Crazy - Jump Leh We Jump (1991)

"Crazy, the lovable lunatic, the madman; call him anything, but never call him sane. Crazy is the most sought after performer today. No Soca Fete in the world is complete without 'The Lovable Lunatic'; he never fails to tantalise and mesmerise his audience driving them into hysterics."

– Sleeve notes of Jump Leh We Jump

One appealing thing about a lot of international music is there are artists who do stuff you could never get away with in Britain. Can you imagine a national mega star whose image, whose stage name, rests on the idea that one is a good-time nutter and a total one at that? Oh, I know we've had our Buster Bloodvessels and Captain Dreads, but to call yourself 'Crazy, The Lovable Lunatic' (that's his subtitle!) you'd be imprisoning yourself, or at least people's perception of you, through a thousand winks and all the arch riff-raff, always at perhaps several removes. Crazy is no such thing, and he genuinely is a lovable lunatic. I don't suspect he is one of genuine pop madness, not as we know it (Bill Drummond, say), but nor is he a novelty act. Rather, he was one of the most popular musicians in Trinidadian music, and his large audience throughout the decades was seeing him and his easy lightness of approach eye to eye.

He made his mark as a calypsonian in the mid-1970s and soon signed to Eddy Grant's Ice (as established in my Grant piece an innovative, perfectly realised label ripe for rediscovery), with whom he released some early soca ("Parang Soca") whilst competing annually in National Calypso Monarch events. The people of T&T took to his natural bonhomie and he regularly graduated to the finals. He was also one for the Carnival Road March, for whom he wrote anthems like 1982's semi-synthesised "Uncle Crazy" (whose bloopy steel drum break would feel like pop-avant territory in any British record), the same year he made his UK debut at the Pickett's Lock Centre. To distant ears like mine, 1984's brilliant "Soca Tarzan", also written for the March, corners towards Kid Creole territory and makes a mockery of Tight Fit and late Modern Romance with its balance of blatant urgency and instrumental workouts. The album under discussion came seven years later but the intervening years saw no great sea change; he had long been happily adhering to his tight but rewarding schedule throughout the years and Jump Leh We Jump is one product of this.

Now, I'm far from an expert or even proper connoisseur in this area of music, and at least historically know of no outlet closer, after all, than the Notting Hill Carnival, which is held 110 miles away, but I think many readers will agree its appeal is instant, and the days of me singing (or trying to) "Hot Hot Hot" at a family' friends karaoke when I was six or seven probably set up my taste for soca and calypso as much as the Caribbean Uncovered compilation that introduced the even younger me to other Caribbean styles outside of reggae and ska. But I digress... Jump was Crazy's tenth album and only contains four proper songs plus two versions and thus to some may appear rushed or compromised on the surface, especially given how quickly he went through albums, but its considered one of his best (and fastest) records not least to Bryon Lee's typically masterful production, who retains Crazy's essential tinny cheer while feeding the arrangements (an inherited mix of digital and live) extra subdued detail when required. As it turns out, four songs and two versions is all that is necessary.

As he would with any of his records, Crazy commences with a song (in this case one that is barely a song at all) to re-announce to the unwary new listener (along with that back cover blurb) who he is and what he does, and so uses the unfailing rhythmic template of "Leh We Get on Bad" as a sailcloth on which to adlib and toast, crack laughs, deliver the occasional verse when he's in the mood and engage in call-and-response with his oddly pocketed, backing soprano singers. All this cocksure geniality ensures the cartoon irony in the title and refrain (but then again, he is crazy/a lunatic/etc.) as the record is as undeniable as Super Blue's "Flag Party". He also takes the unusual decision to include a fully instrumental version (save for the response vox) just two tracks later, confident enough that even though he's barely on it, the album's magnetising appeal won't suffer for it at all (and it doesn't, not least because it allows a different way into the music and you can better notice how often new accents appear, like in one uncluttered instance some squidgy, almost Zapp burbles of 1980 synth. No detail goes unnoticed but they all cohere).

The more melodically-inclined, but no less heated, counterpoint is the terrific "Scoogie Woogie"; gleaning the nonsense popsteak of the title alone you may think this a song about getting it on, but then you hear it and it's actually the pet name for a woman who is admired for her charisma by everyone in the town from his friends to his parents, highlighting (through its admittedly odd focus) a communal attitude we don't so much have in 'our' pop (and thus 'we' don't have many songs like this; it feels an oddly twee and 60s from a UK/US pop perspective). The mirror version later on with toaster D.J. Flathead is one of playful Cutty Ranks-style romancing (and thus closer to the Jamaican ragga that in a few years would be embraced by the British public). In fact this version is pretty daring in its minimal design, frequently leaving Flathead to speedily toast formless shapes over only the tightly-knotted beat which, reliably charged enough on its own, only infrequently looks to hook up with other instruments.

It must be said that, typically for soca records, the music does not hustle the listener with its obvious fervor and trusts they will want to get involved on their own terms (like for instance coming to see the show or joining the carnival, where surely participation is inevitable). The invitation is nevertheless of course always there and this is particularly identifiable, "no matter what is your class, creed, or colour", on "Mas in Jamaica", practically designed (in usual Crazy style) as a component of the carnival, in this instance the one launched in Jamaica by Byron Lee himself the previous year (with, of course, the traditional masqueraders, hence 'mas'. You can practically hear the multihued fabric set pieces of the procession). It should be pointed out the album was recorded in Kingston's Dynamic Sounds, used of course by Tosh, Tubby, Cliff, Perry, Marley and plenty others, but which was also founded by Lee, while released specifically to UK, US, Canadian and Caribbean audiences by the studio's house label.

The record ends with "Fools" slowing the tempo ever so slightly and Crazy reminding you who he isn't as much as who he is. Crazy, yes. A fool, no. Fools, says Crazy, are racists, murderers, corrupt governments, the inventor of the nuclear bomb, Saddam Hussein, destroyers of nature, greedy money spinners and others. As always, it's all delivered in party style with his endearingly contrasting backers and I can get down with its flippancies. And even more so knowing that, though not mentioned here, fools also include homophobes; "Penelope", a song Crazy released the following year, advised listeners who "can't get a woman" to "take a man", and became a LGBT anthem in Trinidad and Tobago, a country whose law makers would rather such people didn't exist and, as author Wesley Crichlow pointed out, was a massive middle finger in the fact of the permeating homophobia in a lot of local music. Crazy? Brave, sure, but he's far too smart to be crazy or a lunatic. Still lovable, of course.

Wolfstone - Seven (1999)

It's not a popular opinion, not that there is a much of an established consensus around a small band's catalogue, but Seven is for me the greatest of all Wolfstone albums. Typically for one of their 90s records the production isn't as stern or oomphy as it could have been, but it is their most entrancing, which for me is important to consider given how I ever loved Wolfstone to begin with. Sure, they're a Celtic rock band from Inverness, with music from and for the people and those old stories and the infrastructure of what it is to be a folk band, but to me, as with numerous other bands from completely different places, they take me not only to my early childhood but especially to Stowford Farm, Farleigh Hungerford, a few miles up the road from me. Scottish, Irish and English folk music to me is the sound of the Trowbridge Village Pump Festival, which I attended annually, thanks to my parents and some of their friends being permanent fixtures in its fields since 1991. Just as it was inevitable that this blog would cover compilations, so it is with folk music, particularly folk which works as pop. There will be more to come, but there is a lot of folk rock and Celtic fusion that is enormously important to me, and I need to gradually tell that story here.

Not that the 'rock' in Wolfstone was always so pronounced, as initially they were set up around Duncan Chisholm's mastery of the local Scottish Highlands fiddle style, having studied under Donald Riddle, and the band only properly came into being when he met singer Stuart Eaglesham some time on. Their earliest recordings, issued locally around the turn of the 90s as Wolfstone and Wolfstone II (and later re-released without band consent) are all but disowned by the group and are inevitably the work of likeminded musical travellers who have not yet coalesced into that singular force, not least because of their reliance on a chintzy, inexpressive drum machine which they'd soon replace with Jon Henderson. Except I'm typically all for the cheap and cheery and even when they do stabilise into the 'classic' Wolfstone I receive much the same exudation of (com)passion out of their music, and you can clearly sense they'll reach the light at the end of the tunnel from day one much as Runrig did. And so, Unleashed (1991) and The Chase (1992), both for Iona Records, set their glacial stage with their mix of songs and instrumentals, standards and originals. By the time of 1994's Year of the Dog, their first on prestigious American Celtic label Green Linnet, they were a reliable part of the international folk circuit.

What Wolfstone can be seen to be doing was, in essence, a relocated continuation of the Big Music of Big Country, Simple Minds and others in central Scotland. By being removed geographically they also were socio-culturally; the punk that had informed those bands vanished, the ancient space ever vaster. Not only was the ignored world Stuart, Duncan, Ivan and the others lived in far smaller but so were their facilities, and it shows. The 'cheapness' in Wolfstone's bigness is key to their central magic; they really use their small-time production and parpy synths to their most logical zenith, not to transcend their land but to reanimate the pastoral music and stories they grew up on. Not 'bombastic', never; no matter how 1987 'stadium' their iconographic guitars, the music is still one of quietness, for small spaces dreaming big. This especially shows when, rather than max out, they emphasise the textural and intimate, as with the languid Ness interface of "The £10 Float" (or rather the first half of it, which sets up the valedictory second section), the geometric horizon of "Hard Heart" or the hollow, amorphous 'rock' of "Here Is Where the Heart Is" (mix it differently and you may have 'arena' or 'folk club' dub).

By remaining so small, Wolfstone of course faced no chance of being 'misunderstood'. 1996's The Half Tail, their best and most dynamic album up to this point, was also their final with lead vocalist Ivan Drever before he departed. What followed were protracted financial struggles that virtually killed the band off. Green Linnet still held them contractually accountable and this led to regrettable decisions like issuing Ivan and bassist Wayne Mackenzie's side-project This Strange Place as a Wolfstone record, despite being as un-Chisholm as, say, Connections & Disconnections was un-Clinton. The luridly packaged album (perhaps the most professional of any 'Wolfstone' project yet) was seen as a minimalist, reductive retreat into mellowness (although "The Wild Monkey Dance" would later be used as a live intro to "Clueless") and threw a band who were re-beginning anew, sans Ivan (with Stuart Eaglesham, who hitherto sang lead on some songs, sometimes as counterpoint to Ivan, taking over wholesale) completely off. Their reformation was again at Green Linnet's doing (the reason there are two versions of Lúnasa's Redwood is them fucking around with people's livelihoods too). But the new Wolfstone recorded the required Seven not just as contractual obligation but something to put their heart and soul into, a band who had to prove themselves, who didn't want the whole mess of 1996-98 to begin with and would actually love to get back on the road.

Compared to Ivan Drever, whose gravelly voice made him sound like the weight of his whole life was pent up inside everything he sang, Stuart is much more fey, more indie even. This was a necessary dynamic contrast on earlier albums, two different singers anchoring each other, bound by upbringing and experience. But now that Stuart is carrying lead vocals alone he ends up pushing the band the furthest away from rawk tropes that they'd ever get. That the whole group conjure up a more reflective, rootsier sound was perhaps them naturally following his lead, even when he isn't singing. On the first of the record's songs, album highlight "Brave Boys", they strip back to the point of it it barely counting as rock 'n' reel, instead prioritising Andy Simmers' flowing piano over any Celtic instruments (the fiddles are left to purr alongside bassy crashes in the semi-formless ambient intro, redolent perhaps of Jon Hassell). A modern McLean anti-war song, or that's at least how it seems, Stuart – weaving in cautions from Passchendaele and "the fields of France" – advises no shame felt by those brave boys who wish to "run away" ("just be your father's son"), and uses similar language even to Stump's "Our Fathers". The squiggly Hammond shapes in the final minutes, by turns melodic and freeform, are a curious choice of exit as they are treated with a serenity that stops them sounding like 60s/70s rock and instead a vague hum into more thoughtful times, perhaps.

Singing there, Stuart comes over like a Scottish Ian Broudie (a compliment!), yet a change of context on "Wild and the Free" makes him sound more like Glenn Tilbrook, which may be why the song proper resembles 1990s Squeeze (particularly their reposing from Some Fantastic Place and beyond) crossed with hints of the Waterboys' rustic mysticism, likewise on "Crowfeathers", which after its Inverness-vast prologue typically begins to transfigure the Big Music of Sparkle in the Rain into something more intimate for a smaller community, but anew. Sung from the perspective of adrift corbies a la "The Three Ravens", there is mindful imagery all over ("a feast of MacAdam's dead") but the song is one of contented free rein (whereas "Wild and the Free" is determinately reflective, just like "Tall Ships" was). The slightly soupy "Black Dog" is relatively slight and probably the closest thing to a weak link, but the Deacon Blue-evoking (a compliment!) rhythmic jolt is blatantly joyful, ergo hard to deny. What all of the songs convey is some sense of communal buckling up and helping each other through, and while I won't pretend to know anything much about Highland history this is still an unsurprising conclusion.

As always, the songs in all their urgency are balanced by the instrumentals, which reprioritise the order of personnel so that, with one exception, the pipes, fiddles and whistles accentuate and as jigs, reels and airs plot out destinations that songs alone do not. Although "Psycho Woman" (big nostalgia!) opens the album with a big Main Tent grin, a reliably stem-winding way of alerting us to their return (it is undeniably rollicking, even though that is not a word anyone actually uses in real life), the others are introspective and bewitching, loaded with implications and an overwhelming sense of place. "Maggie's" is to this album what "Clueless" was to The Half Tail, frantically searching for and then finding mirthful epiphany (providing, after "Psycho Woman", the album's second most obvious crowdpleaser), while "Jen's Tune" is a gorgeous little ruminative arrangement, one of those pieces who sound alone is instantly evocative of a time and place for me (of which more anon) from even before I ever really listened to it. It shares its dreamy, if slightly doleful tone with the twilight rave-up "Quinie Fae Rhynie", which trickles easily on pellucid keyboard drones, mist rolling down the Torridon mountains, and is rhythmically a near mirror image of "Black Dog", except this one requires its speed and heavy beat to shake its agitation off.

"Fingal's Cave", a traditional lament that is not to be mistaken for Mendelssohn's overture, is named for the arresting formation in the Inner Hebrides. In Wolfstone's hands there is a shuffling beat that in another context might be trip hop or something quite Soul II Soul but here is part of a morose cycle at sunset. A nautical Ian Crichton Smith poem is recited by a low, unco voice almost four minutes in but, buried in the mix and distorted by distended delay, it is near-impossible to grasp, a voice lost to the sea breeze (and a precedent for what Peatbog Faeries discovered vocals could be used to achieve in a number of years). The album ultimately ends on this curious, yet expansive note, like some slight trepidation about where Wolfstone may be headed that was to be ridded the moment they stood on stage again.

But the best instrumentals form the album's centre and are arrestingly crestfallen like few other music is to me. I know nothing of who keyboardist/pianist Andy Simmers was, and this was his only studio album with Wolfstone. Having joined the reformed group in 1998, he hanged himself during the tour that followed Seven in 2000, the band's second suicide after piper Roddy McCourt several years prior. But on Seven he plays a solo piano piece, "John Simmers", named for I assume a relative, but we don't know who he or what the story could be, and the enigmatic nature of Andy and this instrumental only heightens its prematurely mournful nature, two minutes of a maroon flame to stop all time. And it does to me what "The Eternal" or "Decades" off Closer do (maybe not to you, but this is music I know just as well and need as much). Think also, perhaps, of The Cure's "Homesick" (I came to that later).

Then it fades as softly as anything (so it is not isolated after all, and others are in the room) into Wolfstone's greatest piece, "J-Time". Hanging weightlessly over a synthesised ambient drone with wordless coos for a minute, the deep breath before it is time to proceed, the band come in steady and collected, a forlorn Celtic melody central to its slightly swinging fabric and Andy's jazzy piano solo downcast but subtly stunning. It adds some explanation, of sorts, to "John Simmers" in that it is not resigned but, in my ears, yearning for a state (a feeling, or environment) it knows can still exist. If this sounds flowery bare in mind that for me that's precisely what it is, as it brings back some of the happiest of all memories; as a very young boy, listening to CDs with my dad in the conservatory, making compilations of Village Pump Festival music and enjoying the wonder of it and its music with, as with all music I loved back then, nascent, sculpting wide-eyes. So yes, melancholia galore, but the melancholy here is particularly so because of what it symbolises, and it is blissful. My dad still considers its a "great chill tune", and it's music for me that, as with much of Seven, allows me to step beside myself and into my fables times, and in doing this, things can be put back into perspective upon my re-entry into earth. This is the genuine power of nostalgia for someone like myself (but maybe the argument there is one I can have another day).

But of course, in magnifying these contemplative moments some disservices are being done. Wolfstone's standing as a band for people to get happily drunk and dance to/with at folk festivals is, well, is, and even though personal tragedy imposed natural soul searching, the group found that touring Seven was just what they needed to get back on track, not least exemplified on the of course lively Not Enough Shouting live record. And even if later albums, all leaner sounding, saw ye olde rock boot in to extents I think would, again, turn away some unsuspecting readers (not that it stops me liking Almost an Island in the slightest, maybe their third best album, although Terra Firma, made with singer Ross Hamilton, oddly recalls Incubus at times), Seven is despite everything the one. Wolfstone pensiveness done particularly winsomely. That album count title is marking dues to history, but the music itself is as deliberately required: a new beginning.

Various - Club Mix 97 Volume 3 (1997)

I reckon you could walk into any charity shop across the country and leave with a solid dance compilation in your hands, typically one from the 1990s or 2000s. I don't think many of the people I know who make noise about their charity shop purchases (hi there) are really bothered about them, whereas beyond purchasing many collections of this type first-hand upon release, I've been at them for most of my life. It was inevitable since the moment I conceived this blog that at some point I was going to start doing pieces on compilations; it's not like all the music I love is album-friendly.

By 'dance compilation' – and allow me to be very 1990s-specific, given the subject of this piece – I of course don't mean Warp Classics or Blueprint (The Definitive Moving Shadow Album) but rather, say, anything from strands such as In the Mix, Now Dance, Club Mix, The Best Club Anthems...Ever!, Dance Level Zone [x], On a Dance Tip, Kiss in Ibiza and the like. The mainstream (in terms of marketing if not always content) compilations of normally up-to-the-minute surveys of what's about in British clubland, as issued by major labels (Virgin/EMI, PolyGram TV, Telstar TV, BMG, Universal TV, WEA). Not that all of these compilations strictly mine the same territory, but typically what you'll get is an eclectic compilation centred on (typically) house and its siblings with numerous hits, a lot of deep cuts, with labels like Positiva, Manifesto, Xtravaganza and FFRR dealing out the cross-licensing. In other words, what you'd expect from genre compilations modelled loosely after the Now template.

As such, a lot of the compilations bear music that has not been remembered, tracks which were current then, only to be apparently forgotten forever, and much of this music has never incited critical discussion. It mostly wasn't 'hardcore continuum' stuff, or album dance, so if you're invested in those worlds it isn't what you're "supposed" to be interested in. The "cool" stuff is happening elsewhere, apparently. Tellingly, many of those that reached the top 40 only received daytime national radio play in chart countdowns (every 90s chart turns up its forgotten dance hits, whether of the commercial or 'tasteful' variety) and many sit in the one-pound bins. And yet turn to Discogs, look at practically any house, trance and suchlike single from the 90s and reel in the high ratings counts and nostalgic clubbers leaving reviews and piecing together history when no one else will.

Generally, there are three levels to 90s dance compilations, as in the sort that were advertised on TV and could be bought at Woolies and entered the compilations chart. Ones with 'dance' in the name were the vastest through their incorporation of commercial dance music (Eurodance, straight up dance-pop, etc.), whereas those saying 'club' focused on the house, garage, trance and stuff that was more 'credible', that the superclubs were playing. Then finally there were the superclub compilations themselves (MoS, Cream) or tastemaker radio (Kiss), perhaps the "final word" on what "mattered" to the self-conscious in this infrastructure. Broadly speaking, of course. Lament if you want the absence of a Ghettotech Hits, The Best of Neurofunk '97 or IDM Mix III lining the Tesco CD shelves, especially as all music is conversation with each other, but for many people experiencing dance music in Britain this was how it would be. So why ignore these releases, especially when there's so many of them?

Club Mix 97 Volume 3, mixed by siblings St. Peter & Heaven, belonged to PolyGram's Club Mix series, initiated a year earlier. The origins of the club-oriented DJ mix album go back to the 1970s at the latest (A Night at Studio 54, Casino Classics: Chapter One) but in terms of the modern manifestation in Britain, Ministry of Sound were first on the money in 1993. By 1995 and the launch of The Annual it was obvious it was a good business and so Virgin/EMI (with In the Mix), PolyGram and everyone else gradually followed suit. And the rest, they say, is... Why profile this edition in particular? I've listened to it incessantly for over a year, firstly as what might appear to be escapism when the first lockdown began as part of my fixation with 'forgotten' 90s chart dance (except music is always a distraction from the world beyond my home). It's now among my favourites, balancing classics and the unjustly overlooked, and hopefully I'm about to make a good case explaining why...

The opener

It's standard practice for compilations of this type to open with a consensus hit and "Free" was staring at them in the face. Aged 29, it was Ultra Naté herself freed from many unsuccessful attempts at that one bona fide crossover. Once signed to Warner Bros, she made an admirably diverse set of records with the Basement Boys, Nellee Hooper, D-Influence and even System 7, but even when fellow singers Robin S and Ce Ce Peniston were able to break even the US top ten it would not be until "Free" that Naté had her equivalent garage-handbag anthem, one that has endured throughout the decades no matter how many remixes or new contexts get thrown at it. A reliably stirring part of any of '90s classics' package.

And I write 'anthem' because, like "Finally" (they make great companion pieces), that is so obviously what it is. The song and particularly its chorus came about through Naté wanting to divert from label pressure, and as Lem Springsteen himself has put it, she and him genuinely did feel stuck, so the fight is audibly genuine. The incendiary chorus is the natural release that the unassertive verses conceal. She's there to go about stirring on ("If you gave more than you took, life could be so good"), before "now's the time, 'cus you're FREE to do what you want to do" and the bronze minor keys join her in lighting the way out, like "I'm So Excited" two decades on and still excited. How endearing it is too that 1997's most instantly recognisable guitar intro isn't that of a rock song (although rock was the influence and Woody Pak keeps spinning those Vini Reilly webs throughout – compare with the latter's Balearic effort Obey the Time). Unlike Deniece Williams with own "Free", Ultra Naté was unfortunate to never reach number one, despite spending eight straight weeks at numbers four-eight, the sort of chart stiffness that "Hey Ya" and "Angels" later had to deal with. But like those songs it got out of it well enough by effectively becoming Public Pop in the meantime.

The future

I needn't underline what nascent UK garage, 1997's most promising new discursion, ended up doing for British music. It's importance is right there. Turn on the radio and you can hear music made possible because of a lineage which the likes of, say, Dreem Teem, 187 Lockdown or Double 99 were, on their turn, a huge part of. Or just listen to the relevant cuts here and see this future as we know it today suddenly snap far more into view than on any equivalent 1996 mix CD. As a music born from both jungle and house, how exciting and natural it must have been for a sound to thrive both on the pirates and in house clubs and still spill over into the charts undigested, something jungle alone – more rooted to rave's version of subcultural capital than house's (where's the jungle equivalent to this mix?) – often struggled to.

Yet hints of this particular future on this compilation begin with a remix from 1995. I remember being surprised way back when to discover that was Rosie Gaines duetting with Prince on "Diamonds and Pearls", but the original "Closer Than Close" is much more in line with the New Power Generation to whom she belonged, as essentially a tasteful neo-soul slow jam if not much more. Then Mentor had the idea to stick her a cappella over sped-up garage house beats and... it's not necessary to dwell on the US-UK garage split that this remix accelerated; it's well documented elsewhere how a visiting Tony Humphries was taken back by how this was already one of 'our' records, London's own advancement on their longstanding MK/Todd Edwards/etc NY fix. But one thing led to another and speed garage was recognisably the London thing, and what better single to largely kick it properly into life?

I actually heard "Closer Than Close" during a rather miserable car ride a few months back, and berate Craig Charles's soul and funk show for few surprises or risks if you will, but hearing that, Frank Wilson's "Do I Love You (Indeed I Do)" and Central Line's "Walking Into Sunshine" (three favourites from different generations there) was a mood lifter even in the bleak dead of night on country roads. Here on the compilation she continues Ultra Naté's commitment to a better tomorrow the moment that elastic bounce, at once unshowy and blatantly exciting, tries to trip the beats of the prior song into double speed. Gaines still sounds like she's playing at 2x speed on Media Player (and invents the sound of AutoTune abuse, without any actual such manipulation in use, at the same time).

And yet Armand van Helden's immortal Dark Garage Mix of "Spin Spin Sugar" is opposingly paced; fatigued and draggy, too disoriented, and disorienting, to process the speed of time around it. This was the effects of speed garage's entropic time-stretched vocals, which here sprawl disproportionately high as there is no room anywhere near the bottom end with all that BASS enveloping everything around it. Such mutant low end – the main attraction (the hook!), so severe and inspiriting – was more the reserve of the more dread-happy ends of jungle (think Ed Rush, Nico etc.), the hitherto most unrelenting crossover dance to bear such radio-unfriendly sub-bass arguably being as far back as "LFO" (think it's weightless interludes). Yet here is the alien funk sound of the future breaking through in the middle of the market long before 2-step, grime and beyond helped batter it into familiarity.

This is not to take anything away from Sneaker Pimps' original, a surprisingly effective cut of noxious post-trip hop that is closer to the winded hellscapes of techstep than is given credit. But in Armand's hands it is the monochrome London sound of 1997 waiting patiently inline to evolve into all the colour of what is to come. "I'm everyone. I feel used. I'm everyone. I need you." We are in even more claustrophobic nether regions than "Professional Widow", erotica and creepiness as one singular force. Marcello Carlin highlighted the "floating clouds of handless A.R. Kane" guitars on the latter track and here, in a new discoloured shade of psychedelia, they resurface unmoored up there with Kelli Ali in the mix, distant but huge shivers of silicon danger, kept afloat by the murkiness below. Yet everyone is dancing. How could they not.

And "Fly Life", in its central Brix Mix, is so startling, so fuckingly 21st century, it's the best thing not just here but in virtually any context (bar maybe its own creators' The Singles and that's only because of "Lucky Star", possibly the most extreme development on what started right here). Before this, Basement Jaxx were knowingly retrograde, part of the fetishising nu-house bunch too young to catch wave of NY garage's most iconographic days and so, in almost acid jazz-minded sensibility, went about chasing it. This certainly, because by design, did not result in music that was anything less than solid (although Simon Ratcliffe's best record in this period was Helicopter's more animated "On Ya Way"), but nor did it in any way even hint at their most batshit ambitions, or much engagement with what was immediately around them. Their Nuyorican-by-way-of-Brixton approach got a shot to the arm with 1996's "Samba Magic" with its fiesta speed and Tony Moran-goes-salsa chords. There was something in there, if only they continue to work at it.

But *this* brazen raggamuffin rave-up with bladed disco stabs and white noise and an unexhausted sack of ideas intermingling, a complete hyper-reconstruction of dance music, came just *one* single later. Virtually all that's fertile about UK club stuff in the 90s – house, garage, rave, jungle, dancehall – is funnelled through one life-affirming behemoth (the best 12" of its year with "Ripgroove") and you cannot even pause to take in all the astonishing newness, not even in its daredevil beatless breakdown, all ambient waters and echoed vox stutters, which issues no warning as to when the next "JUMP!" smites and the beat and all the deliration it brings with it will strike again. So you're capable of this, are you? Maximalism as freedom, everyone under one roof. And it had been a good few years since ragga emceeing had sounded like something was bubbling, ready to spill into the rest of pop (I am thinking not just of jungle but the '93 summer of ragga; hits like Louchie Lou & Michie One's "Shout (It Out)" which unlike Bowie and 'the' Art of Noise made "Peter Gunn" a possible sound of the future by making it act as a drone).

And so Basement Jaxx, about to stock up on their P-funk and Prince, went and did an album, Remedy, and house was... well I won't quote Armand van Helden's profane assessment of what they did to snap house music back into the centre of things, but suffice to say they're hyperactive minds that won't rest until they've tried making everything they love in music, in sound, get along like a house on fire. Proper integration, rather than dense co-existence, undigested eclecticism. Everything that makes Jaxx perhaps my favourite thing about pop music in the late 1990s through to the mid-00s begins with "Fly Life".

Big breax

"Naked & Ashamed" is high up the track list and also appears on Dance Level Zone 9. Weird, considering it was a non-charting 12" and these compilations don't usually plug random JBO sides. And yet here's the rousing big beat of Dylan Rhymes with all the saturated acid burbles you relish from Better Living Through Chemistry, keeping the label engaged with its Planet Dust past. No, nothing particularly revelatory on its own but it's at least more Propellerheads than Crystal Method and swarms valiantly at the end of JBO: A Perspective 1988-1998 (right before "Moaner" comes in to decimate everything).

Slacker's "Scared (The Lonely Traveller)" does the house breaks thing too and was something for XL to entertain themselves with as they prepared for The Fat of the Land. Its upturned 1990 ambient breakdown of indeterminate distractions and unsettling, adjust-your-senses sample of a fearful young woman ("I don't like what's going in the world, I'm scared more than drugs") was atypical territory for the label (if one ignores past triumphs like "Weather Experience") if not quite "Mr Kirk's Nightmare" flippant.

Pizzicatata

After its 'dream' variant, the emergent trance sound of mainland Europe in 1996/97 was the use of pizzicato string refrains, a flexible template that could result in records that were spirited, sullen or anywhere between. Many credit Faithless' "Salva Mea" as the instigator, before they then writ it larger on "Insomnia" (yes, that), leading to all sorts of pundits trying it for themselves from Sash! to Disco Citizens, often with much crossover success, and compare with the continent's immediate soundalikes of "What Time Is Love?" almost a decade earlier to realise how this is club culture in good health (the will to expand on a great new sound). Usually known as pizzicato prog (because it's often more accurately a strain of progressive house than trance, and no, now is not the time to defend that poorly-named music as a whole from dissenters' easy shots) it was identifiably enough a thing to form the template of a host of compilations (particularly in Germany), but like most developments in this world it has yet to be usefully written about. When will we get an Energy Flash for all the 90s dance that wasn't so critically probed?

Red 5's "I Love You...Stop!", released by Multiply and among the most forgotten number 11 hits of the whole decade, marks one of a few brushes with the style here. It's very much a close cousin of DJ Quicksilver's "Bellissima" in its strings exuding a very glacial, almost stately texture (for an unlikely comparison my mind is going to Simple Minds' peak 1981-84 Big Music), essentially post-minimalism as dance music (am I losing you yet?) to the point where everything else on the record seems a necessary afterthought (even the title – the only thing sung in the song, albeit without the ellipsis so it bleeds into one "Iloveyerstah!" leitmotif – puts 'feeling' over any inherent meaning). Follow-up single "Lift Me Up", remember that one? No?

When building my library of Now albums as a boy, and particularly from when I discovered Pink Planet Games Exchange in 2005, it was fascinating to buy older editions and marvel at all those enigmatic dance artists, usually at the back of the second disc where Ashley Abram typically hoovered up odds and ends having got past the big and almost-as-big hitters. Browsing the booklet of Now 37 ahead of playing the music I wondered who these Orbital stick figures next to the fancy car were (CD2 track 16) and particularly who Brainbug, next on the disc, could be. His monochrome visage was that of a, well, brain bug, or some sort of Mars Attacks!ish alien clad menacingly in sci-fi trousers besides a plinth of atomic energy, ominously clawing towards some unseen lifeform. The track was called "Nightmare". What was I in for?

When trance gets a bit stupid, not only aware of its grandeur but celebratory of it, it gets really good. In its charting Sinister Strings Mix (although other remixes, like the fantastic Synergetic, don't distract from its core appeal too much), "Nightmare", as playful as pizzicato gets, is case in point. It's camp gothic horror, a suspenseful B-movie terror symphony (with the sharp string note familiar to Positiva trance) throwing itself over a rubbery bass part that sounds like your scared heartbeat as you hide from the unseen threat. The video plays up to it, all grainy black & white 50s budget horror trailers with plastic brains and what not.

'Ard 'ouse and other nuttiness

Coming into 1997 hard house and associated sounds (nu-NRG etc.) were in very fine shape, the unifying scenes now very vast and long-since freed from being strictly bound to the roots of hardbag (Tony De Vit even had his own Kiss show, and see his Kiss Mix 97 disc for parallels). The Difference released on the Netherlands' Blue Limited and their "Funny Walker", here in its most popular Tweeky & Funk-ky Remix, is mad stupid – a knowingly obnoxious acid whir going on an adventure in sound as it repeats with Fatboy-esque mischief in all different directions. Think of how "Poing" or Winx's "Don't Laugh" play unrelentingly with their gimmicky noises and you'll have some idea, but think also of "Dooms' Night", the way its dissonant propellers speed up and disappear into a beatless, momentum-keeping mid-section then back out again, and hear how the same thing more or less happens here three years earlier.

Manifesto were licensed a particular favourite of mine. "Go with the Flow" is something of a minor classic for Loop Da Loop, aka Nicolas Dresti, with its delightful '97-as-fuck acid techno synths and a pitch-altered B-boy (MC Duke's "I'm Riffin", as also used on Criminal Minds' "Baptised by Dub") hollering his thing just like with the better-remembered Porn Kings' "Up to No Good" or Klubbheads' "Klubbhopping" (their name always makes me imagine them with giant inflatable clubs on their heads, or even for heads), or even "Tha Wildstyle", Dresti's earlier classic as DJ Supreme. The only proper hit he achieved as LDL, 1999's "Hazel" (remember that one? No?), marvelously wove his indelicacies into Mint Royale-type party big beat.

Lorraine Cato's "Love On & On" is likably remixed here (in an "Element of Surprise Dub") by E-Motion of naughty north/sexy south semi-fame but is more conventional than the hybrid of rave nostalgia and hardbag that they were coalescing just a year earlier. Baby Doc's remix of NRG's "Never Lost His Hardcore" is a lot more successful and, as the name suggests, remembers 1992 very fondly and sees no reason why those menacing rave hoovers (think Nebula II) should be disinfected and discarded when they still have the power to turn your blood to sludge. Carl Younge and Slipmatt get a turn with "Can You Feel the Heat", once again one for a swarm of extreme Pump Panel noise.

More house and more still

Funky house, which was slowly becoming house's dominant style in the charts and the clubs, pervades the first disc, and while typically demonstrating his well-honed garage smarts, Todd Terry's "Something's Goin' On" continues the disco flirtations that were unavoidable on "Keep on Jumpin'", the humble result being as '99 Soulsearcher as it is Full Intention. The no-frills "Heaven on Earth" (Spellbound via Dilion & Dickins) is speedy deep funk with a punchbag beat (allow for some oceanic ambience), "pure" dance music which proceeds very easily into Nush's remix of Sara Parker's "My Love Is Deep", almost the same track but with a song attached. "Satisfied (Take Me Higher)" by H2O then undoes the tunefulness and we are back in tracky, emphasise-the-bass matter, something that couldn't be emphasised more than it is on the 'Rocksteady Dub' of Problem Kidz' "Misbehavin'", a filter-house groove that priorities its hissing bass so ahead of anything else it's practically all there is to take from it, likewise the Higher State mix of Koolword Productions' "Invader" (by this point the 'funk' has inevitably disappeared).

More pop-leaning, if still rather stripped back, are cuts like Mr Spring's "Break It" and the Cold Crystal Mix of ORN's "Snow", a quite simple track from the late Deconstruction staple. The melody isn't very elaborate, and the builds are where you'd expect them, yet all this understatedness evenly combines for a fetching seven minutes of house, one of my favourite moments on the whole compilation (although only three minutes are used), so it evidently knows what it's doing. Tin Tin Out, one of those production duos who could completely change their sound at a second's notice if necessary (I do hopefully plan to write about them separately at some point, not least because they were to release of the year's best singles), make an appearance remixing some intensity into the otherwise not-terribly-interesting "Legends" from the second Sacred Spirit album (which operated under the idea of being a 'cultureclash' but to its credit is more listenable than your Enigmas and what not).

My friend always considered Hondy's near-titular "Hondy (No Access)" among his favourite songs, and I agree that it's an exquisite lost gem of 90s Euro-drama, unfortunately a modest flop (reaching number 26) when tried out as a single in spring 1997 (having been first issued as "No Axess" in 1995). The singer (who is she?) and her falsetto bellows ("HonnnDYYYYY") are as striking as they would be on any record, while the breathy verses, where she (sounding not unlike the Kylie Minogue of 1997 – if it wasn't for that chorus yodel this would fit perfectly onto Impossible Princess) visits different places in search of something, only to get no access, are meaningless but importantly they don't sound meaningless. Hondy, aka Souled Out, were later to combine with fellow Italian act Kamasutra to become Planet Funk, whose 2001 hit "Chase the Sun" is one of the greatest records of the last 20 years.

Disc two is a thoroughly trance-ridden affair (save for the hard house and adjacent music already covered) but there's still the odd exception. Every now and then, Tall Paul (usually under a pseudonym like Camisra or Escrima) would break the Top 40 with a track that owed very little to pop, but his "Rock Da House" here is comparatively melodic (justabouts) and its overdriven surface foreshadows mid-00s electro house (which is to say it and the typically minimal vocal combine for an almost 80s simplicity. Or would if it weren't for the rave cheer and, very Alex Party, those melt-in-the-mouth CZ-101 organs).

Trance nation

As suggested, the second disc homes mostly trance, by 1997 the red blood cells of European clubland. Ariel's "Deep (I'm Falling Deeper)", as remixed by Red Jerry, has shades of "Go" and a slightly melancholic underswell that subsists into Disco Citizens' essaying of Lucy Drayton's "To Be Loved", which balances its speed with ethereal, lost-in-reverb-space vocals and ambient hums (very much part of trance's dream pop sector, if not actually dream trance). B.B.E.'s "Flash" was a departure from the vague, echoing ricochets of "Seven Days and One Week" and instead a melodic glance forward to the world of System F, while Ascension's "Someone" is standard issue Perfecto, with some Grace piano (they appear themselves with "Hand In Hand") and a yearning, cooing Joanna Law, also the voice of Way Out West's "The Gift" (and who tried out a solo career at the start of the decade in the post-Soul II Soul vein), but is not among the label's greatest releases. Whereas I've always been weirdly fond of "Shine" by the Space Brothers, which isn't all that different (I'll put this down to its sonar melody).

"Café del Mar" is bloody "Café del Mar". To those into trance you either find it overplayed or you're like many who have ever bought a Ministry of Sound compilation, or listened to Essential Mix, or been to a trance night, and consider it holy writ. Or you're me, someone who does really like it, just not to those venerated levels. Obviously it's the Three 'N One remix here, that which has had many lives (including only a year later upon re-release, hence why it's on both '97 and '98 dance anthologies), and the edit's greatest move is how there is little ambient build before suddenly it is just there, that plucked arpeggio (yet more pizzicato) playing to infinity. I've never even been to a nightclub (no, honestly! I'll probably explain it all someday) but even a track that's so obviously made to be experienced with many other lifelivers around you sounds immersive enough alone in my ears (trance of this sort, big tasteless crashes et al, does gesture on a huge scale, like Jim Steinman gone to Ibiza). The music video, which is saturated-to-heck and has white flashes to change shots, is the most 90s video ever made.

The previous Club Mix opened with David Morales' remix of U2's "Discotheque" but none of the remaining Pop remixes (of which there were many) featured on any of the year's mainstream dance compilations (nor indeed anything from Pop itself. Wot, no "Mofo"?) But just as with prior U2 covers from Clivillés and Cole and Mica Paris, never mind mid-90s not-quite-samples-Island-won't-have-that classics "Only You" and "Landslide", it was often other artists bringing "dance U2" to the charts rather than the group itself. "With or Without You" appears courtesy of Mary Kiani, formerly of The Time Frequency (who famously sold loads of records in Scotland but not south of the border, leading to some middling chart positions). Many won't recall her earlier hits (and this one stalled at number 46) but the tech-trance remix here virtually does away with the song altogether, even its chord progression, and frankly who cares when we have those lovely rolls of piano-house taking us back to the days of Balearic beat (at this point we are still seven years off LMC "Take Me to the Clouds Above", for those asking at the back).

Best of all is Vincent de Moor's "Flowtation". I mean it better deliver the goods if its to crib its name from the Grid's "Floatation", which in its Subsonic Grid Mix is my favourite dance track of all time. But it was good enough for XL (!) to release it in a rare moment of trance on its territory, so you figure they'd only want to touch the most credible imports within that enormous field. With its seamless ebbs and flows and an easily-created feeling of wonder that so much trance tries so hard to conjure it is rightly a classic among 'the community' and deserved to crossover here, although it never actually did. Note, I'm talking about the original mix (the version featured), because the radio mix has singing by one Luciana who tries her hardest to turn it into a 2002 Ian Van Dahl single for no good reason at all.

The compilation ends with a dense recasting of CJ Bolland's "The Prophet", one of those strange nightclub-as-church sermon tracks that comes along every now and then (cf. Fatboy Slim's "Drop the Hate", Eddie Amador's "Rise") – note also the "come with me" refrain and think of Special D. What goes around comes around – and finally the noisy Andy Ling mix of Sunscreem's "Catchy", a bunch of squiggly acid that, to link back with the start of the disc, keeps some unmissable melancholia in its blank spaces.

A word on the rival

The roughly equivalent rival release, albeit issued a month later, was In the Mix 97 3. There are only several records in common ("Closer Than Close", "Fly Life" and a different mix of "Nightmare") and helps go some way towards completing the story. "Ecuador" is as bonkers as ever, "the Age of Love" a time-starting 12", "Block Rockin' Beats" enormously influential in my life and Airscape's sublime "Pacific Melody" where I may have liked to have ended this piece. When there is so much happening in single, or specifically 12"-oriented, music at any one time, there's many signals to receive and examine. As someone far removed in time (born just months later), I love how, thanks to the abundance of compilations like these, a project like Join the Dots, formatted the way it is, can go back in time and stick it's misshapen antenna out.

Betty Boo - Grrr! It's Betty Boo (1992)

If you, like me, watched the 1990 (and start of 1991) Top of the Pops reruns on BBC Four, seeing Betty Boo stride her way through "Doin' the Do", "Where Are You Baby" and "24 Hours" will have been among your highlights of the TOTP year. The Kensington star was 1990's great pop hope, and her songs made it sound like there was no more fun job in the world than being Betty Boo (and surely, she beat even the Boo Radleys in turning that word 'boo' into a catchphrase/insignia). Like Monie Love, she was one of the early successful British female rappers, but her world wasn't really hip hop – it was combining her plastic raygun raps (about all things Boo! Independence and fun, having a great life) with melting pot dance-pop and the instant appeal of many of the 60s classics she grew up with. She successfully debuted, like Cathy Dennis, in 1989 as guest vocalist to a DJ (the Beatmasters' "Hey DJ") and then proceeded to record an album. Boomania presented everything Betty Boo was about and I won't hesitate to call one of the greatest of all pop albums – just so teeming with life, even on an instrumental (!) like "Boo's Boogie".

Two of its best songs, however, were atypical and laid out other courses. The sublime "Don't Know What to Do", an abrupt move away from rap, remains her best song and a real 90s lost classic; her ethereal vocals would not shame a great shoegaze album, while the music's fanciable streams of house see Pete Tong favourites Futureshock on the horizon (at a decade's distance). Overall it foresees Bilinda Butcher guesting on Collapsed Lung's "Ballad Night" in 1996. The following song, "Shame", is essentially French house being invented years ahead of schedule (in particular the Motorbass end of the spectrum); it is the only thing on the album that wouldn't have made any sense as a single, too ambiguous to be properly commercial – note the "Family Affair" drum machine, remember what that song's about, and consider how the permeating non-clarity here twice makes room for a blunted bit of 'ardkore rave menace circa '92. There is almost some threat there, likewise on the closing "Leave Me Alone", but everything else on the album snuffs it out.

Boomania was ultimately a huge success in Britain. She was a pop and indie darling (Melody Maker's "Completely Faultless Goddess and Pop Genius of the Year") and couldn't have fit more perfectly in 1990, the year of multihued optimism and positivity in pop (cf. Beats International, Deee-Lite, the Beloved, Soul II Soul, De La Soul, Definition of Sound, Snap! and so many others). In the aftermath of our second summer of love (not to mention reception from around the world, i.e. Mandela, the fall of the wall etc.), pop was in its daisy age. As Rebel MC sang in his greatest hit, from March of that year, "let's make this world a better place". Boomania's crayon-drawn world can be heard directly impacting hits like Twenty4Seven's "Are You Dreaming?" and Jason Donovan's "I'm Doing Fine" (which I know you hate, but regardless). It seemed like everything great in pop was in discussion with each other. So what had changed by 1992 for her second album, Grrr! It's Betty Boo, to completely pale in comparison?

Lead-off single "Let Me Take You There" was hopeful enough a success, peaking at number 12 in the late summer. Adopting, and then skewing, the template of the Four Tops' "It's All in the Game", it was a decisive curveball for a 'comeback', happily swooning in an imagined 1960s far more serene than the go-go booted, Ready Steady Go! spirals of 1990 Betty. Born March 1970, she was maybe the first singer or musician to weave 60s psychedelic pop signifiers into her music while completely removed from any memory of the actual decade – although I note Jordan Knight of New Kids on the Block, who recorded an even more unlikely Pepper pastiche "Tonight" as their own entry into buoyant 1990 pop, wasn't a 60s baby either. But unlike their effort (more ELO than anything), "Let Me Take You There" did very much exist in the now now, successfully sprinkling some "Pet Sounds" (the instrumental breakdown apes it wholesale) into one promising emergent strain of American R&B (think "Summertime"), with a post-baggy breakbeat melting into the sun-heated sand below.

The result is some instantly loveable sunshine pop not unlike the sort that Saint Etienne were beginning to make (how about "Avenue" for mining new elements in the fountain of 1967). But perhaps it gave off a more 'adult' façade; on Now 23 it slips snugly between Vanessa Paradis' "Be My Baby" and Sophie B. Hawkins' "Damn I Wish I Was Your Lover" in the downtempo end of disc two, whereas on Now 18 she was in more obviously lively company (even if that company included Bombalurina, but you catch my drift). Not that Now track sequencing means anything, but it's often in pop that great critical weight put into a slight change in image, and the 'new' Betty had long hair instead of a bob cut, leopard prints instead of space age colours (some time before Austin Powers or the bachelor pad lounge 'revival'). 1992 was a brilliant year for pop, but not much about its greatest sound – the lunacy of Altern-8, SL2 and the like – really sounds or even looks like 1990. The KLF had been and gone, Madchester had petered out and pop's heavyweights had changed. Whatever angle you want to try and perhaps hopelessly grasp for, ultimately Grrr! spent its solitary week in the charts at number 62. Vangelis, Izzy Stradlin and the New Fast Automatic Daffodils all had higher charting debuts that week.

Still, the abrupt public disinterest was, no surprise, more the product of bigwigs. WEA had already under-promoted the second single "I'm On My Way", which blindly entered at number 44 and stayed there. If the label hadn't already stopped caring about Betty, they certainly had when they inevitably dropped her months later. In 1994, Madonna (who had the second highest debut that week with Erotica, and there are parallels) wished to sign her to Maverick, calling Grrr! "horribly overlooked" in her Paul Du Noyer Q interview whilst adorned in an outfit of the period given to her personally by Betty. She considered the offer, but (again like Cathy Dennis in due time) found that she had more joy writing for others, and you know how that turned out. Not only that, but her mother fell ill and she naturally spent years prioritising nursing her. Not that it was goodbye forever; in later times she has joined Chesney Hawkes as 90s pop stars on the 80s nostalgia circuit, and there was her brief alliance with Alex James in 2006 as the one-song WigWam (although their typically strained Popworld interview is more memorable than the song itself).

Given that Cherry Red later gave it the deluxe treatment, many side with Madonna on Betty's premature final album, and as is obvious from my covering it here I'm among them. At 39 minutes Grrr! It's Betty Boo was a concentrated refinement of her style; slicker but at no cost to her avidity. Boo's central collaborator was John Coxon, now shorn of production duo King John (who handled much of Boomania) and soon to join Spiritualized as guitarist-keyboardist, and if there's any one new card that's repeatedly played it's his rinky-dink keyboards, just the right sort of cartoon embellishing to further hook you on the songs' affability. It's the very first sound you hear, opening the aforesaid "I'm on My Way". With its human cat noises and "Lady Madonna" piano/sax outro (Ronnie Scott, Harry Klein, Bill Povey and Bill Jackman, the players from the original track, all coming back to re-record it), the song is of course all spark (and provides one of the least obvious new contexts for the Beatles in 1990s pop), enough to show her clingy partner that he can't hope to ever complement it, to ever respect what she wants to do ("It should be understood that I said 'no', it's not my problem if you can't let go"). She's navigating her own way forward, recognising when it's necessary to change things.

Life continues to look up on "Thing Goin' On", and even though "Hangover" and "Curly & Girly" are both about cheating exes, Betty dismisses them a smile – there's no hurt and they're just good stories to tell. The good humour and unassuming confidence are integral to Betty's outlook on life, so even when, mid-way through the album, she spends a song 'wishing you were here', contentment can still be achieved anyway. She could convince you alone but the music makes especially clear how much fun she's having; the chain of human animal noises on "Thing Goin' On" are arranged like a swing rhythm, whilst "Hangover" brings out the synth strings and steel guitars for a chamber-country pop setting (even allowing the guitars to attempt inventing Hawaiian shoegaze in the instrumental break). "Curly & Girly", on the other hand, is a twelve-bar dance-pop blues, "Where Are You Baby" rewritten with harmonicas. The album's gentle creativity, much like that of the first album, should not be overlooked.

"Wish You Were Here", as well as the later "Gave You the Boo" and "Catch Me", reveal her other primary new direction, a sort of Smash Hits-goes-garage house (where the Erotica connection mostly comes in), and while the former two are still a relative hybrid of that with Betty's typical speed raps, the entirely-sung "Catch Me" could have been released on Strictly Rhythm (play back to back with, say, "Partay Feeling"), even with its momentary discursive details (like the icy tickles of 303 acid that run down the second verse). It's an easy fit and it is entirely possible that Betty would have continued this direction and scored a few Loni Clark-size hits if she'd made it to 1994. Album highlight "Skin Tight", on the other hand, is +8 speed electronic ska, including Skatalites/Prince Buster chk-a-chk-as crossed with a rigid video game bassline (and is that Inspiral Carpets' foppish organ put to absurd use in there too?) This is all despite it being a vignette of nightlife, as it was unlikely you'd hear a skank like this in Kensington, insofar as it practically invents its own template. There is the transatlantic comparison of what another 22-year-old woman, Gwen Stefani, was doing to ska via pop earlier in the year with No Doubt's first album, but it closer resembles sped-up Rebel MC & Double Trouble, while in its chronicling of a girl's night out it puts Girls Aloud (you imagine they were all fans) through one voice (appropriately, she co-wrote a few of their early songs).

While her luckiness-in-love has gone up and down for much of the album, she believes she's found it on "Catch Me" and has it confirmed on "Close the Door", the closing song and biggest sonic departure. Sure its speak-whisper and jazzy breaks means Grrr! finishes in a manner not unlike Erotica and "Secret Garden", but in the song's humid meld of trip hop beats and R&B it is remarkable how much it reflects what was not quite yet the blossoming of neo-soul; it could fit easily onto Joi's The Pendulum Vibe, an album from 1994 whose importance, or rather the depths of it, would not yet be apparent for some time. As the final song on the final Betty Boo album it comes off as a final, self-assured 'I'm better than my label anyway' – you dropped a singer doing stuff like this? – and even if the record was ignored, it's confident enough that it being so good matters more. By the time pop came to, say, Lily Allen, you can specifically observe some of her world of agency and merriment, one via the other and vice versa. And listen to her flow on things like "Skin Tight" and then go check your Mis-Teeq CDs. Boomania is ultimately the better and perhaps more prophetic record, but that is to take nothing away from Grrr! It's Betty Boo and its own way of expanding on what made Boo so distinctive. "In case you didn't know," she comments mid-rap on "Gave You the Boo", "respect is free; I gave you enough time to get it on with me".

Eddy Grant - Walking on Sunshine (1978)

Thanks to the labile ways of the nostalgia machine, with the likes of Radio 2, Heart and the like deciding what gets to be remembered (why else mainstream 'forgotten 80s' projects that cover such obscure gems as "Cruel Summer" or "Let's Go All the Way"?), it would seem many in Britain are decided on Eddy Grant as something of a lightweight pop-reggae hit maker from the 80s who works best on the radio or compilations during the summer. “Electric Avenue”, “I Don’t Wanna Dance” and “Gimme Hope Jo’anna”: these are apparently all perfect to slot in between “Don’t Turn Around” and “Rat in Mi Kitchen”. Some will also point out that “he used to be in the Equals... You know, ‘Baby Come Back’...” These songs, for ease of convenience, are so often branded as reggae despite them mostly drawing from other music on Grant's antenna. "Baby Come Back", meanwhile, was good old beat music with a persuasive undertow of ska, but Pato Banton’s dancehall version has infiltrated public memory. And never mind that “Jo’anna” was an angry anti-apartheid record. A wider context on what Grant does is never really provided.

Unhelpfully, radio typically avoids Grant’s first UK solo hit, “Living on the Frontline”, a song of international unrest that, suitably, was heard and reacted to internationally. It watches the world from a nervous-to-say-the-least disposition, perched at the edge, the frontline, but unable to intervene in the gang violence in Africa, the drug dealing and corruption he isn't quite touching but is there right before him. He incessantly repeats "Oh mama, mama, you got me living in the frontline" like someone pacing round and round in circles in either a search for clarity or, conversely, to delay the inevitable (because shit won't do; "Me no want to take cocaine, oh, to block off my brain"). It was very anomalous within the 1979 charts (where it became the best song to ever peak at number 11 – honest, I did a top 100 list) and the discos that helped it become popular to begin with (via, as you might expect, DJs like Chris Hill).

But it got there because it was wise enough to marry its blurry distress with a hell of a paranoid groove. It drones for six minutes over a sparse electronic rhythm that hints at reggae and disco but isn't completely either, leaves its creaky spaces to a doleful organ, a bare guitar solo like the era's arena rock lost in a fog far from home and defeated doo-wop chants, and marks each bar (each cycle) with a squidgy, proto-303 "wab wab wab wab" that is acid house ten years before acid house. It sounded positively leftfield (said Smash Hits' Cliff White, and yes, the Wikipedia article was my work) and, much like Hot Chocolate's "Put Your Love in Me", Heatwave's "Put the Word Out" or the Real Thing's "Can You Feel the Force?", it (in its own inimitable way) did as much to build pathways from disco to the future of British music almost innocuously. Maybe you can DANCE your paranoia away, it seemed to suggest. Of course Chris Hill was wanted to release it on Ensign (already home to Light of the World at this point).

And yet, despite being recorded in Stamford Hill, neither the song, nor its parent album Walking on Sunshine, were originally intended for release in Britain. Grant's public profile had swindled since he left the Equals in 1972 and he subsequently became an unlikely musical entrepreneur (the full extent as to why will become obvious later on in this piece). Chiefly important was establishing Ice Records, a groundbreaking, proto-world label dedicated primarily to a smorgasbord of Caribbean music (typically artists produced by Grant himself) which has never had its due. The label was hugely popular in the Caribbean and also parts of Africa, particularly Nigeria, and he catered the release of his second solo record, 1977's Message Man, specifically to them. Like Walking on Sunshine, it was pure hybrid-pop, absorbing and repurposing Grant's many tastes that were too 'fringe' here (a natural development on his time in the Equals, who jumped styles pretty rapidly and as such have never been easily categorised); "Hello Africa", carried over from his eponymous debut and cited as its most revelatory track (insofar as his biographers consider it a lightbulb moment in what was not yet named soca music), laid out where his heart was now laying.

But Walking on Sunshine, his 1978 third record, was cut in its tracks when the Nigerian government banned the importation of records. By that point it had already gone Gold, and Grant was lumbered with a further 10,000 copies he couldn't dish out (his whole business went no further than London). So he sent them to local record stores and that's how, pretty quickly in fact, the hip priests spotted its vivacious heatwave of a sleeve poking out (a very reggae-looking design, it must be said). "Frontline" was the favourite among its curious buyers and made its procession to London nightlife from there. The album was then re-released properly in the Britain, the US and other major markets in 1979, a full year on from its first release, via a deal with Epic, and this is more or less how Grant's 1980s second coming began, making dance-pop records that are too alive with the idea of possibility to concretely be any one 'thing'.

Walking on Sunshine lights Grant's mentality clearly enough. Almost every song holds onto a single chord or two, giving his every sound enough room to breathe and move. And yet despite the hit single, the album flopped (commercially anyway – I reckon the weeklies gave it the time of day, at least before forgetting about it forever). Given that people were already decided on Grant as 'reggae', and that there weren't exactly a lot of reggae on the albums chart, perhaps the perception was that "Frontline" was a one-off, a future classic that, like "Silly Games" (which was on the chart at the same time), made more sense to the wider British public as 'pop' – not quite the album reggae Penny Reel would be turning music heads onto. And yet within a year, the Clash were recording his old Equals side "Police on My Back", and "Electric Avenue" wasn't far behind, so Grant's time was coming. For those who actually heard the rest of Walking on Sunshine, there was enough evidence as to why it should be.

"Frontline" itself is half-halted on the album by Grant's freaky, wordless back-and-forth chorale section, a devious response to the world's systematic self-destruction. This begins "The Frontline Symphony", essentially a seven-minute coda to the song proper (meaning the same groove plays for 13 minutes. Are we sure this isn't disco? But for as long as things are heading into oblivion it could go on forever). The basic rhythm, wubs and everything, is kept as intact as a doomsday metronome, except pervading is the ominous, synthesised orchestra playing a disquieted symphony – classical music is now in Grant's vision, except he's not conjuring anything but his own continued agitation, so it's hardly Tomita's Snowflakes are Dancing. Regardless, as a seven minute prog-electronic piece, grand compositionally but spacious sonically, it envelopes past, present and future – looking back to Wendy Carlos' Moog cantatas, to the present day's minimal wave, and, via what remains of the first "Frontline", to the future's Phuture. But beyond all it sounds like Jerry Dammers locking heads with all of these things (it could practically pass as part of the gothic, end-of-all-life-itself Muzak on the latter's More Specials. 'Easy listening' as timebomb).

Suitably, there are no "Still Life"-style sweeps at its climax; instead the symphony has been eaten up, the whole thing rotting into an orange hum of spitting noise as if finally asphyxiated. The "Frontline" pair are positioned at the end of side one, so with that at its end you'd think side two would have no choice but to go somewhere else. But the only other song on side one – the opening title track – is really what balances "Frontline" and the rest of the album. "Living isn't everything," he sings, "but you know the feeling love can bring". His apprehension is there, but life will proceed. It's all about the reward in that uphill climb (quite literally; "Lead me to the mountain top, and we'll work until it's time to stop"), the will to go on, and to will others on ("I got to tell you that you doing fine, walking on sunshine"). It's as if "Frontline", as a hit single, leered concerned listeners to the album and having got them at that point Grant then instils all the necessary hope in them about things moving again.

Rather befittingly, "Walking on Sunshine" ended up the album's best known song, thanks to Arthur Baker unexpectedly breaking into the top five of 1983 (his year of all years) with his Peech Boys-inspired dub-garage-electro recasting (and I'll remind you how the primary influence, Baker's friend Larry Levan, played "Frontline" at the Paradise Garage pretty regularly). Part of what Baker heard in the track is it's easy dance groove, but it is maybe surprising that Grant's original might even be the one that better anticipates house; his slightly Latin rhythmic interplay is not miles off "Girls Out on the Floor", nor the underwater guitar line and mid-song bloops from mid-90s one-offs. But the almost Mutant Disco-like horns (which star in their own lengthy call-and-response section, as if almost jazz) underline how the song could easily have come out on ZE. At the very least, it almost invents Liquid Liquid. And as Record Mirror's James Hamilton noted at the time via his observation of an "almost Hi-Tension power", there are parallels with the then-nascent Britfunk, its energetic remodelling of disco-funk to a socially aware young Britain (and it was a genre with a lot of grassroots, much like Grant out here).

If my discussion of side one hasn't make it obvious enough, I consider Walking on Sunshine one of the most innovative and quietly impactful dance albums of its time. Some (not me) consider the second side to be weaker thematically (what, because it's about happiness found? People can be so boring), but Eddy's masterful ear for bringing together almost incongruent components until they've formed a unique sound continues. And really, "My Love, My Love" is not only some light relief after "The Frontline Symphony" but the album's best song and frankly one of the sweetest love songs I have or will ever hear. Essentially cross-breed soca pop, the strength in the joy its exudes is aided by its cheapness (that chintzy drum machine and squiggly organ playing to their hearts' content, like Timmy Thomas finding happiness!), and he sings the whole song like love is an epiphany he's only just had for the first time – how else could someone arrive at a chorus like the one it has? It absolutely refuses to keep a lid on itself, and is all the more loveable for it.

"Just Imagine I'm Loving You" is a tad more shaded – he's apart from his lover, with whom he wasn't treating as he should. Her mother still isn't keen on him but the girl'll 'just imagine' a happier time with him in her dreams as her pillow. It's all a little unsteady, so requires the audacious, watery arrangement Grant gives it, again on the dub-disco axis but this time a moonlit sway (the main bassline curiously reminds me of "Annie I'm Not Your Daddy", while the waterlily synths ensure even the mid-range sounds translucent). It's perhaps surprising that the track closest to lovers rock, and to conventional reggae, isn't a love song at all but "Dancing in Guyana", a slowing of the pace as Eddy reflects on his native country during a trip to Georgetown to see his girlfriend. Guyana is a place of animation ("they all say that's the way") that he's temporarily putting aside in order to put it into perspective, and how it seeps into not only the rest of the record but Grant's whole career. The castanets particularly jump out of the mix (as they always seem to in pop, cf. "World Leader Pretend"), but if they remind me of anything in that regard its, of all things, the almost free-form hand drums in "Zabadak!" by Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick & Tich, whose own globetrotting hits (that among them) can be partly seen as a precedent for what Grant was always trying to do.

"Say I Love You", the album's most popular song in Nigeria, is one final giddy love song to wrap up many of the record's routes. There is calypso and there is funk in its Rhodes organ and a lot of gradually-unfurling ecstasy (his many overdubbed adlibs and James Brown-esque whoas – there is no mistaking the genuine jubilance). Strange that the album doesn't end there, then, but with the shadowy and enigmatic "We Are", which exhibits a quietude so pronounced you may not notice it is easily the record's fastest song. A dolorous rock guitar, not unlike that of "Frontline", is the only really accent colouring. Otherwise, its minimal funk with a repeating, unifying chant: "We are the sunshine, we are the light, we are the love in our hearts, we are the land". But it's so far back in the mix and drenched with so much echo its ungraspable, a thought that's still just over the horizon. Much of the 'song' is dedicated to wordless vocal drift from the chant, a rather sinister cloud in the sky. So the determination of the beat is you figure why we will get 'there'.

As a marriage of dancefloor funk with a social chant it develops on what Brass Construction proposed as much as a lot of Britfunk did (and as a fusion of dance music and a uniting chant it again sees house on the horizon – imagine the lyric as a bit of nightclub or rave euphoria in sample form), but what of all the dust in its receptors? Slow it down and you might even have something close to Massive Attack (the vocals give me the same uneasiness as the post-Whitfield strings on Blue Lines). It ultimately is one of the many ways in which Walking on Sunshine was without real precedent.

But there's something about it I've ignored. Grant played almost every instrument himself – apart from a bit of percussion on a few songs and the “Loving You” piano – and did it all in his own studio, with himself as engineer and producer, for his own label. He even had the record pressed at his own plant. This makes one want to put him in the same lineage as Roy Wood or Todd Rundgren – one-man-band studio boffins who saw pop as a mapless journey, to reshape history and history-to-come as they saw fit (the extent Eddy went, taking care of business as well, has parallels in one end of punk but also today's Bandcamp pop). With Walking on Sunshine his experimental spirit caught up with his pop pedigree and burst out in all new hues and styles. Think of 'anything goes' fusions between Caribbean music and the rest of pop to come, like Dennis Bovell's Brain Damage (1981), not to mention the concurrent meld of reggae into post-punk, and it seems particularly potent. How it has remained so overlooked may never be too clear (as if the world wasn't yet willing to catch up itself; 'walk on, sunshine'), but it is among the greatest albums of its decade – relevant, inviting music that constructs its own connections to what lay before it, casting its sun on you.