In 1992, a Swedish house producer called Sten “Stonebridge” Hallström was asked to remix a track by an unknown American vocalist. The project had not had terribly auspicious beginnings. Looking for work, Hallström had called up a British dance label, Champion, and, he says, simply asked: “Guys, don’t you have any old sh*t in the basem*nt that I can remix? And they said, ‘We do, actually.’ This record by the same team behind Somebody Else’s Guy by Jocelyn Brown. They told me: ‘Yeah, yeah, the production is sh*t, but the song’s quite good.’”
His first remix was rejected as too soft, so he set to work again, changing the sound on the Korg M1 synthesiser he was using for the bassline. “I switched to the next setting which happened to be an organ sound. I thought: ‘Man, it’s kind of funky.’ I don’t think anyone, least of all me, expected it to be something.”
Hallström’s remix of Robin S’s Show Me Love went on to be a huge global hit in 1993: top 10 in the UK and top five in the US at a time when house music seldom made the American charts. Robin S was able to spin a career out of it, bolstered by the fact that it has been reissued six times since: 22 years on, she still performs Show Me Love at nostalgia concerts, Gay Pride events and on cruise liners. For a while, it proved hugely influential: you couldn’t move for house records that used setting number 17 on a Korg M1 synthesiser as their bassline. “The phone didn’t stop ringing for four years,” says Hallström. “Every day someone wanted a remix. First it was the cool countries, like the UK. Then Europe, Germany and France, and in the end it was Russia and Poland and stuff like that.” He laughs. “And you know that when Russia and Poland start to call, you’re kind of on the end of your run.” Hallström went back to DJing, set up his own label and began rebuilding his career, making records that sounded nothing like Show Me Love remix: he was nominated for a Grammy in 2008 for a remix of a track by R&B singer Ne-Yo.
He says he first noticed that his mix of Show Me Love was exerting a curious hold on modern pop when he heard Canadian singer Kiesza’s 2014 number one Hideaway. Hideaway certainly sounds like Show Me Love, but it was hardly the first latterday hit to sport its influence: you could hear its echoes in Disclosure’s 2013 smash White Noise and the oeuvre of multi-platinum pop-house artists Clean Bandit, who underlined their debt to the track by covering it live. They weren’t the only ones. For the past three months, the top 40 has played host to another version of Show Me Love, this time by Dutch producer Sam Feldt: this week, it’s two places above Tinie Tempah and Jess Glynne’s Not Letting Go, and 22 places below Felix Jaek’s Ain’t Nobody, both singles audibly in thrall to Hallström’s 22-year-old remix.
Quite aside from the prevalence of tracks that sound like Show Me Love, the current top 40 is awash with other singles clearly inspired by house music of a roughly similar vintage: Calvin Harris’s How Deep Is Your Love, Jess Glynne’s Don’t Be So Hard On Yourself, Galantis’s Peanut Butter Jelly, David Zowie’s House Every Weekend and Martin Solveig’s Intoxicated, the latter a track that seems to have borrowed its chorus melody from Ultra Nate’s 1997 hit Free.
Two decades on, the sound of 90s house in its various guises – from the slick American variety of house released by labels like New York’s Strictly Rhythm to the rougher, bassier UK sound initially dubbed “speed garage”, by way of the poppier variant on the form once dismissed as handbag – appears to have become one of the driving forces of pop. It has infected everything from the music of this year’s BBC Sound of … poll winners Years and Years to the single released by X Factor contestant Karen Harding. It’s sent a compilation featuring current pop-house hits alongside old tracks by Armand Van Helden, Todd Terry, Livin’ Joy and, with a certain inevitability, the Stonebridge remix of Show Me Love, into the upper echelons of the chart: “I’ve got a 14-year-old daughter and a 16-year-old son,” says Simon Dunmore, head of house label Defected, “and I’m always surprised about the records they know: they’ve heard them on compilations or YouTube.” And it’s caused an improbable resurgence in the career of Detroit house producer Marc “MK” Kinchen, the man behind another iconic 1992 house remix driven by a Korg M1 bassline, The Nightcrawlers’ Push the Feeling On (there is, apparently, some dispute between Kinchen and Hallström over who used the sound first). Kinchen spent the last decade as Will Smith’s in-house producer, before the vogue for 90s house returned him to the charts in his own right two years ago, when his remix of Storm Queen’s Look Right Through went to No 1. His services have been called upon by Sam Smith, Lana Del Rey, Rudimental and Paloma Faith among others. Meanwhile, his vintage tracks have attained a kind of omnipresence in clubs. “It’s impossible to go out now without hearing MK’s Burnin’ or his remix of Nightcrawlers wherever you go,” says Duncan Dick, editor of dance music magazine Mixmag.
How this state of affairs came to be is straightforward. Pop music tends to take its inspiration from what happens in underground dance clubs, and a 90s house revival has been ongoing in British clubs for some time. Quite why is a matter of debate. Duncan Dick thinks it has something to do with the passing of generations. “Kids who turned 17 or 18 a couple of years ago, their big brother’s music was probably 90s house and UK garage. And when they went clubbing that’s what they wanted to hear – the perfect example of that is Disclosure. You can hear David Morales’s old remixes in their sound, the stuff Masters at Work were doing in the 1990s. That kind of sums up that generation, what they grew up listening to, and what they expect to hear in clubs.”
Dunmore agrees, and thinks the audience’s youth may account for the sound’s rise as a pop phenomenon: “Radio 1 is really fixated on 18-23 year olds. And 18-23 year olds were really hungry for house music, so not only was it cool, it was at the heart of the demographic they were looking for. Guitar and rock music has been having a particular low as well, so everything in recent years has been conspiring to make house music, specifically that sound, super-popular again in quite a short period of time.”
Others think the 90s house revival may be a reaction to the rise of EDM – the noisy pop-rave sound that’s taken mainstream America by storm in recent years. “When you listen to EDM from a producer or engineer’s point of view, you think, “Wow, how did they get it to sound so loud and banging and clean?’” says Kye Gibbon, one half of Gorgon City, a house production duo responsible for a string of top 10 hits, and a fan of the 90s productions of Masters at Work and Green Velvet. “But then, at the same time, you think, ‘There’s no soul or realness to it; there’s no life in it.’ I think the antidote to that is stuff that’s more influenced by the 90s. Those tracks weren’t just made on a laptop, they use real instruments, guitars, old electric pianos, hardware synthesizers: it’s all analogue, they’re real sounds and it has a kind of warmth to it, it just has more soul.”
“Twenty years ago, music was harder to make,” says Hallström, perhaps understandably a devotee of the theory that 90s house music has experienced a revival because it’s of a high quality. “A record label like Strictly Rhythm, they’d really make you work to get a track right because they had a reputation to uphold. Now, you can make a record in your kitchen on a laptop and go to an online distributor like TuneCore and get it on iTunes and Spotify. There’s less quality control.”
As Dunmore points out, the sheer popularity of 90s-influenced house on the charts means the underground clubs are likely to move on: “If it’s all over radio, they’ll regroup in a different sound really quickly, because the house community hates for it to be in the public domain, it likes to think of it as music that hasn’t really been discovered by the masses.”
“I think sometimes I’ve heard a bit too much of that M1 organ sound,” agrees Gibbon. “Some of the tunes, it just feels like they’re using it for the sake of it. I think … people might get bored of that pretty soon.”
