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.)