BABY D – "Let Me Be Your Fantasy"

There’s a huge streak of melancholy running through Let Me Be Your Fantasy.

The piano breaks, when separated from the accompanying frantic drum pattern, suggest a very downbeat mood – this is made explicit towards the end of the track when the percussion is briefly removed.

It’s a similar trick to that pulled off in Liquid’s Sweet Harmony in that regard. Those with any musical training should be able to help with this, is it a contrast between major and minor chords?

Then we have the vocals. On the page, a succession of rave-era exhortations they may be, but to my ears there is a pleading desperation to the delivery, a suggestion that deep down she knows he isn’t interested. He may not even know she exists. That final “I’ll take you higher” is almost resigned…

One of the strongest number ones of the decade. A 9.

“Underground is where we want to go moving/How’s the crowd?”

It is one of the greatest couplets in all of pop, and sums up more or less every adventure which has been pushed or enticed its way since the Beatles – there is little doubt that the above was what they were thinking as they put Revolver or Pepper together – and its robotic intrusion into the peaceful yearning of “Let Me Be Your Fantasy” at 3:09 indicates another of those points where music changes. It didn’t do so alone, of course; the move from rave via happy hardcore to jungle also has to take into account things like Lennie De Ice’s “We Are E,” Foul Play’s “Open Your Mind,” 4hero’s “Mr Kirk’s Nightmare” and in particular the work of Shut Up And Dance – but for Marc Cohn’s lawyers they would have had one of the greatest of all number ones with 1992’s “Raving, I’m Raving” (it peaked at number two before compulsorily being withdrawn from circulation) – and Nicolette’s Now Is Early album, also from 1992, still stands as a largely unheralded harbinger of what would happen in the rest of its decade.

“Let Me Be Your Fantasy” also dates from 1992, and had been an underground club classic (and at the lower end of the Top 200 singles chart) for over two years before given the promotional push. Belatedly topping the chart, it precluded the Stone Roses from doing so with “Love Spreads,” and that seemed unusually fitting, since the record stands at the crossroads of several different ambiguities of music. Essentially a comedown record from the final days of primary-coloured rave, its beat is Prodigy frantic but its flow is aqueous and unhurried. Over this backdrop singer Dorothy Fearon sings of the usual rave tropes – “I’ll take you up to the highest heights,” “Spread our wings and fly away,” “I’ll fill your world with ecstasy” – with a voice of rare nobility; note her graceful Queen’s English voiceover (“Let me touch your dreams”) after the first verse. It all seems indicative of an urge to slow down, take some deep breaths and inhale eternity.

But then the “underground” unexpectedly asserts itself and we dive into a dizzy cannonball run of beats, unlovely fuzz bass grinds and hisses, mirrored halls of warps and loops – the sequence is one of those moments of recorded evolution, where rave gives way to what will become jungle, then drum ‘n’ bass. After this disturbance, which lasts for no more than thirty seconds, the original song returns, but the landscape has been less than subtly altered. And yet those “let me be” backing vocals at the end hark back to another era; Dorothy Fearon is the wife of Phil Fearon, the somersaulting man behind Galaxy, who recorded some very astute hits in the very late days of Britfunk, in the mid-eighties (“Dancing Tight,” “What Do I Do?,” “Everybody’s Laughing” amongst others), and the owner of the Little Dragon label on which “Let Me Be Your Fantasy” was released, and so this remarkable record ends up joining all of the dots, showing us where it has come from and where it, and black British music, was going. This time, the crowd was happy to go along as well.

#2. Popjustice calls that feeling a “Kylie moment”.

The best number one of 1994, no contest (and for that matter no competition). Sexy, supple and arrestingly modern – a chilled glass of lemonade after a trek through a desert where a mirage of Marti Pellow kept appearing to sing at you.

#7 Keeping “Love Spreads” off No.1 is a feature not a bug!

(OK, I’d have quite liked to write about it, I guess)

I’ve always been disappointed that I couldn’t find more hardcore records like this; a marriage of malevolent sounding breakbeats and euphoric (yet melancholic) vocals. Once jungle arrived, happy-hardcore seemed to abandon breakbeats for 4/4 beats, and most hardcore before that point, for me, just didn’t seem happy enough.

As I recall, it was records like this which prompted much soul-searching about what records should qualify for the indie charts. Clearly records like this were more “independent” of major-record label control than a lot of other indie stuff and yet, in almost every other respect, were a world away from the latest album by the Field Mice. I think some kind of exclusion was introduced for the ravier end of the spectrum, but I’ve no idea how you’d draft something like that.

I loved it and enjoyed seeing it go to Number One. But the curious thing was at the time its success had a nostalgic tinge to it. It seems incredible now but by late ’94 rave’s peak years of 91-92 seemed a distant utopian era before UK dance’s various tribes – house, drum n’ bass, techno – stopped speaking to each other. To me anyway, there was a sadness to this that, as Auntie Beryl mentions, LMBYF captures beautifully.

As I recall its success led to a whole swathe of 91/92 era hits – Sweet Harmony, Is There Anybody Out There etc – being rereleased, remixed and repackaged in ’95 as ‘classics’.

The best number 1 by far since 1990 for reasons which have already been adequately covered, and to the refusniks I ask do you really prefer the endless stream of Take That, Love is All Around and the, frankly, novelty records that filled in the gaps to this beauty?

#2 Funnily enough Beryl I was ruminating on ‘a history of modern (post-War at least) melancholic dance music’ (on a sonic basis, not lyrics and vocals) this morning and thought it might make for an interesting playlist.

One of my favourite piano chord sequences in Hardcore rave can be heard on Skin Up’s ‘A Juicy Red Apple’ although it’s more about the interplay of melancholy and menace (in a generally euphoric and otherwise somewhat inane affair) akin to a break during a thunderous rainstorm where sunlight penetrates the clouds only to reflect on them more darkly.

LMBYF’s balance of those three moods is differently weighted for wider appeal with the menace only occurring in the middle eight. Dyce & Nino’s approach tended to go this way although their darkest productions (e.g. the wonderfully eerie ‘Exodus (The Lion Awakes)’ as Brothers Grimm with its cheeky sped-up sample of ‘Tubular Bells’) and House Crew’s ‘We Are Hardcore’) are just as effective.

Their cover of The Korgis took its cue from the original more manic Hardcore version of the song credited to N.R.G. (but titled ‘I Need Your Lovin’).

There’s definitely a melancholy here but for me not as pronounced as some dance hits, if anything melancholic tinges on uplifting housey tracks seemed to be a norm not an aberration. I don’t think it’s usually much to do with the text of the song, it feels more like an awareness suffusing these tracks that nights (and highs) always end. Bittersweet, maybe, rather than melancholy?

Baby D’s earlier efforts ‘Casanova’ and ‘Daydreaming’ are worth hearing if only for a nice game of ‘name the sampler’ (e.g. the former on The Prodigy’s ‘Break And Enter’) – Dyce & Nino often the culprits themselves, re-contextualising Dorothy’s lines and their own work to suit their next manoeuvre.

The Baby D stuff generally represents to me a specific antecdent of Katy B (even the names are similar ha) and so the latter’s success in recent years has been a pleasure to see, although her hits have shown a little more versatility (dubstep, house, breakbeat-based pop) really.

Re: 23, I love the sleevenotes that are apparently on The Dark Side comp, according to Discogs:

“Hardcore has once again astounded the House nation with it´s diversity, no longer is a Rave track a selection of obscure noises from an ancient analog keyboard, the modern era Rave tune is now more likely to contain a multiplicity of elements such as Soul, Techno and Rap from diverse musical cultures. All the tracks on this album have some of the elements; ruff cut up beats, severe bass lines, uplifting vocals, piano breaks, dark sounds (sometimes samples from horror films). The end result is music that has a power and intensity that elevates the mind.”

#25
I think it is, here she is a mere 9 years earlier. (Backing singer on the right)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xfpg1oghf3Q

It doesn’t surprise me that this track has split the opinions of readers, actually, since I can remember it doing much the same thing at the time. Either you thought it was a masterpiece, a club classic which could not be criticised in any way, or you thought it was run-of-the-mill and really couldn’t find a way in. I was (and still am) in the latter camp, unfortunately. When this was at number one I actually had a loud, drunken argument with the lead guitarist of the (awful) band I was in – he believed it was an achievement somewhere close to the Sistine Chapel Ceiling, whereas I thought it was a rather dull record.

If I’d actually gone out to many clubs at the time I might have found a way into it – possibly, maybe. And having said all the above, I did just go on to YouTube to listen to the 1992 original (by mistake, actually) and that does sound a bit more enjoyable for reasons I can’t entirely discern. They’re not radically different, but it feels as if its got more of a kick to it. I still wouldn’t choose to play it myself at home, though.

Phew! Thought I was the only person here who didn’t like the track.

I suspect there is some kind of difference (if only in my head) between ravey dance tracks (banging beats, thumping bass, interesting noises etc etc), which I like, and clubby dance tracks (of which this is an example), which I don’t.

Anyone else, who knows more about this stuff, care to comment?

“Very much an end of an era song.” It didn’t feel this way to me at all. As Will at #14 says, it may only have been two years since the peak of rave, but it felt like ten.

By late ’94 the Sunday Social was my reference point for dance music, which meant the Dust/Chemical Brothers own recordings mixed with the Beatles’ Tomorrow Never Knows, and a fair bit of seventies soul (Jeff Perry’s Love Don’t Come No Stronger, Love Unlimited’s Under The Influence Of Love). Oasis were on the rise. B**t P*p hadn’t settled into a pattern. It felt a lot like 1989 in that guitar music and dance music were blending and moving forward; from this scene Black Grape would (re)emerge with Top 10 hits in ’95, and the Charlatans would score their biggest hit (Just When You’re Thinking Things Over) since 1990.

Love Spreads didn’t connect with any of this. It sounded lumpy and depressing.

Let Me Be Your Fantasy on the other hand – though no one I knew rated it, or even mentioned it – had the same spirit of renewal as the Sunday Social. I’d imagine the clubs that were playing LMBYF in ’94 were also reconnecting with what they had loved about rave, and the sense of joy that had been lost, which would also explain the euphoric Set You Free’s no.2 revival at the start of ’95.

I’d compare the DJ’s who created fresh interest in LMBYF to the Merseybeat groups who were covering three or four year old Chuck Berry/Little Richard songs in 1962, which must have seemed like ancient history by then. Maybe LMBYF is an equivalent to Twist And Shout, harking back to the recent past but ushering in a new golden era.

“The usual mash of ravey trigger phrases” for me are just classic pop lyrics, perfectly placed and as totally effective as the chorus to Reach Out I’ll Be There, which also has lyrics that may look like no more than trigger phrases when they’re written down.

I hear LMBYF as a love song about music, a song about how music can take you to the highest high, and – miraculously – it actually does just that! Melancholic, dreamlike, life-affirming, it’s a beautiful record. I honestly can’t find any fault with it.

I like “Set Me Free” more though, oddly because it’s so effortful – this great willed struggle to bring the good times back (like the breakdown of “One More Time”), whereas LMBYF floats back into them.

Straight 10 from me, one of the best records ever imo. Not a great deal to say about it though – it’s gorgeous and I love it is really all. I dont know what to say to anyone having difficulty getting it. Just listen, I suppose – the joy, the melancholy, the resolution, they’re all plain on the face of it and there to be loved.

I’d forgotten it was this that kept Love Spreads (which I also love, only a bit less) off the top. That explains why I wasn’t annoyed at having lost (as I saw it) the best chance we’d ever get of one of our bands making no.1. Instead it was just like: fair play, you can’t argue with that.

I liked ‘Love Spreads’ but ‘Begging You’ was a bit more contemporary-sounding thanks to the Chemical Brothers influence and fits well with their stuff at the time like ‘My Mercury Mouth’.

LMBYF’s success felt ‘too late’ at the time and it took me quite a while to like ‘Set You Free’ due to it’s johnny-come-lately trying-too-hard approach. ‘Inner City Life’ (plus Nookie’s dreamy Corona-sampling ‘Only You’) appeared at around the same time and for me did make this stuff sound older than it was and harder to be excited about.

I’m sure the Radiophonic Workshop would say there was always a dance element to their music. #diggerdydum

Can’t say that I hear much menace in LMBYF (this is in the era of Dr Dre after all!). I’m also surprised to hear Wichita and others salute the lyrics. To my ears they fall over themselves left and right – ‘highest heights’ (blech!), ‘Let’s be as one in soul and mind’ flat out murders itself with the ‘one’ and the ‘and’, the ungainly two syllables in ‘tri-ip to wonderland’, ‘put a smile upon your face’ (blech again!), and so on. In general, lots of the verbal constructions feel cluttered and weak (even the relatively interesting middle 8 lines don’t feel to me as taut or as interesting as they could be). I also don’t like the title line – it feels odd (and verbally cluttered/weak) to ask permission to be a fantasy as opposed to asserting you’ll be one or offering to be one. But maybe the latter is all that’s heard.

I had decided not to intervene with things like this because they largely passed me by and were in no way “my” music. Needless to say I have no recollection of it at the time but there were probably reasons, like at the time it was number one I was just starting to deal with the fallout from a stormy three-month relationship that in hindsight would have been best not entered into in the first place and the fallout from which would only culminate rather soapishly some six months later. But I digress (I may elaborate further in later entries but only if I feel like it, otherwise you’ll have to wait for my autobiography). Live music for me meant partaking of one particular end of Bristol’s energetic pub scene and no, not that end of it. A group of us some of whom worked in the Bristol University computer lab gathering to hear Chris Scott’s Blind Lemon Beefcake at the Prom in Gloucester Road and discussed relaying one of these events as the world’s first live internet gig. We were too laid back to do it of course, and others soon afterwards got that glory but there you go – there’s the global context for you.

It was only six months later, as part of that soapish culmination in fact, that somebody took me in hand and introduced me to the local delights of K-Passa and Massive Attack. Chalk and cheese of course, and the raw cajun fiddle’n’squeezebox rocking of the former was much more to my taste, but the nearest thing in my music collection to the matter in hand is Blue Lines, not something I choose to listen to all that often. It’s better than Baby D anyway (IMHO), but they all sound much of a muchness to my ear.

Which brings me up short, because I’m reminded that at some time in the early 1960s when my popular tastes were forming, somebody who I’m pretty sure was Alma Cogan (qv) refused to give a verdict on Juke Box Jury because she thought everything sounded the same anyway. There was predictable outrage, but I now see she had a point. Those who inhabited the club scene in 1994 (my then 14-year-old daughter wasn’t one and neither were any of her friends) will no doubt hear this and be reminded of great spaced-out all-night events on cavernous, packed and sweaty dancefloors; at least that’s how I imagine them when I wake in the night sweating with terror at the thought, it seems like my idea of purgatory and anyway I was turned 40 by this time and running out of steam for all-nighters. Certainly the music is intimately tied to the event and doesn’t really work in isolation. It’s about as affective as music gets.

I never went to UFO in the 60s either but it’s closer to my era and my mindset, so I can recognise LMBYF as kin to the early Soft Machine/Pink Floyd/Incredible String Band and just as carefully tuned to the psychoactive confection of the day. It’s just that the denizens of UFO would have been mortified by the idea of the music they danced to featuring in any kind of chart, let alone topping it.