#47: FELIX
"Don't You Want Me"
from the single "Don't You Want Me"
Released: July 1992
If you want to be a disc jockey, remember this valuable lesson; when people come to dance, they don't want a history lecture. You can assemble a delicately-sequenced and clever - so fatal, that latter adjective; think of "Mr Clevver" in Riddley Walker - tapestry of pop heritage, but if your mates want heritage, plenty of National Trust houses are available for inspection. Eventually the embarrassed but bored-shitless spectator will gingerly wander over and ask whether you have "anything more modern." High Fidelity nights mean nothing outside Kentish Town pensioners' clubs.
No, what people who come to dance want is to dance and for all that furrow-browed, benign broth of heritage to be thrown against all available walls and UTTERLY wiped out by what tickles their hearts RIGHT NOW. Hence in the context of a 1992 works' night out - say, the Clarendon Arms pub on Fulham Palace Road in mid-spring - the tank battalion bombast succeeding the sampled Jomanda's pained rhetorical question "Don't you want my lov-IN'?" made all previous pop music sound pale and worthless. Popularity is symbiotic with the present tense and the tension of presence, the beats per minute measuring living heartbeat, not antiquated echocardiogram printouts. And - unlike rock und roll everybody lose control, even in 1992 - its power still pervades almost half a lifetime later, even though it was released too late to be played at the Clarendon Arms in the mid-spring of 1992. I think what actually got played was "Unbelievable" by EMF. Who'd dance to that now, though, who wasn't there at the time? Way too ploddy. Actually it was the Greyhound. The Clarendon Arms was on Hammersmith Broadway. Who is Prime Minister again?
No comments:
Post a Comment