Welcome to this weeks In Strict Tempo - first a confession: I promised music reviews would return this week, but they haven’t. The reason should soon become clear. Secondly - if your company is a member of the Association for Electronic Music, then I’m standing for the Executive Board this year. There’s a lot of ‘behind-the-scenes’ folk in this industry who’s voices don’t get heard, and I think that needs to change. Voting closes next week, and I’d appreciate your vote if you’re able to. Anyway, on to this weeks essay, which is quite a personal one… and apologies for the clickbaity nature of the title this week!
Cast your mind back to late 1996, the awfulness of “Cool Britannia” was in full swing, Britpop was at it’s peak, England had suffered another international tournament defeat. Ready for the big Q4 period and Christmas #1 race, Virgin/EMI released their bi-annual Now That’s What I Call Music compilation, the 35th edition of the series.
For whatever reason I didn’t get Now 35 that Christmas. I can’t remember what I did get, probably the Trainspotting Soundtrack and a PlayStation game or the latest Cambridge United shirt, but I was 13 and my memory isn’t what it was…
Fast forward to the Summer of ’97, and my school organised one of those PGL adventure trips to the South of France. Setting off from Suffolk, our coach went first to Dover, and then overnight through France until we arrived in the Ardeche region. For the trip, I’d packed all my favourite tapes and my walkman, including a new one I’d bought from Woolworths in town: Now 35.
I’ve always loved road travel, either by coach or driving. It allows you to see a country pass by at a decent pace, with the option to stop more or less where you want. I’ve driven to the South of France a few times as an adult and really enjoy it. For me it beats flying, and the large windows of a coach are a great way to experience somewhere new. I stayed up most of that coach journey (as great as they are, a coach full of teenagers isn’t exactly the best place to get a decent sleep) listening to music letting it soundtrack my journey. Eventually the time came to put Now 35 into my Walkman.
Despite the first cassette kicking off with The Spice Girls, George Michael, Peter Andre and East 17, it soon improved, and Pet Shop Boys and The Beautiful South lead us into the second side which featured more Britpop type stuff, some of which I enjoyed including Ocean Colour Scene (sorry, but The Riverboat Song is a banger), Pulp and Suede.
The first side of second tape got off to a bad start and didn’t really get any better, mostly cheesy pop stuff I can imagine I skipped through, mindful of conserving precious battery life, but Tape 2 side 2 is where it got interesting. Faithless’ Insomnia - a tune made for late-night European coach trips if there ever was one was followed by another trance classic, BBE’s Seven Days & One Week, which fitted the journey perfectly. Stretch N Vern’s Earth Wind & Fire-sampling I’m Alive was an upbeat tune that had me imagining if that was what Ibiza would sound like, before tunes from Healy & Amos, Livin’ Joy and Wildchild continued in a more commercial dance vein. Then, oh my God, then… my mind was blown. Pearl’s Girl, the track that changed my life. I was aware of Underworld through Born Slippy (which I loved) and Dark & Long (which I didn’t really like at the time due to the intensity of the scene) from Trainspotting, but this new (to me) track Pearl’s Girl sounded like nothing I’d ever heard before. Was this music? Could music be like this? Just drums and a weird repeated vocal sound in the background? Can drums be that heavy, that intense? No one could play this live could they? And the lyrics? Crazycrazycrazycrazy, they were nonsense. This can’t be music, this isn’t a song? Where’s the structure? Where’s the guitars? What are these machines? What do these lyrics mean?
As the coach drove through some industrial French edgeland I was looking out the window at the sodium lights in a trance. God knows how many times I rewound that track. It was amazing. Music shouldn’t sound like this, but it does. What else sounded like this? Where could I find it? I was already vaguely familiar with dance music, certainly on the more commercial, Radio 1 friendly side of dance music, but hearing this felt like an opening into another world. Faithless & BBE were good, but Pearl’s Girl was even better.
The holiday itself was good, canoeing, windsurfing, canyoning and discovering those little French beers were cheap and easy to get hold of from the shop just over from the campsite. Some people find themselves on these kind of trips, or discover a lifelong passion for adventure sports, but I found something better.
On returning to the UK I threw myself into ‘dance music’. Obviously still being too young to go to the clubs (not that there was anything remotely near to us in small-town Suffolk) I’d use our dial-up internet connection to find out everything I could about Underworld and other acts like them. I discovered Orbital, The Prodigy, Chemical Brothers, Aphex Twin, Squarepusher and so on. I’d download everything I could find (in low-res late 90’s MP3 format) and burn it to CD. Tunes, live sets, radio shows all of it. I was a vessel waiting to be filled with all this music, and it felt like my little secret. No-one at school was really into it, but eventually my friendship group from the local estate started to come round towards it, and as we got older we’d start to go out to local clubs and parties.
The following year we went to New York for my dad’s 40th birthday. In Tower Records I found a CD of Pearl’s Girl with two new mixes and a number of other tracks on it. I snapped it up, and and had my mind blown again. A band remixing their own tracks? Six amazing tracks that aren’t on an album? What was this? I’ve still got that CD today, it still sounds incredible.
It’s easy to sneer at ‘pop music’ and these kind of compilations, but for many of us they were a gateway to discovering all kinds of new music, and the new worlds that lay beyond.
In a way, In Strict Tempo owes a debt to Now 35 (Tape 2, Side 2). It might not be the coolest, or most credible tape ever released, but sometimes inspiration comes from the most unlikely places.