10. Pepe DeluxeSuper Sound
This is a bit of a different vibe. I spent a lot of time listening to dance music in the 1990s. I bought a lot of stuff, the sort of stuff Norman was listening to and playing. This was his influence on me. I had been making him CDs, then he started making me ones of dance and hip hop stuff.
But there wasn’t many great dance albums. People like Deee-Lite and people like that, they made legendarily poor long players. But Pepe Deluxe and a few of the Catskills Records artists – including the brilliant compilations, which were called Straight Out The Cat Litter – they were really properly made albums. This one was just brilliant. It was eccentric and dance-y.
There was a hit off it with the jeans advert, ‘Woman In Blue’. The whole thing is great – Supersound, Tour De Force, Beat Experience, I like the whole thing, I like the silly voices and links between the songs. I didn’t like the follow-ups unfortunately. They are one of those artists that went further, more bizarre, like Chris McGregor Brotherhood of Brass, that out-there jazz. They went down that angle rather than keeping an eye on the mainstream, so this is the only whole album I liked by them.
We would go clubbing all the way through. We never went to raves, but we went to clubs a lot – the whole lot of us were into dance, but we just never made any dance records. I still am into hip hop massively and modern R&B is one of the main genres I listen to, but I would never make a record like that, because I wouldn’t know what I was doing.
