the intro, I just thought, ‘No one's ever used anything like that as an intro before. So how crazy would that be for me to use something like that as the intro?’” Summers says. “I didn't have a single thought that clearances or anything. I just thought, ‘I’m going to make this crazy track and see what reaction I get to it.’”

Summers continues, “I found a really good breakbeat [from the Clivilles & Cole Dub Mix of Seduction’s Heartbeat] I wanted to use with it, which had this like really deep 808 bass drum on it. And that fitted in really well; then I added in the Lonnie Liston Smith Expansions bass line. It became a melting pot of crazy ideas. And, trust me, I wasn't on any illegal substances when I made that track. I was just, you know, in my living room, in the space of a couple of days s putting it all together.”

Whether you like Summers Magic or not (and I love it), it is undeniably a very well produced track with enormous hit potential. 4th & Broadway flipped when he took the finished track to them. “I had a meeting all set up with the A&R people at 4th & Broadway. And they played it really loud. And they were flipping out, ‘Wow, this is insane. This is so crazy. We've got to put this out.’ Almost immediately. There was no time for any, ‘Oh, let's have a think about it.’ No um-ing and ah-ing as A&R people are renowned to do. It was on the spot. We got to release this.”

Ravers, too, had a similar reaction. “The track I was playing out in the clubs and in the raves was more like my demo mix,” Summers says. (He was, in fact, unhappy with the radio mix that came out on the single’s A side.) “But yeah, people were still going nuts for it. You could tell there was a really big surge, suddenly, in the crowd when they were all freaking out. hearing it. People were jumping up in the air.”

In their haste to get Summers Magic out, 4th & Broadway released the song in the decidedly un-summery month of January 1991. In its first week of release, it breached the UK’s magic Top 40 at 36, climbing for the next two weeks until it reached its peak of 27. Summers never got to appear on Top of the Pops, beyond a photo flashing past in the chart rundown, but he says the track was played on Saturday morning Children’s TV shows and MTV. 

Appearing on Top of the Pops was always a dream of mine. But Summers says he wasn’t that bothered about missing out. “I'd already done a tour of the UK with people like the Dream Warriors, [US singer songwriter] Will Downing and Mica Paris because they were signed to Island Records as well: 4th & Broadway,” he says. 

“It was mainly soul, R&B artists that were doing this tour around the UK. And then they had me. I was jumping all over the stage, with my small keyboard and just pretending, miming to the voices and things on the tracks. I thought I was going to have to do that if I went on Top of the Pops. It's gonna be the same kind of thing: just jumping around like an idiot. So I didn't really care that missing out on that.”

He did, however, still manage to get some pop star moments, when Radio One started to play Summers Magic regularly. “It was at that point I started to feel like a bit of a pop star,” Summers says. “And there was a club, near Colchester: I was a resident and I left there about six months before Summers Magic came out. Then they wanted me, begging me to go back and be their resident again because I'd become this pop star.  My name was big and in lights on the front of the club. So yeah, when I saw that I was like, ‘Okay, yeah, I guess a bit of a celebrity now.’ So I did feel it.”

I was 13 in January 1991, when Summers Magic hit, too young for clubs, raves and the pop star lights of Colchester. But I remember the song being everywhere, from Radio One to children’s TV. It was easy to love: light-hearted, multi-coloured and just the slightest bit silly. I was strangely nostalgic, even as a teenager, and Summers Magic took me right back to my youth in Scotland, watching The Magic Roundabout on the second sofa as my school day slowly dissolved into dusk.

Did Summers ever think of a teenage audience listening to his song? The Magic Roundabout was, after all, a kids TV programme, albeit a rather provocative one. 

He thinks for a while. “You know, I probably did,” he reflects. 1991, I am reminded, is a long way away. “Maybe subconsciously,” he adds. “I didn't consciously think, ‘I've got to make this for a particular market.’ I think mostly I was making the track for myself. You hear that a lot from other producers, they will say they don't always make music for the general public. They're not trying to please anyone but themselves.”

When the song dropped out of the charts, after its six-week stay, the descent from pop stardom was rapid. Summers recorded a follow up single for 4th & Broadway but he says it wasn’t what they wanted, with the label trying to usher him into a more soul / R&B-type sound that would have fit in with its existing roster. Five months after Summers Magic exited the charts, 4th & Broadway dropped Summers and he was left wondering where to go now.

“I was still DJing but even that was starting to tail off a bit,” he explains. “For whatever reason, I decided to get myself a day job. Maybe I was getting worried: I wasn't really making that much money. And so I decided to work for a company that builds new houses and became like a salesman for them, working on those developments where they build new properties. And so I was doing that all around Essex, Suffolk, Norfolk and Cambridgeshire as well.”

For many people, the rapid change from pop star to East Anglian salesman would have been hard to take. But Summers sounds very sanguine about it as he tells the tale, giving the impression that this was simply one of those things that had to be done. 

“I was not really enthused at all about that idea at first but my girlfriend at the time pushed me into doing it, simply as we didn’t have much of an income after I was dropped from [4th & Broadway parent company] Island Records,” he says. “So it became necessary, just to make some money. I soon began to enjoy the work after a few weeks. It always amused me that none of the customers had any idea I was the guy with that crazy Magic Roundabout track in the charts, just a year earlier.”

All the same, it can’t have been particularly easy to be flogging houses on new estates when the charts were starting to fill up with songs that copied Summers Magic’s formula of children’s TV sample plus rave beats. The Prodigy’s Charly came first, in August 1991, a tune that many people assumed was by Summers; then Shaft’s Roobard & Custard that December. By the time of the release of Smarts Es’ Sesame's Treet and Urban Hype’s A Trip To Trumpton, both in July 1992, we even had a word for it: cartoon rave or Toytown techno and the serious music press were proclaiming that The Prodigy had killed rave.

The first time I spoke to Summers, he was happy to acknowledge Summers Magic as the forerunner of this particular trend, even if he wasn’t always enamoured by the records that came after. “I thought: ‘Oh fuck, what have I unleashed?’” he told me during that interview. “Most of the time I found it quite amusing. I thought some of the choices were a bit obvious, even things like Blue Peter [on Doctor G’s 1992 tune G’s Blues], people were trying to use and it didn’t always work. 

“But there were a number of them that I thought were quite clever and did work. Trip to Trumpton I thought was quite a good idea and wasn’t too novelty based. It wasn’t overly commercial. The production behind it was obviously well skilled.” But, he adds, there were also producers that “come from nowhere and think, ‘If he can do that, the I can do this.’ Copy cats who put little thought in to it.” 

In 2023, when we spoke for a second time, he seems to have slightly shifted his thoughts, mentioning that he was inspired to make Summers Magic after hearing other rave records that sampled children’s TV theme tunes. This isn’t impossible: Summers Magic first charted in January 1991, although Discogs has it being released in 1990, which would date it as coming out before (or, at a push, at the same time as) most of the obvious rave / children’s TV bangers, such as Skin Up’s Blockbuster (1991), X Project’s Walking In The Air (1992) and Sons of Bungle’s Rainbow Vibes (1993). 

But there were some earlier examples of the art: in 1988 The KLF (operating as The Timelords) released Doctorin' the Tardis, which sampled the Dr Who theme tune; and in 1990 F.A.B (featuring M.C. Parker nonetheless) gifted the world a house version of the Thunderbirds theme tune, Thunderbirds Are Go. That same year Manchester rave act K Klass released Wildlife, which featured a replayed sample of John Barry’s Florida Fantasy, which was used as the theme tune to the 1970s-1980s BBC children's programme Wildtrack (as well as on the Midnight Cowboy soundtrack). So there were some kind of precedents.

Summers is also a little down on the quality of some of the rave tunes that followed in Summers Magic’s wake.  “At the time there were actually a lot that were not so well produced,” he says. “I mean, they might have had good arrangements, or some of them might have been executed really well. But I think, for the most part, you’ve got to think back to the type of people and the equipment that were being used to put those tracks together. And also, what kind of mindset they might have been in, as well.”

He adds, “I have known people who were producing music at that time, who would say, ‘Yeah, I didn't really care about what it sounded like mix wise.’ Or other others would say, ‘Oh, no, I spent ages cueing the snares and the kick drum.’ And so I think there's quite a variety of different things.”

During his time as a salesman, Summers continued making music and, after a year selling houses, was asked to come and work for record label / publisher Chrysalis, who wanted a sound engineer for their new label Tuch Wood Records, a job that found Summers happily manning the boards of a tiny, 16-track studios that was largely used by artists who wanted to demo new songs.

In 1996 Summers launched his own label, Scorccio, and almost immediately found himself back in the charts under the pseudonym Souvlaki. Inferno, both Souvlaki and Scorccio’s debut single, was a disco house monster that made use of Dan Hartman’s Relight My Fire, eventually climbing to 24 in the UK charts in 1997 when re-released by PolyGram offshoot label Wonderboy. Summers’ two big chart hits aren’t particularly alike, although when you know Inferno to be the work of Mark Summers, you can perhaps understand the link back to Summers Magic, in the later song’s cheery demeanour, rave-y piano lead and judicious use of a (replayed) sample.

More releases would follow from both Scorccio and Souvlaki. But Inferno would prove vitally important to Summers in another way, sending him down a path that - in one way - led to him being in Ukraine in February 2022. 

The Scorccio release of Inferno might have used a straight sample of Dan Hartman’s Relight My Fire. But this wasn’t going to fly on a major-label release. PolyGram apparently told Summers he could either pay a large fee to sample Hartman’s Relight My Fire or re-play it himself. Summers took the latter option, studiously recreating the sound of Hartman’s original song, right down to a four-piece string section, a canny move that would soon open up new avenues.

1997 was a good time to get into the sample replay business. Sampling had, by this time, existed for some three decades. John Kongos’ 1971 song He's Gonna Step on You Again is often said to be the first song to contain a sample. But Revolution 9 by The Beatles, from 1968, is based upon tape loops, which are samples in all but name. And there are plenty of examples of this kind of work, dating back to Pierre Schaeffer and his musique concrète in the 1940s. 

Samplers themselves had also come down greatly in price by 1997, making them a fairly standard bit of home studio equipment for many musicians. Early sample-based records tended to have a very laissez faire attitude to the legal issues around sampling, with many first-wave dance producers - and especially rave artists, who leaned heavily on samples - figuring (correctly) that they weren’t making enough money from their music for anyone to both suing them.

By 1997, though, law suits over unauthorised samples had become a very steady sources of income to the legal profession, with the first case coming in 1989, when The Turtles sued De La Soul over a sample used in the hip hop band’s Transmitting Live From Mars. 

At the same time, dance music had become a very big business, especially in the house-mad UK. By the late 90s, dance music was arguably the biggest musical genre in Britain, regularly topping the singles charts and selling millions of singles and albums: Ministry Of Sound’s Annual 2 album, which featured Inferno, apparently sold 1.5 millions copies in 1996. This, clearly, is the kind of success that might send lawyers sniffing around for any uncleared samples that could make their clients a quick buck. Far better, then, to employ the likes of Mark Summers to replay your sample for you and avoid legal headaches. 

It would be a few years before Summers’ replay work started to take priority over his own productions. Scorccio records were very popular popular in Japan, which gave Summers a financial cushion, until Napster arrived in 1999 and started to nibble away at sales. “I was getting pretty worried because, again, something was affecting my my income,” Summers explains.

He started thinking about alternative sources of income within music - jingles, soundtracking - until a friend suggested that he might try to turn the sample replay expertise he had used on his own records into a business. It turned out this fit Summers down to the ground: over the years he has replayed samples for many vast dance music hits, including Shapeshifters’ 2004 UK number one Lola’s Theme, Pitbull’s first international hit I Know You Want Me (Calle Ocho) and Duck Sauce’s infernally catchy anthem Barbra Streisand.

It is, Summers acknowledges, a slightly ironic position for someone like himself to be in. “I often say to people that I'm not an iconic producer, I'm an ironic producer,” he says, “because I started off with my music making using samples from all over the place. And here I am now, 30 years later, remaking samples to make them sound like the authentic original recordings themselves.” 

Perhaps most interesting of all of Scorccio’s business though, though, was Summers’ work on The Day Is My Enemy, the sixth studio album from The Prodigy, who had gone from cartoon rave hit makers to unlikely global musical force in the 1990s. 

I can’t help but asking: did The Prodigy ever realise that they were dealing with THE Mark Summers, who had beaten them to the UK charts with a kids TV sampling rave tune by half a year? The same Mark Summers who some people assumed was behind The Prodigy’s breakthrough hit Charly?

Summers smiles and tells the tale. 

“I had a few emails from The Prodigy’s management saying they're interested in having you replace some samples for them for the next album. ‘Could you have a chat with [Prodigy mastermind] Liam Howlett about what's going to be required?’ So I said, ‘Yeah, sure. I'll chat with him on the phone. No problem at all.’ And then the next day, Liam called me and within the 10-15 seconds after saying hello, he said to me, ‘So are you the same Mark Summers did that Summers Magic by any chance?’”

Summers pauses, dramatically.  “‘Yes. In actual fact, I am. And I know what you're gonna say next,’ I said, ‘that came out six months before Charly did.’ And he said, ‘Yeah, that's right. We loved that Summers Magic. That was such a fucking crazy track.’”

Howlett didn’t go so far as to say that Summers Magic had influenced Charly. But Summers believes it must have played a role “because it was unavoidable”. “You couldn't have NOT been influenced by that,” he argues. “If you were going to make a track like Charly, that idea behind it must have dawned on them from somewhere. And there was my Summers Magic and some other ideas that were going around.”

I first met Summers in summer 2017 in Barcelona, the city where I had lived since 2011. I looked him up for a piece I was writing for The Guardian on cartoon rave and was amused to find out he lived just down the street from me. We met up for a coffee and an interview, before I jumped on a plane back to the UK for a holiday and then never met again, despite our vague plans to stay in touch. Looking back at my notes from that date, I see he mentioned a conference he had visited three months previously in Kyiv, a city I then knew very little about, to talk about sample replays.

When I say that getting into sample replays set Summers on the road that led to Ukraine, I don’t really mean this, though. Rather, that his Scorccio business gave him the independence to work when and where he wanted, rather than being chained to a job in the UK, Barcelona or elsewhere. 

In fact it was love that led him to Kyiv. “It goes back to like 2018, when I decided to actually move from Barcelona to Kyiv, mainly because I had just gone through a separation with my wife and I wanted to get away from her, ” he says. “That was the first thing and my girlfriend, who is now my fiancee, she is Ukrainian. The idea being that I would move to Ukraine and we could see more of each other because we had been flying backwards and forwards to see each other between Barcelona and Kyiv.”

It is this, perhaps, more than anything that struck a chord with me. Like many people in Europe, I have always felt that the war in Ukraine feels incredibly close at hand. I’ve lived through wars before, of course: the Falklands, the Gulf Wars and more. But they have always felt so incredibly removed, taking place in countries that were separated by thousands of miles of sea, in places I was never likely to visit. Ukraine, though, is one the same land mass where I sit today. There’s no comforting sea barrier between Barcelona and Kyiv: in fact, you could drive between the two cities in 33 hours.

I moved to Barcelona from London for precisely the same reason that Summers moved from Barcelona to Kyiv: to spend more time with my girlfriend, who would later become my wife. We, too, had been flying backwards and forth between cities wondering how we might make it work. 

My wife is Catalan: when we got together she lived in Barcelona. But imagine if she had been Ukrainian and living in Kyiv? I too could have ended up in the Ukrainian capital. It’s selfish, I know, to bring this all back to me. But I couldn’t help thinking about the parallels between Summer’s life and my own and how wildly they now differed.

So Summers moved to Kyiv in 2018. Initially, his plan was to stay there for a year and see how things would go; then one became three years, and more. Until February 2022 arrived. 

“About two or three weeks prior to the invasion, there were a lot of warnings given by the British and the American embassies, telling citizens they should leave because it is going to become become dangerous: there is an invasion imminent,” he says. “Although people living in Ukraine were just thinking, ‘Well, that's never gonna happen. Yeah, not gonna happen. The Russians would have to be absolutely lunatics to even think of the idea of invading.’”

Summers eventually left Kyiv on February 17, one week before the Russians invaded, getting out on what was one of the last flights to leave from Ukraine. He thought he would be away for a couple of weeks, then the noise would die down and he would be able to return to his life in Kyiv. When he realised this wasn’t possible, he went to Turkey, keeping as close to his fiancée as he could, then he went to Bulgaria. After three months there, though, he realised he needed a residence permit. And so, with admirable bravery, mixed with a very British respect for bureaucracy, he went back to Ukraine.

“I thought I'm gonna go back to Ukraine, but in a very, very safe part, which will be in the very far southwest, close to the border with Hungary and Slovakia: NATO countries,” Summers says. “So I went back into Ukraine, probably about 20 minutes away drive from the border of Hungary and Slovakia. And I stayed in that town, Mukachevo, in Ukraine for about two months or so.”

By that time, Summers says things in Kyiv had started to get back to normal, after the Russians had retreated from the city’s suburbs. “I was reading things, everyone’s going, ‘Life’s getting back to normal now. Everything's happening on the very far Eastern front, where the battles are continuing.’ So I thought, ‘OK, I'm gonna go back to Kyiv.” And I went back there in August.”

Life, he says, was largely normal in Kyiv, until November 2022 saw the start of renewed Russian attacks on the city. “The Kamikaze drones and the power cuts started happening in November,” he says. “And I actually did hear quite a number of explosions. I mean, I'd been hearing air raid sirens going off even in Mukachevo, even in that quiet town that was near the border of Hungary. Even there that you would hear air raid sirens but nothing ever happened. It was like there was no connection to the war, really. I'd see some soldiers marching around now and again, but they they were there on their two-week break.”

The drones and missile attacks that started in Kyiv in November were, he says with admirable understatement, “a bit nerve wracking”. “I actually got wind of what the sound of those kamikaze drones were like: it was almost like a moped sound,” Summers explains. 

“I actually heard that sound one morning. I thought: is that a drone? Or is it is actually a moped? Or someone’s… like a diesel lawnmower type of sound. It was that kind of sound. And then I looked out the window and I'm trying to look around in the skies to see; there was something that I could visualise but couldn't see anything. Then suddenly there was this huge boom, almost like a thunderstorm type of bang, you know? And it was the the air defence system actually taking down one of the drones very close to where I lived.”

The most frightening thing, though, was the absolute dark at night. “There were no streetlights and no lighting for many houses. And if you wanted to go out somewhere, you'd have to put the flashlight on your phone to be able to see where you're walking your streets,” he explains. “Because you have cars coming down the street and they rely on their headlights. But apart from that, it's pitch black, even in the city, pretty much.”

Eventually, though, the blackouts in Kyiv, as the Russians targeted Ukraine’s power networks, got too much for him. “At first, you get three hours of a day without any power. And you could get by,” Summers explains. 

“But then from one week to the next it was doubling up: it was six hours every day. And then the last week of November, I was there, it was nine to 10 hours without any power. And also it was affecting mobile internet. Because, while the blackouts were occurring, I would be on my phone just like watching YouTube videos or on Netflix or something. But eventually that was becoming a problem because the mobile internet was being affected as well. So there was like nothing you could do.”

Unable to work under these circumstances, Summers moved to Vinnytsia, in central Ukraine. But the situation there was even worse, with 12-hour power cuts and almost no internet access. “I was there for one week and I just thought, ‘I can't hack this. I'm gonna have to go back to an EU country or a NATO country again. So I thought well, ‘What's the nearest one? Romania. Okay, let's go to Romania then.’ And that's what I did.”

It was in Romania, in early 2023, that I caught up with Summers. He sounded remarkably content, hopeful even, for someone who has gone through a borderline unimaginable, life-changing event, although perhaps a little tired by the constant stress. I hope to hell his story has the happy ending it deserves, for the courage he has shown. “It has been a bit of a ride, to say the least,” he says as we end the call, with admirable understatement.

For Summers Magic, his iconic song, the story definitely does end happily. Summers says he never really made much money from Summers Magic, with 4th & Broadways paying a small advance, and the song isn’t available on streaming platforms for those fractions of a penny to role in.

But he did get paid - and a well-deserved day in the sun - when Summers Magic appeared in 2013 sci-fi comedy flick The World’s End, in which Simon Pegg and friends see their pub crawl interrupted by an alien invasion. Summers Magic is, in fact, the first song in the whole film, as we are introduced to the leading characters, with Summers’ tune the perfect soundtrack to a night of carefree fun in summer 1990.

“That gave Summers Magic a whole new lease of life because it's right at the very, very start of the film,” Summers explains. “It's the whole like [impersonates the song’s intro], ‘It's that man again..’ And then it goes into the whole intro of Summers Magic, but then they blend it. They've got Simon Pegg doing a bit of a narration at the start along with Summers Magic, which then gets mixed into another great rave track [MC Tunes versus 808 State’s The Only Rhyme That Bites] … That film is kind of wacky as it is. And it's all summed up in the very, very first few seconds when they play Summers Magic.”

Summers has to go. We’ve been talking for an hour and he has a nasty cough, the result of what might have been Covid, a few weeks previously. As a parting question, I wonder how people remember Summers Magic, all these years on. I figure I can’t be the only person with such sweet memories of the track, which once set happy fire to my teenage brain.

“They just say what a fantastic track that was,” Summers replies. “They're always full of praise for it. And they'll say things like, ‘That was the craziest track I'd ever heard.’ I don't think I've even heard a person criticise it. People are always showing their gratitude that I made that track which I just find very flattering and just awesome.” And for a moment, at least, war seemed so very far away.

Some listening

Ichiko Aoba - Lucifèrine

It was on my fifth straight listen to Lucifèrine, the new single from Japanese singer-songwriter Ichiko Aoba, that I began to realise I might be addicted. And yet it still wasn’t enough. Lucifèrine is like a cloud of colourful perfume that blows this way and that, never settling where you expect it but equally beautiful wherever it lands. At times Lucifèrine has reminded me of Cocteau Twins, Kate Bush, Radiohead, a good Sigur Ros, double-bass jazz, an old-fashioned waltz, British folk music and Tomita, none of which it really sounds like but you get an idea of my knock-kneed confusion.

Good Sad Happy Bad - DIY

Against the extreme HUGEness of much modern rock, Micachu’s Good Sad Happy Bad offer a very intimate take on indie guitar, their sound calling to mind the skeletal shapes of early Cure records or Broadcast’s spell-weaving, lean-in effect on All Kinds of Days their newly-released second album. Intimate, though, doesn’t mean unambitious: this is a brilliantly inventive record that isn’t afraid to throw angular saxophone, spooky woodwind and electronic textures into the mixture. DIY, a chugging spoken-word number about the power of self motivation, that is full of grit, determination, beauty and weirdness, like Dry Cleaning on jazz powders, sums up the resourceful and hugely original spirit of this excellent record.

Sherelle and Clipz - Meet Me At The Temple

Before recording, Sherelle and legendary Bristol producer Clipz apparently had a long conversation about their love for early jungle and hardcore. You can hear this affection on Meet Me At The Temple, named after the Glastonbury stage where the song got its first airing. There’s a kind of tough levity to Meet Me At The Temple that is typical of much early jungle, where sweet soul samples pitched up to chipmunk trill meet hoodlum-hard drums and bowel-rattling bass, with just enough of a mournful synth melody underneath to remind you that Monday does exist but you shouldn’t worry too much about that now. For all that, the production on Meet Me At The Temple is forward-thinking and 2024 buffed enough to make the song more than just a retro treat.

Shabaka - Timepieces (featuring Billy Woods)

I loved Shabaka’s recent album Perceive Its Beauty, Acknowledge Its Grace - and his Barcelona gig last month was spectacular. But it is gratifying to have a little more grit creep back into his music on Timepieces, with New York rapper Billy Woods. The new song has its origins in Perceive Its Beauty, Acknowledge Its Grace: Shabaka sampled the album’s opening track End of Innocence to create Timepieces and you can hear the original’s flute-light grace poke through the new track. But to this he has added clattering and rather rough percussion, while Woods’ vocal is sombre in its reflection, creating a sublime mixture of moods and tones.

The Cure / Ben Frost - Songs of A Lost World (Disintegrator Mix)

Ben Frost is a) a lovely person; b) did the music for Dark aka one of the best TV series ever (and there shall be no argument on this) c) once interrupted an interview with me as a giant rat chewed through his internet cable and d) has now remixed The Cure’s new album in its entirety, “so it sounds more like The Cure” by which I think he means, “so that it sounds more like Disintegration”. To my ears, he has slightly scuzzed up the mix a little, making it more epic and swirly and a little less stadium rock than the original, which is AOK by me. 

Safety Trance - On 1 (feat. Dorian Electra)

Barcelona’s own Safety Trance teams up with pop experimentalist Dorian Electra on this warped dembow beat. The key for me lies in Safety Trance’s intricate drum programming, which squeezes in the tiniest slice of breakbeat at the precise moment it can be most impactful, like the single bay leaf that makes a winter stew really kick.

Nilufer Yanya - Mutations (Empress Of remix)

I knew there was something missing from my life - and it turns out to be a bumping UK Garage-influenced remix of Nilufer Yanya by Empress Of, who I didn’t think sounded like this. It is a mark of Yanya’s sharp songwriting skill that her song shines in an entirely new context, while Empress Of gets eternal credit for bringing out the Garage diva lurking within.

Nexus 21 - Mind Machine

Mark Archer and Chris Peat live close to my heart. Altern-8 were - as I have written about at length - one of my favourite groups as a child and a brilliant introduction to electronic music in their day-glo and extremely soulful mix. (In fact, there’s a chapter in my unreleased rave book about Mark Archer that I may unleash here some day.) It is kind of well known - but not well-known enough - that before Altern-8, Archer and Peat were in Nexus 21, a well thought-of British techno act that was in love with Detroit and received love back: Nexus 21 worked with Marc Kinchen and Anthony Shakir, while Carl Craig and Kevin Saunderson both remixed their tracks. (Craig’s take on Still Life was, apparently, his first ever remix.) Anyway, Altern-8 took off and Nexus 21’s second album, Mind Machines, was shelved as a result. Some tracks came out on the Made In Detroit and Progression Logical EPs - including Mind Machine, which I have linked here - but the full glory of Mind Machines is now coming to your shelves on December 13 and I am basically more excited about this than Christmas.

Amor i Ritme: Valencia Relief Fundraiser

The good people at R$N Records, together with Spanish artists Orion Agassi and Luishock, have put together a 23-track compilation to help raise money for victims of the devastating floods that hit Valencia earlier this month. It features loads of excellent, Line Noise friendly artists, including Phran, Pau Roca, Hercules and Love Affair, Ylia and more. So why not go and buy it?

Things I’ve done

RPS Presents - Will Hodgkinson

I spoke to Will Hodgkinson last week about his incredible new book Street-Level Superstar: A Year With Lawrence, in which he examines the extraordinary life of Felt / Denim / Go-Kart Mozart mainstay Lawrence. It is, quite possibly, the music book of the year andI asked Will about everything from taking 2ps to the bank to mental illness, journalistic responsibility and whether Lawrence is actually happy. Have a listen here. Then go buy the book.

The playlists

In six weeks or so it will be the end of the year, which means you had better get your best albums and songs lists in order. Should you want a helping hand, I have my Spotify list of the best music of 2024 - which I guess turns into a pumpkin on December 31 - and that old faithful playlist of the best new music of the last four or so years. Follow them, who not?