Influences: The Revenge

Being a kid in the 80’s it was impossible to escape Madonna and “Get Into The Groove” still stands up as a brilliant pop record today. It’s obviously a dance record but has a real emotive quality to it with the arrangement and chords. When I was getting into production it was always a touchstone for making something shiny and punchy.

I first heard this when I was about 12 years old. We went to Florida on a family holiday, picked up the rental car and this came on the radio. It was at night time and I just remember thinking it sounded amazing driving through the city. It’s got that mysterious, swirling, jazzy start and then when it kicks it in it’s just pure funk. I’ve always loved that warm, smacking, punchy disco sound and this record was probably where that seed was planted. Hard to imagine it was written by a bloke from Cleethorpes.

This was an album my parents had in their collection and I really only latched onto it when I was about 17 or 18. There was something totally unique about John Martyn. A combination of brilliant song writing, arrangement, rhythm and the sound of his voice. He used simple fx to blend it together into these beautiful compositions. My love of analog delay really stemmed from John Martyn’s records. He was obviously a man who had a lot on his mind but it just poured out through his musical which remains timeless.

I hated rave music when I first heard it. Maybe it was just too dark. I was still in pop-radio mode while my mate was buying a lot of stuff like KLF, Prodigy, Orbital etc. But something clicked when I was about 16 and I started buying import CD’s as I didn’t have a turntable. This mix was on a little 3” CD that I bought and I just loved the trippy-ness of it even though I didn’t know what trippy-ness was yet. The KLF stood head and shoulders above a lot of the other rave stuff as they not only had the music, they had the presentation and PR stuff locked down too. It was accessible, and a bit tongue-in-cheek but also had conviction and purpose too. It was just the whole package really, and over the years I slowly uncovered different aspects of what made them such an important band to me.

I had been making hardcore rave stuff on my Amiga computer for a couple of years before I got my first sampler around 17 years old. Around this time I was started getting into stuff like the Beastie Boys, Snoop Dogg, Ice T, Dr Dre. I had my first job and started buying more bits of equipment and I remember picking up DJ Shadow’s ‘Endtroducing’ around then. It just sounded so unlike anything I’d ever heard. There was a cinematic quality to it and the real feeling of being on a journey through the album. It’s really a masterclass in sampling. It’s a collage of lots of different sounds but holds together as one piece. I bought an old Akai MPC60 shortly after it and banged away furiously for many years.

When The Neptunes appeared it just gave hip hop a much needed shot up the arse. This was such a hard hitting record made up of a combination of only a few key elements. That general-midi clavia hook is so basic and dumb that in the wrong hands it would just seem pony. But with that chest-rattling beat and Noreaga’s flow it just destroys. Pharrell obviously has a great ear for what works and this is a strong reminder that simplicity is a good thing.

I’d been listening to a lot of house, techno and jungle up until this point. My mate Paul had been buying a lot of the French Touch stuff and I remember getting into it a bit later. The tempo on this really blew me away. Everything I’d been listening to had been 125bpm + and this just showed me that there was room to do stuff that was slower and still jammin’. The production on a lot of Bangalter’s stuff is still a strong reference point for club stuff. It just had that fizz and sparkle in the top end with the phasers and filters and that tight, punchy bottom end.

I was helping with the mastering for Harri and Domenic’s Sub Club mix CD “20 Years Underground” in 2008 and this track was on there. There were loads of tracks in that mix that made an impression on me, but this just has that heart-tugging emotive quality to it that is missing in a lot of dance music. There’s a simplicity to the production which lets the song speak for itself where it could have easily been overcooked and lost a lot of it’s power. A truly timeless piece of music.