15 March 1990
Like that Internet meme of Stephen Rea with his notebook out, I’m taking names for the Castle: who in Ireland in St Patrick’s Day week in the year of our lord 19-Italia-90 was buying a record called ‘The Brits’?
Anyway, this was a compilation of snippets of well-known recent dance singles to tie in with that year’s Brit Awards, and it obviously found an audience in Ireland too. The mix is by an English DJ called Michael Gray who went on to have a hit in 2004 with a swish banger called ‘The Weekend’, which you may remember from the fairly leery video where office workers throw off their blouses and skirts to gyrate on the photocopier. (Nowadays we can do all that remotely online from home via Zoom.) As bonus trivia for you, this is the first-ever Irish number one single to be attributed to Various Artists.
This 1990 mix takes great tracks like ‘Voodoo Ray’, ‘Theme From S’Express’ and ‘Pacific State’, then… well, it just squeezes them into the same one-beat-fits-all carry-on suitcase, one on top of the other. As a showcase of dance music it’s fairly rotten, as what this does is play right into the rock-ist stereotype of “all dance music is the same, innit?” (In the spirit of the record, I’m imagining this being said by a Brit.) As a mix it’s just a cut n’ paste job, with no interest in bringing out new facets or creating interesting soundclashes. I have a vague recollection of similar cheap, slapdash mixes being number one hits not long before this, so this inspires me with a slight dread: will this Brits mix open a gap for the return of a certain mange-ridden cartoon rabbit? Perhaps not. After all, that was 1989 and this is the ’90s, a more sophisticated time; what are the chances of people falling for that rubbish again, eh?
