Aretha Frank1yn - A Deeper Love (1994)

In 1994, after a lengthy and fine career, Aretha Franklin was on the decline. Robert Clivillés and David Cole however were at their prime. At the time, dance was hot, soul was not. With hindsight, it seems only logical that the latter would be hired to come to the aid of the former.

Surprisingly, it wasn't a new song that Aretha was to sing, but a cover version of a Clivilles & Cole song that had already had its share of success in 1991, "A Deeper Love". The dance crowd knew it well already, but Aretha's fans probably had no idea that this was an old track being given a second lease of life.

Although the C&C mixes of the two recordings of A Deeper Love are well known (pretty much legendary even) I didn't realise at the time that there was also a CD-single of Morales mixes released after the main ones. Even after having discovering them on the Finest Def Mix blog, I wasn't immediately bowled over.

A year on, it finally dawned on me that the lesser known Morales mixes are at least as worthy of praise as the C&C mixes. It can't be easy trying to breathe new life into the second recording of a track that has already been definitively remixed every which way.

I found a copy of the CD-single on the web, and decided to make my own long version by fusing three mixes together. At the time, I didn't realise exactly how long it would be - over 22 minutes!

I really extended the bonus beats at the beginning (there's isn't even a kick until two minutes in) and there's no trace of Aretha until the four-minute mark. I like the idea of the track starting off like some sort of unidentifiable ambient monster. The main Morales mix was already pretty long, and although the dub that I've added to the end of the vocal mix doesn't have a lot of new things to say, hopefully my extension doesn't get dull. Either way, I think my transitions between mixes are pretty elegant. Check it out for yourself.



Once again, these mixes are utterly unavailable as legal downloads, so I don't feel too bad making my take on the track available.

You can download my 22-minute version of Aretha Franklin's "A Deeper Love" (Deftramental/Bad Yard Club/Bad Yard Dub Fist fusion) (42MB) by clicking the download button on the player above.

Enjoy!

Wop Bop Torledo - Jungle Fever (1989)

UPDATED! (rip quality upped to 254kbps AAC)


1989! This track is over 20 years old, which - I suppose - is like living in the era of the Beach Boys and listening to the Charleston. Whatever.

Wop Bop Torledo were Maryanne Morgan and Gary Stoner and they didn't last very long (a couple of singles and one failure of an album apparently). However, the mixes of Jungle Fever were from Morales & Knuckles, back in the day when they did all their mixes together. With John Poppo et Peter "Ski" Schwartz helping out, it's one of their lesser known classics, so props to the visionary (but cursed) project manager who shelled out his budget for the mixes.

The lyrics are absolute nonsense, and there's a rubbish sultry rap part way through, but for such an early production it's got a hell of a lot of class, and still sound fresh today. A big shout out to the Finest Def Mix blog (now a little dormant) for bringing it to my attention.

As the vocal version was a little short (just over 5 minutes) and a dub followed, I obviously couldn't resist putting them together to make a 12-minute mash-up. Can't say it was very difficult, but I like the result. The track has a great ambience to it, replete with jungle animal noises! Have a listen below, and click the download button if you want to keep it.

And where are Maryanne Morgan and Gary Stoner today? Well, Morgan seems to be doing occasional backing vocals and has written a few songs for, er, Liberty X and Stoner may or may not be an actor now, recently seen playing "Haggis" in Emmerdale Farm. Oh dear. Update: it's not him. Lord knows where he is now.

And needless to say, none of their catalogue (none of the singles, not even the album) is available for legal download. Thanks to Virgin Records. Again.

Utah Saints - What Can You Do For Me (1993)

One of things I loved about CD singles in the nineties was the difference between UK and US releases, the promise of more track, the surprise of new mixes.

In 1991, Utah Saints were having success in the UK with What Can you Do For Me. Based around three cheeky samples (There Must Be An Angel the Eurythmics, Gwen Guthrie's Ain't Nothin' Goin' On But The Rent and Don't Stop Me Now from Queen which didn't clear for the final official version) it was a bit cheap but insanely catchy, plumbing into a scene that major companies were having problems exploiting. A subsequent album release kept the momentum going, and it was obvious that release abroad was also necessary.

But what do you do if you're a product manager in New York with a rave product to sell, and no-one in America knows what rave is? No problem, just have remixed into New York garage!

So far, pretty standard stuff. Remixing has always been partly about catering the sound of a release to suit your market, or several markets, and in this case David Morales was brought in to make What Can you Do For Me palatable to the club kids, an essential tactic to get some buzz going. The Eurythmics sample stayed, the Queen sample was re-sung (by a woman! with an exaggerated English accent!), but why make do with just a sample of Gwen Guthrie when you can have... Gwen Guthrie herself!

And it is here that marketing cynicism met artistic genius. Guthrie came in and recorded expanded new vocals especially for the remixes. Re-booted and boosted with a garage house sound, this was no longer a track: it was a proper song. And it worked wonderfully. Morales had made things more melodic, peppered the soft vocals with some hard percussion, judiciously used the samples, and the whole thing gelled. Two years after the UK single release, what was a crusty bandwagon-jumper had become a NY club monster!

The U.S. single contained three Morales mixes (there were a couple more on the promo 12") as well as a so-called trancey mix by someone else, but I've always had a soft spot for the latter, so I decided to put it together with Morales' 10-minute Klub mix and make a fifteen-minute marathon! It was fairly tricky, as the two mixes aren't exactly at the same speed, nor do they use the same elements. In the end I extended the end of the Morales mix in order to help it blend in better, and the result isn't half bad. You can have a listen here...



Utah Saints are still going, although their sample-based novelty singles got very boring very quickly. If you have a look at YouTube, you'll be able to see them making twats of themselves back in the day on Top of The Pops (pretending to play instruments. Hilarious), and flogging their dead horse at festivals even now. It's strange to think that after recording new vocals in 1993, Gwen Guthrie was to die from uterine cancer just six years later, age 48. Shame.

You can download Utah Saints -What Can You Do For Me (Klub mix / A Trance for the Saints fist fusion) by clicking the button on the player above. Enjoy!

(P.S. Needless to say, these remixes are now imposisble to buy except second hand, another example of wasted back catalogue lingering in limbo...)

EVE - Groove of Love (1994)

I think we can safely say that EVE was never meant to be a quality act. For a start, their name is a rather forced acronym of Ebony Vibe Everlasting. Plus, they were very obviously riding on En Vogue's coat tails and not doing it with very much class; their tracks were available as either anaemic R&B or remixed to destruction into cheesy piano house. It was not good.

Calling a song Groove of Love does not inspire confidence either, and the original version is indeed a sopping wet mess. I mean they even sing "on and on, until the break of dawn". Check out this steaming pile of cliché:



The good news? From this epic train wreck of monumentally cynical proportions came... a rather good remix! With the melody re-sung at house speed (something he often did with Mariah Carey), Morales made an excellent if near-cheesy house track that starts off with lashings of vaguely dodgy piano and then veers off halfway through into more interesting, even surprising dubby territory. There's a bit that starts at 7'29" that gives me goose pimples. How mad is that? Anyway, great stuff.

The bad news? Morales' original mix of 11 minutes was inexplicably edited down - or rather hacked apart - to under 10 minutes for the CD-single release. The intro no longer had the right number of bars, didn't start on the right beat. The passage from vocal to dub had been reduced making it sound tacked on, unnatural. It's amazing what some hasty editing in the mastering studio can do to ruin the feel of a song.

So I reconstructed it. Not a mammoth job, but it now sounds - to me - a lot more organic. Why they couldn't just leave the full version on the CD, I don't know. I can see the point of reducing a track from 10 minutes to 4 for single release or radio play, but 11 minutes to 9, and making a hash of it? Just stupid.

EVE released one more single after this one and disappeared, thankfully. If you can sing, why sing crap? They got what they deserved.

You can download my slight re-jig of
Groove of Love by four women who made fools of themselves and didn't make any money, here (14MB).

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.)

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.

Luther Vandross and Janet Jackson - The Best Things In Life Are Free (1992)

I think Mo' Money was probably a terrible film. Lord know how they managed to get so much great music on there: Caron Wheeler (with great remixes by Tenaglia), Sounds of Blackness (with remixes by Morales) and this, the motherlode, one of the greatest garage tracks ever and one of my most favourite memories of being on a dancefloor during the nineties.

Bot the vocal and dub versions were amazing, inventive, joyous, hypnotic. It's garage as it was meant to be: uplifting, ridiculously uplifting even, a masterpiece.

Can't say I liked the later remixes from 1996 - despite coming from Sanchez and MK - so I went back to the source: from the US CD-single, I used two of the classic CJ Mackintosh mixes and one Morales mix, moving from the dub, to the vocal and back to a dub, making one long epic that lasts - unbelievably - nearly 25 minutes! It's a mix that dares to take its time (there isn't even a beat until 1'30") and it's consistently interesting and different.

Check it out here...

This is one of the first edits I ever tried, I still love it, and I've just re-done it in better quality for you to enjoy! The mix sounds deceptively simple, but there was a fair bit of tweaking involved, and my favourite bit is around the 16-minute mark (in case you're wondering).

You can download

Luther Vandross and Janet Jackson

The Best Things In Life Are Free

(CJ's Fxtc dub/UK 12"/Def version Fist fusion)

here (48MB)

Alexander O'Neal - What Is This Thing Called Love (1991)

Since I got hold of this from the finestdefmix blog I've been in love with it. Lush strings, great piano from Terry Burrus, that unmistakeable voice. I did my own fusion of it almost immediately, but the sound quality wasn't great (low bitrate) and I knew it deserved better.

After a few technical problems, I managed to wangle some .wav rips (I would have bought the CD myself but it costs a whopping 30 euros on Discogs!) but never got round to re-doing the mix. Finally, my short holidays this summer allowed me to go back to it and get everything in order.

Using three different Morales mixes I came up with a version that lasts nearly 15 minutes, with quite a bit of diversity in the structure so you never get bored. I also corrected a dodgy edit near the beginning of the main mix (if I can do it, why didn't they?).

Have a listen to my version if you like. I'm pleased with it, and still love the song...

You can download Alexander O'Neal - What Is This Thing Called Love (Dee Classic 12"/Red Zone/Dee Instrumental mix Fist fusion) as a CD quality FLAC file here (93MB) or an iPod-friendly AAC file here (27MB)


Bonus!
You can also download my
Alexander O'Neal - All True Man (Big House mix/instrumental Fist fusion)
here (13'01" - 18MB).

Martha Wash gets the double Fist treatment

Couldn't resist that title.

Give It To You and Carry On. I thought I'd heard these tracks soooo many times that it would be impossible for me to get any more pleasure out of them. I pretty much played the US CD-singles to death back in the day, and yet it's been a while... so I dug them out again, and hearing them anew was actually pretty darn great.

With mixes by Masters At Work, Kerri Chandler, Maurice Joshua, Todd Terry and David Morales perhaps that's no surprise.

My Fist fusions aren't brain surgery, but the first for Carry On does allow you to listen to the Masters At Work mix and dub in one long stretch lasting 11'23". The crossover point is pretty flagrant because the two mixes are radically different, but I think it works.

The fusion of two David Morales mixes of Give It To You is much more satisfactory/successful, clocking in at 12'12".

I always wondered where the CD cover art for this one came from, and now I know: there was actually a video for this version, very obviously pitched at the 'club' (i.e. gay) crowd, with numerous muscled men in white underwear venerating an almost-static Martha Wash. You can read my snide comments over the video below, but the quality's not that good, so you may want to check out a better-quality version here too.

It's really quite hilarious, chock-a-block with clichés and gives a whole new meaning to the lyrics "I'm gonna give it to you".



For info, Martha Wash will be 60 in a few years time.

You can download my Fist fusions of
Carry On here (24MB) and
Give It To You here (22MB).

Sandy B - Feel Like SIngin' (1992) - UPDATED

Bit of a no brainer this one. A classic track that I was reminded of by the Nineties Club CD Singles blog (again).

Listening to the two Morales mixes, it was obvious that one would easily be melded into the next with a little jiggery-pokery, so I tacked the Erotica mix onto the Def Classic mix, cut out some of the vocals that were repeated in the second half, and it came out really well.

With a long mix (13'22" here!), it's important not to get bored, but here there's always something new, and it's well dosed: a bit of vocals, a bit of the dub, a bit of piano. You have to marvel at the skill of David Morales - the dub is basically built round just three piano notes. Very clever stuff.

UPDATE - Finally got round to buying this for myself. Now in higher quality, and hosted on Soundcloud, but no download: the Morales mix is available to buy on the usual sites, although strangely the Erotica mix isn't. Send me your proof of purchase and I'll send you my fusion. How about that? Otherwise, you can listen below.

Incognito - Out of the Storm (1996)

Found this - or rather came across this again - on the ever-wonderful Finest Def Mix blog. Back in the days I only really ever knew the amazing, sulty Carl Craig mix that was on the Late Night Sessions II by X-Press 2, still an amazing compilation.

Finest Def Mix is wonderful, but their posts are in mp3 format at only 192kbps, which has a nasty effect on sound quality. I loved the two Morales mixes on this CD so much that I went and bought the CD-single so I could do my own Fist fusion.

Using the beginning of the instrumental, I then mix into the vocal version and add an extra but of piano at the end, resulting in a mix that lasts over eleven and a half minutes. I'm really pretty pleased with it and it's my favourite track of the moment! Can't believe it's 13 years old...

Have a listen if you like!

You can download Incognito "Out of the Storm (Morales Sleaze / Instrumental mix Fist fusion)" as an
audiophile FLAC file here (84MB) or an
iPod-friendly 256kbps VBR AAC file here. (22MB)

My Mariah Carey "Fantasy" mix now improvedand hotter than a fireman in suspenders and a bra

Sorry, I couldn't resist this ridiculous photo, found whilst trawling through Google Images

When doing the Mariah Carey edit below I realised that a previous edit for her song Fantasy done last November could have been better quality. At the time I had gleaned the necessary mixes from a couple of different blogs and they were not encoded with a great bitrate.

A quick shout out for help on this page got me the top-quality mixes I needed very quickly from those nice folks at the Nineties Club CD Maxi Singles blog. Excellent! I immediately got to work recreating my edit...

You can read the original post all about it here. The download link there has been updated, but if you don't want to read the story behind it you can download my 20-minute mix of the Def Drums, Def Club and Sweet Dub mixes here (46MB).

I love this classic track (almost fifteen years old already!), and I'm pretty pleased with the re-edit. I'd also like to know the story behind that ridiculous photo (UPDATE: it's here).

Mariah Carey - Butterfly Reprise Fist Fusion

I have to admit to giving up on Mariah Carey sometime in the nineties. Her syrupy love songs got on my nerves, her being signed for a huge amount then dumped by one major company, and consequently being signed again by another left me cold. Rumours about her depression and diva tantrums bored me.

Looking back, it wasn't all bad though. In particular, her partnership with David Morales was often inspired. I've lost track of how many songs they worked together on and whilst Fantasy was one of my top favourites (my re-edit is here) together with Dreamlover, I hadn't actually heard Butterfly Reprise before today. Thanks to the great Finest Def Mix blog for that.

Morales often had Carey re-sing the vocals of her downtempo stuff in order to remix it at a house tempo. Butterfly Reprise was so far from the original 'Butterfly' that it was even given a slightly different name and it sounds very much like Mariah in the studio improvising over a loop for 30 minutes. There's not much to the 'song', but it's one of those dreamy grooves that - if you get into it - just can't last long enough. Some will say that the chord structure bears more than a passing resemblance to "Stay This Way" by the Brand New Heavies (that you can get here). Others might remark that the song is basically rhyming 'fly' with 'fly' throughout. Whatever. It's kinda sweet.

For my Fist fusion I combined the main house mix with part of the Def 'B' Fly mix and the original, giving a version that lasts over 16 minutes. I also repaired a dodgy edit that had been made at around 3'35" (perhaps at the mastering stage to shorten the song a bit?) and left a slight audible hole.

You can download my Fist fusion of
Mariah Carey - Butterfly Reprise (23MB) here

And for masochists, the video of the original weepy American housewife version is here with lots of scantily-clad Mariah looking wistfully out of windows at horses. Awful!

Clive Griffin "I'll Be Waiting" re-edit

Oh dear. Pity poor Clive Griffin. Dubiously famous for a second after singing with the pair of weepy bellows that are now Celine Dion. Backing singer for, er, Take That and Kylie. Short-lived solo career that no-one remembers, except for a few 90s house and garage crackpots. Like me.

So, poor guy. On some of his record sleeves he looked more like an Elvis impersonator than a guru of garage. This may explain why he's sporting a Phantom Of The Opera look on "I'll Be Waiting". The song has become a bit of a classic over the years, perhaps less for the vocal mix than the dub, both by Morales. A rave/Hacienda/garage classic that just won't go away, a high spot in a career of low spots. iTunes just has the one album from Clive available. Although he's still singing for cheques to this day, it seems that glory will never be his.

At least we have "I'll Be Waiting" to remember him by. You can find CD rips of it on several blogs. Finest Def Mix posted it last August. Nineties Club CD Maxi Singles followed suit a fortnight later. Neither however served up the killer dub that I found on The Love Unlimited Sound System blog. I put the vocal and dub in a blender and came up with what I think is a rather pleaant Fist fusion (here), and it's a testament to the music that I can listen to it at all, as the lyrics are poor beyond belief. Garage lyrics have never given the poet laureate cold sweats, but the priceless rhyming dictionary pap that Clive serves up here just has to be read to be believed:

Believe in forever, forever more
Keep holding on to all of our dreams
You know we can find a way and we'll find it come what may
Oh hand in hand we're strong.

Starts off badly doesn't it? It gets worse. Clive has a lady singing partner for the song. She's black. You can tell. And even if you can't tell, she and Clive and going to bludgeon you over the head with THE MESSAGE:

And maybe the moon glow will soon show
All the beauty lying beneath our skin
When you touch me in the night I know there's no black and white
Nothing's gonna keep us apart.

Tolerance, love beyond the colour of one's skin, and... trying to chart as highly as possible (don't think it worked). Watch out, here comes the chorus:

I'll be waiting, 'til the end of time
Waiting for the moment to live as one
Anticipating a much brighter day
Waiting for this heartache to end.

Yep, they just rhymed 'waiting' with 'anticipating'. You can't stoop much lower than that. I'm guessing that there's a thinly-veiled allusion to apartheid in there, but what a god awful way of going about it. It's it's not about to finish quite yet...

I'll be waiting, for the sun to shine
Shining on the darkness of confusion
What we're creating, this love is yours and mine
Turning on the light in our heart.

I especially like that line, "turning on the light in our heart". It's terrible isn't it? Imagine Nelson Mandela eating slop out of a wooden bowl, in the dark, turning on the light in his heart. For 27 years. Bless.

And maybe tomorrow, the sun

Will seem a little easier to endure
(Oh I believe)
There's no place for any tear when we lose our darkest fear
Heart to heart we're strong.

That last verse is just cack. Pretty much meaningless. Pollution. Moving swiftly on...

Let's say that salvation just takes its time
Coming oh so slowly on down the line
'Cos with dream that we create and I know it won't be late
Nothing's gonna keep us apart.

Yep, forget dodgy sentence structure and scan: remember that salvation is ever so ever so slow. Indeed it would be a few more years after the record's release before apartheid was finally dismantled, no doubt partly - and inevitably - through the force of those lyrics. The song ends off with:

And maybe someday, some way
We'll find a way, can't you feel it
Won't you hold on to me (yes I will)
We'll find the strength to carry on.

Holding on? Yeah, to a sick bag. And that inspirational message of hope at the end? It's like the report on the skateboarding duck after 30 minutes of depressing news. Personally, the fact that I 'find the strength to carry on' after all that shameless bollocks amazes me. Those lyrics are - I believe - the worst ever for any garage song in history, and that's saying something. And it's a testament to the great Morales remixes that I can wade through nonsense and still enjoy the music.

Anyway, if you want to turn on the light in your heart you can download my Clive Griffin "I'll Be Waiting (Fist fusion) here. Enjoy!

You give amazing head love (1991)

Can't say I'd ever heard of Phil Perry before coming across a 1991 promo CD-single of his recently on an obscure blog (turns out it had been posted on the excellent Finest Def Mix blog back last September too, but I'd missed it).

Phil seems to have spent much of his career in the shadow of other singers, doing background vocals for Roberta Flack, Patti Austen or Will Downing. On his website you can sign up for the four-day Phil Perry Fan Cruise in the Bahamas and listen to his latest album Ready For Love which include the songs Ready For Love, Melody Of Love and The Strings Of Love. His previous album was called A Mighty Love. The album before that - Pure Pleasure - featured the songs After The Love Has Gone, When It Comes To Love, Love Don't Love Nobody and (whoah! calm down boy!) Love It Love It. See a theme here? Phil loves love.

The 1991 remixes of Amazing Love were done by the stone cold classic team of David Morales, John Poppo, Eric Kupper and Terry Burrus and it seems incredible that they were not thought good enough for full proper release. The chorus go "You give amazing love, no-one does it better and that's the truth. You give amazing love. Seems I just go crazy for your amazing love", and for some reason I just can't help replacing "love" with "head" every time I sing it. Try it!

Call me wicked, but there's something so earnest about Phil's singing that just needs a bit of derision. Despite that, and even though the song sticks to a pretty standard formula, the voice and production really lift it. I immediately (dare I say it) loved it.

So what do I do when given several mixes of the same song that seem to end too soon? I have to tinker with them, and it proved trickier than I thought. Firstly, the mastering is slightly different on the two mixes, meaning that I had to do some subtle filtering in parts to hide the crossover between the two. I extended the rhythm intro (far too short) on the Club mix, used the acapella from the Serious Moonlight mix for extra drama at the beginning and tagged an instrumental part of the latter to extend the former and make a satisfying 8'30" mix.

I could have added even more from the Jazzy Instrumental, but often a good mix isn't just about the length, it's about keeping the energy going, keeping it concise, keeping things interesting. Hopefully my re-edit does all those. I took great pleasure doing it, and I hope you'll like it.

You can have a listen below - and as the track is no longer available to buy (surprise surprise), it's a free download! Enjoy.

How much Mariah Carey can you take?

My answer these days is 'not very much', or simply 'none at all', but back in the days she had quite a few belters that she, er, belted out, and thank the Lord (of garage and house) for the music blogs that have reminded me.

One of them is Finest Def Mix, with Goff from Thailand (of all places) posting classic remixes from Frankie Knuckles, David Morales and Satoshi Tomiie. Some real gems on there, and quite a few rarities.

Another is Nineties Club CD Maxi Singles (the title couldn't really get more explicit than that), with some cracking stuff.

And then there's Remixes Galores which mostly posts fluffy new club stuff and has an unhealthy Kylie Minouge fixation. However, they were the ones to remind me of the splendour of Fantasy by Mariah Carey as remixed by David Morales. I had it on vinyl back in the day, but hadn't listened to it for quite a while. Hearing it again was - I have to say - a revelation.

Of course, finding two excellent mixes of the same song spurred me into action. Adding a third mix from here (basically, type the name of any piece of music into Google Blogsearch and you're likely to find it immediately) I put the drum track, tribal club mix and garage mix together to make one 20-minute extravaganza! With two slow-it-down-speed-it-up-again bits like they used to do in the old days!

I'm rather proud of it, and despite the fact that I find her recent material complete drivel, it brings back memories of better (musical) days. You know, when Mariah was Photoshopped thin.

Download my sweet sweet version here and see what you think.