I don't like dancing. It's pointless, fake, obviously contrived and bears no relation to the music that allegedly inspires it. I'll do a longer post on why dancing is shit (probably entitled Why Dancing's Shit, obviously) at a later date - and I can hear you all holding your breath for that one already, but don't. No, dancing is not for me. Dance music, however, definitely is. What's more, I blame Noel Gallagher's dalliance with the Chemical Brothers for this.
Now then. I like to think of myself as a person who won't necessarily dismiss music on grounds of genre, but I also count myself as a person who can dismiss a great deal of Nineties chart music precisely in this way, because I was there, and let's face it, it was bollocks. Culturally, musically, in terms of its legacy, it was utter rubbish. Unlike some fads (flares, kipper ties etc) which are seen as dreadfully a la mode at the time, only to be sniffily derided with the benefit of hindsight, mid-to-late-Nineties chart music, with its wall-to-wall manufacture of bobbins boy bands and cheap 'untz-untz' house fit only for the bovine super-club arenas that blighted the cultural landscape at the time, was shit then, and it's shit now.
Between 1992 and '95, something bloody horrible started happening on the radio - a music none of us in the provinces understood washed over us, like a deafening blanket of nothing in particular, its verses, modulation, form, interest all stripped away, leaving a beat and a bunch of synths that just went on and on and on, until someone reached, at last, for a song with words in it. It was horrible unless you were on strong drugs. We weren't on strong drugs.
It was a dark time to be a rocker, I can tell you. This obvious crock of shit - If There Ain't No Love (Then It Ain't No Use) by Sub Sub - later to bafflingly re-emerge as the bearded and bucolic Doves - was on the radio eighty times a day, it seemed.
Give me fucking strength.
Then along came Block Rockin' Beats, with its - gasp - melody and - crivens - bassline probably played on an actual bass! The indie nation looked up from its collective copy of Vox for a second, snorted derisively (which we did a lot at the time) and carried on waiting for Dog Man Star to come out. The Chemical Brothers, who had goosed the public in late '94 with Leave Home and Chemical Beats,were coming back. Their joker, of course, was only just around the corner. This, for those of you who don't have it permanently seared onto your eardrums, is the noisy bastard in all its screeching glory:
I know how that feather felt.
Lore has it that the vocal Noel laid down for Setting Sun, the single that propelled the Chemical Brothers to number one and started all of this in my house at least, was recorded while a cab waited outside with its meter running. This alone makes it unimpeachably great, and is another reason to love Noel and his erstwhile band. I like to file this one alongside 'Supersonic was written and recorded in six hours', and just down from 'Wonderwall's vocal is take one', and not at all far from the fact that Talk Tonight, Headshrinker and Acquiesce were all b-sides of the same single.
As it happens, Noel's contribution to Setting Sun is pretty perfunctory, as the above story might attest. What it did, though, was bring the Chemical Brothers' seismic 1997 career highlight Dig Your Own Hole into otherwise unsuspecting sixth-form common rooms nationwide, whereupon it preceded to gently propel otherwise died-in-the-wool guitar-fanciers towards beats, synths, amyl and acid. It did so with fucking deafening beats, screeching synth lines, clarinets, trumpets - you name it. It's a bonkers record, and Noel's specific involvement with it made a 'cleverer' more textural kind of instrumental house music, acceptable. As trojan horses go, it must be one of the loudest ever constructed.
That must have taken all of 20 minutes, then.
Kasabian's very existence aside, there are no real downsides to this turn of events. Personally speaking, it led me directly or otherwise to seek out Neu!, Can, drum'n'bass, Aphrodite, Renegade Snares, Orbital, the Orb and many other acts in that space that I would normally have avoided while ripping the piss out of, as they didn't know what a Les Paul was for. This interest in dance music comes and goes to this day: while I'm ostensibly 'into' more rock'n'roll than anything else, I'm endlessly drawn back to dance music (and jazz, actually) like it's some vast, scarcely mapped continent that needs further examination. Recently a couple of artists - one new, and one, well, new to me - have emerged that have further piqued my interest. It strikes me that living in London I've been exposed to, and taken a greater interest in, places like the Boiler Room, home to some of the most innovative dance music producers and DJs around - or so I'm told. I'm no expert on this, so forgive, yo.
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