Rez changed my life

"Have you heard the new Skrillex? It's really banging to the roof, I can't wait to jack it up on my mp3 disc player."

"I've heard it, yeah. I preferred his earlier stuff."

"Oh screw you. Screw you and I hope you die a thousand times." 

This is, of course, the natural reaction to anybody who ever says "I prefer their earlier stuff". It's the attitude of real ale drinkers, broadsheet journalists and people who take BBC class surveys. These people should be shunned from society.

However...

At the height of 1990s Underworld when Born Slippy provided a pulsating soundtrack for every heroin lover everywhere, you would have found me harking back to their earlier stuff like a white-gloved, pill-popping Saxondale.

"Have you heard that lager, lager, lager track? It's rad to the club max. I can't wait to jive to its funky beats down the discohouse."

"I've heard it, yeah. I preferred Rez."

"Oh stick it up yourself. Stick it up yourself and swizzle until you explode a thousand times."

Ah, Rez. The track happened when a creatively exhausted Rick Smith was banished to the studio by his wife. He locked himself away and came up with Rez. What he produced was an antithesis to all the bog standard 12-inch remixes that stuck another load of bars into the middle and roller-pinned out the intro a bit. It was a thundering epic with rolling rhythms with nowhere to go but upwards: in retrospect, a shoegazing Higher State Of Consciousness.

Rez got me trawling through the likes of Lemon Interupt and Junior Boys Own 12-inches. More importantly, I didn't hesitate in buying their next album Dubnobasswithmyheadman - despite it not containing Rez and instead having its addictive Karl Hyde-vocalled sequel Cowgirl.

Underworld went on to score Danny Boyle films and frighten millions of people on TV. They also went on to produce two decades of brilliant music - and to write many lyrics of entertaining nonsense. But for me Rez would be the track that taught me boundaries were there to be broken in techno music, that it didn't just have to sound like sine waves jostling for position through MIDI connections. Techno could have soul. And you could record it in your back bedroom.

No Rez would have meant no Cowgirl, no Dubnobass and no reference point for all those bands that hook into some extra kind of kinetic energy in their 4:4 rhythms. So much goes back to Underworld.

I think I've started with an obvious one in 1993 Changed My Life. Part 2 and a new track / album coming up...

Other parts of this series:
Intro | See all 

Further Fats: This is the future: some pilled-up nutter going wild as a retro dance-rock beat combo plays a dead festival (2007)

1993 changed my life: the beginning

Last year, or twenty recessions ago, I blogged about how I discovered Orbital up a tree. The moment still flutters hazily in my Blue Nun-numbed brain: one of those memories that may manifest itself as a crystal-clear hallucination once dementia robs me of my sharp, er, thingy, mind.

Following that blog post, other flashes of memory appeared: other albums or tracks from the same period that now seem to carry echoes of the music I have since loved. I'd remember an old rave beat and hear within it the sound of later drum 'n' bass or electro.

And then I noticed that most what I was remembering was from the same year. 1993. I can't think of another 12 month period that has been so formative in my passion for music, despite hearing life-affirming albums every year since. 1993 changed my life. You'll have your own Year-with-a-capital-Y, I'm sure.

Nostalgia is dangerous. On YouTube the other night, I watched a current-day 5ive, Atomic Kitten, Blue and PJ & Duncan perform a medley of their hits for Saturday Night Takeway. It was horrific. It made me think the world would never be a good place again, especially since it climaxed with a ridiculously energetic Let's Get Ready to Rhumble that was not only cretinous the first time around, but will be even worse when it returns to number one this Sunday.

There is a danger that by launching a blog series reminiscing about a year that may have little relevance for you, this will be your equivalent of you ogling the telly and saying "blimey, Lee from Blue's been on the pies, hasn't he?"

Except that's what I'm going to do. Welcome to a new blog series. Twenty albums or tracks from 1993 that meant the world to me. Some of them are awful, but all of them are important.

I'll post a couple of times a week and we should be done by, ooo, early June. By then, Rhumble will be a distant memory and the weeping can stop.

Further Fats: more nostalgia on A low-denominator, low-rent scally by any other name would smell like sweets