Electronic Club Dance
1975: Kraftwerk appear on Tomorrow's World
The germinating moment for British dance music occurred, strangely, in a 1975 edition of Tomorrow's World, which featured four young Germans dressed like geography teachers, apparently playing camping stoves with wired-up knitting needles. This was Kraftwerk performing Autobahn.
"The sounds are created in their studio in Dusseldorf," presenter Raymond Baxter explained, "then reprogrammed and then recreated onstage with the minimum of fuss." Here was the entire electronic ethic in one TV clip: the rejection of rock's fake spontaneity, the fastidious attention to detail, the Europhile slickness, the devotion to rhythm. It was sublime.
When Kraftwerk toured Britain later in 1975, David Bowie's patronage ensured a long line of followers from OMD to Underworld. Not that everything they planned came to fruition. "Next year, Kraftwerk hope to eliminate the keyboard altogether," Baxter told us, "and create jackets with electronic lapels that can be played by touch". It could still happen.
1977: Donna Summer's I Feel Love
If it felt like the sound of tomorrow in 1977, now it just sounds timeless.
Summer's multi-tracked voice floats over a kick drum, an arpeggiated bassline and sumptuous synths, with Giorgio Moroder's sublime production at the heart of this record. It was one of the first to fully utilise the potential of electronics, replacing lush disco orchestration with the hypnotic precision of machines.
1981 Tadao Kikumoto invents the Roland TB-303
Running parallel to the history of dance is the history of music technology: software such as Cubase, Logic and Reason, and hardware like the Akai MPC-60, Kaoss Pads and the Yamaha DX7 have all had a hand in shaping the genre, as much as Stratocasters and four-tracks did for rock.
One of the first boxes to define the sound of electronic dance music was the Roland TB-303 Bassline. Roland engineer Tadao Kikumoto's machine is a happy accident: not great at doing what it was designed to do (simulate the sound of a bass guitar), but brilliant once it got into the right (wrong) hands.
Production stopped in 1984 because the target audience was disappointed with the lack of realism. But its thrilling, squelchy, endlessly tweakable sound was perfect for the emerging house and techno scene check Phuture's Acid Tracks from 1987 (below) it could only have been written on a machine. Even though you can now replicate the 303's sound on inexpensive music programs, the original rarely eBays for less than £1,200.
1981 Frankie Knuckles 'invents' house music
One night in 1981, Chicago DJ Frankie Knuckles was driving through the city's suburbs with a friend when he saw a sign in a bar window: "We play house music." "Now, what's that all about?" he asked. "It means music like you're playing at the Warehouse," his friend replied. And that's how Knuckles realised he'd inadvertently invented a new genre.
Knuckles had begun his residency at the Westside club in 1977 at the height of disco fever, but by 1980 a backlash had swept the craze away. Knuckles began playing obscure imports and re-editing oddball disco records for maximum dance floor impact. The crowd, overwhelmingly black and gay, went nuts for this new style, which became known as "house" as the new underground style spread to clubs across the city. Knuckles and fellow pioneer Ron Hardy's merging of Salsoul classics with mutant disco, electro and European synth-pop paved the way for the first tailor-made house tracks in 1984. Six years later, Knuckles proudly described his creation as "disco's revenge".
1983 New Order release Blue Monday
"How does it feel, to treat me like you do?" Bernard Sumner's deadpan vocal introduced what was to become the biggest-selling 12-inch of all time.
Did it really start as a test-pattern for the band's new Oberheim DMX? Did they just write it so they'd have a song they could use as an encore while they walked off stage?
The video for the follow-up single, Confusion, makes it clear just how much they were influenced by clubbing at the time, hanging out with producer Arthur Baker in New York and playing the FunHouse in shorts and espadrilles.
1983-5 Detroit gives birth to techno
Technically, Detroit techno was born down the road in suburban Belleville, where chief architects Juan Atkins, Derrick May and Kevin Saunderson met in high school. By 1985, Atkins had his own label, Metroplex.
If Motown had been aspirational, then Metroplex, and the Transmat and KMS labels set up by May and Saunderson, were the sound of a future snatched away by industrial collapse. Kraftwerk, George Clinton and 80s synth-pop were influences but the melancholy undertow was all Detroit.
1987 Steve 'Silk' Hurley's Jack Your Body is No 1 in the UK
While Farley "Jackmaster" Funk's Love Can't Turn Around had climbed to No 10 in 1986, it was in 1987 that dance stormed the charts. Steve "Silk" Hurley's Jack Your Body (see below) was the first to hit No 1.
It arrived with no promotion, a video that was cut from old black and white films and barely any lyrics. The similarly anonymous Pump Up the Volume by M/A/R/R/S (below) also charted at No 1 on 27 September one of the first singles to exploit the possibilities of sampling.
Also among 1987's dance hits were Frankie Knuckles's Your Love and Coldcut's Say Kids What Time is It .
1987 A summer in Amnesia inspires a generation of DJs
What do you bring home with you from holiday? Wacky shirts? Some local booze? For Brit DJs Nicky Holloway, Paul Oakenfold, Danny Rampling and Johnny Walker, it was a whole musical way of life that was to revitalise youth culture for years to come. They spent the summer of 1987 soaking up the sun and uplifting balearic "anything goes" attitude played by DJ Alfredo, the resident at Ibiza's Amnesia club. They took the party back home with them, and acid house was born:
1988-89 The Second Summer of Love
Confusingly, the Second Summer of Love was really two summers. The first, 1988, was the warm-up as acid house graduated from hipster secret to the dominant sound of British clubland. A year later, it went viral. The implied comparison to 1967 may have been wishful thinking, but it was nonetheless a lifestyle revolution for young Britons. The old nightlife hierarchies were temporarily obliterated as unlicensed raves and affordable ecstasy promised state-of-the-art hedonism for all, not just the in-crowd, even if police raids and scamming promoters took some of the shine off it.
The top 40 enjoyed its most utopian phase since the Beatles assured All You Need Is Love, with producers such as S'Express and the KLF becoming stars thanks to cheap samplers and can-do chutzpah.
The Happy Mondays spearheaded Madchester, and even hip-hop, via De La Soul, seemed to sign up to a new idealism. Like the first Summer of Love, it seems somewhat naive in retrospect, but its shockwaves reshaped British youth culture for good.
1989 Turn on, Tune in, Chill out
A couple of years after the Second Summer of Love, the chill-out room was as much a draw as the main dance floor. The Orb, initially made up of Jimmy Cauty of the KLF and Alex Paterson, were the chief pioneers here, already with cult singles to their name when Paul Oakenfold recruited Paterson to DJ at his London club night Land of Oz. Soon, they were on ToTP playing chess and dressed as astronauts, allusions to the psychedelic whimsy of the 60s all too obvious.
1991 Aphex Twin's first single Bubblebath released by Mighty Force records
It's a familiar story through dance music, from Manchester's Eastern Bloc to Glasgow's Rubadub and Berlin's Hardwax: independent record shops acting as a kind of unofficial youth club for musicians and DJs who spend hours hanging out in the record racks, and then starting labels.
Exeter's Mighty Force had a good hit rate, releasing the first ever Aphex Twin record (which also featured Global Communication's Tom Middleton), and Matthew Herbert's Fog City debut, as well as employing Modaji's Dominic Jacobson and helping the early career of Basement Jaxx's Felix Buxton.
1994 Orbital converts Glastonbury to dance music
You barely notice pivotal moments when they're happening. Not so at the Glastonbury festival on the night of Saturday 25 June 1994 when the NME Stage experimented with dance music in the face of an indie crowd still skeptical of music without guitars. I remember dragooning a parade of dehydrated, disoriented walking wounded into yomping across baked earth with the exhortation: you have to see Orbital.
The show was a revelation that changed the nature of the festival. Brothers Paul and Phil Hartnoll played uncompromising, uncut, complex but fantastically thrilling electronics, their heads bobbing up and down inside their control tower with only their trademark torch spectacles visible like two extraterrestrials. Techno bled into drum'n'bass into dream-like abstract reveries, and some 40,000 people roared the Hartnolls on, bringing to life the paradox of dance music: there's nothing so human as machine music.
A year later Glastonbury had a Dance Tent. Now it has a whole Dance Village, with a host of stages catering for everything from techno to dubstep, drum'n'bass to future garage, acid house, disco, soul and funk, with headliners such as Fatboy Slim playing alongside Carl Cox, Pete Tong and the Chemical Brothers.
1995 Goldie releases Timeless
Drum'n'bass and its near-cousin jungle had been bubbling under in clubs in Bristol and London for a few years. But for many people, Goldie's debut album, released on Pete Tong's FFRR label and blending the two genres with atmospheric strings and vocals, was the first exposure to the impossibly fast drum rolls and sub-bass frequencies that made it such an exciting diversion from the solid four-to-the-floor 120bpm that had characterised house music. His track Terminator, released under the name Metalheadz in 1992, was a hit in the jungle scene and is noted for pioneering the use of time stretching.
1999 Moby licenses every track on Play. Ker-ching!
For advertisers and film-makers, using popular music as a soundtrack has long been shorthand for modernity. And thanks to vague or nonexistent lyrics, electronic music can mean almost anything to potential consumers.
Moby's fifth album was the first to license each track (Bodyrock, Honey, Why Does My Heart Feel So Bad?) to an ad, film or TV show and what began out of necessity the album stiffed on release soon became strategy for others as Play climbed to No 1, eventually shifting almost 10m copies.
1999 UK garage goes pop with Bo' Selecta!
Released in December 1999, Craig David's platinum-selling Re-Rewind finally marked garage's elevation into mainstream pop culture.
Before its corrosion and eventual demise garage was the sound of the second room at early 1990s jungle raves, and as the hungry junglists popped next door looking for something a bit quicker, garage stepped up the pace and became speed garage. Later in the 1990s, the variant that became known as UK garage, or two-step, emerged, generally attributed to the US producer Todd Edwards. The chief departure was away from the four-to-the-floor house rhythm, with the removal of the third kick drum beat creating a restless, shuffling effect, the syncopated snare and time- or pitch-shifted vocals generating an entirely different, new kind of dance floor urgency.
But UK garage was perhaps always destined to be a pop genre, in a way that its offspring, grime and dubstep, were not the irresistibly shuffling beats and soulful vocals memorable and infectious. Shanks and Bigfoot's Sweet Like Chocolate was actually a bigger seller than Re-Rewind, earlier in 1999, but it marked the end of an era where the producer-DJs were king and club anthems were sung by anonymous divas.
Re-Rewind changed everything, because it made a star of Craig David and his sweet boy persona, while relegating the producer-DJ (fellow Southamptonian duo the Artful Dodger) to the background. His subsequent hits 7 Days, Fill Me In and Walking Away departed from UK garage in favour of R&B, attracting a fair amount of derision in the process.
The younger generation wanted something edgier and darker. The likes of So Solid Crew and Pay As You Go used their pirate radio shows to promote the dirty basslines and sparse, moody atmospherics that would soon mutate into grime. Before long, UK garage became known as a violent, thuggish MC genre, all "gats", drug deals and raves cancelled amid media-fuelled paranoia: culminating in the ridiculous incident in May 2001 when So Solid Crew's Neutrino shot himself in the leg outside a London club.
Much of Re-Rewind's greatness comes from the fact that it's a song entirely, and only, about the dance floor, and the Jamaican-inspired practice, which garage inherited from jungle, of pulling back and replaying a part of a track that's got the crowd in paroxysms of excitement. Even beyond the famous chorus, Re-Rewind is a tribute to the selector, and to the dance itself; "this one goes out to all the DJs",
1999 Fatboy Slim releases Praise You
Although his remix of Cornershop's Brimful of Asha topped the charts in 1997, this was Norman Cook's first solo No 1. Cook's earlier records were favourites at Big Beat's ground zero, London's Heavenly Social nightclub. Cook was its populist, his tunes evoking laddish hedonism. One live show attracted 250,000 people to a free show on Brighton beach in 2002.
1999 Basement Jaxx find the Remedy
After six years of wildly eclectic parties in Brixton basements, Basement Jaxx finally unleashed their debut album, Remedy a nonchalant nose-thumbing to tiresome dance music purism. Encouraged by New York house DJs such as Masters At Work's Louie Vega, Simon Ratcliffe and Felix Buxton adulterated their breathless house and garage bangers with liberal doses of other fun stuff a ragga vocal here, a two-tone sample there whatever suited. Their status was cemented in 2005 when they deputised for Kylie at Glasto.
2000 Daft Punk do it One More Time
Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo had already left a mark on dance music with their stunning 1997 album Homework. They returned in 2000, welded inside inscrutable robot helmets, to deliver the most shamelessly euphoric dance anthem of all time. One More Time (Below), with Auto-Tuned vocals by American singer/producer Romanthony, reached No 2 in the UK charts, and was followed by the album Discovery, whose artful reboot of previously naff 80s tropes prefigured most current pop trends.
2007 Rusko's Cockney Thug introduces wub and wobble
When, in 2007, London superclub Fabric wanted to put out its first mix CD dedicated to the burgeoning genre of dubstep, it didn't go to any of the more established names: Skream or Benga, Kode9 or the Digital Mystiks. Instead, FabricLive37 passed the baton to a pair of young bucks west London DJ/producer Caspa and his Leeds-born friend and collaborator, Rusko.
Dubstep, at the time, remained a genre with a rather dour reputation, yet to shake its association with the brutalist architecture of the south London boroughs that spawned it. In Caspa and Rusko's hands, though, it was party music, and those low-end tectonic trembles became an inflatable hammer to batter you round the temples. In Rusko's own Cockney Thug, it's a melding of tinny ska keys, insistent mid-range bass throb, and a repeated cockney "fack!"
The bass line became known as the "wub", and along with its rascally brother, the "wobble", it became one of the most familiar hallmarks of the nu-dubstep. With these new dance floor-crushing tools, dubstep was poised to take over the world.