by Bob Stanley
Guns n’ Roses were led by Axl Rose, a Los Angeles showman in the Jim Morrison tradition. His lyrics could romanticise his LA woman (‘Sweet Child o’ Mine’, US no. 1 ’88, UK no. 6 ’89) or the city at night (‘Paradise City’, US no. 5, UK no. 6 ’89), or they could just be flippantly offensive (‘One in a Million’: ‘Immigrants and faggots, they make no sense to me. They come to our country and think they’ll do as they please’). His penchant for wearing T-shirts of Hollywood’s least favourite, Charles Manson, also rubbed the locals up the wrong way, but Appetite for Destruction still became the biggest-selling debut album in US history, at twenty-eight million copies. A different slant on American rock came from the documentary 1991: The Year Punk Broke. Director David Markey said the title had come to him as he watched MTV Europe, while he was jet-lagged in a Cork hotel with Sonic Youth, whose European tour he was set to film. Footage of Mötley Crüe singing ‘Anarchy in the UK’ to thousands of people in an American stadium came onto the screen, and the phrase spilled out of Markey’s mouth. British viewers may have thought the title had some irony, but interviews with Markey suggested not: ‘For many years punk rock only existed on this underground level … finally it is being digested and embraced by pop culture at large.’ His understanding of punk’s influence may have seemed underdeveloped but Markey was very fortunate that Sonic Youth’s support act on the tour was Nirvana, just two months before they released Nevermind, an album that shifted rock’s focus away from Axl Rose’s snotty antics and singlehandedly resumed Anglo-American pop-cultural relations.
Elsewhere in the old new world in 1991, New Kids on the Block’s Donnie Wahlberg was getting himself arrested for setting fire to his hotel room;2 on the west coast, Ice-T made his first record with Body Count, allying metal and gangsta rap, while another unholy musical alliance – funk metal – peaked with the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ album Blood Sugar Sex Magik. The similarly smack-heavy Jane’s Addiction were on a farewell tour called Lollapalooza,3 which seemed more like a travelling festival as it featured high-profile guests such as Siouxsie and the Banshees, Ice-T, Nine Inch Nails and some Shaolin monks. The group’s singer Perry Farrell coined the term ‘Alternative Nation’ to describe the tour; it has run as a festival ever since. The title of Douglas Coupland’s novel Generation X was used to describe 1991’s disaffected youth, slacker culture and the alternative American nation, which hit a commercial and cultural peak when Nevermind was released on the same day as Blood Sugar Sex Magik. Meanwhile, Britain remained oblivious to the biggest American name of ’91, Garth Brooks, who became the first country star to incorporate elements of rock into his music, rather than vice versa. His third album, Ropin’ the Wind, had advance sales of four million, went straight in at number one and dragged his first two albums into the US Top 20 with it; as only Elvis and the Beatles have sold more albums in America than Brooks, it seems churlish not to mention him. You can see Tony Wilson’s point, though – not much of this looked like ‘fun’.
Let’s look at some British chart stats for 1991.
BREAKDOWN OF UK TOP 40 HITS IN 1991
Rock 56 (14%)
Indie 59 (14.5%)
R&B/Hip hop 55 (13.5%)
Dance 92 (23%)
Other 142 (35%)
A few of the indie hits were late-period baggy – from the Charlatans (‘Over Rising’, no. 15), Happy Mondays (‘Loose Fit’, no. 17 – their last Top 20 hit) and a few groups who rode the indie-dance bandwagon around the yard for a few months: Blur (‘There’s No Other Way’, no. 8), Jesus Jones (‘International Bright Young Things’, no. 7), the Farm (whose Spartacus album was a number one in March), the Mock Turtles (with the incredibly accurate Stone Roses-alike ‘Can You Dig It’, no. 18) and James (‘Sit Down’, no. 2). The last mentioned were a group from Manchester who had initially emerged on Factory in 1983; their rattling Jimone EP had been a bridge between post-punk and C86 indie, and a joint NME Single of the Week alongside the Smiths’ ‘This Charming Man’. By ’91 James were reborn as indie dance and, with the karmic hippie message of ‘Sit Down’, came across like a bunch of creepy yoga teachers; their 1993 single ‘Laid’ was possibly the least attractive song about sex ever written. Primal Scream’s ‘Higher than the Sun’ only reached number forty, but their Screamadelica album was a Top 10 hit – it stayed in the chart for over six months, and won the inaugural Mercury Music Prize the following year.3 1991 was also a boom time for a lank-haired, post-acid, largely post-political brand of indie: Midlanders the Wonder Stuff (‘Size of a Cow’, no. 5) and Pop Will Eat Itself (‘X Y and Zee’, no. 15) briefly ruled student discos, as well as leftie squat rockers Carter the Unstoppable Sex Machine, who had a brace of ’91 hits with ‘Sheriff Fatman’ (no. 23) and ‘After the Watershed’ (no. 11).
A 1991 ‘Indie Disco’ incorporated pretty much anything with fuzzy guitars that wasn’t metal. In Glasgow, Teenage Fanclub conflated Neil Young and Big Star to create the spangly chug of the Bandwagonesque album, akin to power pop with the handbrake on; in their wake came soundalikes Eugenius and Velvet Crush. At the other end of the spectrum were vinegary Welsh group the Manic Street Preachers, who showed a complete disinterest in dance and baggy – they were all adrenalin and nihilist slogans, the antithesis of Teenage Fanclub’s Brit slackerisms: ‘Skin up … you’re already dead!’ teased bassist Nicky Wire.
Wire and guitarist Richey Edwards were both pretty and fiercely intelligent. If 1991’s dance music was short on lyrical bite, then the Manics made up for it all by themselves. They quoted Rimbaud and Debord in interviews, and said they would go on Top of the Pops and commit suicide. ‘England needs revolution NOW’ read Wire’s détourned school shirt. They believed in a musical scorched-earth policy, looked for kindred spirits and found none. Outsiders in the Dexys mould, singles like ‘Stay Beautiful’ (no. 40 ’91) and ‘You Love Us’ (no. 16 ’92) gained them a devoted following which grew exponentially when Edwards disappeared in 1994.
Bubbling under were a few groups who dressed up and weren’t afraid to reference the past, specifically a British past. Most notable were Manchester’s World of Twist, who were initially lumped in with the baggy groups but referenced northern soul and Peter Gabriel-era Genesis, and included a band member who made ‘sea noises’. On stage, they looked like a glamorous circus act and in 1991 they made very little sense but, if ‘Sons of the Stage’ (UK no. 47 ’91) had got radio play, things might have been different. They had to settle for being harbingers.
The biggest rock hits were largely metal and all by American acts, the most sizeable coming from Metallica (‘Enter Sandman’, no. 5) and Guns n’ Roses, who had a trio of hits: ‘You Could Be Mine’ (no. 3), ‘Don’t Cry’ (no. 8) and ‘Live and Let Die’ (no. 5), all of which did better in the UK than America. In the R&B department, Color Me Badd took harmonic swingbeat to number one (‘I Wanna Sex You Up’), while hip hop was almost entirely represented by soft, east-coast material: Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince’s mellow ‘Summertime’ (US no. 4, UK no. 8) predicted mid-nineties G-funk, while PM Dawn’s ‘Set Adrift on Memory Bliss’ (US no. 1, UK no. 3), with vocals that sounded like the Association had re-formed with a whispering rapper as a front man, wove layered harmonies around a Spandau Ballet sample. It proved to be a gentle kiss goodbye to hip hop’s golden age – the genre would go on to embrace Ice-T’s ‘Cop Killer’, Dr Dre’s The Chronic and the rise of Death Row Records in ’92.
As for ‘other’? Bryan Adams’s Robin Hood love song ‘Everything I Do (I Do It for You)’ overshadowed the year: the single that wouldn’t die hogged the number-one spot for a record-breaking sixteen weeks; this was the longest stretch at number one by any single since Slim Whitman’s ‘Rose Marie’ (a mere eleven weeks) in 1955, and it came from the same stock as the first number one, Al Martino’s ‘Here in My Heart’ in ’52. ‘Everything I Do’ was part of a pop-ballad tradition that went back even further than Martino, all the way back to John McCormack, Enrico Caruso, Jenny Lind, and – often with a country or continental
twist – had carried on through the sixties, providing some of the biggest hits of the modern pop era. Pure schmaltz, these singles had served their purpose for a short while before being replaced a year or so later by the latest mega-ballad. Few of them, despite all being UK number ones at the time, get radio play any more: ‘Tears’ (Ken Dodd, ’65), ‘Green, Green Grass of Home’ (Tom Jones, ’66), ‘Release Me’ (Engelbert Humperdinck, ’67), ‘The Last Waltz’ (Engelbert again, ’67), ‘I Pretend’ (Des O’Connor, ’68). A modern variant, the ‘power ballad’, was born with Harry Nilsson’s ‘Without You’ (no. 1 ’72): the ingredients were a slow rock beat, quiet verse and surging chorus; like the ballads of old, the power ballad would always include degrees of mawkishness, manipulation, self-pity and emotional blackmail. From the opening line – ‘Look into my eyes’ – Bryan Adams sounds like he’s covering up for a dirty deed on ‘Everything I Do’: ‘You know it’s true,’ he whimpers – methinks he doth protest way too much. But ‘schmaltz’ comes from the German ‘schmelzen’, ‘to melt’, and ‘Everything I Do’ made plenty of record buyers feel gooey enough to buy it in ’91. Adams must have thought he’d won the all-time power-ballad gold medal, but he wasn’t accounting for a new kid who appeared on the block in ’92, the French-Canadian Celine Dion, who proceeded to knock out soggily aggressive monsters on a bi-monthly basis.
1991 was a big year for novelty records in the UK: Hale and Pace’s ‘The Stonk’ and the Simpsons’ ‘Do the Bartman’ were both number ones; Right Said Fred’s ‘I’m Too Sexy’ was stuck behind Bryan Adams at number two for six weeks. Rod Stewart had his last two Top 10 hits (‘Rhythm of My Heart’, ‘Motown Song’), and a swathe of the eighties’ bigger names – Erasure, Chris Rea, Level 42, Phil Collins – weren’t off the chart just yet. But 1988’s acid-fuelled ‘second summer of love’ had planted seeds in chart pop that bloomed beautifully in the early nineties.
Deee-Lite were brand new, from New York, and they released a single in the summer of 1990 called ‘Groove Is in the Heart’ that inhabited a cartoon world all of its own. There were swanee whistles, rattling cowbells, lines about ‘succotash’ and probably the catchiest bassline in history. It was insanely joyous and reached number two in the UK, number four in the States. Their singer, Lady Miss Kier, was straight out of Alice in Wonderland, loved by men and women alike, and could have been a Debbie Harry for the nineties. The problem was that Deee-Lite forgot to write another good song. People were willing them to release something even a fifth as good as ‘Groove Is in the Heart’, but it wasn’t forthcoming. It was a real pity.
Betty Boo partly made up for this disappointment. She looked like a panther and had a squeaky voice. Originally she was Alison Clarkson; she had learnt to rap along to ‘Rapper’s Delight’ when she was ten, and then got into graffiti (her tag ‘Ali*Cat’ appeared all over White City and Shepherd’s Bush in the eighties). Like Lady Miss Kier, she looked as if she’d been rustling through Emma Peel’s Avengers wardrobe, and her hits had a grab bag of sixties samples to match: ‘Doin’ the Do’ (no. 7 ’90), ‘Where Are You Baby’ (no. 3 ’90) and ‘Let Me Take You There’ (no. 12 ’92) fizzed like Tizer with a playful dollop of attitude – ‘I’ve used up all my tissues on more seriouser issues,’ she said, screwing up her face and wiggling her tail. ‘A lot of people use clichés in their lyrics,’ she haughtily told Q magazine, ‘like Gloria Estefan – love this, love that. But listen to “Let Me Take You There”: I say, “cashews and champers”. Nobody says “cashews and champers”.’
Betty briefly threatened to take over from Kylie Minogue as Britain’s pet pop star. But Kylie was going through a golden period herself. When she had first emerged as tomboy Charlene from Neighbours, with her Stock Aitken Waterman-produced breakthrough hits, Smash Hits had dubbed her Corky O’Reilly. Later, re-emerging in 1994 after a two-year hiatus, she was Indie Kylie, keen to distance herself from anything that appeared manufactured; overthinking the direction of her career, the Top 10 hits soon dried up. Later still, she was Disco Kylie, more concerned with her hot pants and pert bottom than notions of NME credibility, and the public loved her all over again. But her imperial phase, even allowing for the classical perfection of 2001 hit ‘Can’t Get You out of My Head’, had been at the turn of the nineties, when she changed from PWL poppet into SexKylie. ‘I guess you can pretend to be something you’re not but only for so long,’ she told the NME’s David Quantick, who coined the name SexKylie in ’91. ‘When I decided I wanted to make some changes, the suits at the record company just about had a heart attack. “Kylie? What are you doing?! You’re going to ruin us!”’ To match Kylie’s new-found libido, and to compete with newbies like Betty Boo as well as the house and techno DJs taking control of the chart, Stock Aitken Waterman’s writing and production went into fourth gear. The quartet of singles from her Rhythm of Love album – ‘Better the Devil You Know’ (no. 2 ’90), ‘Step Back in Time’ (no. 4 ’90), ‘What Do I Have to Do’ (no. 6 ’91) and ‘Shocked’ (no. 6 ’91) – were super-modern, super-melodic and as well tuned as Motown records of old.
While Kylie and Betty represented 1991’s spirit of abandon, the real story of the year was hidden in a breakdown of the Top 10 hits. The Top 40 may have suggested dance music held sway but, if we look at the statistics for the sharp end, the results are even more extreme:
TOP 10 HITS
Rock 12 (8.5%)
Indie 12 (8.5%)
R&B/Hip hop 13 (9%)
Dance 44 (31%)
Other 62 (43%)
Almost one in three Top 10 hits was a dance record,4 and I’m not including anything in this category – like Kenny Thomas’s smooth eighties-revivalist soul, or even PM Dawn’s Balearic hip hop – that could have conceivably been made pre-house. Consider also that even Kylie’s ‘Shocked’ (filed under ‘other’) and Happy Mondays’ ‘Loose Fit’ (filed under ‘indie’) aren’t included in that slice of the pie. The Top 10 was all about rave – the takeover was that complete. ‘I’ve always hated commercial pop music,’ said Happy Mondays’ manager Nathan McGough, speaking for generations raised on the Stones, or prog, or punk, with their collective mistrust of Top 40 pop, ‘and now if you asked me to list my ten favourite records I’d guess eight of them would be in the British Top 40.’
As had happened with ‘indie’ in the eighties, ‘dance’ became a genre rather than just a descriptive word in the early nineties. Dance music was all about rhythms and textures. It was post-house and, for the most part, post-melody. In 1990 the only terms used for dance music were still ‘house’ and ‘techno’, the former used to signify a more vocal-based sound, a little closer to R&B, and the latter suggesting something more purely electronic; 1991 was the year in which ‘rave’ became more commonly used shorthand for the gleeful airhorn-and-breakbeat noise dominating the chart. By the middle of the decade dance music had become a nightmare of semantics. It would evolve so fast and frequently that it was almost impossible to keep up; even with two decades’ distance there are plenty of barely remembered experiments, worked at for a few weeks then abandoned in favour of some grand new futuristic design. Others were swept aside not only by the pace of change, but by the law. Beyond this, the music press ignored whole swathes of it. The era remains ripe for deeper exploration.
Novelty and fun were what people wanted in 1991 – supposedly serious music like Enya’s new-age number one ‘Orinoco Flow’ could be gleefully chewed up and spat out as RAF’s ‘We’ve Got to Live Together’. A recurring theme on early rave records was the plea for everyone to get together – Sabrina Johnston’s ‘Peace’ and Rozalla’s ‘Everybody’s Free (to Feel Good)’ were among ’91’s bigger hits; both did their best to promote the cause. There was no hierarchy. Rave thrived on mass unity and, for this reason, it didn’t need pin-ups; the mere act of going on Top of the Pops was enough.5 So Xpansions (‘Move Your Body’, no. 7) would hold the conch one week, before passing it on to the Bassheads (‘Is There Anybody Out There’, no. 5), or K-Klass (‘Rhythm Is a Mystery�
��, no. 3), or whoever happened to be on TOTP the following week. The only message to get across was ‘raving is fun’ – it was a totally unified scene.
The indie music press, Top of the Pops and Radio 1 tended to describe rave, and dance music generally, as ‘faceless’. In fact, there hadn’t been as much dressing up since the turn of the eighties. At the sillier end of the fancy-dress spectrum there was Guru Josh (‘Infinity’, no. 5 ’90), who waved his arms and wore clothes like a TV magician, but when you looked closely you could tell he was actually a dentist. Altern-8 were much more exciting, a duo from Stafford who wore boiler suits and face masks – in this respect they were faceless, but it was a pretty distinctive faceless look. ‘Infiltrate 202’ (no. 28 ’91), ‘Activ 8’ (no. 3 ’91) and ‘E-Vapor-8’ (no. 6 ’92) epitomised rave with airhorns, gargantuan keyboard riffs, galloping breakbeats and wailing female vocal samples. Altern-8’s sole album had the glorious title Full on … Mask Hysteria. In the 1992 general election, the duo’s Chris Peat stood as a candidate for the Stafford constituency, representing the Hardcore Altern8-ive Party; he received 158 votes and came fourth.6
European dance music began to realise it was no longer reliant on imports from Detroit and Chicago at the turn of the nineties. By 1991 Britain had become remarkably self-sufficient. DJs cut records at home (The Prodigy’s ‘Charly’, no. 3 ’91) or in small, local studios (Cola Boy’s ‘7 Ways 2 Love’, no. 8 ’91). They pressed white-label twelves and took them to nearby specialist dance shops. The shops then often started their own record label to distribute the music more widely – these included Flying (Soho), Suburban Base (run from the Boogie Times shop in Romford) and Warp (Sheffield). Sometimes the DJs worked in the shop and played the records out; you could see this as rather incestuous, or as a rather successful cottage industry. Either way, it kept everything fast-moving, and largely bypassed the music industry. Warp was the most successful shop-cum-label, scoring hits with a brace of ‘bleep’ singles, ‘LFO’ by LFO (no. 12) and ‘Tricky Disco’ by Tricky Disco (no. 14), as well as Nightmares on Wax’s pulverising ‘Aftermath’ (no. 38), in the summer of 1990. This Sheffield-specific sound was based around a sampler’s sine-wave test tones: they weren’t on the sampler for making music but, as acid house had been born from abusing the Roland 303, Warp’s acts created ‘bleep’ techno by emphasising the high end and, more significantly, extreme sub-bass notes, so low that you felt them rather than heard them. Warp’s new techno strain found favour at the Labyrinth club in Dalston and with London DJs Fabio and Grooverider, who were soon to take over at Rage, a weekly night at the Heaven nightclub next to Charing Cross station.
