Strictly Deep House
Following a huge donation of 12” singles to TASS*, Terry Hyde attempts to make some sense of the music that gets young scamps jitterbugging these days.
For music analysts, Deep House is a form of electronic dance music (a sub-genre of House), identified (according to Wikipedia) by soulful vocals, slow and dissonant melodies and some complex chords. This differs from the strict 4/4 drum-machine- dominated original House music of the mid 80s. Deep House should not be confused with Euro House, Tech House, Acid House, Green House, Terraced House, Bobmonk House.... (That’s enough daft names for music genres. Ed.)
As a card-carrying old wrinklie, I can remember seeing Earth, Wind & Fire in their prime at Colston Hall in the 70s, but I have to admit that over the last 30 years or so, the classification of modern dance music into dozens (nay hundreds) of genres, sub-genres, styles and sub-styles has somewhat passed me by. Whatever happened to One Nation Under a Groove?
the only 12” dance single in my personal collection is Donna Summer’s revolutionary minimalist tour-de-force ‘I feel love’ remixed over 16 minutes by Patrick Cowley in 1982, but originally produced in 1977 by Giorgio...(Get on with it! Ed.)
When the CD was invented in 1982, commentators almost everywhere were announcing the death knell of music on vinyl. The music world therefore owes a great debt to club DJs, dance-music producers, artists and samplers. Without the persistence of the 12” vinyl single and the club DJ use of extemporaneous mixing and scratching on twin turntables, vinyl as a music medium would have gone the way of the 8-track cartridge and the 78. Or to quote the immortal words of Ali G:
‘Give a man a compilation CD and he will groove for a night. But give a man twin decks & a box of 12” singles
and he will scratch for a living.’ 26
Indeed
About half of our 12” singles are House from the early 90s. Amongst them, there may well be some desirable ‘old skool’ dance classics (‘old skool’ is an annoying noughties phrase that pony-tailed record company marketing execs use to describe dance records that are more than a year old; see also ‘back in the day’.) Half a dozen (genuine) sub-genres of House are also represented, together with a sprinkling of Trance, Synth-Pop, Techno, Disco, Funk, Hip-Hop and even a few bits of Reggae and a handful of promo-only DJ mixes.
At least one of our singles from the disco/funk era takes me back to the Colston Hall: EW&F with The Emotions in the 8-minute version of ‘Boogie Wonderland’.
One
memory from that gig was the drummer doing a solo, whilst the drum platform rotated. doesn’t
This seem particularly
memorable, until I tell you that he was strapped into some kind of harness, so that the drummer, his kit and his platform rotated not in the horizontal plane, but the vertical! Not sure one would get that kind of entertainment at a Calvin Harris gig
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