The controversy around “Ride On Time” now feels like a mixture of typical sharp practise and unusual naivety. Details are murky, but it seems production team Black Box had obtained sample clearance for Loleatta Holloway’s “Love Sensation” from her record label, but they hadn’t asked her about it, they hadn’t credited writer Dan Hartman, and they certainly had no compunction about hiring a model to lip-synch Holloway’s lines.
It’s this deception that became the focus for the trouble. It’s also what dates it to this late-80s frontier moment – when the potential of sampling to make a) terrific pop records and b) lots of money very fast was obvious, but ethics and practises around who gets credited for what hadn’t quite settled down. What rankled wasn’t just Holloway getting ripped off but the sense that Black Box were overclaiming their part in it: nowadays she’d get a “featuring” and Hartman’s writing credit would be in place from the off.
But here’s where the naivety comes in. What’s remarkable now isn’t that original work went uncredited – the ghosts of Robert Johnson, and many others, would have been nodding in recognition – but that Black Box got away with it for a good few weeks before the story broke. If you play “Love Sensation” after “Ride On Time” the sampling is beyond obvious, but back then mainstream listeners (and radio DJs, programmers, etc.) simply didn’t do that kind of thing. Of course any disco DJs would have recognised the lifts at once, and so would their audience, but the public were quite happy to accept that “Katrin” was belting out these (really obviously edited) vocal lines.
None of this mattered much even then – there was no Milli Vanilli style backlash, and Black Box records kept on selling. But the deception underlines the oddness of “Ride On Time”. This is a record which takes almost all its vocals, and its piano line, from an older song. But what Black Box do with them is to chop and shuffle them into a dance track with aspirations to being a completely new song. Even now this is unusual: mostly producers will take a line or two, and centre the new track on them, making the recognition part of the point. “Ride On Time” – from the phonetic title onwards – isn’t doing this: it’s almost at pains to disguise its origins.
Creatively, this is exactly the right move: it means “Ride On Time” is its own record, even when you know “Love Sensation” well (and like it better). The two songs have completely different virtues: on the original Holloway is exploring and expressing a feeling, trying to capture a lover’s qualities. On the Black Box track she’s less a voice than a force, a pure slug of diva power there purely to make the song rush harder. “Ride On Time” is a series of peaks, with the union of “Right on time!” and the piano riff the highest and most thrilling.
Anyway, Holloway isn’t doing all the work. The trappings of Italo house – light, sequenced keyboard lines, bouncy bass, endless hi-hat all working in unison to give that gorgeous piano its lift – seemed to be on a hundred hits that summer, and the vocal hooks made this the biggest. But listening to it now it’s the piano which draws me back in each time – to the point where I almost want Loleatta to get out of the way.
Score: 7
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Well, this is interesting – 21 years on, I am listening to ‘Love Sensation’ for the very first time! What is my instinctive reaction to this record? Holloway’s winning personality through her voice, an undulating groove that has time to ripple out, some jolly bits of arrangement from Hartman, and the sense that all of this pleasure is founded upon a song that seems pretty routine.
Now, let’s listen to ‘Ride On Time’ again. It still sounds ace, I’m relieved to say. It radiates a strong sensation of being engineered to the listener – but engineered in the sense that the Forth Rail Bridge is engineered, inspiring a sense of awe and amazement. While Holloway sounded like a pretty amazing person to know in 1980, now she sounds superhuman!
As Tom says, the work that Black Box do underneath her is pretty fleet of foot, too. As well as the piano, I’m always beguiled by the invocation “Gotta Getup! Gotta Getup! Gotta Getup!” – Indeed, many was the time that my teenage self would finally motivate himself to rise out of bed in the morning by hearing those words in his head.
Number 2 Watch: A week of Jason Donovan’s ‘Every Day (I Love You More)’, two weeks of Dale Winton favourite ‘Right Here Waiting’ by Richard Marx, then two – rather more palatable – weeks of “Pormp Urp The Jam” from Technotronic featuring Felly. None of these discs are anything like as good as ‘Ride On Time’
I’m now listening to ‘I Don’t Know Anybody Else’ Black Box’s number four follow-up to ‘Ride On Time’. It certainly, uh, repeats the ‘Ride on Time’ formula. Still sounds great, though.
Wikipedia tells me that “The song features an un-credited Martha Wash on lead vocals. Wash later sued the record label for royalties and directly contributed to legislation ensuring proper credit for vocalists on both songs and music videos.” Those cheeky Italian hitmakers, they never learn…
TOTPWatch: Black Box thrice performed ‘Ride On Time’ on Top of the Pops. If you want to find out more about the Christmas show, then you’ll just have to wait…;
17 August 1989. Also in the studio that week were; Martika, Fuzzbox and Nenah Cherry. Nicky Campbell & Anthea Turner were the hosts.
31 August 1989. Also in the studio that week were; Big Fun, Eurythmics and Damian. Gary Davies was the host.
this is so refreshing after much of the drivel at number 1 this year. The ethics of the production are a sideline for me I’m afraid. I just enjoy the momentum and vocal jump cuts.
Like Billy, this is the first time I’ve heard ‘Love Sensation’ and for me Loretta sounds too strident – her fierceness seems more powerful when it’s sliced and diced as it is here.
Light Entertainment Watch: Just the one UK TV appearance is listed;
WOGAN: with Black Box, Uri Geller, Georgia Holt, Gorden Kaye, Emo Philips, Jackie Stallone (1990)
Well, at any rate I have this record to thank for introducing me to “Love Sensation”, Loleatta Holloway, and Salsoul, ooh, 21 years ago. Which is certainly something to be thankful for.
At the time – I was 14 – I thought this was an absolutely thrilling, breathtaking record (and it was by no means the only case of Martha Wash being sampled and her being replaced in the videos and publicity by someone younger, thinner, and more conventionally attractive – did not C&C Music Factory do the same thing with their group Seduction? I think there may have been other cases too. Although only this one was sufficiently high-profile and notorious to lead to a -notably inferior – rerecording sung by a session singer – and again I think not the model in the video – being issued mid-way through its chart run) – the…squawking of that sample near the beginning…using the sampled voice as an instrument in its own right in effect- and there is a structure to the song – a climb up to a peak and then a mellower ending – which still works perfectly on the dancefloor.
All that said, and noting that I still like the track, it does feel very much of its time – rather than (as with, say “I Feel Love”), being something that aspires to timelessness. Italo House seemed to thrive here, really for just the final six months or so of 1989, and then moved on elsewhere/ The team behind this had loads of smaller hits under various pseudonyms – “Numero Uno” by Starlight I think being the biggest, “Airport 89” by Wood Allen (who thought of that name?) being another. Not sure if it was one of theirs, but “The Real Wild House” by Raul Orellana was another fine example of the genre. And I seem to recall having a soft spot for “Mental” by the Manic MCs
And as for the pretence that Black Box were a real group, that would go on to a have a string of smaller, inferior, and far more conventional hits (not that any of those from the “Dreamland” album was unpleasant)..I’m still unsure if that was just a blatant cashing in on a freak but thoroughly deserved success, or just a nod towards the not-yet expired world of the variety show. A few years later I’m not sure that they would have bothered.
So I think a seven or eight is probably about right. Still good fun, but in a strictly retro way. Which is the last thing it seemed that it would be at the time.
#7 – I actually preferred “Numero Uno” to this, and it’s something I’ll still dig out and play now and then. Not that I’m even attempting to suggest that “Ride On Time” is pedestrian, of course, as I think both are superb singles, but one had the distinct advantage of being fronted by a glamorous model (I think the Starlight video made heavy use of a dancing flower instead).
It’s always seemed odd to me the way Italo House emerged, was everywhere for a few months, then just disappeared again, not even back underground (to the best of my knowledge, at least) but for good. It made the records not so much summer hits so much as part of a weird one-off summer scene. I’m happy to be corrected on this, but it almost seemed as if the commercial explosion of it suddenly made it seem too tacky, too populist for the right clubs. And it did have a very strict template as well, albeit one I found hugely enticing – those joyous piano lines, screeching vocal samples from old seventies soul and disco records, a complete and total sense of fun seeming to spew out of every record.
To my ears, a lot of those records still stand up and are worthy of a revival, but I accept that this probably isn’t a typical opinion. Whereas a lot of eighties House records sound either too slow or too knowing and studied to me now, “Ride On Time” still sounds absolutely effervescent, and still has the ability to create excitement. It’s just a shame I don’t hear it very often anymore.
Bizarrely, I don’t have any memory of Ride On Time from its time (it wasn’t released in the US apparently, but still), indeed it’s only gradually filtered into my consciousness in the last year or two. By way of contrast I do remember both Strike It Up and Everybody Everybody, albeit more as general background dance music than anything I really listened to. Anyhow, effectively discovering RoT only recently, I confess I was pretty impressed that UK punters went for this one big time rather than Black Box’s, how shall we say, gentler hits. This wild beast of a sampled vocal line amazes – no background music this, even if you play the record at low volume Loretta L. just comes right through the speaker and, roaring, owns you. That sort of liminal moment doesn’t happen often in pop and normally it comes connected to a big name like Aretha Franklin or Jimmy Page, one that sort of tells you it’s OK to be ravished by this unstoppable force. I can completely understand the consternation that must have been caused for some people when RoT’s sampling issues came to the fore, and as it were, *who* you thought was ravishing you wasn’t really, and so on. Anyhow, deep down this strikes me as a pretty radical #1, and that this is a case where the UK’s pop fast forward-ism really served it well. Fuss about ‘skinny models in vids with the voice of Martha Wash’ stuff didn’t really kick in for another year in the US (with C&C music factory), so the UK now feels way ahead in dance music:
8 (9 on the right day).
#8 I think it just may have been that Italo House kind of came out of nowhere – and not really out of any existing musical tradition (however pompous this expression may sound in this context) beyond a wee bit of late 70s soft disco revivalism mixed with the latest drum machines and piano samples. It appeared suddently, and ended just as suddenly – there wasn’t a place it fitted into, or a place where it could be nurtured and could develop into something more lasting.
I think it’s also that, in terms of artists/performers, it didn’t really actively engage or involve that many people (the million and one pseudonyms of Daniel Davoli and a few others, essentially).
And then, also that (decent cross-over FPI Project stuff notwithstanding), it also quickly became commercialised in a fairly naff and tbh not terribly appealing way (e.g. the 49ers – who did, in “Touch Me”, what Black Box did here with “Love Sensation”, with Aretha Franklin’s “Rock-a-lott”: but the result was something very much third class in comparison with “Ride on Time”, just as “Rock-a-lott” was itself third class in comparison with “Love Sensation”). Although I must admit to having a soft spot for “Girl To Girl”, perhaps slightly in a so bad it’s good way.
Maybe it was just that 808 State (and for that matter the KLF remixes of that and the following summers) were just so very much superior to what Italo-House had become that they effectively supplanted it.
I had – on vinyl and long lost now – a compilation from late 89 called Italo! which had incredibly enthusiastic sleevenotes from Andy Weatherall on the back. I got it 2nd hand when he was at the height of his Lord Sabre steampunkiness and the notes became even more entertaining in that context.
One of the earlier musical memories for me and still a joy to behold even though the “scandal” has overshadowed it greatly since.
That vocal still has no equal. I havent heard the original I would still feel that it would not live up to RoT.
Even though this was a record that moved up the ladder by house association it was a record that almost goes beyond its boundaries.Almost like a fusion of the old (soul voice) and the new (dance).Maybe its just to my ears but there is a likeness to back to life here.Worthy of an 8 for that alone.
Thank god Tom doesnt do a US popular otherwise we would have to discuss Marky Marks lame ass “Good Vibrations” which samples loleeta holloway as well.That wouldnt be far off the 1 mark.
Interesting that around this time Milli Vanilli, Technotronic, and the other bunny were in the top 5.
How many of ye were taking in hook, line and sinker Id like to know.
11: Is that compilation ‘Italia: Dance Music From Italy’? NME Compilation of the year for 1989, perhaps unexpectedly – IIRC it got a 10/10 review!
“Thank god Tom doesnt do a US popular otherwise we would have to discuss Marky Marks lame ass “Good Vibrations” which samples loleeta holloway as well.That wouldnt be far off the 1 mark.”
I will not tolerate any bashing of “Good Vibrations.” I challenge you to a duel.
#14. Sorry MBI.Im on my hands and knees typing this of course.
Hold fire for now.We will get a few chances to discuss it.in fact for the near future it has some relevance to popular.Think of a “chemical spill” creation down the line.
Lets just enjoy ride on time for now and more importantly the sleeve.
Crikey! I was going to go “I bought a random Italohouse compilation from a charity shop in Leicester earlier this year which had this on it” in an attempt to say something unique, but blow me down if it wasn’t “Italia: Dance Music From Italy”! There goes my USP.
Great compilation, and this is a great track to start it. (I do prefer “Numero Uno” though.) But a nine: forceful, and the piano line really is spectacularly groovy.
(I haven’t heard the older record, though I would be surprised if “Ride On Time” wasn’t an improvement.)
I’m not sure I can really articulate why I loved (and love) Theme From S’Express, say, and hated this, but I did. I’ve always found it screechy and relentless – which might be the point, I guess, but I don’t enjoy it. I find it lacking in charm, in a way that S’Express never were, nor, for instance, the wonderful Inner City.
I was living in Milan at the time, and was firmly of the opinion that post about 1966 or so, Italian music was many shades of diabolical. Incidentally, Italo House was not the sound of Milan’s clubs, where they continue to play a rag bag of recent ish local and international hits and oldies pitched right up to squeakiness.
17 August 1989. Also in the studio that week were; Martika, Fuzzbox and Nenah Cherry. Nicky Campbell & Anthea Turner were the hosts.
But, without wanting to come over all unnecessary, it was Very Much the black box performance I remember, blimey (despite a big crush on the singer of fuzzbox). Katrin was slightly underdressed to put it politely.
I’m sorry, I was a 15 year old boy, what can I say…
Funny that, unlike Blackbox, Technotronic would at least feel the need to credit their debut single’s mimer Felly (as opposed to actual vocalist Ya Kid K), tho they corrected this after the massive success of Pump Up The Jam required a follow-up.
The mime culture in Italian dance music at the time was peculiar to say the least. Worth noting that all the mimes seemed to be black models which felt like some kind of clumsy attempt at or concession to credibility*. Well, it fooled us naive kids anyway who wouldn’t question it much at all.
I’d read about ‘Love Sensation’ (which I barely know even today, apart from the vocal/acapella obviously) and the shameless rip-off going on at the time but wasn’t too bothered either way as it took a few years before I came to really like ‘Ride On Time’. Now I just think of it as a crafty remix – they put enough other stuff into it to make it more than just a rip-off. Worth an 8 or 9 for its effects. The follow-ups are all fairly likeable although I don’t understand why ‘Everybody Everybody’ seemed to do better in the States (enough for it to show up on both an old Beavis & Butthead – “set me free Beavis, set me free” – and more recently on Pitchfork’s top 200 singles of the 90s).
Also preferred ‘Numero Uno’, the equally audacious FPI Project’s take on ‘Back To My Roots’ (just the ‘Rich In Paradise’ instrumental version would do!), Gino Latino’s ‘Welcome’ and Mixmaster’s ‘Grand Piano’ (“tell me what you think about the womens liberation!”). Now quite chuffed to have found DJ Lelewel (another psuedonum for Daniele Davoli)’s Magic Atto II on YT too: http://www.youtube.com/watch#!v=lPengR5O2Mk (anyone know the original source of the female vocal there? would be grateful).
Italo-House persisted into the 90s, with a couple of fine examples from ’91 being TC’s ‘Berry’ and Jinny’s ‘Keep Warm’.
*Less often the case in a few UK dance videos e.g. N-Joi’s ‘Anthem’ where Saffron Republica passes off a Caron Wheeler snippet as her own, and even more audaciously a blonde model miming Barbara Roy of Ecstasy, Passion & Pain in the video for JX’s ‘Son Of A Gun’.
As much as I understand why Loleatta Holloway was so pissed off I would still say this was the best number one of 1989.
10 out of 10 by an absolute mile. Best #1 since Yazz. Always make sure though that you’re listing to the original, Holloway-sampling version and not the re-recording by M People’s Heather Small, which is the only version on Spotify and is played as often as the original by music channels. Heather Small does pretty well, but Loleatta has the true power.
Beginning of 2004, and I hear this on a music channel for the first time, aged 15. Even after all those years of pop music development, I had never, ever heard anything like it. Seconds into the track you have the “And time won’t take my looooovvvveee…AWAAAAAAAAY!!” which is uplifting in itself. Then the piano came in and I was hooked. And then once we got into “WOAAAH-HO! WOAAAH-HO! WOA-WOAAAH-HO WOA-WOA-WOA-WOAAAH-HO!” I decided it was the greatest thing I’d ever heard.
It sounds incredibly modern for its time as well – if I heard it without knowing the year, I’d place it sometime between 1991 and as late as 1996, when we were still getting house tracks with that piano sound in – top ten hits like Ken Doh’s ‘I Need A Lover Tonight’ and Alison Limerick’s ‘Where Love Lives’ (which I know is from 1991, but became the big hit in ’96) sound very similar, seven years on.
Simply a glorious, uplifting, incredible four minutes and one of my favourite songs of the entire decade. An immensely deserved biggest seller of the year, even if it did annoy Loleatta.
Speaking of subgenres of house now lost to history, since Technotronic are at number 2, is this our best opportunity to discuss hip house? Pump Up The Jam was HUGE at my school, but the real sensation of the year was Silver Bullet’s “20 Seconds to Comply”. We all gave blank cassettes to this one kid who copied both these tracks plus Neneh Cherry’s “Buffalo Stance”, which isn’t hip house.
I must say that I’ve been really enjoying listening to Black Box over the past few days. It has a good spread of frequencies compared to much current (Gaga/Rihanna/Perry etc.) dance-pop music (whose buzzing, compressed synths and vocals really tire out my ears).
@Billy, 21. Great comment.
Re 19: you might make a leap and connect this to the Italian film tradition, where they would hire big foreign stars for the main roles – eg Burt Lancaster in The Leopard – and dub in the dialogue in Italian with local actors.
Also re: 19, also, of course, classic Hollywood musicals – the stars open their mouths, and the voice of Marni Nixon emerges.
Back to Ride On Time, it occurs to me now that the combination of propulsive rhythm, raw vocals and pounding pianos make it some sort of distant descendent of Little Richard, or even more of Little Richard-esque records like Psycho by The Sonics.
#22 Silver Bullet was SCARY, mega-aggressive, a very strange top 10 hit indeed. And one to me that seemed entirely detached from broader trends of the time. If anything this was even more true ofhis other single of the year, “Bring Forth The Guillotine”. Between them they were music to assassinate Ceauşescu to.
(Actually, wasn’t this about the time that the US military used the “aural weaponry” of Bon Jovi and hard rock to persuade Noreiga to get out of office in Panama?)
It is easy to understand how a record of such immediacy and knowing nowness – that “got to get up” fanfare still comes over as a wake-up call – could be so successful in the wake of Jive Bunny; to remind us that it was in fact 1989, it takes the past but places in a new perspectival frame instead of drawing a moustache on its face. With the addition of an irritating cartoon rabbit.
“Ride On Time” was the commercial, if not the aesthetic, apex of the shortlived Italo-house movement, even though it only leans suggestively towards House. Essentially a proto-bootleg of Loleatta Holloway’s “Love Sensation” rejigged and superimposed on the “Theme From S’Express” rhythm line, with stray touches of “Love’s Theme,” it works on the near fanatical pointillism to which it cuts Holloway’s screams and exclamations of ecstasy (“HOT temptation!/You just walk right in!/WA-WA-WALK RIGHT IN!”) to somewhere in the neighbourhood of the point of abstraction. Its significance lies its being a clearly transitional record, waving a fond farewell to the dance music of the past and crossing the threshold into dance music’s future; memories of Silver Convention and the Michael Zager Band, but also prophecies of Snap! and New Atlantic…although the year’s other major dance hit, “Pump Up The Jam” by Belgium’s Technotronic – a number two hit in the UK – was in its straightforward linearity arguably far more influential on the dance-pop crossovers to come in the early nineties.
In late 1989 it felt like an explosion of something approaching nowness, and it sold well in excess of a million here; its parent album, the Italia: Dance Music From Italy compilation, was the hip record to own for a month or so. However, it may well be that “Ride On Time” has found itself overtaken by the history it helped create and now sounds like something of a period piece. Messrs Limoni, Davoli and Semplici, who that autumn also scored a top ten hit under the name of Starlight with the far superior and sprightlier “Numero Uno.” There was talk of cutting up language into a new polyglottal broth of Anglo-Italian – see the (deliberate?) misreading of Holloway’s “right on time” as “Ride On Time” or the juxtaposition of “vienne qua” and “night-time sky” in “Numero Uno” – but the Dadaist mischief that promised never came to pass (and indeed had been pre-empted rather more successfully a decade and a half previously by Adriano Celentano’s 1973 pop-disco crossover “Prisencolinensinainciusol”…the latter’s parent album Nostalrock, despite its regrettable cover, is still worth investigating as a template for the Avalanches meet Jive Bunny in Serge Gainsbourg conference) and the lumbering likes of such contemporaries as Gino Latino, Dr Zhukov and the splendidly named but musically flat Kekkotronics were never going to catch on*. So “time won’t take my love away” says the sweeping, ascending escalator in the centre of “Ride On Time,” and its historical position is secure even if its lustre, as tends to happen with purposive immediacy, has in small part faded.
*Then again, the early nineties Italian rave boom which evolved out of Italo-house – Rosso Barocco, DJ Atomico Herbie, Pierre Feroldi, Boss System et al – proved to yield some highly entertaining cheese and coaxed its way back into the mainstream via Corona, Livin’ Joy etc.
Nice sidestep Tom , I thought you were guaranteed to give this a 10 and had a good line ready which I’ll store for later use.
While not my bag at all being a non-clubber I do see this as a genuine game-changing chart topper and some of the excitement does come over to a bedroom listener. It amuses me that there was so much controversy over Kathleen Quinol’s role as a frontperson. Seven years earier you had that loincloth-wearing poseur Steve Grant fronting Tight Fit’s “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” and he didn’t sing a note on the record either but didn’t get the same flak.
This was the record that inspired TOTP’s “live vocal” rule that led to some “interesting” performances but ultimately helped make the programme seem dated and irrelevant.
#28: I flip-flopped between 7 and 8, and had to consult both past scores and upcoming tracks before deciding. (The Loleatta rip-off didn’t tip my score in either direction, it’s just something interesting to write about: but I have been listening to a good bit of Salsoul this summer/autumn thanks to that great Walter Gibbons compilation that came out.)
As my misremembering of Italia’s title suggests, at the actual time I was not really down w/Black Box, though I thought it was OK. (I preferred “Numero Uno”, but was still all too suspicious of dance music in general.)
MikeMCSG #28 – and seven years before Tight Fit you had Tina Charles having her vocals usurped on 5000 Volts’ “I’m On Fire” by blonde lovely Luan Peters, also known as the hotel guest whose nipple is confused with a light switch by Basil Fawlty (as I said 2½ years ago on the “I Love To Love” thread while referring forward to this very record!)
Anyway – I waver about this one, I really do. Although, like Mike, I’m a non-clubber and this kind of thing isn’t aimed at me anyway, it’s undeniably a great, dramatic production, hugely effective, and doing the trick used by many, from Donna Summer to Bjork, of turning a terrific female voice into the most essential instrument on the track. I can see why it’s a landmark record for many of you, and if that was all there was to it I’d go along with much of the enthusiasm. But knowing what we know … Loleatta was treated like shit, literally replaced with a younger model as part of the marketing, and deservedly managed to sue them for it. And they couldn’t be arsed to spell the title properly. I find it even more reprehensible than Milli Vanilli, since in that case the public bought the package but at least Brad Howell and John Davis knew what was going on, even if they didn’t exactly get a decent deal out of it. So although this is, I admit, a great production job, it’s a very difficult thing to love.
Numero Uno was my 2nd 12″ reckid, and I still have it NOM NOM. I *think* I bought it and Weddoes Bizarro at the same time. I don’t have the Weddoes LP anymore obv as I have CDs and files on a hard disk – not so with Numero Uno, which I must remedy.
i love this, most of all the sheer grainy physicality of the vocal, there’s a kind of throaty weight to it that makes it feel like it’s digging right into you, not gliding serenely overhead like a mariah or whitney. that and the abstract precision with which this fearsome weapon is deployed. what it reminds me of most is black francis unleashing his hair-raising roar across surfa rosa and doolittle at will, for no reason other than that he can (though i like the little Richard comparison upthread a lot too)
talking of the pixies, much as i loved it at the time, “ride on time’s” epic run at number one didn’t soundtrack an orgy of pilled-up raving for me, but instead coincided exactly with my comically sudden conversion to indie absolutism. the week they got to number one i bought my first nme, six weeks later i was a grizzled veteran – in a rubbish band, hopelessly infatuated with a girl who wore those stripy tights, the whole set. obviously, black box can’t take much credit/blame for this startling ‘middle class teenager goes a bit alternative’ tale, but they were at least an appropriately momentous backdrop. (and nme endorsed too!)
Re 30: It might have been accidental, but ‘Ride On Time’ is so much better a title than ‘Right On Time’ would have been. It fits with the machine constructed feel of the single, allowing the listener to manipulate and surf upon a force of nature, like a fairground ride.
I never once saw the joke “Ride On Mime, more like” at the time, just realised. Incidentally Katrin Quinol was the cover star of the first issue of Record Mirror I bought. Still my favourite ever music weekly due to its general support for charting dance acts, pre-NME Great Pop Things and featuring more charts than you could shake a stick at.
To this day few things still thrill me more than a great pounding House piano riff and this is one of the best (though not quite as peerless as ‘Where Love Lives’). I wish there was more of it though and the fact that the record mostly just repeats it’s (exhilarating at first) effects over and over again keeps this “only” an 8 for me.
This is superpop – disembowelling Love Sensation, making it five times better, then fronting the record with a model. Wow.
I loved the generic sleeves of the Daniel Davoli records, at least for Numero Uno and (my fave) Airport ’89 by Wood Allen, which sounded amazing out (it had AEROPLANE NOISES ON IT!). I remember an interview with Davoli in which he was asked to to explain where he’d got the moniker Wood Allen from. He shrugged, and said “I like Woody Allen movies.”
I wonder if Black Box Recorder ever got confused with Black Box. It always seemed an odd choice of name to me, as if the Luke Haines mob were pretending their more famous namesakes had never existed.
I have the “Massive Mix” of this on 12-inch, which has the same cover as in Tom’s post. But what about the original, radio version? I may have never actually heard it!
#34 With you on RM Steve. Sadly at this point it had little more than 18 months to go, for me the saddest victim of the early 90s recession. I lack any real knowledge of the charts after its demise.
Re 34, 38: Snap. In the Morley/Penman era I was a RM/Smash Hits devotee, which I was embarrassed about at the time. I was very sad to see it go; Sounds went the same day.
Superpop is the perfect word for this. Utterly love this – one of my all-time favourites – so it’s a 9 for me. Played at a friend’s wedding the other week, and the floor was bloody mobbed. The unison “WOOOOOAAAA-OHHHs” left many a thirtysomething woman crying for a Strepsil.
Like many people of my age – born in 1978 – I was utterly obsessed by most chart house music between ’88 and ’89, but had no idea at all how club-oriented it was, being 10 or 11 at the time. Something about the cut-and-paste sampling technique from the house years is so utterly playful and innocent, so incredibly childlike, the way they press everyone’s easy buttons at once. We wore the dungarees and doodled the smiley faces – this musical language was ours, as kids, we had no concept of anyone else being in on it. And I’m sure this contributed to its mainstream success as much as the people necking pills rather than raspberry Panda Pops.
@MikeMCSG, 38. Y’know, I think that that early ’90s recession is hardly remembered these days, but it was pretty jolly vivid at the time. In the US it definitely set the table, as it were, for grunge there much as ’70s economic problems had seemed to set the table for punk in the UK. I don’t think the underlying econ. problems were as bad then as they were in the ’70s or as they are now but there was an edge to it that was compelling nonetheless (lots of talk about ‘peace dividends at the end of the cold war’ seemed like a cruel joke to those living through the recession).
In the US, and I assume elsewhere, the atmosphere seemed to change abruptly again near the end of 1993 when the first proper web browser, Mosaic, was released (for free baby!) and suddenly a new digital gold rush was on. David Fincher’s ads for AT&T in the US in 1993 really captured that precise new frontier moment. Now with his Facebook movie Fincher’s seems to be having his say about what that new world he helped sell is like once the frontier’s been closed. I wrote a note about this back in July if anyone’s interested.
An earlier poster’s claim that Italo House came out of nowhere with no kind of existing musical tradition is slightly wide of the mark. Italo Disco – which simmered away through most of the 80’s but encountered it’s salad days during the early to mid part of the decade – was not unknown to use a piano break and one of the scene’s greatest tracks, ”Stop” by B.W.H (1983), featured one which could have been a prototype for the Italo House sound of 89.
Strangely my abiding memory of this track is of a disgusted Whitney Houston shaking her head and repeating ”it’s wrong…it’s wrong” during a tv interview. The controversy surrounding Holloway’s vocals left a bad taste with some although I’ve always sensed (and I’ll stand corrected on this) that the shitstorm was more intense in the US than the UK.
Anyway, this is still a thrilling song. The best of the dance related #1s from the latter part of the decade.
The top 10 for week-ending 30th September 1989 is one of my favourite charts of all time.
1: Black Box – Ride On Time
2: Richard Marx – Right Here Waiting
3: Technotronic – Pump Up The Jam
4: Sydney Youngblood – If Only I Could
5: Tina Turner – The Best
6: Erasure – Drama!
7: Madonna – Cherish
8: Damien – The Time Warp
9: The Beautiful South – You Keep It All In
10: Tears For Fears – Sowing The Seeds Of Love
Also in that top 40 – the aforementioned ‘Numero Uno’, the very long-titled ‘Hey DJ I Can’t Dance To That Music You’re Playing’, and Depeche Mode’s ‘Personal Jesus’.
And people wonder why I love 1980s music so much.
I remember the early 90s recession well because I was made redundant and was out of work for six months. The design biz got hit very hard, the end of the “designer decade” I guess.
#43: Sadly to me that top ten is the epitome of Dale’s Dullard Discs. This weekend it’s 1967 and 1991, with the super sounds of Frankie Vaughan, Engelbert Humperdinck, Kenny Thomas and Erasure. No wonder he’s leaving.
Re 40: I can see that, even though I was born, err, a few years earlier. I imagine Italo House/Euro techno pushed the same buttons for a 10 year old in 1989 as Glam did for my (childhood) generation. Shamelessly gleeful, no self-conscious soulfulness or knowing cool.
Re 42: I would LOVE some recommendations on Italo Disco, a genre I was totally unaware of at the time.
Re 43: A mix of genius and fast-fading eighties pomp, 80s/90s battle lines drawn. Where do people stand on If Only I Could these days? For me it was a gorgeous, late summer-of-love pop house single, with (gosh) vibes, atmospheric piano, and a genuine naivety. But I remember it dividing people back then.
@wichita. There’s Chrissy Murderbot’s italo mixtape here. I’ve enjoyed listening to it a couple of times this past year. Perhaps I can tempt George,42 to give us his impressions of its selections (there’s little if any House piano on it for example – fun stuff tho’!).
#46: “If Only I Could” – actually I always thought if Rick Astley had worked with St Et it would have sounded something like this. Sydney Youngblood as I recall was an American GI stationed in Germany – much better than other singing squaddies I could mention (but the bunny calls for patience).
I love “If Only I Could” – one of the great songful/soulful house tracks. Also very keen on “Pump Up The Jam”, and “Drama!” is the best Erasure single.
“Sowing The Seeds Of Love” seemed like The Enemy at the time but either I’ve got soft or time’s been kind to it: it’s a ridiculous folly but there’s an edge of longing to it which is absent from smugger Beatle Band pastiches (i.e. almost all of them)
Actually, no, having just listened to it again my memory was kind to it: time has been duly harsh. Sorry Roland and Curt!