A Full On Guide to Full On: Lionrock's Lionrock and Little Rascal's Movin' To The Beat

After a bit of Italian and Spanish flavour, the next two tracks on Full On bring us to Northern England.

Track four is Lionrock by Lionrock, or Lion Rock as they are also listed. Is the emphasis on the Lion or on the Rock? Who knows.

It's another early progressive house classic. Justin 'Lionrock' Robertson worked in Manchester's Eastern Bloc Records and built up a neat line in banging four-to-the-floor tunes. Get your ears around this:

 

What's most interesting about Robertson is how his music went on to progress throughout the decade. 1993's Packet Of Peace was notable not only for its acidic lines, but for its conscious-style rap from MC Buzz B. (Not an actual bee.)

By 1995, he was pumping out breakbeats in the form of Straight At Yer Head, and in 1996 he blessed us all with his brilliant Sherlock Holmes-themed big beat album An Instinct For Detection. Oh how this Mancunian trilled at the Manchester-themed track titles: Snapshot On Pollard Street; Wilmslow Road. If memory serves me correctly, he was living in Withington at the time.

His inclusion on 1992's Full On album cements Manchester's reputation as a far-flung Balearic isle: shake those maracas, Bez.

The next track on Full On keeps us in Northern England. Little Rascal's Movin' To The Beat is a lively piano house track with a dollop of Newcastle attitude. I'm pretty sure this would have stormed the Northern clubs back in the day. It's insanely happy:

The Little Rascal himself is label owner Chris Scott, who has electronic music projects coming out of his ears. He's a member of Lexicon Avenue and Echomen, and scanning his list of remixing and production credits, you can spot names like Darren Emerson and John Digweed. This is a bloke hard-wired into club culture.

I know very little about Newcastle. The only time I have been in the North East, at least as an adult, was a visit to a single pub in which a guitarist was playing Jimmy Nail's Crocodile Shoes.

Do you know what I like about this album already? There's something gratifying about a club sound that can slip so easily from Northern Italy to North-East England. It's deliciously European and delightfully unifying.

Speaking of careers progressing throughout the 1990s, the next progressive house track on Full On – Edition One features someone responsible for one of the most memorable top ten hits of the decade. Think blue...

Read the Full On series in, er full.

Read the Full On introduction explaining what the heck this is all about.

A Full On Guide to Full On: introduction

When Kylie Minogue moved to Deconstruction Records to release Confide In Me, she gained an indie credibility entirely absent from her Stock Aitken and Waterman past.

And yet, Deconstruction was no less pop. Co-founded by Mike Pickering of M People, they had the big piano anthems of Black Box, K-Klass and Bassheads and M People. Taking on Kylie seemed an entirely sensible choice.

There was one compilation, however, which cemented Deconstruction's underground credentials. It was Full On: Edition One, subtitled "a year in the life of house music". This was Decon sticking a massive flag on the moon, and that moon was underground dance music. Not that moons can be made from abstract nouns, but you get the idea.

The cover design wasn't great. Here is its Discogs image in all its low-resolution glory. It looks like the front page of a financial company's glossy annual report. "Yah, Damien says the VAT changes have had a peripheral effect on out-sourcing but the bottom line remains pretty solid."

I shouldn't knock the designers, Farrow Design. They have pretty solid credentials, helping define the look of post-Richie Manics, Orbital's 20th anniversary, and recent Pet Shop Boys.

Anyway, I'm not here to talk about whether navy goes with burnt orange. I'm here to talk about the music.

Full On came out in 1992, which made it pre-cool-Kylie but post-Italo-house. 2 Unlimited had taken the charts by storm with their lowest common denominator "techno" sound. Full On had a foot in similar bouncy Euro-house, but there was something so much more listenable about it.

It had Felix and Usura banging out thumping anthems for blocky pre-Windows-95 visuals. It had an early appearance from Justin 'Lionrock' Robertson', laying an early warning shot for the rise of big beat. And it had a nascent appearance from someone who, five years later, would score one of the most memorable top ten singles of all time.

So here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to analyse one track a day and I'm going to call it a Full On Guide to Full On. I'll do two tracks a day if I don't have much to write about. Three if I'm really struggling. You can see the complete track listing on Discogs.

Don't worry: if you never listened to this album, you should still enjoy this. I'm going to shine a light on 1990s dance music by, er, deconstructing this Deconstruction album. At least, I hope so: I haven't written any of it yet.

Stay tuned for the Full On Guide to Full On.

Read the Full On series in, er full.

Read the Full On introduction explaining what the heck this is all about.

For extra points, listen to Wilmslow Road on Wilmslow Road

Things are a bit hectic this week, so pouring words down this blog drain may be more difficult than usual.

In lieu of quality written content, enjoy this old track by Lionrock.

I'm posting this because I mentioned Justin Robertson's Lionrock to someone the other day and they had never heard of him. We were stood a stone's throw from Wilmslow Road, Manchester. As in the Wilmslow Road featured in the Lionrock track Wilmslow Road.

Tssch. Sometimes I doubt people's commitment to geographically-themed records.

So here is Wilmslow Road, from Lionrock's debut album An Instinct For Detection (1996).