STEVE "SILK" HURLEY – "Jack Your Body"

Here’s where we come to my great generational divide! Sitting in the basement of SNCF in Piccadilly, where we’d gather to sit around and make ourselves comfortable at lunchtimes, I heard this in the chart rundown one Tuesday and thought, “why am I even listening to the chart if this kind of shit can get to number one?”

OK, so I’m going to carry out an experiment now. Back in 1987, at the age of 24, I thought this was repetitive, monotonous, one-idea drivel and absolutely hated it. I haven’t heard more than a couple of bars of it since. I’m going to listen to it and see if it’s any better now I’m 47. Here goes.

Hmm. Well it’s not quite as bad as I remember it, it’s just that whenever that vocal line is deployed – which it is a lot – it gets boring very quickly. For the last minute or so of the 3.15 version, it’s something only someone who’s already working up a sweat on that dancefloor could love. Early on there are a few things gong on that I find listenable – the keyboard about halfway through is a bit discordant, but I liked the buildup to the crush of notes around 2.10. The rest of it, well there are a lot of elements in it that are familiar to the point of cliché now, but I guess this was where it started. Being fair (which I try to do most of the time!) it’s not that bad. You still won’t catch me giving it a tick in Popular ’87 though!

This seemed ubiquitous for a time and yet I’d completely forgotten the record and how stark it sounds until now. I remember the b&w video reminding me of the clips they showed on the OGWT. I like it.

1. The dreadful video, one of so many to use what were presumably out of copyright clips, is one reason it didn’t feel as much like the future as it should have done. Also, listening to it now, Tom’s Axel F comment is spot on.
2. My main memory of the arrival of house was later in the year, when I spent an afternoon killing time with a friend in pasta place on Queensway, where a constant stream of ultra-minimal tracks played. It seemed quite a baffling choice of soundtrack in what I think was a pretty bland restaurant, vaguely hypnotic and quite dull.*
3. The fact that this was No1 is of course sinks the oft-repeated (mouthy) Northern claim that nobody in the south had HEARD house until the summer of next year. We’d all heard it, just not widely embraced it, which is a whole other thing.

(*Totally off the subject, looking back, I’m also struck by the fact that we were hanging out in a proper restaurant and not McDonalds– slightly precocious for 16/17 year olds?)

When did John Peel start playing house, BTW? By the summer of 1988 it seemed to take up about a quarter of each show (alongside Earache Records, Zimbabwean music and The Wedding Present) – much to the irritation of older listeners – but I can’t remember hearing much of it in 1986 or early 1987.

I like that “JJJACK” in the bottom right hand corner of the sleeve!

Well, here we are. The first House #1. You can’t really pin a whole genre on this record, as it’s maybe 5 or 6 bpm too slow. Or that’s what it seems, looking back. What we do have is a little synopsis of where we’ve been since THE DEATH OF DISCO. Listen to those electro cowbells and handclaps. Listen to those funky grunts. Tackhead, Double D & Steinski and our friend Mr Hardcastle continued the dub philosophy of using vocal cut-ups before, and House DJ’s/producers used this style as well. Chicago was a melting pot of styles and The Warehouse was the club where DJ’s developed their styles…latino, disco, funk, soul and electro merge together, as DJ’s put together marathon sets of non-stop groove laid over a continuous 4/4 beat. Instead of cutting and scratching we have synching and beatmatching. The crossfader is used only to merge one track into another.

So JYB stands as an example of a snapshot of the Chicago experience. Taken out of context, this is a one hit wonder. Steve “Silk” Hurley never hits the Top 40 again under this guise as artist, although his hand can be detected in future hits with an array of artists, both sides of the Atlantic.

Also what’s it even meant to be?? When I bought “The Rockefeller Skank” on CD Single there was a sticker on it saying basically “THIS IS THE ONE THAT GOES RIGHT ABOUT NOW THE FUNK SOUL BROTHER IT’S NOT OUR FAULT IT’S NOT CALLED THAT”, but it’s not like you’d hear “Jack Your Body” and think “right I must go to the record shop and ask for the one that goes ‘Jjjack'”

At fifteen, still a year or two away from seeing the inside of a nightclub, I remember classifying this as arty electronic studio experimentation – ah, I thought, this is what Americans sound like when they try to be Art of Noise or Yello. These strange, simple uncompromising, pulsing, thrilling, inhuman sounds were bedroom headphone music for me – nothing to do with the sweaty, fleshy mess of real bodies dancing, surely? I was intrigued and amused by ‘Jack Your Body’, I almost loved it – but I don’t think I ever felt like dancing to it, any more than I felt like dancing to, say, ‘Close (To The Edit)’.

It didn’t take me long to realise I had completely misunderstood this music. But most house from 86 and 87 still feels too fragile, too slow, too choppy, to get me – or keep me – dancing. I assume it was a case of ‘you had to be there’ – in the clubs, hearing these records when they were fresh and startling. House music changed my life, but not for a little while yet.

I’m surprised by how rhythmically sloppy it sounds now, actually. I guess he was using actual tape to edit this?

I’m glad I live in a world where Steve Hurley gets to #1. My “Dubs From the Dungeon” 12-inch used to be one of my most dependable go-to DJ staples when I did that kind of thing.

Re 11: “this music/scene was hyped at the time, people tried hard to like it”. But it’s a number one hit. So, whether it was hyped or not, people presumably tried so hard they eventually got to like it a lot. Does anyone recall hearing it in a club before it hit, or having any indication it would be so big?

The video was hastily concocted once it was already a huge chart hit, possibly when it was number one (Billy, can you support this?). I certainly remember a still photo of SSH taking up a couple of minutes of screen time, possibly on TOTP, which seems way more appropriate in its blankness. If we consider this cobbled together thing to reflect “officially” on the song or its mark out of ten we may as well include the TOTP DIY vids of the early/mid 70s. Or even DLT’s Golden Oldies Picture Show.

The generic 80s London bag looked so minimal and clean, marking it out from some of the ghastly artwork we’d seen since ’82: Paul Weller, reviewing Rockers Revenge’s Walking On Sunshine called it “beautiful”, and for once I’m in his corner. Not sure about the jjjack variation, mind!

Haha, if this got played in any club now it’d be the height of populism – not cold or “interesting” at all! I didn’t consciously know what it was until a few years ago but even by then it was totally familiar to me. It still sounds pretty classic – love the way it pauses every so often for those awesome notes to just hang there nonchalantly.

I have very little idea about the historical context, I find it hard to imagine instrumental house as something completely new.

Arctic winter? I’ll give you an Arctic winter! Try January 1987 for starters. That was a month of intense winter cold and deep drifts of snow, some of which I unwisely attempted to shovel away from our driveway one afternoon. Combined with an equally inadvisable dietary intake, I plunged into ten days of debilitating fever and inertia, and as the winter refused to let up my weight plunged to beneath the nine stone mark (halycon days, perhaps, from that perspective alone). To cheer myself up I played some of the hardest, most brutalist music I could find on my shelves – the Beastie Boys’ then hot-off-the-presses Licensed To Ill, Sly’s There’s A Riot Goin’ On, Ayler’s Village Concerts, PiL’s Metal Box (in the original 12″ canister, to make extracting and playing the records even more difficult)…and Volume One of the compilation series The House Sound Of Chicago.

That latter might not fit with the rest of the unforgiving fare, but it did provide a crucial balancing lightness. Its lead track – side one, track one – was the original, deliciously minimalist 12″ mix of “Jack Your Body,” and there is a pungent symmetry about its succeeding “Reet Petite” to become 1987’s first number one single; the two records placed side-to-side could usefully bookend an entire history of post-war black pop.

There is no doubt that “Jack Your Body,” the first House number one, is a landmark single which forms a crucial bend in the pop river. We are now as far away from “Release Me” as we are from “Put Your Hands Up For Detroit,” but can we imagine any of the latter-day dance smashes happening without the example of “Jack Your Body” to open the floodgates? This represented the exact point where many people decided to get off the bus; Radio 1’s Peter Powell, for example, remarked with specific relation to “Jack Your Body” that he could no longer understand modern pop music, and promptly retired from being a DJ – if only others had been honest enough to follow his example!

But “Jack Your Body” also stands for the logical cumulation of several coalescing trends in dance music which had been apparent for some years. Deriving its name from the Warehouse club in Chicago, House music began its inexorable rise out of its immediate locality throughout 1984 and 1985. Inspired in equal parts by the deconstructing tendencies of pioneering hip hop DJs like Kool Herc and Grandmaster Flash (though instead of “scratching” in samples from other records, elements would be digitally sculpted into the House DJ mix), tendencies in electronic music from Munich and Sheffield alike (though the surprising New Pop influences would initially be more apparent in the parallel Detroit Techno movement quietly brewing at the same time, with Juan Atkins, Derrick May, Kevin Saunderson and others) and electrofunk itself, taking as its starting point the crucial likes of D-Train, Sharon Redd and Shannon, House focused in more and more narrowly on the beats themselves, the feeling and mood superseding notions of “song” in importance. The silences between beats became as important as the beats themselves, but there was still room for considerable fluidity and flexibility – it was still a broad church which could encompass the stark minimalism of Phuture’s 14-minute-long “Acid Trax,” the lush soulfulness of JM Silk’s “Music Is The Key,” the unworldly lushness of Mr Fingers’ “Can You Feel It.”

Starting in the clubs of Scotland and the North of England (particularly Fire Island in Edinburgh) and slowly spreading down South (for the soft Southerners were slow to catch on, besotted as they were by the Guts and Realism of Rare Groove) – it helped that most dancers saw it as a natural extension of Hi-NRG – House began to catch on in Britain; shops like 23rd Precinct in Glasgow were the initial stopping point for those extraordinary, mysterious, anonymous 12-inch imports like Strafe’s “Set It Off” (a transitional eruption from Brooklyn) and Farley “Jackmaster” Funk’s minimalist Isaac Hayes reshaping, “Love Can’t Turn Around” which latter, nearly a year after its initial appearance in the import racks, crossed over to the national top ten.

Again, “Love Can’t Turn Around” has to be understood in its ruthlessly functional original mix, but its popularity was in great part down to the amazing vocal performance of Darryl Pandy – if you can find the 12″ vocal remix you can see House becoming maximalist, with Pandy’s great, swooping arpeggios worthy of Buckley on Starsailor – a characteristic which slightly nullified the notion of House as faceless, functional dance music! There were other pointers to what was going to happen in the charts of the period – think of Colonel Abrams’ “Trapped” or even “Axel F” by Moroder protege Harold Faltermeyer, which latter the pop mix of “Jack Your Body” most closely resembles.

“Jack Your Body” itself is as minimalist as pop had dared to become this side of Joe Meek and Lee Perry; a flat but springy beat, keyboard strokes and basslines out of Kraftwerk, and the total absence of a centre in its determinedly Baudrillardian environment – everything is suggested, must be absorbed in the act of dancing (and coincidental or otherwise ingestion of appropriate chemicals). The voice, as such, repeats the title over and over, lapping in on itself, mechanically generated, a simulacrum of a human being – and that is essentially all that there is to the record. Its influence on the subsequent generation of dance-dominant charts is incalculable and its effect was immediate; soon House music, in both its original form, its typically British Acieed mutation and the inevitable (if good) pop cash-ins, would become an indispensable part of the pop landscape. It was not the entire landscape in itself – as we shall see, 1987 was something of a stylistic grab-bag where literally anything went (and quite often did). But “Jack Your Body” – especially in its 33-minute multi-mix 12″, which nearly provoked Gallup to list the record in the album chart on account of its length – is the beginning of a new time, and much of what is to follow has to be viewed in its immense and far-reaching light.

That Arctic winter was a cold snap that didn’t last as long as the ones this year or in 1963 and 1947, so won’t be as well remembered, but by God was it intense. Memories of getting down Telegraph Hill in New Cross by hanging onto gateposts, and having a bath in our non-centrally heated house and the bathwater was getting cold after ten minutes. And I recall standing on the terraces at Brisbane Road for a Cup-tie between Leyton Orient and West Ham as the closest I’ve ever come to getting frostbite at a football match.

Strange to feel myself lumped in with Peter Powell! His last Radio 1 show was in September 1988 according to Wiki, and he was 37. When he joined Radio 1 he was described as “no spring chicken”, being 26! As I said above, I was 24 at the time, and didn’t quite “get off the bus” in reaction to JYB and the like, but I was finding the chart less fun; besides which, football activism started to play a bigger role in my life. Of course there’s plenty of room for both, but footy was taking over what you might call my “obsessing time”. One year on from “Jack Your Body”, my neat little exercise books logging the chart which I’d started to compile in 1972, came to a halt. By the early 90s there was never a time when I couldn’t tell you what was number one, but I was following things at a bit of a distance. I wouldn’t put it all down to “Jack Your Body”, but the thought I mentioned at #2 was maybe the start of the process.

like others, ‘jack your body’ blindsided me utterly, in a way that i can’t remember any record ever doing before or since. i’d never heard it, never heard of it, never heard of steve’silk’hurley, it just turned up unannounced on top of the pops at number one. ok, this happened now and then, but watching it i just could not for the life of me work out what the record thought it was doing, or how it had got to number one. i don’t think i even twigged that it was dance music (though the video does give clues!), i just remember sitting there wondering when something was going to happen that i understood. it felt vaguely threatening that all these people had gone out and bought this record for reasons that were utterly opaque to me, like there was a joke that everyone else was in on and i wasn’t. twenty odd years on there still seems to be a lot of people who feel that way about this sort of stuff (not so much here, obviously) which really is quite an achievement.

it wasn’t until the more hooky likes of ‘beat ‘dis’ and the bunnyable ones coming up that i really got it (though that did lead me to go back and discover the awesome likes of nitro deluxe) and ‘jack your body’ is still a bit too minimalist for me to love it as much as i admire it.

Last year I realised I knew next to nothing about Chicago house (as opposed to Detroit techno) and decided to get a copy of Original Chicago House Classics which is pretty awesome. However the Adonis track (a remix of No Way Back) has a ‘J-j-jack your body’ hook too (almost certainly nicked from the same source as Steve Hurley) which means I have been humming it all the way through reading this thread and now have zero ability to recollect how the ‘Jack Your Body’ actually goes.

#31 last night it was running at almost 9 in the reader votes Swanstep so it’s worse than you imagine!

Obviously if I wanted to hear JYB none of the other records you listed would be a remotely acceptable substitute!

@34, Tom. Blimey, oh well,… I assume this means there are going to be some very high scores later in the year.

BTW, enjoyed your latest Pitchfork piece and the Eric Harvey piece you referred/linked to. Did you take Harvey to be suggesting at the end of his piece that musicians etc. should be funded (like defense, roads, pure scientists) out of general tax revenues as producers of (non-rivalrous, non-excludable thanks to internet) public goods? He never quite comes out and says that, but I couldn’t think what else he could mean.

Also January is a time of poor singles sales, so it was easier for a disc of minority interest to score highly and make a big impact (see the first number one of 1991)

26: sounds like you’re peddling the complete myth that “house was massive in the north before it came south because of rare groove” peddled by clueless post-house Mixmag/rock press writers who didn’t know what the fuck they were on about.

Rare groove was played by a few clubs frequented by the type of scenesters (Face writers/the kind of people interchangeable with those post-house dance press writers etc) who had tried to flog us Go-Go a couple of years before to no interest aside from their own kind and a few people possibly from the rock world dipping their toes in dancier waters.

It had absolutely nothing to do with the tens of thousands of people from London and the South East who made up the pre-house dance scene, ie those who went to the clubs, the alldayers, weekenders, listened to the pirates, used the import shops.

The only three tracks that were big enough to trouble non-rare groove dancefloors (and then no more in London than anywhere else) I can think of were Jackson Sisters “I Believe In Miracles”, Maceo and the Macks “Cross the Tracks” and Gregg Diamond’s “Hot Butterfly” (the latter already known as an oldie on the soul/funk scene anyway before the West End posers in their silly 70s poor boy hats got into it).

The only djs of any later consequence post-house who were synonymous with that tiny (in numbers) rare groove scene (but with its connections to the style press big hype)were Judge Jules and Norman Jay.

Oakenfold, Colin Hudd, Kev Hill, Johnny Walker, Danny Rampling, Trevor Fung, Bob Jones,(even) Nicky Holloway and all the rest – hardly caning the “rare groove” back then were they…

In fact one of my strongest memories of “rare groove” was it being completely ridiculed in the clubbin’ gossip columns in “Blues and Soul”, Echoes etc at the time

I’d like to know where all these clubs up north (which seems to be often shorthand for the Manchester area)playing any more house than the south east were. Before I threw out all my “Blues and Soul” back issues in the mid-90s and after hearing Graeme Park talking bollocks once too often about how he was this house scene-leader I checked a few of his dj charts from early 1988 (not even 1987 yet alone 1986)and they consisted of a mix of a bit of genuine house, dodgy early UK/Euro pop- house, bit of hip hop and the dying embers of electro-funk. In other words what a hell of a lot of your club djs throughout Britain were playing at the time.I don’t know about Mike Pickering who is also often mentioned as an early North Western dj but I don’t remember him mouthing it off so much.

How idiots like Park had the nerve to talk the shite I don’t know when from the word go it was known that Jazzy M (on his London pirate show) had been playing purely house since 1986/87. The first attempt at a house club was in Streatham with Trevor Fung (although admitedly I don’t remember hearing about it at the time and I don’t know where he got much house to play in 1985!)and every mainstream club (I frequented rather a lot of these dodgy establishments at the time as the drinking gained a hold and you could always get a late one in them)round the South-East was banging the obvious house crossovers in 1986-87 amongst the funk and little bit of pop.

Dates are a bit hazey but in (probably) late 1985/early 1986 I remember being at a (think it was)free party at a disused mill near High Wycombe (think it was called Safe sex I had the flyer for years complete with free condom!)where it was all the more electro-side of electrofunk, a bit of dancier hiphop along with the dying embers of the jazz/funk era stuff. Good night until a load of local beer boys found it and proceeded to wreck the place.

Undoubtedly from 1985/86 the wind of dance change was blowing across the cutting edge dancefloors of Britain (which usually translated as London/South East, Manchester and possibly the West Midlands).
However there was a long way from that to what we know now as the dance scene as as recently as 1989 you’d invariably hear the first 2 Alexander O’Neal and especially “Hearsay”(probably the last old style soul/funk albums to be massive with the clubbers who were either retiring or switching to the house sounds), Freddie Jackson, maybe even a bit of Maze along with the house stuff in the car on the way home and back at the chillout (before we used that word)session.Us suburban kids didn’t always end up watching the sunrise on Primrose Hill – in fact I never did – you were just likely to be reading the football results in South Mimms services!

And “Set It Off” was massive on any underground dance floor/pirate from the word go -Solar FM (always slightly more electro-ey than JFM) caned it from very early on for months – (although I remember the later Harlequin 4s version a couple of years later almost eclipsing the Strafe original in some areas)it didn’t need some shop in Glasgow to make it take off (to be honest at least house WAS big early on in the North West but this is the first time I’ve even heard Scotland mentioned as involved in its UK development).

You only have to look at the big sellers in the Bluebird, Jifs, Slough Imports ads in the dance press back then to see what we were listening to in London at the time.

PS this isn’t some typical diatribe from some stereotypical gobby and arrogant Cockney who thinks the world ends once you get outside a 30 mile radius of London – after all I live in the North West myself and have lived up here for a large proportion of my life now – just a piece by someone who wants to tell it how he remembers it.

I’ve always been a bit dubious about the mythology surrounding when and where the 1st House record was played in the UK. So many conflicting stories, pseuds who say “I was there”, DJ’s creating hype etc.

As I understood it at the time, House appeared to break out from Manchester and spread from there. I think Mike Pickering had been mentioned in the music press as early as summer of ’86. There’s a possibility that Tony Wilson had a hand in hyping the Hacienda as the first place to play a Chicago House record, but if it’s true that Pickering had avoided shouting from the rooftops about it, then he was probably not the first. The mystery deepens…

#26 Punctum, if this helped send Peter Powell on his way that’s another reason to cherish it !

Actually I think this is quite a milestone in Radio One’s history anyway as they had nothing to do with it getting to number one and there was no other mass media source for its exposure (a la Nick Berry) to which they could point. It was simply a matter of “the kids” ignoring the crap on their playlist and buying something else instead. The road to Bannister began here. Younger members might not understand how significant and ubiquitous Radio One was in the 70s and early 80s as it’s more of a niche station now but it was very hard to get a big chart hit without their support. Hurley disproved all that and they were permanently diminished.

It also spelled leaner times for Top Of The Pops soon to experience a significant slump in viewing figures as faceless djs with identikit dancers (Beatmasters, Krush, Coldcut, Bomb The Bass etc) replaced colourful rock performers on the programme. Mind you the exponents of Crap Pop (Climie Fisher, Brother Beyond, Transvision Vamp, Johnny Hates Jazz, Curiosity Killed The Cat) bear equal responsibility for this.

It’s obviously not an instrumental in the purest sense but it’s the nearest thing to one since “Eye Level” and I’d rather give Steve the credit for breaking that duck than the next candidates who are bunnied in more ways than one.

While being a complete danceophobe I actually thought this sounded quite fresh at the time but it’s not aged well.

#45:

a) I think you meant #40 in your reference
b) your piece #26 was 1015 words long. #40 was 1000.

Ahem.

I think the “PS” is the key to the message (it’s #40).

Point: If the single had been bought only in London, would that have been prevented from being in the chart under the ‘regional hit only’ rule, or was London exempted from that? (probably…)

Point 2: There were many clubs all around the place that were more ‘up’ on trends, and the reason they weren’t well known is due to their exclusivity of interest. I worked for a short while in a nightclub in Turkey which also had good ‘advice’, if that was a well known ‘scene’ I didn’t know about it.

Of course, you had to be in the scene to know the scene. If it was just your ‘local club’, you just enjoyed it for what it was, I guess.

Lee at 41: fair point especially as I wasn’t actually involved in the Rare Groove scene myself – the thrust of my argument was that that the general London/South East dance scene itself was in anyway the same thing as Rare Groove.

And I’m not blaming people in Manchester for believing this myth as they by the fact that were 200 miles away would know no better if they were being told one thing by the London style mags – it’s that old problem peculiar to London where whatever scene the metropolitan elite are into however atypical automatically becomes in their eyes what the whole of the London area is into.
As earlier shown with the idea that London Mods all got into rock music and psychedelia in the 60s when once again that was a tiny trendy West End elite and the vast majority (and just about anyone working-class)became hard mods and then skins as Robert Elms admitedly flawed but actually quite illuminating books showed. Ironic that later he became just part of the worst type of West End scenester that he would have railed about as a young skinhead.

Fat Git at 42: but wouldn’t Jazzy M’s (at least) equally venerable pirate radio show or Trevor Fung’s “The Project” also be in the mix when as the mystery deepens.

Punctum at 45: don’t think you really need to be lecturing me on casual rudeness or verbosity.