Memory of the Month: Eurodance anthems 92-94

As this month's mixtape and musings illustrate, there's a certain stickability to the Eurodance anthems of the period 1992-1994. Snap's Rhythm is a Dancer, Corona's Rhythm of the Night, Dr Alban's Sing Hallelujah!, Haddaway's What is Love?, De'Lacy's Hideaway, Bobby Brown's 2 Can Play That Game (K-Klass Remix), Billie Ray Martin's Your Lovin' Arms have all displayed a resilience that perhaps would not have been expected at the time they were first hits. I mean you can walk into a DJ bar or mainstream club in virtually any large provincial town or city in Europe on a Saturday night and still be guaranteed to hear at least one of the above.

What's the secret? Well, sonically, they set the template for commercial pop for at least the next 15 years - they were among the first pop records to be inspired by the rave scene, to understand that scene, and yet to be designed for a mainstream audience. And they are all bloody good songs. Unlike 2 Unlimited's Get Ready for This and No Limits, which both fell between the stools of full-on rave anthem and pure pop rush. I mean hearing Get Ready for This in Tom-Tom's in Cardiff in late '91 (see the film Human Traffic for the reference) was the moment the rave scene died for me. Dross.

By contrast, I've always loved Corona, Haddaway, etc. for their ability to tread the fine line between crass commercialism and musical sophistication. One day people may speak of Torsten Fenslau and Peter Zweier in the same breath as Stock, Aitken and Waterman or Lieber and Stoller. The concept of 'classic Eurodance' suggests the process has already begun. Time to put on a shirt from Topman/Topshop, get down to your local Ritzy (or whatever) and boogie...

Memory of the Month: Gods Gift

The missing link of the Manchester post-punk scene has been rediscovered, or rather it has discovered me! Gods Gift was the one band I was unable to track down for my history of New Hormones records. Now, the band's former guitarist Steve Murphy has discovered the website and dropped me a line. I had a fantastic chat with Steve over the phone last weekend, the results of which can be seen on the New Hormones site later this week. (:-)

Memory of the Month: 'Hard Times' in Thatcher's Britain

In the September 1982 issue of The Face, THE UK style magazine of the '80s, journalist Robert Elms wrote a feature entitled "Hard Times: The New Young Soul Rebels". You can find it in NightFever, an anthology (published in 1997) of The Face's pieces on the 'club scene' (a term the magazine if not coined, made into common currency). Beyond a few music journalists, musicians, and music obsessives with long memories, the 'Hard Times' article and the short-lived, but surprisingly influential 'Hard Times' movement Elms championed are long forgotten. So, what's the skinny?

In a nutshell, 'Hard Times' was about listening to Soul music from the late '60s/early '70s with a political edge (Curtis Mayfield, Gil Scott-Heron), as well as early '80s black music with similar sentiments (the original version of 'Money's Too Tight to Mention' by the Valentine Brothers, 'Cash Money' by Prince Charles & The City Beat Band and 'Drop the Bomb' by Trouble Funk being prime examples, along with, a little later, 'Ain't no rockin' in a Police State' by Black Britain). You would listen to this music while out enjoying yourself clubbing in Soho, however, to express your solidarity with the 3 million unemployed elsewhere in Thatcher's Britain, you would wear stylised versions of workwear, ripped Levi's 501s and sleeveless leather jackets.

It sounds laughable, and it was. The excellent website, My Cassette's Just like a Bazooka?, which gathers details of all the cassettes given away free by the NME in the 1980s, includes some choice analysis of 'Hard Times' and its malign influence. Music critic Simon Reynolds devoted about a quarter of his first book, Blissed Out: The Raptures of Rock, to shooting down the theories of Soul as the music of resistance, propagated by the likes of Elms and Paolo Hewitt in the early-mid '80s. 'Hard Times' was one aspect of this wider trend (which Reynolds dubbed 'Soulcialism') and its influence could be seen everywhere from Simply Red's cover of 'Money's Too Tight..' (their first hit) to Bros's ripped jeans. Thankfully, the rave scene and the alternative rock revival of the late '80s/early '90s killed all that stuff stone dead. But, it did have its moments, as this live version of 'Cash Money', complete with Princess Di lookalike, illustrates. Dance before they drop the Bomb!