Nu Colours "Desire" - 1996A lost Masters At Work mix?

Any garage-head will know about Nu Colours. Desire was one of those songs that wore on me after a while; The Masters At Work dubs were everywhere at the time, and I just got sick of hearing it.

Then recently I bought a CD compilation on eBay (for the Horace Brown track) and found another MAW mix of Desire on it, the Style mix, clocking in at over 11 minutes long. Can't find it on any other blogs, can't find it on Discogs. Very strange indeed. Even stranger is that mix is pretty damn fine! So why didn't this very decent, full-length Masters At Work mix get released back then? And why did it seem to disappear completely? Who knows. Anyway, I'm happy to share it here for fans of the group and - especially - fans of the wonderful Masters At Work.

Click to download an audiophile FLAC version (79MB) or iPod-friendly AAC version (23MB) of Nu Colours "Desire (Style mix)" by Masters At Work.

And here's the original video which cleverly gets around the obviously saucy nature of the song by heavily featuring a steam train (numerous shots of trains going into tunnels, coal being shovelled into the boiler engine, etc). At around 2'52" you'll see the couple that have been smooching since the beginning. The bloke points to the end of the carriage where the toilets probably are, and they both go off there looking very smiley. Desire indeed!

Horace Brown"One For The Money (C&C Music Factory mix)" - 1996

Quite unlike me to listen to anything recorded after 1994... ;-) but a classic is a classic, whatever the year.

This was a an R&B smoocher in 1996, with Horace boasting about how he has risen from poverty (sub-text: thanks to his amazing TALENT) and now has a new mansion, champagne soirées, etc. etc. (thanks to his amazing TALENT). That boy. What a larf!

Nevertheless, not a half bad song. Unsurprisingly, the video (see below) is classic mid-nineties MTV-formatted posturing with lots of spontaneous synchronised dancing in black suits. Who would have thought that Clivilles & Cole could turn it into a great house number? I especially like their mix because a) they take their time (10'26") to build the thing up, and b) it's really a mix in two halves with the vocal flowing into the dub effortlessly. Classic C&C genius.

Perhaps not especially rare (apparently available on a German CD-single here through amazon.de) but I couldn't find it on any of the other blogs, so here it is! (in audiophile and iPod-friendly encodes)

Download Horace Brown "One For The Money
(C&C Music Factory mix) here (FLAC 74MB)
or there's a 256 kbps VBR AAC file here.

(If you don't know what FLAC is or what to do with it you might like to read this on Wikipedia and download rather useful program Songbird which can read almost every audio format you can throw at it and may well come in handy in the future).

Joey Negro presents Lifeforce "Feel Your Body" - 1992

I'm not really in the habit of posting whole CD-singles. A lots of other blogs do it, and good for them, but I partly felt bad for copyright reasons and partly didn't want to duplicate what had been posted elsewhere.

However, as time goes by I've realised that I do have some stuff that people might be interested in (and that hasn't been posted elsewhere) and more importantly that specialised blogs have become the unofficial archives for a lot of record companies that made their buck back in the day and then moved on.

I get pretty angry frustrated about the non-availability of a lot of what I call classics. God knows I would buy them if I could, but I can't. Anyway, enough ranting...

This 1992 German CD-single on EastWest isn't half as rare as I thought it was (you can still find it second-hand here on amazon.de for example) but I got it on eBay a few years back and was pretty chuffed. It's classic, early Joey Negro with a plethora of mixes that all have their subtle specificities, and dates from a time when disco house was so big that the majors were licensing left right and centre(stage!).

You can download Lifeforce - Feel Your Body here (66MB)

By the way, I am sooo over mp3 (especially at 192 kbps, not really archive quality). I'll be using FLAC for single tracks but in this case it was too heavy, so the mixes are ripped in m4a format at 256kbps (which is - to my mind - better than a 320kbps mp3 file and a lot lighter to boot).

20 minutes of Trippin' On Your Love

Kenny Thomas had a few 'hits' back in the early nineties, but I'd be surprised if many people remember him now. I only ever really noticed his track Trippin' On Your Love back in 1993, especially the Roger Sanchez Grand Diva dub that had (anonymous) female vocals instead of Kenny's. Go figure.

It was a pleasure then to come across a post on the Hard To Find Trax blog with the all the mixes from the double 12" promo, two from Simon Dunmore that are not really up my street and no less than six from Sanchez, all of them stormers.

Of course 16 year-old vinyl suffers, and the noise reduction on the recordings is pretty harsh. The treble is crushed and some of the voices sound a bit chevrotant as we say in French (i.e. warbling like a goat! Love that expression). However, if that's the tradeoff for being able to listen to this again, then fair enough. Does anyone realise how much time it takes to rip vinyl and clean the files up afterwards? Kudos.

The remixes are classics, all with their own identity. Sanchez was really at the top of his form here... and of course I couldn't leave all that great material alone. So...

...I boosted the treble and overall levels to get it sounding nice and crisp, did some manual de-clicking (yep, there were still quite a few left) then took all my favourite bits from the various mixes and ended up with a 20-minute version that I really like. Epic! Hurrah!

By the way, a Fist fusion doesn't just involve sticking everything together and making it as long as possible; ironically, certain parts of the individual mixes have to be shortened because they just drag on a bit over a very long mix. Here I trimmed a couple of things down and hopefully got a mix that keeps your interest, switching from vocals to the dub and back... and back again(!), something that sounds like it could have been one of the actual mixes. I only have a Mac and some very cheap software (not even any hardware) so I'm pretty pleased with the result. Sanchez and Hard to Find Trax inspired me!

You can download my Kenny Thomas - Trippin' On My Love Fist Fusion here.

The golden period of Masters At Work

There were a few years in the 90s when no-one could touch the Masters At Work. Ideas, beauty, energy: they were at the top of their form. Equally at home with chugging jeep beats or clickety-skip house, the production was perfect and the music amazing.

I've done numerous re-edits of their various remixes, but here are a couple that are a little different. For "Like An Eagle" by the Neville Brothers and "Nothing Can Stop Us" by Saint Etienne I've coupled the downtempo mix with the house mix. There's an obvious transition because of the different BPM, but I think they flow quite well. Good for a change of tempo during a DJ set perhaps?

By the way, can you imagine being a product manager at Warner in New York in 1992, being handed a UK indie group like Saint Etienne and deciding that it would be a good idea to give two of their tracks to Masters At Work? Inspired or reckless, the results were classics...

The Neville Brothers "Fly Like An Eagle (12" Remix/Slippin dub Fist fusion)"
Saint Etienne "Nothing Can Stop Us (Masters At Work remix/dub)"

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!

Shirley Murdock - my Frankie Knuckles re-edit

It's always great when you come across something that you didn't even know existed, and that you love instantly. Thanks to the ever-brilliant Finest Def Mix blog (although Tribute to Def Mix had posted a rip of the vinyl last year) I managed to get my hands on a CD rip of Let There Be Love by Shirley Murdock, remixed by Frankie Knuckles.

So who is Shirley Murdock? Well, after a couple of R&B hits in the 80s (such as 'As We Lay', a syrupy number about two people cheating on their partners with a night-long session of boomshakalak). As a background singer for Zapp, much of her subsequent production was produced by Rouger Troutman, and the late eighties/early nineties saw her releasing a few albums that were more remarkable for her shaggy lioness hairdo than for the music they contained.

Unfortuntely her singing career (or at least the visible part) was to take a dive after 1991's Let There Be Love, remixed by Frankie Knuckles. From the four mixes on Finest Def Mix I took the Classic 12", Banji dub and Intrumental reprise and put them together to make a mix that lasts just under 20 minutes! These early Knuckles (& Morales) mixes always had a lot going on in them, meaning that you never really lose interest. My 'Fist fusion' isn't rocket science, but I think it flows pretty nicely. You can download it here.

So what happened to Shirley ? Well, her waistline went south and she found God big time. Although she's still going and still has a great voice, I doubt she'll be singing about the joys of a one night porkfest again any time soon.

Check out the track below. Pretty damn funky, despite the fact that it's about 'The Lord'.

And don't forget to download my Shirley Murdock "Let There Be Love (Classic 12" mix / Banji dub / Instrumental reprise Fist Fusion)" here.