The secret history of Basement Jaxx
Basement Jaxx may well be the most misunderstood act in the history of house music. Nowadays they are probably best known known for their bells, whistles and the kitchen sink take on stadium house, a divisive sound that has taken them to the heights of The Hollywood Bowl but written off their underground acclaim.
And yet trace the duo’s history back — past 2014’s Junto, 2005’s massive-selling The Singles compilation, 2004’s Grammy-winning Kish Kash — and you find a band whose work for their own Atlantic Jaxx label was adored by underground DJs and consumed in dodgy South London pubs; a duo who pioneered a very English take on house, one that added the South American and Jamaican sounds of London to the US deep house template.
You will, in short, find one of the most intriguing and overlooked catalogues in British dance music, one that is ripe for reappraisal, as we pass the 20th anniversary of the duo first bothering the charts with Samba Magic.
EP 1
1994 was an important year in British music, with the release of Oasis’ debut album and Blur’s classic Parklife signalling the start of Britpop. British dance music, meanwhile, was dominated — at least in the media eye — by trip hop, an expression first coined in the June 1994 issue of Mixmag, and handbag house, a raunchy, commercial brand of house music that favoured diva vocals and pianos.
The year also saw the release of Basement Jaxx’s EP 1, a record “created in a shoe box somewhere in [London’s] SW9”. It was not just the first release on Basement Jaxx’s Atlantic Jaxx label, it also comprised the first four songs the duo Simon Ratcliffe and Felix Buxton made together as Basement Jaxx.
Key track: Undaground.
Ratcliffe and Buxton first bonded over a love of New York house music in general and Masters at Work in particular. You can hear this affinity in EP1’s four tracks — Don’t Stop It, Deep In Tha Night, Deep Inside Your Love and Undaground — all of which sound considerably more Brooklyn than Brixton, all swinging high hats, warm bass lines, snatched vocal samples and rolling congo drums.
The results, while not particularly original, display a production finesse and casual fluidity which would fit seamlessly into the set of an MK or DJ Haus today. They also shared a certain affinity with Salt City Orchestra’s The Book, a northern English deep house classic by Manchester DJs Elliot Eastwick and Miles Hollway, which was released in 1994 on UK house label Paper Recordings. Undaground is the EP’s key track, though, thanks to its patronage by legendary New York DJ Tony Humphries, who played it on his New York mix show throughout 1994 and 1995.
“Our first EP sold over a thousand copies, proving popular and we even heard that Tony Humphries had played it in New York, which was mind blowing,” Ratcliffe told The Sun newspaper. “Knowing that people you respect are supporting your music is so important in the early days as encouragement to keep going, it means you are doing something right.”
1994 also saw Basement Jaxx debut their eponymous club night, which was held in various grimy locations in Brixton, South London, starting Mexican bar called Taco Joe’s.
“I was trying to do what I thought was happening in New York,” Buxton told The Resident in December 2014. “I had an idea of what the club would be like and one room had to have a stack of speakers, one strobe and one red light with music from the early house scene, Latin culture, black culture. The early Basement Jaxx sound was based on that. When I finally got to a club in New York it was exactly the same. I was so pleased.”
The club night would also feature an open mic, which introduced the band to another of their key influences: Brazilian music. “Early on we had open mic with all sorts of entertainment,” Buxton told The Resident. “That’s how I met the Brazilian crew, on Brixton riot night, actually. The tube stopped at Stockwell and didn’t go to Brixton so I was chatting up a girl and through her I got to know a lot of Brazilian people. They would come down and play percussion and dance.”
EP 2
EP 2, released in 1995, proved a notable step forward for Basement Jaxx: the influence of US house could still be heard in the swinging drums of Be Free but a track like Deep Jackin proved they had moved on to a sound that was tougher, dirtier and more distinctively English. Dusk Till Dawn brought elements of jazz and samba to proceedings, while I’m Thru With You introduced singer Corrina Joseph — brought on board as the duo worked looked to write “proper songs” and later to become a key part of the Atlantic Jaxx family — with a wonderfully insouciant vocal.
Again, the EP had little in common with the UK’s dance mainstream, where big albums that year came from Leftfield, Tricky and the Chemical Brothers, the latter helping to usher in the breakbeat-based sound that would later be known as Big Beat.
Speaking to the Daily Mirror in 2009 Buxton said that when they started, Basement Jaxx “had the unfashionable idea of making deep spiritual American-sounding underground house music”. “European dance music was horrible at the time — it was all about drugs, it sounded like all the producers were on cocaine with hard Nazi beats, and it didn’t enrich the soul,” he explained.
On EP 1 they achieved this goal, making a fine impression of the US house sound. On EP 2 the duo went further, producing the first music that was notably theirs, sowing the seeds of the Basement Jaxx sound.
Key Track: Deep Jackin
I’m Thru With You is righty celebrated for introducing Corinna Joseph to the world. The singer would record three brilliant EPs for Atlantic Jaxx — Live Your Life With Me, Wanna Get Down (When U Get Down) and Wish Tonite / Lonely — which all sport immaculate Basement Jaxx productions, equal to anything on their own releases. Joseph would later work with Nightmares on Wax and Russ Gabriel and record for Paper Recordings.
But Deep Jackin is the standout track for two reasons. Firstly, it sees Basement Jaxx finding their own voice. Yes, there are elements of contemporary New York in there — the rock hard kick drum, the unsettling high-pitched string noise — but there are other elements to Deep Jackin borrowed from rave, techno and God-knows-where, which give the track a rougher, unsettled edge. Most house music at the time was about smooth transitions and gentle, soul-filled bumps. Deep Jackin was awkward, with odd samples which seem to come from nowhere, out of time but full of funk.
[Deep Jackin would also prove a favourite at Back to Basics, a Leeds club which claims to be “the UK’s longest running weekly underground club night” as it approaches its 25th anniversary. Danny Tenaglia, Frankie Knuckles and Josh Wink were among the US DJs to make early British appearances there, while Basement Jaxx played Basics on their first UK tour (returning for the club’s 21st Birthday in 2012).
The club’s resident DJ Ralph Lawson, a key figure in the UK house underground whose 20:20 Vision label was a source of quality music from artists including Fred Everything, Inland Knights and Bobby Peru, included Deep Jackin in his Best of Basics 1991–2001 playlist, alongside classics from the likes of Adonis, Carl Craig and Inner City.]
Summer Daze EP
South London is a very beautiful place in the sun. And little says “sunny South London” like Basement Jaxx’s Summer Daze EP from 1995, a record “where the sounds of SW9 meet the sun-kissed grooves of downtown Rio”.
Its five tracks veer from the South London Sueño Latino of Paradise to the sweaty-in-a-basement minimal groove of 325 to the percussive frenzy of Arpino Jam. But the standout track has to be Samba Magic — still one of the group’s best-known tracks — and its little-known younger brother Phase 2 Hi.
Key Track: Samba Magic
Basement Jaxx’s love affair with Brazilian music, born out of the duo’s Brixton club night, was consummated, introduced to their parents and whipped off for a dirty weekend on Samba Magic, the earliest track to feature on the band’s singles collection.
The track — which proved a big hit with Masters at Work, bringing things nicely full circle — samples Samba de Flora, from Brazilian percussionist Airto Moreira, riding the original’s breezy percussive brilliance into nigh on eight minutes’ worth of hot-blooded house heaven that still sounds fresh as a summer haircut today. (It is very much worth checking out the band’s 2010 version of the song as performed with Holland’s Metropole Orkest to get an idea of the track’s unique, enduring and thoroughly musical appeal).
Basement Jaxx, of course, were hardly the first act to introduce Latin sounds to house music: the roots of Latin House go back to the mid 1980s, with records like Jesse Velez’ Girls Out On The Floor and Amor Puertorriqueño by Raz.
Nor would they be the last. In fact, Atlantic Jaxx would later release Latin-influenced house beats by the likes of Moreno (SummerTime), Braziu Xplozian and notably the Heartists, whose Airto Morera tribute Belo Horizonte is one of the genre’s best-know tracks, liable to get wheeled out even today when TV producers need shorthand for Brazilian exuberance.
But of all these producers Basement Jaxx are almost certainly the only ones who have played the Hollywood Bowl and Brazilian music has proved an influence throughout their career, popping up on songs like 1999’s Bingo Bango (which samples Bolivar’s Merengue) or 2014’s Sereia de Bahia, a take on Mermaid of Salinas featuring Brazilian singer Nina Miranda.
For anyone who may have over-listened to Samba Magic, Summer Daze’s Phase 2 Hi comes recommended: the track uses the same Airto sample that powers Samba Magic to much tougher ends, bolting it to a steely kick drum and some Daft Punk-esque filter sweeps.
Phase 2 Hi also appears on Virgin’s 1996 re-release of Samba Magic, billed as a Phase 2 Hi mix of the original track, alongside a DJ Sneak remix. This release marked the first time that Basement Jaxx — albeit under the name of Summer Daze — crossed over to a mainstream audience, the weight of a major label behind them.
EP 3
Simon Ratcliffe’s solo EP City Dreams and Corinna Joseph’s Wanna Get Down (When U Get Down) became releases four and five on Atlantic Jaxx, with the duo returning for EP 3 in 1996.
And what a return it proved to be. Daluma is a jazzy frenzy of live drums and airy chords, which resolves into an elegant house groove not a million miles away from the work of fellow Brit House pioneers Faze Action, whose string-laden disco classic In The Trees was released the same year.
Jus Becuz is one of those tracks that seems to endlessly build, going from deep, warm house to funhouse tech nightmare and back again, while Slide Slide sounds a like an English take on Moodymann’s Detroit sound, all dusty samples and rough-edged human grooves.
But the EP will probably always be remembered for Fly Life, the band’s first UK chart hit (when re-released in 1997) and the peak of phase one Basement Jaxx.
Key Track: Fly Life
The most astonishing thing about Fly Life to anyone raised on Basement Jaxx’s later commercial successes is how minimal it sounds. OK, with its vocal and undulating samples it hardly reaches Basic Channel levels of moderation. But compared to the maximalist house attack of a song like Lucky Star, Fly Life is a model of restraint.
What’s more, like the best minimalist dance music, Fly Life extracts every possibly ounce of funk from few key elements. In fact, you could say that Fly Life is really about just one noise: the seven insistent synth stabs which drive the track ever forward.
And, for once, “stabs” might even be the correct word — there’s something exhilarating, aggressive even, about the sound, which works brilliantly on a dance floor. No wonder that the track proved a massive hit with DJs of the time. “Remember first hearing Elliot Eastwick play this at Hard Times in Leeds just as I was peaking,” says dilshad57 on YouTube. “Felt like everybody on the dance floor was trying to stab me!” Well quite.
In 1997, Fly Life was picked up for re-release by Multiply Records (better known for its success with the likes of Sash! and Phats & Small), eventually reaching number 19 in the UK charts. The re-release was led by a new version of the song, the “Brix” Mix (and “Brix” Radio edit), which tweaked the production and added vocals from British reggae artist Glamma Kid.
It proved a controversial move — some of Fly Life’s original fans hated the new vocal, which they considered to be pandering to a mainstream audience. Others loved it for putting a new spin on the song. What was certain, though, was that it marked a new phase in Basement Jaxx’s development, making them into chart stars and also adding a Jamaican element to their musical mix.
That mixture — house plus reggae — was something they would go on to explore in their work with Ronnie Richards, a London singer who recorded a number of EPs (including the brilliant Missing You) and an album for Atlantic Jaxx. It was a fusion that was very London, very Basement Jaxx and very Brixton.
Sleazycheeks
Corinna Joseph’s Live Your Life With Me was Jaxx007, with Basement Jaxx’s Sleazycheeks EP following quick on its heels.
By this time — late 1996 — Basement Jaxx’s international renown was growing. Their deep house sound had little to do with the UK’s dance music mainstream, which was dominated by The Prodigy, Underworld, the Chemical Brothers and Robert Miles’ execrable trance light classic Children, but they had received a warm welcome among US DJs such as Roger Sanchez (who remixed Live Your Life With Me) and Derrick May, who included two tracks from Sleazycheeks on his furiously brilliant Mix-Up Vol. 5 CD, released in 1997.
These were probably the EP’s best known tracks: Eu Nao, a deliriously addictive Latin House number and Get Down Get Horny, featuring a suitably salacious vocal hook from Corrina Joseph over smouldering early-evening beats.
They are joined by Moradi, a tech-y number with Middle Eastern musical hooks; Jump, a sparse, percussive track I remember fondly from a Ralph Lawson mixtape given away free with DJ Magazine; and Stanley, four minutes of uncharacteristically melancholic funk, which samples Stanley Clarke’s Concerto for Jazz/Rock Orchestra (Part II and Part III) (also sampled by DJ Shadow on Best Foot Forward that same year and Danny Brown’s Guitar Solo in 2010).
Key Track: Eu Nao
Eu Nao may not be the first Basement Jaxx track to experiment with Latin sounds; it is almost certainly not the best known. But it might just be the best, sporting a near-perfect vocal from Adrianna Montero, which nags and uplifts in perfect measure, rousing house beats and Brazilian instrumentation aplenty.
You can hear it — and indeed many of the tracks here — on the logically-titled1997 album Atlantic Jaxx Recordings: A Compilation. For my money, though, Eu Nao is probably best enjoyed on the Mix-Up Vol. 5, where the songs emerges bright as Brazilian beach attire (and pitched up to about plus 6) from a mix submerged in Chicago house and tough-as-nails Detroit techno. It’s one of those unexpected juxtapositions that the best DJs pull off, highlighting all that is bright and beautiful about the song by means of clever contrasts and spot-on track selection.
Urban Haze
Urban Haze was the last Basement Jaxx EP before they signed to XL in 1998. It was released in 1997, the same year the band became chart stars, thanks to Fly Life. But, frankly, anyone hoping for a repeat of that song’s chart-friendly bounciness would be disappointed: Urban Haze is probably the duo’s toughest EP, with sunshine samples eschewed in favour of raw jacking and distortion.
Urban Haze, the title track, is well named — it’s a misty, ambient number that you could see being used to convince tardy nightclub punters to go home after a big night out; Raw Shit is one of the nastiest numbers in the Basement Jaxx catalogue, all distorted kick drums and buzzing synths; City People, meanwhile is a mess of sirens, bongos and weird noises, which sounds a little bit like how you might imagine a particularly funky evening in Brixton might do. Best of all, though, is Set Yo Body Free, a track whose raw, nagging city funk is the epitome of all that is good on Urban Haze.
Key Track: Set Yo Body Free
In 2016 Basement Jaxx remain a big dance music act: Junto, their last album made a respectable 168 on the US charts and landed at 30 in the UK, and they are a strong live draw.
But it would be fair to say they lack the cultural cachet of Daft Punk: no one really cites Basement Jaxx as an influence these days; Pharrell’s probably not taking their calls and they don’t get wheeled out to the launch of superstar-backed music streaming services. In fact, for many house music fans Daft Punk probably operate in an entirely different league to Basement Jaxx — legends to the Jaxx’s party act; innovators to the London duo’s good-time bounce.
And yet the two acts are really not so different. Both emerged in the mid 90s on indie labels, bringing a European take on house; they share many of the same influences (disco, New York house etc) and they have worked with some of the same people (DJ Sneak, for example, who has remixed both acts).
It gets forgotten in their latter-period embrace of pop maximalism but Basement Jaxx were once critical darlings too, with their debut album Remedy picking up ecstatic reviews across the board. In 2009 Sasha Frere-Jones wrote in the New Yorker about how he had predicted that Basement Jaxx, rather than Daft Punk, would be the dance act to cross over, singling out Jaxx’s 2001 single Romeo for special praise.
Then there are the more obvious crossovers between the two bands: Daft Punk DJed at Basement Jaxx’s London club and also supported them with a low-key DJ set at the band’s Paris’s gig in 1999. [(I was there and the Paris crowd couldn’t have been less interested when Thomas Bangalter and Guy Man took over on DJ duties. Bangalter dropped Europe’s The Final Countdown, to our great amusement.)] Basement Jaxx remixed Daft Punk’s Phoenix for their Daft Club remix album (although the results are rather less than you might expect from such a meeting of minds) and both acts were part of Armand van Helden’s loose DJ collective Da Mongoloids, alongside the likes of Todd Terry and Ian Pooley.
Then there’s Set Yo Body Free, a track which suggests a certain kinship in sound between the two acts. The track is raw, techno-influenced house, with all the funk of the latter and all the steel of the former. It is reminiscent, in other words, of early Daft Punk tracks like Rollin’ & Scratchin’ or The New Wave where the Parisian act let their love of Jeff Mills and Dancemania take the upper hand. Close your eyes and Set Yo Body Free could, at a pinch, be the work of early Daft Punk.
So why didn’t Basement Jaxx make a Daft Punk-style breakthrough? It’s hard to say exactly — but several factors may have been at play. Firstly, Basement Jaxx were probably more inconsistent than Daft Punk: they put out a lot more music than the Parisians and, while much of it is great, there are a lot of clangers in their catalogue. (Personally, I find the brain-melting sonic overload of Basement Jaxx’s 2003 album Kish Kash very hard to take).
Secondly, Basement Jaxx arguably didn’t fit in in the same way Daft Punk did. Basement Jaxx were an important act for the British house underground, with links to Paper Recordings, Faze Action and 20:20 Vision. They received a lot of love from the US, too.
But you could never quite pin them down: they were too Latin for the British, too British for the Americans, too exuberant for the underground and too strange for the stadiums. There’s little consistency to their sound either — there may be notable Basement Jaxx signatures (their stuttering drums and the garbled use of vocal samples) but they would flit from Brazilian pop bangers to snarling, rough-and-ready house on neighbouring EPs.
This continued throughout their career: the singles from Remedy, for example, called on producers from the burgeoning two step and breakbeat garage scenes (Steve Gurley on Red Alert and Stanton Warriors on Jump and Shout, both very much worth hearing). And the Basement Jaxx influences just kept on piling up over the years: house, disco, techno, garage, Latin, reggae, jazz, ska, hip hop, two step, Bollywood, grime, electro etc etc etc. That can make their records sound slightly rooted in a moment — outdated even — as musical fashions come and go.
Daft Punk changed too but their evolution came in great, consistent leaps — Homework to Discovery, Human After All to Random Access Memories. There was a notable Daft Punk sound — filters and disco on Homework, rock samples and vocoders on Discovery — which lesser acts would imitate.
Ultimately, then, Daft Punk were more Paris — classically beautiful, with one look pushed to perfection — while Basement Jaxx were London: a ramshackle melting pot of influences, with one eye always focused on the new. That may have been bad news for their critical appeal. But it makes them arguably one of the most interesting acts in dance music. Set Yo Body Free, a moment of wild, gritty exuberance proves it, some 19 years after first released.
