Chav-ant garde

There's a doc about Victoria Beckham on the streamers (not as engaging as the David Beckham one) and that's my cue to dredge up this moment of genius.  

The doc doesn't mention this track - which got to #2 in the charts - at all, but according to the life chronology that the doc follows,  this would be from her flailing-around-a-bit period, after the Spice Girls split but before she launched her super-successful fashion and cosmetics business. A time when she was some combo of WAG and celeb-without-portfolio, drifting and dabbling, and mostly just existing to be photographed and to be seen at her husband's side.  

But if this is Posh Spice flailing... well, all former pop stars should flail so fabulously! 

Listen past the Auto-Tune gloss and it's one of  the more avant hit singles in UK chart history.  

Truesteppers - Jonny L and Andy Lysandrou - mash up the breaks 'n' bass and the stinging techsteppy stabs, but embed all that Nuummy Nuum stuff in a poptastic setting of nu-R&B meets 2step. 

There's a tuffer 12-inch mix for the clubs.

"This tune's gonna punish you..."

A remix by credible UKG artists 10degrees below versus X-Men  - not nearly as exciting!

Oh I didn't realise she had another intersection with UK Garage

Todd-ified

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

What is funny about "Out of Your Mind" to me is that Andy Lysandrou was, only 7 or 8 years earlier, doing things like this track "Pain" under the name Kid Andy, for his hardcore label Boogie Beat Records, which turns around a huge chunk of "Careless Whispers". I remember ads for this track on the pirates, which was surprising because you rarely had a record advertised on a pirate and if you did, it would be compilation. They must have expected big things of it. 

Then come 2000 and the astonishing total takeover of pop by UK Garage, he's no longer cheekily and  sneakily lifting a pop star's vocal as a sample, he's able to work directly with Posh -  a rough female equivalent of George Michael*, both in scale of fame and also regional / class location (George was from Bushey, Posh grew up in Goffs Oak - Hertfordshire massive, both of them -  and self-made middle class). 

So actually not really "chav-ant garde" although the hypergloss aesthetic of the clothes and the video is totally lumpen-futurist. 

The whole look that Posh and Dane Bowers are rocking  is very much a peek ahead to Love Island aesthetics.  Which as has been established is entwined with the Nuum to a surprising degree.

*Suddenly struck me that maybe Lysandrou chose the George Michael sample not just because it's so chuneful and well-known but because George was of Greek ancestry - he would have been the most successful Greek-British singer ever, I should think, so perhaps a point of pride. 

There was a cluster of Greek Cypriot involvement in nuum, UK clubscene, pirate radio - Nick Power, and influential instigator brother George Power (deejay, cofounder of Kiss FM etc etc). 

true step garridge

Still sounds like phuture

Jonny + Andy chewed up D&B, swallowed the good bits, spat out the rest - and turned it into supapop for the Y2K.  So potent that Posh Spice wanted to get on board.

And it got to #2 in the UK pop charts in the late summer of 2000 -  back when the pop charts meant something -  how cool is that?

Never heard anything else by the True cru

There's this, which got to #6



Dane's B voice (esp at the chorus) sounds like how his faceflesh looks in that video  - grey-white plastic googunk

Oh yeah, this was a hit - a small one - too -



And  (who knew) a whole bunch of other bits





Now tell me, is this the only example in the entire history of Nuum remakes of early nuum-phase anthems (e.g. UKG revamps of ardkore or jungle tunes), where the remake is remade by the original maker?




Ah now this, this, is interesting - it could just be taken as 2step cover of SOS Band's Eighties R&B gem  "The Finest".... 



But really - for those who know - it is obviously meant to signify as a remake of ardkore classic "Finest Illusion (Illegal Mix)" by Foul Play, since that more or less swallows whole the vocal from the SOS Band tune

Funny thing, only two years or so before going 2step and Top of the Pops, Jonny Lisners was doing tracks like this



A sub-style that people in the D&B scene called two-step and which became utterly and deadeningly dominant

It is the same beat as the more basic 2-step garage beats - but the feel is completely different - unsexy, unrelenting, no swing, no sensuality - like a nail gun

Powerful in its way - I was quite taken with this direction at first - but ultimately nullifying

Why's it called "Piper"?

Your guess is as good as mine

I'd like to imagine it's a tribute to the wonderful Piper Laurie

It's almost certainly not.

That video is the perfect distillation of the neurofunk spirit

I do like the album Sawtooth (recently reissued) though

Particularly this track



Oh yeah I forgot - he did a second album in the neurofunk rigor mortis mode - Magnetic





What a canny leap from the dead end of D&B in 1998-99, to the lissom (and more lucrative) pastures of UKGstep

Jonny L was a bit of a shall we say nimble shifter though - for instance when the ardkore tide went out, he moved from doing things like "Hurt U So" to things that were more like pop trance or progressive



Actually that is not unpleasant at all - and in fact a bit proto-Daft Punky

But definitely straying from the nuum track.

As is this



Also much more Euro in feel



One of the tracks on these EP even has some Harthouse involvement in the production




But let us wipe all of that from the memory screen and remember "Hurt U So"



And this - the full mix of "Out of Your Mind"




Number Two in the UK charts!

"This tune's gonna punish you"