122. Yazz & The Plastic Population - The Only Way Is Up (Big Life)

One week at number one on 20th August 1988

Originally, I was tempted to tie this together with the last entry (“Superfly Guy”) for the simple reason that it underlines the point I was making about the different approaches to music for the dancefloor. You can either stick doggedly to a groove where the lyrics are a pure afterthought, mere chanted exhortations, or offer a much more coherent, emotional story, guided more by pop song structures (“I Will Survive”).

Otis Clay’s original version of “The Only Way Is Up” was always on the latter side of the fence, though wasn’t a huge success when released in 1982. If you haven’t listened to it in a while, go back and do so again – while researching this entry, I found myself unexpectedly moved by having the experience afresh. I’d forgotten just how understated it was, yet personal. If you’ve ever experienced poverty, however briefly, the idea of having somebody by your side throughout the ordeal takes on a highly romantic edge; a lot of couples don’t make it through to the other side as desperate times expose ugly personality flaws. We may all have insecurities about not being attractive enough, clever enough, charismatic enough or warm enough for our partners, but capable enough? Able to actually contribute towards food and shelter, fundamental life basics? Not being a financial drag? In the unforgiving modern world, that’s a kicker, and something the post-Reagan/Thatcher mainstream continually reinforces as a kind of societal blight.  

Literal hunger can also lead to brash comments, rash behaviour and long solo walks in the freezing cold away from the claustrophobia of the bedsit. The very idea of a couple helping each other through the dark times, convinced that better things are ahead, is therefore an extremely strange idea for a dancefloor driven ballad, but an effective and touching one – and the songwriters Jackson and Henderson pull no punches (“If we should be evicted from our homes” is a brutal line in any context) while Clay sells it subtly and beautifully, without a hint of bitterness, like a warm hug in a freezing cold bed. When he sings “I know love will see us through” (a line missing from Yazz’s version) he could be singing about a relationship or about society more generally, depending on how you want to hear it. It feels like underclass gospel.

In some senses, Yazz may have seemed like the perfect person to front a cover of this record. She was sold to the public as a plucky everywoman, a club dancefloor girl with a distinctive peroxide crop who got lucky. On her first chart appearance with “Doctorin’ The House” she played an important part, providing a clarion call and foundation to Coldcut’s chaotic pilfering of old records, but it was certainly more their track than hers. A lot of people assumed she was a friend of the duo, grabbed from the club floor, when in reality she had already spent some time working as a catwalk model, and was shortly afterwards handled by Wham!’s management team. They sent her to singing lessons and she cut a demo, then was subsequently introduced to Coldcut, who happened to issue “Doctorin’ The House” right at the point where House music was becoming a commercial force (their previous records had not charted).

Her version of “The Only Way Is Up”, produced by Coldcut again, is fascinating to listen to back-to-back with Clay’s, purely because the approach is so different. Clay is smooth and warm but dogged, doing his best for his partner and guardian angel. Yazz, on the other hand, is being driven by something else – a noisy self-belief almost. Her delivery suggests she’s never lost a minute’s sleep in her life wondering if she’s wrong, or feeling as if actually, her natural level in life might be working in a call centre. The track is far too ebullient for that, punctuated with screams of victory and joy. You exit Clay’s track thinking he might land himself a perfectly average job soon, whereas throughout, Yazz sounds as if she’s already won the lottery (and in a funny way, of course, she had).

You could meaningfully compare “The Only Way Is Up” to “I Will Survive”. While Gaynor’s single is about surviving without your deadbeat cheating lover, “Up” is about the pair of you surviving through the difficulties – in Yazz’s hands, it’s a tool of absolute defiance and self-belief, determination winning over any scrap of self-doubt. Just as Gaynor knows she can get by alone, Yazz also knows that two good people united in determination to overcome their difficulties are going to have better odds than one.

Her ecstatic (pun absolutely intended) delivery is also much more in keeping with the dancefloor of the day. Coldcut’s trumpet howls, jittery bottle-bank rhythms and squelching Acid sounds demand something that can overpower them rather than falling beneath them, and just as she did on “Doctorin’ The House”, Yazz rises to the occasion. At moments, she howls in what can only be described as joyous defiance, and it sounds like an unbelievably of-the-moment record – skint kids at Shoom, being part of a movement, a moment, dosed up on E and believing that despite all the difficulties, they are finally part of something together (cue one of Mike Skinner’s diatribes). She effectively took this song away from the early eighties global recession and translated it for the later, chemical part of the decade.

109. Beatmasters featuring The Cookie Crew - Rok Da House (Rhythm King)

 

One week at number one on 30th January 1988

Casual dismissers of eighties music usually refer to the over-produced “sameyness” of the era. I’ve always been a little bit gobsmacked by that assertion – yes, the MOR and AOR aspects of the decade’s middle period occasionally suffered from a weird, suffocating and dispassionate smoothness, and there was a tendency to either overlook or airbrush guitar sounds in the mainstream, but that was never “it”. Innovation was everywhere. 

“Rok Da House”, for example, is something which was didn't completely take off on its first release for its crossing of two genre streams. In 1987, House Music and Hip-Hop were two different beasts, seldom seen in the same habitats – in some cities they may have attracted similar audiences, but people usually did not rap over a House beat, anymore than they would a Hi-NRG rhythm. House was party music, Hip-Hop was its own, usually more intense area.

“Rok Da House” is widely considered to be the first example of a disc which mixed the two and got away with it. Cookie Crew were a long-standing Hip-Hop duo from South London who grew in prominence after they won a 1985 rap championship at the Wag Club. Two John Peel sessions followed and these are well worth a listen, because despite being quite raw and innocent, they also show how well-developed the pair already were. Despite his support and enthusiasm, though, record label interest appeared non-existent until Rhythm King stepped forward in 1987. 

Beatmasters, on the other hand, were the total opposite of “late night radio”, with two out of the three members having day jobs composing jingles and soundtracks for television adverts. Despite their roles churning out ditties to sell bathroom products to, they were also regular London club-goers who were excited by the scene’s ongoing developments, and keen to get on board. Rhythm King records gave them the job of working with Cookie Crew, and despite the obvious illogic of giving a credible but marginal UK Hip-Hop duo the task of recording with a trio whose interests were geared around House music, “Rok Da House” was born that year.

Interest was marginal at first, with the single bobbing up into the lower reaches of the Indie Top 10 but not quite crossing over. Following its initial release, the decision was taken to give it a fresh remix and relaunch it again into the cold winter snap of 1988, where it shot into the National Top 10 without much hesitation, following the success of other House records during the same period. It had finally found its moment.

While M|A|R|R|S sometimes felt like an uneven collaboration with one artist doing most of the heavy lifting on its most played side, “Rok Da House” is an obvious partnership of equals. If you removed The Beatmasters contributions from this and allowed the Crew to do their usual rhythmic verbal assault over their cutting and mixing technique, the end result would probably have been another cult track for the duo following “Females”. Equally, without the fierce, loud rapping over the backing track here, The Beatmasters work would have been just another club-friendly House instrumental which might have lucked out with a low Top 40 position.

Combined, the two are dynamite. Cookie Crew sell the track awesomely, never ashamed or afraid to acknowledge the track’s instrumental peaks by using those moments to bark and shout the fiercest; listening to this again, it’s astonishing how raw and instinctive but utterly perfectly timed some of their moves seem, shooting off in a quickfire fashion, frequently raising the volume halfway through sentences to emphasise the track’s drive and momentum. There was still a misapprehension in the late eighties among “real musicians” that rap was a dead-end fad (or as Ozzy Osbourne put it “Just talking over a record? It’s a doddle, innit!”) and while there were many short-lived novelty chancers both in the USA and UK, Cookie Crew make it really obvious how they won a competition two years prior to this. Their fluidity makes it sound too easy (try copying them and you’ll realise it’s not). It’s not just the speed of their flow that’s impressive, it’s the charisma and the instinctive use of emphasis, as well as their unapologetic brattiness. It’s the sound of the two loudest women in the room expressing a rush of ecstasy, but doing so with consummate technique. 

The Beatmasters, meanwhile, have provided them with a House track that’s a little bit more restless and scattergun in its focus than most of the crossover records we’ve heard so far. It starts off ordinarily enough with that piano motif, but they then riddle the song with endless extra keyboard runs, what sounds like a prowling bassline sped up five times over, and (one of my favourite bits, and probably yours too) that chaotic, giddy psychedelic keyboard break which emerges just when you suspect they might have run out of ideas (eventually, it does more or less finish the song). If you were being cynical, you could argue that they were professional musicians putting their experience at writing catchy ad jingles over a genre which was booming in commercial and dancefloor popularity - there are a couple of slightly buried elements in the mix which do sound a tiny bit like “brassy synthetic library music” - but then again, why not?