“Kept the hooks flying so fast that it sounded like a pop radio hit”
This entry is constructed around ‘samples’ of other people’s blog posts or writings mentioning “Pump Up The Volume”. Even saying that feels absurd and a little pompous – they’re just links, right? In the way that samples now are just… samples. If you listen to 21st century pop you experience them as content, not as process, with the occasional exception – Girl Talk for instance. But “Pump Up The Volume” got at least some of its power from the sample-as-process, the surprise and delight of cut ups, that videogame sense of micro-events coming at you in random attack formations.
Actually “Pump Up The Volume”‘s pace isn’t particularly fast – the track feels roomy, a sandbox of possibilities bounded by that loping bassline. It’s nice to imagine that this is down to AR Kane’s interest in dub, though the participants have suggested the ‘collaboration’ was fractious and the dreampop band’s contribution to the hit side of this double-A came down to little more than guitar overdubs. Whatever the inspiration, it means “Pump Up The Volume” has aged more gracefully than some of the spatchcocked sampladelia that followed it – though I love almost all its imitator records too.
Also, those slices of echoing guitar are the ingredient that gives this single its enduring strangeness – alien noises cutting across the hip-hop and funk sources “Pump” mostly draws on: as a proportion of the record they’re minor, but they’re also what makes it special.
“some people were yearning for acid house before it was invented, almost willing it into being”
Like “Jack Your Body”, “Pump Up The Volume” was another step towards club culture’s takeover of UK pop. But while “JYB” was an unexpected shot of purism in the compromised land of the top 10, “Volume” is a wild hybrid, made by intrigued outsiders. Which makes its success even odder – imagine the Dirty Projectors’ “Stillness Is The Move” getting to #1, maybe? The record is as much hip-hop as house – it owes more to Grandmaster Flash and Steinski than to Chicago musicians, and I’d guess hit bigger as a pop event than a club one.
The DJ house strain of club music “Pump Up The Volume” helped birth burned itself out fairly quickly because it was incestuous in terms of sample sources and easy to parody, and because unpredictable juxtaposition isn’t a consistently useful strategy on the dancefloor. But “Pump” itself chose its samples well and set them well too: the bassline working as a tour guide, and that sly top-end ripple on the drum track giving the record an intimacy where most sample workouts simply used novelty and brashness. We peep through a hidden door into a different record, hear Dunya Yunis sing, then shut it again and stroll on.
“bewilderment gave way to enthusiasm and we had a hit on our hands”.
Whatever its place in the wider story of dance music, for me “Pump Up The Volume” was a moment of pop crisis. I’d overlooked or ignored “Jack Your Body” but M/A/R/R/S was more strange and striking – and I despised it. Its rejection of structure, of tune, of identification points seemed close to nihilist: this simply wasn’t music as I could recognise it. This state of mind is hard to recover now – dance music and hip-hop have rewired how I hear music to the extent that it’s ended up being rock I’ve had to re-learn how to listen to. What seemed like a destruction of everything I associated with music now seems like a blueprint for so much I enjoy about it: an equal and opposite exaggeration, perhaps, but this record is still a milestone for me.
Score: 10
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definitely a ten – the 90s start here with an intoxicating mix of hip hop, house, indie and anything else they could throw in – and still sounding fresh.
Colourbox were certainly aware of dub, as their cover of ‘Baby I love you so’ proved
Hurray! Well done, Tom – one of the absolute high water marks of pop. This getting to number one was a reaffirmation of pop’s ability to beguile, to turn and face the strange.
I really liked this at the time, but fourth form reaction was generally as dismissive as the 14 year-old Tom’s. The U2-embracing majority rejected it for its alien-ness, while the small minority who liked club things disliked it for a perceived silliness and lack of authenticity, their stance supported by the pasted together video.
I note that although it was officially billed as a double A-side you don’t mention Anitina. Understandably… AR Kane are one of my favourite late 1980s things, but I’ve never really got that song. Indeed, although I know its a heresy, I’d say that I much prefer ‘i’ to ’69’ – where the dub bits and spiralling guitars really connect together in a much more identifiably pop way, and expand and expand over four sides to create the sort of music that I hear in dreams.
Number 2 watch: 2 weeks of ‘Full Metal Jacket (I Wanna Be Your Drill Instructor)’ by Abigail Mead and Nigel Goulding. That was a palpable hit amongst my peers, particularly those in the College Cadet Force.
Great to see a Vaughan Oliver sleeve at number one, too!
I like “i” more than 69 too – the splintery-guitar stuff I think comes over best on their early EPs anyway. But I was never a HUGE fan – Simon R in his Blissed Out phase had an enviable knack for making stuff sound world-changing on paper that didn’t do a lot for me when I actually heard it.
Interesting about the “inauthenticity” reaction – I wondered if something like that happened.
Clear ten – wonderful, wonderful record.
I’ve revisited this many times over the years and it’s never sounded dated or even anything less than the future to me. Maybe because of its very strange elements – the voyager-passage guitar, that clattery break, the slowness – it’s always felt worlds beyond its genre, whatever that is.
(And yes, I was planning to fit Anitina in but couldn’t really – I’m sure others will have more to say about it: I know Steve M is a fan. It’s a fun one to play at Club Popular nights for sure.)
This is a record I like a lot, but I’ve never *loved* it in the same way as I have a certain 1988 #1 that I’ve always mentally filed it next to. The video however – OMG dance music lives in SPACE! Of course it does! However could we have thought otherwise?
An interesting comment about this track from a source that I am definitely allowed to share with the world er um: “Press cuttings indicate legal proceedings imminent by Stock, Aitken, Waterman as writers of ‘Roadblock’, no claim received yet.” What happened with this? Colourbox are still the legal royalty recipients at the moment.
It’s not still 1 April is it? I swear I’ve been to bed and woken up several times since the last entry.
Ghastly noise. Irritating and devoid of emotion. I had to turn it off after two minutes and reach for the codeine.
I’m off to listen to some Beefheart. 1
I’m surprised and delighted that this is a 10 – thought only I would go that far.
For starters I just love the beat, I mean the actual sound of it. People eulogise the TR-808 bassdrum but the snappy punch of (what sounds like) the 909 snare and hats are just as great. Obviously this effect can be felt on numerous other electro tracks from the time but they don’t have to contend with quite as much as what else is going on here and the general medley-like construction of the track. The bassline, comparable to Fleetwood Mac’s ‘Oh Well’ (at least in the context of the Ben Liebrand-remixed cover version that would appear two years after PUTV), is brilliantly bouncy and elastic. The low digital piano note and crashing Horn-esque thuds could be a nod to ‘Relax’ as much as to the scratchadelic medley effect of ‘The Adventures Of Grandmaster Flash On The Wheels Of Steel’.
As well as the first two FGTH #1s a few other chart-topper connections can be made. The eerie screeching and heavily-echoed guitar must be one of the most ‘extreme’ sounds to feature on a #1 up until then, harking back to ‘Voodoo Chile’ at least. A more tenuous connection with another past #1 might be ‘Telstar’ due to the off-world connotations hinted at in the music (and fully thrusted in the face with the music video’s marvellous NASA footage…partly inspired by Blondie’s ‘The Tide Is High’ promo?) combined with it’s “instrumental” nature. Not only does PUTV sample a dozen or more other tracks (in doing so introducing many of us to them), it reminds me of all these other great important records from before, several of which had also topped the charts. It pays tribute to them while matching them for greatness and importance – from that greatest and most important location, the centre of the dancefloor ultraverse.
The samples are fascinatingly selected, arranged and recontextualised and I enjoy the irony of the primary sample coming from a recent hip-hop track. PUTV apes the ‘megamix’ trend of the times, akin to Mirage’s Jack Mixes, Steinski’s cut-ups and the aforementioned TAOGFOTWOS? But unlike the latter there’s no real attempt to demonstrate “live” DJ craft here, just a similarly sequenced parade of ideas and moments (in love) from other grooves. I spent years not really thinking about the original records they came from but last year started going about tracking them down (there are lists/guides on YouTube, handily). My favourite moment is probably the introduction of the break from The Bar-Kays excellent ‘Holy Ghost’ just after the notorious ‘Roadblock’ sample. Sped up, the huge drums clatter and collide into each other but without their effect spoiled.
The fun mystery of the track and its makers follows on from the relative anonymity of The Firm. WHO or WHAT the hell was M/A/R/R/S? There seemed to be so many people involved in the genesis of the track, challenging anew the conventions of performer status and hierarchy and highlighting the virtues of collaboration beyond a more typical band-based setup. The credit can go to Colourbox and AR Kane or Dave Dorrell and CJ Mackintosh but the very large array of uncredited voices and effects drifting or falling through space that make up the record are the stars of the show. The relative anonymity of the group allowing for greater empthasis on any visual motifs and concepts attached to the record e.g. the brilliant video and the smart, clear, attractive artwork for the record designed by Vaughan Oliver (a match for Peter Saville in my book). I was thrilled by its chart reign for three weeks and very annoyed at the dated dinos who tumbled it…
And yes ‘Anitina’ is very good too. A triumph all-round for 4AD and certainly my favourite double A side #1.
Yes to Telstar! I was thinking of saying something about sci-fi number ones – Telstar, I Feel Love, this… and then the future arrived so we didn’t need ’em
Kat – the original recording did indeed include that S/A/W sample; I seem to remember that the single was re-pressed with the offending sample removed and replaced by a (not as good) soundalike.
There were clearly sample clearance issues in the states as well – the version I (unwittingly) downloaded somewhere has enough different samples to almost sound like a different record.
Also, on a personal note, this one marks my debut as a singles buyer. I’d been listening to and enjoying the charts for a while, but this was the first one I loved enough (and had enough spare pocket money for) to actually go out and buy. Unlike 14 year old Tom, 13 year old me absolutely adored it for sounding so utterly unlike anything in the charts, it really sounded like the future to me and it totally deserves that 10.
Isn’t it a mis-conception that Ofra Haza is sampled on this tho? It is actually Dunya Yunis apparently (after the “put the needle on the record…” bit). People seemed to apply Haza’s name to the section following the international success of ‘Im Nin Alu’ a year or so later but they really don’t even sound alike!
I’d certainly never call it a bad song, but the idea of being attached to music like “Pump Up the Volume,” that’s just something that’s never going to happen for me. It’s a fine song, but there’s something in me that won’t accept something this far from tune and traditional structure as something I’d actively adopt as part of me.
I thought this was fun but I never really felt it – when I think 1987 I think “Fascinated” and “Take It Off” and “I Know You Got Soul” and Deborah Allen and Roxanne Shanté and Vivien Vee, so this feels pale in comparison. But then, I was hearing with ears that had long since known dance mix medleys and “Looking For A Perfect Beat” and Flash and Steinski, not to mention years of Jamaican “versions,” so mix and match wasn’t the thrill it’d be in teen Britain (or middle America, I imagine).
Geoff: the Wikipedia entry on the single has a really great table showing the 5 different versions and which samples feature in which.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pump_Up_the_Volume_(song)
Tom – that’s brilliant! and also confirms Steve’s point about Ofra Haza’s absence (although she was definitely sampled in Coldcut’s amazing ‘7 minutes of madness’ remix of Eric B & Rakim’s ‘I Know You Got Soul’, from March 88, and which was responsible for ‘Im Nin Alu’ being released as a single in the UK a month later)
‘Paid In Full’ surely? Quite right, though – “This is a journey into sound!” – remixing gets no better! Though I’ve read that Eric B & Rakim were unhappy when they heard it…
Being swank I have two copies of this, one with SAW and one without. Also I interviewed both ARKane and Ofra Haza. (And James Brown!) (And I was in a band with one of Coldcut!) I *am* Pop will Eat Itself…
iirc Haza’s LP was already released by GlobeStyle — but they didn’t usually do 12″s, and the Coldcut remix gave them the opportunity
Greg Tate once described old-school rap sampling as “ancestor worship”, and the list in that wikichart bears that out, doesn’t it? It’s like “these are the constellations in OUR hemisphere”
I think it loses energy when the bass drops out. Also: How many actual mixes of this are there?
And yes, Erik B and Rakim weren’t very happy!
Of course both the Paid In Full remix and PUTV were playfully mocked in Star Turn On 45 Pints ‘Pump Up The Bitter’ and LA Mix’s ‘Check This Out’. If you were a sampler you were a samplee. PUTV’s beat itself was used wholesale on Cappella’s debut single ‘Bauhaus’, prior to the more successful ‘Heylom Halib’.
My April 1988 7″ Top 20 smash copy of Im Nin’Alu (as purchased in Lewisham WH Smiths) is on WEA.
Hurrah! It’s always a great Popular moment when a truly-deserving record like this gets a 10. Like I Feel Love this house/hip-hop hybrid is a milestone; setting the blueprint for a whole new kind of dance music. Most of the 90’s dance records I love owe some amount of debt to this. But it’s not just it’s influence that grants it a perfect score, but the music that is so awe-inspiring. The bassline, drums, echo-drenched guitar, and fascinating selection of samples make this a true cut-and-paste dancefloor extravaganza. A tried-and-true 10.
“both the Paid In Full remix and PUTV were playfully mocked in Star Turn On 45 Pints ‘Pump Up The Bitter’” – more an act of witless – and borderline racist – desecration than playful mockery in my book. Which Radio 1 DJ was responsible for the success of that again? Batesy? The hairy monster? It was as if the Baron Knights had never gone away.
LA Mix were fun, though.
I can’t actually remember anything about Pump Up The Bitter except the “chorus” as it were. Did it offend Yorkshiremen?
Ha! Yes, I was wrong: Ofra Haza: Yemenite Songs and the 12″ Galbi/Im Nin’Alu were BOTH out on GlobeStyle well before this OR Erik B and Rakim — in 1985/86, rerelease of an Israeli record. She came second in Eurovision in 1983, for Israel. And died in 2000, only 42
It has an unfortunate cameo from “Mrs Patel”.
You can however always tell a genre’s importance from whether comedy pisstake records get into the charts.
That racist bit in full: “Amusing” high-pitched Goons-style approximation of Im Nin’Alu “Can someone help Mrs Patel out? She’s having one of her funny turns! Gunga Din!”
We can blame DLT for this, I’ve discovered.
A bit of a strange one in how this was received. with it sort of being perceived as “unauthentic” – whatever that meant!. But it translated as PUTV never receiving much airplay on the pirates or being spun at “proper” dance clubs.
Was this because at this stage being accepted in the dance world was still subject to the whims of a sort of closed shop? – having said that CJ Mackintosh (who I didn’t even know was involved till now) and Dave Dorell were undeniably from that world.
But I suppose the fact that I never knew who WAS involved in making this track until now speaks volumes for how relatively little it did permeate into the underground dance world which I was now fully immersed in again – my time making the industrial-cleaners and reluctantly listening to Radio 1 at work having just ended).
The very similar in concept “Just Give The DJ A Break” by Dynamix II from the same year IIRC had no similar problems and was even played occasionally on Summer of Love pirates the next year.
Maybe the snobbery existed because it was hiphop which more than any type of scene was extremely precious about who it was “ok to like”.
It wasn’t to do with not being black too as no-one had any problems with 3rd Bass or slightly earlier Paul Hardcastle (qv the domination of the pirates before its release of “19” or “Rain Forest”)or the before mentioned Dynamix II.But then again the Stereo MCs were completely ignored – they didnt even make the Top 20 UK hiphop crews in “Blues and Soul” at their peak (this was pre-any dedicated UK hiphop magazines when from about 1983-86/87 British break-dancers used to have to make do with Paul Oakenfold’s 2 pages of “Wotupski” in that magazine!)
Does anyone else have any thoughts on the roots of such musical “snobbery”?
One route to disdain — or indifference — might be the label it actually came out on simply not being plugged into the usual information exchange? Coldcut’s solution to this in a few month’s time — if i’m not mistaken — was to put “Hey Kids What Time Is It?” out on a (fake) white label until it gathered momentum and cachet, then set up their record company on the back of it.
Haha I still remember dropping Matt and Jon off at Kiss and them making me HIDE MY EYES bcz it was a proper actual pirate radio station with a secret address. (It was in the Walworth Road…)
Re the PUTV credibility issue I think it’s probably true that it fell between two stools for too many. In general, too ‘wacky’ for serious clubbers and too ‘hip’ for the types who’d otherwise vote for Colourbox in the Festive 50 (altho I see PUTV did make #46 that year so bad example maybe).
Andy in my own experience snobbery in hip-hop is no worse than in Indie. Motivated by different causes but having similar effects (at least wrt the ‘no sell-out’ ethos in rap). Privilege (and the abuse of which) was surely a prime factor (and the major stumbling block with, say, Vanilla Ice – more than ‘wack flow’ or a cheesy sample I’d say).
Steve at 25: They were set in a Geordie WMC not one in Yorkshire.
I actually had “Pump Up The Bitter” and the one from a few years earlier called “Stars on 45 Pints” sending up the “Stars on 45” type medleys.Got rid of them years ago but think they’d still raise a chuckle now.
Having said that if DLT was even remotely involved in their mild popularity its sort of ruined it for me!
LA Mix or Les Adams was actually a very respected dj/producer back then and “Check This Out” wasn’t really “playfully mocking” PUTV it was just one of the more successful examples of the hundreds of similar records that came out like this back then. He was quite big around London until round about 1990 think he was playing at the Lyceum one night when I was there – think he used to play “The Best Disco In Town” show live from there on the radio a Friday night after Steve Walsh had passed away.
Yes Eric B and Rakim were very angry remember them being very racistly/sexistly insulting about the singer back then.
Like Rosie, I thought that this was another April Fool from Tom…
For me, the advent of this being number one simply meant that the game was up for the charts. After this, I just didn’t care any more. If ever the currency of being number one was devalued, it was by this thing.
Rosie # 9 – Not Captain Beefheart and codeine for me. My escape from M/A/R/R/S is going to be “Pet Sounds”, a homemade shepherds pie and a bottle of claret. The Swede needs reassurance. Wouldn’t it be nice?!
this is a great track that I appreciate a lot more today thanks to my early 2000s journey through turntablism and hip hop, and this is exactly the type of scratch-laden, playful hip hop I love.
Sounds incredibly fresh and exciting now. Didn’t know what to make of it in 1987.
Records this inventive should be allowed a free pass on sample clearance on grounds of bringing new artistic merit to an existing work.
No doubt a 10 and bloody hell! This turned my head in a big way. Having heard that it came from the same label that gave us The Cocteau Twins, I had some kind of internal crisis. AR Kane and Colourbox collaborating with Dave Dorrell and some fella called CJ Mackintosh, dreampop to hip-hop via p-funk, world music and house? (Points two fingers at right temple and pulls imaginary trigger making PWOOUUUGGGGHHHH sound).
In all fairness, we ought to have been prepared for a moment such as this. Age Of Chance, Steinski, Paul Hardcastle and Coldcut had nudged hip-hop towards the dancier end of the spectrum. M/A/R/R/S crystallised this intention with this record. For the cherrypicker like me, this was everything compressed into a scooby snack of a record, and it took a while to make sense of it and work out what all the flavours were. However PUTV had an infectious and compelling groove, and if you let it in, then you couldn’t take it off the turntable.
A little note of acknowledgment for “Full Metal Jacket(I Wanna Be Your Drill Instructor)”. Having seen the movie and felt the dehumanisation of young men as they are trained as marines, was less a war film and more a study of the american psyche, Mead and Goulding’s samples of R. Lee Ermey over party-funk nestled alongside PUTV’s ColdWarSpaceRaceStarWars video, felt like a reappraisal of the US/UK “Special Relationship” forged by Thatcher and Reagan. Did we really want to be dragged around on a US leash? Global politics was changing. Somebody mentioned the U2 crowd would have rejected this. Having owned every U2 album since “October”, I felt more in tune with PUTV and even “Licensed To Ill” than I would listening to “The Joshua Tree”. Just goes to show how out of step Bono was around this time.
As usual my sense of times passed is all scrambled: Coldcut’s “Say Kids” preceded this by some months, and “Paid in Full” was almost exactly contemporary.
Yeah, Coldcut were the pioneers here in the UK at least – Marc Gascoigne once did a tape for Franks’ APA with a prehistory of sample house (including one amazing Velvets-Philip Glass-James Brown mashup I wish I had a good quality copy of).
I loved ‘..Drill Instructor’ at the time too and was fun being confused by wondering if said drill instructor was in fact named Abigail.
At this point 9 years old I think I was experiencing an enthusiastic peak wrt the charts and most of what was in them be it the Fat Boys or bloody T’Pau. The biggest party-poopers were indeed U2 and their Joshua Tree singles, boring me to tears. My attitude to Bono & Pals changed dramatically soon after tho for reasons that I may attempt to rationalise another Popular time.
Actually that’s a point. The Edge-y ear-splitting guitar howls on PUTV wouldn’t sound amiss on Achtung Baby!
Comparisons to Telstar (especially) and I Feel Love seem very apt to me. But both of those got Tom-scores of 9. Cssty suggests that that’s the right score for this too. (I also tend to think 9 is right independently of cssty considerations. Oh well.)
Anyhow, having dabbled in and been actively turned off by first wave House music, this and the Coldcut remix of Paid in Full and Public Enemy’s It takes a nation of millions (the latter being a pure extinction level event of a generation) were a friggin’ revelation and/or revolution. No fads, this music was fun and imaginative as all get out, not at all boring. A good chunk of the future had rudely showing up and elbowed everything else aside. The broadly clubby music had serious legs, projecting the globalized, interconnected future built around sampling, and shared content that came true, etc., and Rap was now officially huge. Rakim’s flow astounded, and with PE, rap had a genuine colossus to stare down the Beatles, Led Zep, whomever you like. A massive few months at the 1987/1988 boundary.
It’s worth pointing out too, that Sinead O’Connor’s Lion and the Cobra album came out in November 1987 with this vid a few months later. The full sonic connection between rock and all this new sampled drum kit stuff had been made at this point. I was in my own little musical bubble at the time and so didn’t pay close attention to what was really going on until the end of 1988… but the M/A/R/R/S track was in the charts and everywhere as the undeniable, visible sign of a truly massive, multi-faceted musical reformation that was going on, and that a lot of us spent the next several years catching up with. So Tom’s hi-score certainly isn’t crazy (sorry Rosie).
And U2 weren’t too far off the pace here: the Hollywood remix of their forthcoming bunnyable track was seriously nodding to M/A/R/R/S’s world…
A low peak of #13 in the States, although the single was certified gold. Another unbiquitous 80’s song that is even more popular now (in the States) than when it was on the charts.
Once again Popular serves as an intriguing history lesson on stuff that’s just never been on my radar before. Listening to this for the first time tonight, I basically enjoyed the track but find a 10 completely baffling….and thus interesting. Always nice to get these transmissions from alternate realities with different canons than your own, and force yourself to inhabit this other world. Really don’t get it, but happy to be exposed to it…
It’s a 10 for me, hugely important even if you already knew about sampling, hip hop and house music. Some other sampled records from this time sound cheap, but this one always sounded smooth. My recollection is that this was more popular among hip hop fans in California than with the alternative rock set.
A couple of links that might be useful for novices:
Eric B. and Rakim, Paid In Full (Coldcut remix)
Public Enemy, Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos
My sister had a tape to tape stereo at this point and I spent a whole weekend using it to make my own remixes of two separate taped off the radio versions of PUTV, with stabs of my own attempts of samples to add to it (Ian Dury’s Hit Me With Your Rythmn Stick was not successfully interpolated into the mix). For me this was the breakthrough of the music, I imagined I understood how it worked, and that I could do it too. It is thus a bit of a pity that I did not have the access to the tools I could use now to do this, but its amazing how idyllic being chained to a Amstrad tape deck can seem now.
I’ll have to join Rosie and Jimmy in the naughty corner on this one. Tom’s initial reaction was exactly mine but unlike him I haven’t shifted from it. I did actually give this a fair hearing because I rated Colourbox from previous singles such as “Breakdown” but couldn’t get this at all. It’s just a bassline with some random effects and samples. At least 19 and even Jack Your Body had some nice keyboard bits (and the former a lyrical premise) but this has no compromises. At the time I think I made the dodgy assumption that there must be too many chart return shops in London so black tastes were over-represented in the charts. I just couldn’t conceive that anyone would want to put this on their turntable at home. I know it’s a big question but when and why did melody and meaning become unimportant to people ?
As you’ll have guessed from the above this was a bit of a departure point for me. It was around this time that the charts switched to being announced on the Sunday Chart show instead of Tuesday lunchtime and that didn’t help. Partly this was due to Bruno Brookes and his moronic pretence that the chart was still being compiled while the show was on air. Anyone with even a basic grasp of mathematics would know that you can’t work out what’s at no 40 before what’s at no 1. But it wasn’t just him; I liked the certainty of the old show, knowing exactly what was going to be played and when (perhaps going back to when I used to tape things off the radio) and after 14 years of listening to the show religiously I started to tune out. This was also due to Erasure’s “The Circus” being just about the only record I liked in the charts at the time. It didn’t seem worthwhile investing two hours of my life in listening to it anymore.
A landmark Number One, for sure. Though being a young indie Luddite I didn’t like it at the time. I’m sure I remember complaining loudly that it was nothing more than a hip version of Stars On 45.
And yes, and Mike points out, PUTV’s first week at Number One was the final chart to be announced on a Tuesday lunchtime, and thus the classroom culture of smuggling radios into lessons and dissecting the new chart during the lunch break ended forever.
47. why did melody and meaning become unimportant to people?
Wow. It’s never occurred to me until now that this record could be seen as unmelodic or lacking in meaning, and I’d’ve said that my tastes have generally tended towards the traditional structure of pop. I don’t normally count myself as a massive fan of dance or hip-hop or anything, and I’m definitely not criticising – but I am interested in this perception of it lacking the essential qualities of a record, because I just don’t see it.
I wonder if it’s just age that is the difference here? I was eleven when this came out and I got and loved it instantly, and I guess my whole enjoyment of music since has been coloured by knowing that this stuff exists and that it can be brilliant, or alternatively that dance culture has been the water in which I’ve swum all these years, and never realised it. If your perceptions were formed just a couple of years before, this might never have happened. Or it could just be this record and its succession of thrilling hooks – maybe this has always been melody and meaning enough for me.
Melody I don’t know about but yeah PUTV has plenty of meaning – like a lot of club pop it’s a meta-record, a record about the thrill of a DJ dropping a great track. With a lot of these records the meaning works best when distributed and experienced as a crowd, PUTV is slightly different though: as a few people have said it’s not an especially good club banger, so beyond the formal meaning (DJs R GRATE) there’s a layer of meaning around the space and sense of possibility in the music. Coldcut brought that subtext into the text of their record with the “This is a journey into sound…” sample – a journey you could make on a dancefloor but also in an armchair