Los Clodettes - Alexandrie Alexandra (Joey Negro mixes) - 1995

Although moving to Paris in the early nineties made finding some records a real battle, there were - from time to time - benefits. The rise of the French touch, Dimitri from Paris, Daft Punk... it wasn't all bad. And then, in 1995, Sony released Joey Negro remixes of a French disco classic Alexandrie Alexandra, originally sung by French disco deity Claude François. For those who don't know of him (and outside of France, there's no shame in that), he was famous for:

a) wicked/disturbing disco moves and threads (for the 1970s)
b) his backing singers/dancers The Clodettes
c) co-writing the original version of My Way, and
d) accidentally electrocuting himself by trying to change a lightbulb whilst in the bath. True.

Disco was not taken very seriously at the time (François was sometimes called "the favourite singer of the under-10s) but he is is mourned to this day by a bunch of nostalgia-obsessed loonies, and his hits are heard all the bloomin' time on French radio. To be fair, he more or less brought disco to our shores, which I suppose is not a bad thing, had an amazing ear for a hook and danced like a wigged out motherfracker. Check out his legendary moves below. The video is from 22nd January 1978. Two months later, François was dead.



The Clodettes' version of Alexandrie, Alexandra seems to have originated on Joey Negro/Dave Lee's Z Records label, but licensing it to Sony France was a masterstroke. It's rare to see a well known tune like that get released through a major with remixes by such an underground name.

Whether the releae was success, I don't know. 16 years later it's not even available as a legal download, a bit of a shame seeing as the CD-single had four great mixes and a total running time of over 45 minutes. A bit of a classic.

I had a bit of fun putting two of the mixes together (a vocal and rather daring acid-laced version), making an 18-minute version that's part cheesy, part surprisingly catchy, a guilty pleasure if you will. Not sure what sort of club would play it (first part's too cheesy for the underground crowd, second part's too 'strange' for the mainstream crowd) but although it almost makes me cringe, I do have a soft spot for it.

You can download Les Clodettes - Alexandrie Alexandra (Joey Negro/Parallel mix Fist fusion) here (33MB)
(and the whole CD single can be had for 3 euros here!)

UPDATE: there's a legal download available (of the Z Records 12", with some of the CD-single mixes + acapella and bonus beats) here. Thanks Konstantin!

Ultra Naté - Party Girl (1995)

Just a couple of years before the abominable 'Free' - probably the song that single-handedly made crap garage popular - Ultra Naté was still making great records. This one was part of the soundtrack for indy film Party Girl starring Parker Posey, the story of a clubber who becomes a librarian to prove to her aunt that you can dance all night and still master the Dewey Decimal System by day.

I don't think the film was a great success; it's not even available on DVD outside of the USA, although there was a spinoff TV series apparently. Funnily enough, the director, Daisy Von Scherler Mayer (I'm not making this up) recently directed an episode of my favourite series Mad Men. Take a look at the trailer...



Lord knows what goes on in the film that is forbidden for under-17s. Anyway, you can hear the Ultra Naté track in the background near the end, and the Satoshi Tomiie mixes that I've tinkered with mix old school piano-driven garage with hard house elements very cleverly. It's almost a little too hard for me at times, but I think the track has stood the test of time, and the slightly hysterical elements reflect the theme of the film pretty well.

I took the vocal mix and the dub to make a 16-minute track that starts hard, goes vocal, then goes hard again. Tomiie isn't afraid of an old school breakdown, although back in 1995 I suppose it was just 'a breakdown'. Check out my version below.

You can download Ultra Naté -

Party Girl (Satoshi Tomiie Interpretation/Hardshell Fist fusion) (32MB) by clicking the download arrow on the player above.

Lisa Lisa & Cult Jam - Let The Beat Hit 'Em (1991)

 

This has to be one of the greatest club tracks of all time, with Clivilles & Cole at their zenith, showing how effortlessly they could deal with funky rhythms or house tracks with equal genius. The production's tight, the ideas in abundance, the beats... irresistible.

Both Lisa Lisa and Clivilles & Cole were from a freestyle background. Emerging from hip-hop, freestyle would soon turn into electro and house, and being on the cusp of those worlds in a time of change certainly produced some memorable music.

Clivilles & Cole liked to do long mixes (cool!) and lots of them (extra cool!). I hadn't listened to the house mixes for quite a while, but going back to them was a pleasure, especially as there were three mixes all with different elements that I could combine into one. It's a track that knows how to take its time and always throw something new into the mix (and at 13'20", that's probably a good thing). Have a listen:



If the house mixes weren't too hard to combine, the funky mix was more or less perfect, but I couldn't resist extending it just a tiny bit too. Hard to believe that this track will soon be 20 years old. Yikes!

So here are my two mixes of Lisa Lisa & Cult Jam - 
Let The Beat Hit 'Em for you to download.

The house mix (L L With Love R C / Club-Dub / Paradise Garage Club mix Fist fusion) can be found here (25MB)

and the funky mix (The Brand New Super Pumped-Up C&C Vocal Club mix Fist retouch) is here (12MB).

Juliet Roberts - Free Love (1992)

Of all the stories of lost garage classics of the nineties, few are as tragic as Juliet Roberts. From a jazz background, she had a string of chart hits in the early nineties, with some absolute classic remixes:

- I Want You, with ace mixes from Dancin' Danny D, K-Klass, Roger Sanchez, Junior Vasquez...

- Caught In The Middle, with stunning mixes from Roger Sanchez, Farley & Heller, David Morales,  Dancin' Danny D, Murk, and

- Free Love, with classic mixes by Dancin' Danny D and David Morales

Rarely has a dance artists had so much money poured into so many mixes by so many big names, and rarely has so much mainstream success followed. And yet, if you want to buy any Juliet Roberts remixes these days... you can't. None of the legal download platforms have them. How can labels spend so much money on tracks and then just leave them to rot in the vaults? It's a crying shame, unbelievable, baffling.

Luckily, music lovers such as Nineties Club CD Maxi Singles, Finest Def Mix, Burning The Ground and especially Hard To Find Trax do (or have done) a tremendous job of archiving and preserving these tracks.

It is completely illogical for major labels to complain about illegal downloading whilst large slices of their catalogue deliberately remain unavailable. Once people get used to searching for their favourite tracks on blogs, they'll keep doing so, rather than use the legal download platforms.

The blogs above are doing important archive work that the label itself should be looking after. They should be saluted, not vilified and erased.

Anyway, thanks to Hard To Find Trax, I picked up a Morales dub of Free Love that has never been released on CD, and added it to the end of the Morales mix. The end result is only a couple of minutes longer, but the two fit really well, and it gives the track extra energy to go just that little bit further. Extending tracks isn't necessarily about making them as long as possible, it's also about giving them a natural feel and making sure they don't outstay their welcome.

You can have a listen to my Fist fusion here:



Juliet has moved on (or back) to more jazzy territory now, and her website looks like it was made in 1994. It hasn't even been updated in the last three years and says you'll need Flash 6 to see it! Cooltempo is now reduced to nothing more than a grotty Myspace page which promises re-releases but fizzled out after a month and hasn't been updated since April 2008. Their Facebook page is completely dead too.

These remixes deserve to be available. How expensive can it be to get them out again digitally? What is the problem? I just don't get it.

You can download Juliet Roberts - Free Love (Morales Classic 12" / Club Eclipse Fist fusion) here (13MB).

(and if EMI isn't happy, then they should get their act together and make the mixes available legally. Idiots.)

General Public - I'll Take You There (1994)

1994, hell yeah! How can you possibly go wrong with Satoshi Tomiie remixing, aided and abetted by Johnny Vicious and Lem Springsteen?

Nevertheless, it could have been a disaster. This dodgy cover of a Staples Singers classic got a cod reggae treatment for the soundtrack of slightly dodgy-looking 90s film Threesome. The film's French title was "2 boys, 1 girl, 3 possibilities" a less concise title that accurately describes the plotline.

Anyway, after having a track on the Weird Science soundtrack and Ferris Bueller's Day Off,  General Public seemed a natural choice for Threesome; black but not too black, singing a cover version... both the tracks and the films had only mitigated success, but at least they gace us some rather ace remixes.

At the time, Sony often released 12"s and CD-singles with different mixes on each (the 12" catering more for the club crowd). Although the Hoya Tribe Trip is easy to find on CD, the Satoshi Tomiie Experience has never been released digitally, so I did a vinyl rip and cleaned it up for you. The mix is subtly but significantly different, although it also contains a slow-it-down-speed-it-up-again section, very much in fashion in the time. I have to admit it's one of my favourite tricks in a house track. Have a listen:



The Satoshi Tomiie remixes manage to turn what could have been a a train wreck into a decent piece of music. Not an absolute classic perhaps, but a commendable salvage job to be sure. Unfortunately, as is often the case for unsuccessful singles from defunct groups, it's only available second hand (which doesn't earn the label or the artist any money), so I think it's legitimate to let you download the two mixes in question in high-quality AAC.

You can get General Public's
 I'll Take You There (Satoshi Tomiie Experience) here (18MB)
and I'll Take You There (Hoya Tribe Trip) here (15MB).

CeCe Peniston - My first YouTube audio-only video

Gosh it's tough finding time to blog at the moment...

When I'm looking for music on the web and can't find it at Juno Download or Beatport, I inevitably try a Google blog search which will often lead me to the track on some nice person's blog.

Or not... in which case I revert to doing a standard Google search. This often brings up YouTube videos of tracks, which I always used to think was weird, but I've finally worked out that it's a whole parallel network of music lovers trying to share tracks, sometimes even identify tracks with the help of others.

Up until now, I've always posted tracks here with a link to my Soundcloud account, but the free space there is running out, and it seems no websearch can find the tracks (yet). Youtube is Soundcloud for the masses - with no downloads possible - and now that their sound quality has been hiked up, the quality is as good as a Soundcloud stream (which is 128 kbps).

So, after finding no way for people to listen to a brilliant Morales dub I recently found on the (intermittently great) Only 320 blog, I thought I'd try my hand at a YouTube video. Seems a bit of a waste of time having a fixed image attached to a track, but why not eh? The track in question is the D-Max dub of Hit By Love by CeCe Peniston, released in 1994. It was only on the US CD-single, which explains why I hadn't heard it before, and the standard vocal of the song is a bit too sugary for me now, so this came as a breathe of fresh air; concise, well-produced, hard-edged, it turns the track into an ever-evolving dubby percussive monster. I considered extending the mix, but in the end I think it's fine as it is.

Have a listen to it below (in high quality, of course). If you like it, Only 320 has it to download with the rest of the CD-single remixes here.

MAW & Company ft. Xaviera Gold - Gonna Get Back To You (1992)

If I were a drag queen, my drag queen name would be Xaviera Gold. It's just a ridiculously excellent name.

And this happens to be an outstanding title. The Ken Lou mix starts off as a fairly standard garage affair, but it is extremely well constructed and produced, and I love the hint of India on the backing vocals. It's not too hard to find on CD as it was on the Kinky Trax 2 compilation, and also Declaration of Independents that was recently featured on fairly new blog Only 320. A good percentage of stuff there is interesting, and the rips are high quality, so how can you complain?

However, it's a little more difficult to find the Mood II Swing dub from the b-side in decent quality. It's a saucy affair with Xaviera telling us that she wants a "long big dick" and that if you don't have a yacht in your jeans, you needn't bother her. Hot!

I ripped this years back and just found it again, so decided to declick and re-encode it. Quality is pretty good! And it's a classic! Have a listen...


I'm now re-listening to both mixes with a great deal of pleasure. Thanks MAW and thanks Xaviera. Gold indeed.

By the way, there's a 3rd mix on the 12" (edited by Frankie Knuckes apparently), but it doesn't really stand out, and another - rarer - mostly instrumental dub on 12" (that I found on YouTube but can't find again right now).

It would be great to see the track officially re-released. Alas, I imagine that it's stuck in major label limbo (as it originally came out through BMG).

You can download the

Ken Lou 12" and Mood II Swing "Big Thick" dub of

MAW & Company ft. Xaviera Gold - Gonna Get Back To You

here.