Weird 90s - Jack Your Body and a childhood in rave
I’ve talked before about Weird 90s, the book I was writing about 90s rave hits that eventually got shelved. I’ve even shared three (and a half) chapters, one on LFO, one on Summers Magic, one on the KLF and one (heavily edited) on Altern-8 / Nexus 21, which I am counting as a half.
And today I bring you a fourth chapter from that unfinished book, the opening chapter no less, one that focuses less on a specific song / artist and more on the actual thinking behind the book.
Admittedly, the chapter is loosely hung around Steve “Silk” Hurley’s house classic Jack Your Body (Heurgh!). But, more importantly, it goes into how I - and doubtlessly loads of British people my age - first got into dance music via Top of the Pops, Now and Radio One, a seemingly innocuous introduction that planted deep roots. And from there I explore, the dubious notion of good taste, musical evolution, the power of a hit and more.
I hope you enjoy it. Should any publishers be blinded by the dodgy brilliance of my book idea, feel free to get in touch.
Steve “Silk” Hurley - Jack Your Body
Released: December 1986
UK chart peak: 1
Top of the Pops performance: N/A (they played the video)
Children are not, on the whole, bothered by the troublesome notion of good taste and even less so when it comes to music, the most immediate and body-shaking of all arts. I see it with my own children. They enjoy an infuriating meme hit like K0i’s Pony Salvaje - if you don’t know it, don’t look it up - as much as a critic-friendly pop classic like Carly Rae Jepsen’s Call Me Maybe. They react to it, perhaps better put.
The same was true with me. I was born in 1977, grew up in small-town Scotland for my first 10 years, and rural Norfolk for the following three. I consumed music via Top of the Pops, BBC TV’s weekly pop show, which reach millions of homes in the 1980s; as well as the dual compilation album attack of the Now That's What I Call Music! and slightly less successful Hits series; and later via the national broadcaster Radio One and ITV’s video-led Chart Show, with its fancy proto-computer graphics.
I had, as a result, very simple criteria by which to judge music. If a song was on Top of the Pops, a Now… or a Hits album, it was a hit. Full stop. For me, at the time, the idea of credibility was closer to viability, rather than anything to do with being fashionable or somehow “real”. If a song was a hit it was, by definition, credible for me.
Furniture’s 1986 indie lament Brilliant Minds, which I later discovered peaked at 21 in the UK charts, the band’s only chart entry; or Lovebug Starski’s novelty hit Amityville (The House On The Hill) were, therefore, just as much hits in my book as Peter Gabriel’s Sledgehammer, David Bowie’s Absolute Beginners or Queen’s A Kind Of Magic because they all appeared on Now That's What I Call Music 7, the first Now… compilation I bought with my sister and which we hammered into our brains with glorious repetition over the following months.
One of the results of this cosmopolitan consumption is that it is hard to say exactly when dance music entered my life - but I do know it was pretty early on in the evolution of house. Jesse Saunders’ On And On, generally acclaimed as the first house music record, was released in 1984 and, while it did make an impact in the UK, the song came nowhere near the Top of the Pops / Now… level of recognition, where I found my music.
The first British house hit, Farley “Jackmaster” Funk and Jesse Saunders’s eternal Love Can’t Turn Around, came two years later, the song reaching number 10 on the singles chart in September 1986, one month after the release of Now…7, earning the Chicago DJs two Top of the Pops appearances alongside singer Darryl Pandy, who wore a sparkling light blue top and made being on Top of the Pops look like the funnest job in the world. Which is as it should be.
The duo’s Top of the Pops appearance on September 4, 1986, when I had recently turned nine, was, in all likelihood, my introduction to dance music. That I don’t remember being particularly bothered by what was a potentially epochal moment in my cultural life is down to two things. Firstly, the whole point of Top of the Pops was to underline what united the seven or eight songs the programme played in every show rather than to point to any differences; and that was that they were hits. Hit status, in other words, always trumped musical genre and you would see this in the way Top of the Pops approached every act that performed in its studios.
A typical episode of Top of the Pops in the 1980s would include roughly two videos and five in-studio performances. (Not “live performances”: Top of the Pops acts mimed to a backing track until the new bosses in the 1990s decided that live vocals was a better idea.) On September 4, when Farley “Jackmaster” Funk made his ToTP debut, the in-studio acts were The Communards, Mc Miker G & Deejay Sven; Bon Jovi and Frankie Goes To Hollywood. These acts were introduced by the same host, in roughly the same fashion, performed to the same crowd, for roughly the same amount of time, and, while they did appear on different stages, the studio had a generic, 80s-disco-on-New-Year’s-Eve vibe to them. This was a centralised vision of pop that worked very well in a country as geographically small as the UK, with a powerful national broadcaster like the BBC. Top of the Pops was a show where the programme was bigger than the bands and the hit was biggest of all.
The fact that Farley “Jackmaster” Funk’s performance on Top of the Pops didn’t seem particularly shocking to someone of just nine years old also explains a lot about the slowly shifting sands of musical evolution, where new forms of music emerge not in great leaps forward but in subtle shifts of taste, technology and attitude.
This is to take nothing away from Farley, Jesse Saunders and other early pioneers of house, who dreamed up a musical form that would take over the world. House music is a brilliant expression of Black creativity that is one of the musical wonders of the world. But it shouldn’t be taken in isolation. House music emerged largely from disco, when US producers and DJs used the new technology at their disposal to make a minimal (and more affordable) take on the big-band disco hits they admired. But they weren’t the only people listening to disco at the time and they weren’t the only musicians using the new drum machines and synths that had started to emerge.
Jesse Saunders apparently used a Roland TR-808 drum machine, Korg Poly-61 synthesiser and Roland TB-303 bass synthesiser to make On and On; and we can probably assume a similar set up for Love Can’t Turn Around. These instruments weren’t cheap, exactly. But they weren’t that expensive either: the TR-808 was priced at less than $1,000 on its release in 1980, which meant that it was used by a lot of producers of all stripes. And so there was nothing shocking in their sound to a child who had grown up surrounded by 1980s pop.
In fact, you don’t need to go that far from Farley “Jackmaster” Funk’s September 1986 performance on Top of the Pops to find a disco-influenced club hit played out on drum machines and keyboards. The very same show kicked off with British synth pop duo The Communards and their hit cover of Harold Melvin & the Blue Notes’ classic Don’t Leave Me This Way. Is this song house music? Not really. The song’s sound is too maximal, for a start and, in the early days of house, the where was probably as important as the what. House music, in 1986, was a little like champagne, in that you could make other products that resembled it but it was probably only really house music if it came from Chicago, New York, Detroit or another of the US enclaves where house music had originated.
But Don’t Leave Me This Way wasn’t that far from house music, at least not in the ears of a nine year old; it wasn’t that far, either, from the Pet Shop Boys, who were one of my favourite bands as a child; and it wasn’t all that different sonically from Kraftwerk, Ultravox, The Human League or any number of electro pop acts who had made it onto Top of the Pops (and therefore into my consciousness) at this point.
The musical evolution of the 1980s saw different artists, from different places, using the tools of the time to arrive at similar spaces, independently of each other, like Newton and Leibniz discovering calculus in the 1670s. The result was that when I heard Love Can’t Turn Around I could relate it to other 1980s hits and it didn’t sounds so strange to me, particularly when dressed up in the dubious glitz of Top of the Pops.
Age comes into this too. If I had been slightly older when Love Can’t Turn Around burst onto the scene I might have investigated the song, found out who it was by and where they came from; I might have tried to understand something of the song’s context and why it was different. But at the age of nine, I simply sat back and enjoyed it.
Jack Your Body by Steve “Silk” Hurley, also from Chicago, was another matter. Hurley’s first solo single was strikingly different to Love Can’t Turn Around and I remember my head being spun around by this brilliantly weird, oddly repetitive little song that climbed all the way to number one in the British charts in January 1987.
Jack Your Body is a masterpiece of tough, addictive minimalism. There is little more to it than the adrenalised thump of a drum machine rhythm; a simple yet effective bass line (apparently borrowed from the Shep Pettibone mix of First Choice’s disco classic Let No Man Put Asunder) that for the large part contents itself with just four notes; a synth riff that marches up and down the scale like Sisyphus carting his rock up the hill, fitting into the bass line line like a particularly satisfying jigsaw corner; and the song’s de facto chorus, in which a voice exhorts us over and again to “jack your body”.
The song’s minimal approach - it was far more stripped down than most of the house music of the time, even with its key changes and occasional blues piano runs - could perhaps have been off-putting or even unsettling to a nine-year-old child.
But much like Rotterdam Termination Source’s Poing, released six years later, this minimalism didn’t bother me. Children, after all, are used to dogged repetition - it’s what many nursery rhymes, lullabies and children’s chants are built on. And this, in a way, is what Jack Your Body reminded me of: a children’s song, with an enduringly repetitive hook that, once heard, could be employed ad nauseam in the playground. I had no idea what “jacking” was, even when given a healthy hint by the dance-laden video, but it reminded me of Jack and Jill in the traditional English nursery rhyme, who go up a hill to fetch water.
Even better, for a child’s ears, Jack Your Body was overlaid by a series of grunts, vocal spasms, stupid noises and an almighty “huergh” of the kind that children love to make. I long thought that these noises were intended to be serious, which made me slightly uncomfortable for laughing at them. But they were actually meant to be funny all along.
“I made Jack Your Body purely to amuse my friends,” Hurley told Jude Rogers in The Guardian in 2017. “Listen to the voices I’m using on it: I’m imitating James Brown, Mr T on the A–Team, Richard Pryor… I didn’t expect it to go beyond the Chicago clubs, let alone become a number one.” James Brown I was dimly aware of in 1987; Richard Pryor I’d seen in Superman 3; and Mr-T was very much my guy; so I was on board with this kind of behaviour.
Later on in life I would become obsessed with cartoon rave, a briefly flowering genre of music that combined proto-jungle breakbeats with samples from children’s TV shows, à la Sesame’s Treet or Trip to Trumpton.
Jack Your Body wasn’t that - but there was something subtly child-like about it, in its intense repetition, lyrical babble and embrace of the ridiculous. If you had put Ring a Ring o' Roses to a jacking house beat - something UK rave survivors Orbital came very close to doing several year later on Ringa Ringa - it wouldn’t have sounded all that different in spirit to Jack Your Body. And I think that was why it appealed to me in 1987.
Sadly, Hurley wasn’t able to properly capitalise on his success. He was, at the time, under pressure to finish the J.M. Silk album and so he didn’t promote the song in the UK, which meant no Top of the Pops appearance to put a face to this rather alien song. (We were left, instead, with a mysterious video of historical dance footage.) It has been claimed that Jack Your Body received no UK radio play either, even as it powered to a number one slot on the charts.
JM Silk’s next two singles flopped in the UK, as well in the US. “In America, you’re told to make something that people know is selling, to follow cookie-cutter guidelines to make something a hit,” Hurley told The Guardian in 2017. “It doesn’t work like that with you. You UK guys embrace the new.” Hurley did have later success, though, as a remixer and producer, with high-profile work for Michael Jackson, Janet Jackson and Madonna, and as producer of Kym Sims’s 1991 club classic, Too Blind to See It.
But if Hurley didn’t have any more British hits, house music itself was only getting started in the UK, as a flood of dance songs climbed the charts in its wake. Maybe the best way to view this is through the Now…. compilations that my sister and I pooled our money to buy every few months. Now 9, which was released in March 1987, featured Jack Your Body; Now 10, which came out in November 1987, had MARRS’ Pump Up the Volume, which had followed Jack Your Body to the top of the UK charts in autumn 1987.
By the time Now 11 was released, in March 1988, Britain had gone house crazy, with side D of the two-cassette release - obviously the only way to buy a Now album - kicking off with Bomb The Bass’s Beat Dis, followed by Coldcut and Yazz’s Doctorin’ The House, Krush’s House Arrest, Jack 'N' Chill’s The Jack That House Built, Beatmasters feat. Cookie Crew’s Rok Da House and finally Tired Of Getting Pushed Around by 2 Men, A Drum Machine & A Trumpet, a Fine Young Cannibals offshoot off all things.
None of these groups are American and some of them aren’t even very good. But it is evident that, even before the famed Second Summer of Love kicked off in 1988, house music had become entirely mainstream in the UK. And, yes, a lot of it was watered-down, British attempts at house. But some of it wasn’t. Farley “Jackmaster” Funk returned to the British top 10 in autumn 1987 with House Nation, as House Master Boyz and the Rude Boys of House; and Kevin Saunderson’s Inner City project scored two top ten hits in the UK in 1988, with Big Fun and Good Life, which remain classics to this day.
Allied to this was the fact that the British media lost their collective minds about the illegal raves of the Acid House era. I was far too young to go to a rave in summer 1988 - I don’t think I had even been to a school disco by this point - but they seemed to be everywhere you looked in that long hot summer, from the front pages of the tabloid newspapers to the BBC’s evening news.
The media’s alarmist takes on Acid House - these were illegal drug parties! where you were certain to die! - meant that I never saw them as entirely good things. But I definitely found them interesting, in the way young people inevitably do when faced with moral panics, and I remember picking up rave flyers as soon as I was old enough to go to a local record shop and trying to piece together from them what these events must be like.
What hope, then, was there for me and for other people of my generation? When Good Life reached number four in the charts, at the start of January 1989, I was 11. But I already had house music in my heart. Was there any way that I wasn’t going to grow up with a love of dance music? Was there even a possibility that I wouldn’t go on to spend countless house listening to repetitive beats in darkened rooms, as the early hours of the day ticked past? Of course not. I was hooked.
Some listening
Some drum & bass tries so hard to impress you; Nectax’s latest just can’t be arsed, laying out melodic pads and dualing vocal samples in a kaleidoscopic stew that reeks of summer days by the swimming pool with nothing more arduous than a barbecue in mind. The producer makes all this sound as simple as child’s play - but if you pay attention there is fierce beat savagery and a brilliantly busy bass line running along underneath it all, which demand repeat listening.
Wim Mertens - Maximising The Audience
As someone who has never been to Ibiza, nor seriously considered it, I am perhaps the worst person to judge the true musical spirit of the White Isle (do people even still call it that?). For all that, I would love to think that Maximising The Audience, a 1985 piano, opera and drum machine song from Flemish composer Wim Mertens, is very much in the Ibiza spirit, as it is presented on Paraiso, a new compilation from the legendary (and now sadly late) Ibiza DJ Alfredo, a man who forgot more about the Balearics than most club goers will ever learn.
It’s a bizarre song, one that seems to cycle around gleefully chasing its operatic tale rather than actually going anywhere, like Penguin Café Orchestra at the Sydney Opera House, but it also feels absolutely perfect for sun, salty days and an open-minded club audience, with the perfect Mediterranean touch of sadness, like the song knows you will soon have to go home. The whole compilation is fantastic, actually, balancing genuine dance classics (Promised Land, Pacific State etc.) with a healthy dose of songs I have never heard of.
Call it growlcore: music characterised by a fearful rumble that falls somewhere between the call of a bear and the cry of your hungry stomach. Pepe Bradock did it with Rhapsody in Pain, now Seattle producer Jason Code has a go on the very well-named Nervous Growl, a song dominated by rumbles, grunts, moans and mechanical snarls.
That may sound particularly esoteric but Code keeps it all under control with neatly-swung house beats and clipped vocal effects that remind me of Akufen. Heard in the right circumstances, this could be deliciously dangerous. Incidentally, the EP gives me Jacob London vibes, for anyone who remembers his excellent work for Classic in the 2000s.
Inland Years occupy the sweet spot where early Pavement melodic grot meets Teenage Fanclub-level harmonies, which is a potent mix in a beautifully unassuming way. I am often wary of deliberately lo-fi music in 2025 but That Day is 84 seconds of entirely charming lo-fidelity stroll that I have been rewinding again and again.
You know what unites a lot of your favourite electronic music? Melodies. I guarantee it. And yet they remain stubbornly underrated by much of the dance world. Aphex has great melodies; Boards of Canada have great melodies; and Kettel - aka classically-trained Dutch musician Reimer Eising - has loads of great melodies, as is evident on his classic 2005 album Through Friendly Waters, which the good people at Lapsus are re-issuing for its birthday. Pinch of Peer is a perfect example of this, in that it has a teasing sound palette - kind for fairy grotto meets particularly clean chill-out room - but it is the mysteriously creeping melody that will stay with you.
Things I’ve done
Line Noise podcast with mad miran
I spoke to mad miran at Primavera Sound 2025 about the perils of DJing back to back, disturbing genres, John Talabot, life in Barcelona and more. Sadly, we only had 12 minutes but Shawn Reynaldo’s interview with miran this week goes into a lot more detail, should you wish.
The playlists
I have two: The newest and bestest 2025; and The newest and the bestest. They are both on Spotify, in the name of reaching the largest amount of people. Does that justify it? Maybe not. Funnily enough, I personally use Apple Music, so maybe I should shift to there, although the functionality isn’t as good. I don’t know. What do you think?