SPACEDUST – "Gym And Tonic"

I’ve put the original up on the Tumblr now. I never heard the original until a few years later, either, when I was digging into the French scene on soulseek – I wasn’t going out to that kind of club regularly, and I think you might need to have been. If it had got an official release, post-Stardust, it might have done pretty well.

Speaking of Soulseek, when I was first looking for obscure number ones at the start of this project, this one – only 5 years old at that point – was THE hardest to find online.

I think I was still going to a gym at this point, but never felt at home. At some point huge TV screens were introduced so that you could run on a treadmill towards an unobtainable star on MTV. Everything I like about this is a steal from the original Gymtonic and everything I dislike is what reminds me of the enforced bonhomie of Step classes, etc. I never plan to watch the video again

Are we sure that the Charts Company wasn’t just trolling everyone by showing this POS at number one? This isn’t even worth bothering to mark…

And thus we thankfully get to the end of a long and largely dismal* string of entries with minimal to no US impact. Next comes what I consider to be Pop’s Main Event of 1998/99. Looking forward to Tom’s commentary whenever it turns out to be….

*DU, VF, IYTTYCWBN, and oddly enough, Millennium were the four that should’ve been US hits IMHO; the others I’m not shedding tears over

So is this the Baby Jump of the 1990s? I had a vague memory of reading that this largely got to #1 on the basis of a video full of lycra-clad bummery, although reviewing it it’s slightly more good-hearted than that.

As a thirteen year-old scholar of the charts for precisely eighteen months straddling 1998/99, I remember being righteously shocked at how this appeared from nowhere to claim No. 1. Listening back, it’s even thinner than I remembered it.

#7 That D’Menace song is brilliant, I’d forgotten that one!

#8 yeah, the soft porn video as sales tool is at the other end of the filter disco era. We will be encountering it, though, oh yes.

Songs with counting in them got really popular around this time, but I think this is the first one (of the era) that got to number one.

Some other examples are 5, 6, 7, 8 (Steps) and Got The Feeling (Five – band name also a number); there were more to come including at least one that will come up on Popular.

According to http://www.whosampled.com “Gym and Tonic by Spacedust sampled Bob Sinclar and Thomas Bangalter’s Gym Tonic” which sounds doubly unfair on the original. I hope they got a wodge of money for the sample (not that they need it).

#14 also DJ Shadow’s “The Number Song” got a Cut Chemist makeover in 1998. Not sure if it charted.

#15 Amazing, isn’t it (“Music Sounds Better With You”)? I have a summer playlist on my iPod and that sits there and gets repeated airings, year in, year out. Such a shame it didn’t make it to number one.

It did make it to the top of the “Chart Show” chart, however. It didn’t have a proper video at that point, so on their penultimate show they just played their old eighties animations and intro sequences underneath the track, which felt like an oddly appropriate thing to do at the time.

One of the more nefarious and shameful examples of the quick-buck domestic cash-in cover version, although in Spacedust’s slender defence the original was being forcibly kept out of the competition. One of the absolute peaks of the French disco movement, “Gym Tonic,” as composed and performed by DJ Bob Sinclar and produced by Thomas Bangalter, is the goofy equal of “Music Sounds Better With You,” pounding along and gathering endless momentum with the aid of a carefully chosen sample from Jane Fonda’s Workout Record, principally the looped “BACK, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 and BACK!” The moment when the full beats kick in and Fonda’s “BACK” locks into it with perfect timing is beyond immaculate.

By October 1998 the track had been available, as the closing, climactic track on Sinclar’s album Paradise, for the best part of a year; it was all over the clubs and my first-hand perspective at Massive Records in Oxford , just behind Gloucester Green bus station, confirms that copies were shooting out faster than the shop could get them in. The reason why Virgin France didn’t jump at a full-blown British release was down to legalities; Fonda objected to her voice being used and refused permission for it to feature on any single mix of the track (although the original remained on the album, even when belatedly issued in the UK, and moreover, a few years beforehand, Fonda had played broker in getting brother Peter to say yes to being featured on “Loaded”). So one of 1998’s most in-demand dance anthems was being kept off the mainstream shelves and out of the charts.

In stepped Paul Glancey and Duncan Glasson, the production duo behind Spacedust, who sniffed an opening; they employed an actress to impersonate Fonda, but rather than stop at simply covering the Sinclar original they rejigged it entirely, changed the title – and appended their own names to the track as composers. So even though “Gym And Tonic” casts its sonic net slightly wider than the original, incorporating more Fonda dialogue, a pregnant mid-track pause and a would-be Chemical Brothers finale of descending electrohowls, it is difficult to avoid the rather nasty smell which pervades its bogus grooves; everywhere the rhythmic accents are changed, the guitar chord sequence chopped up and fed in out of sync, all to prove that legally it is a different piece of music and not merely a cheapskate ripoff of genius.

The Sinclar/Bangalter original may use fewer sound sources and be more linear, but it works an infinite number of times better than Spacedust partly because of Bangalter’s complete mastery of persuasive micro-minimalism, where the systematic thickening of sounds behind the surface repetition is less sensationalist, more curvaceous, and because the Frenchman, as with Daft Punk and Stardust, achieves a curiously natural swing to his rhythms. Put it this way; “Gym Tonic” makes me want to tango across Goya’s black mountains and turn them into pink, whereas “Gym And Tonic” reminds me of a makeshift gym set up in the corner of a leaky shed in Rotherhithe on a wet and windy Tuesday morning in November. And it’s possible that its intended audience saw right through its hollow hole of an anti-heart; the record disappeared from the charts very quickly and was by some distance 1998’s lowest-selling number one, its sales too low even to qualify for the end-of-year Top 100. 1

Aye, Music Sounds Better With You is an excellent piece of refined Gallic flair tailor-made for the dancefloor. Hypothetical Pitchfork 8.7/10. We’ll encounter a few where that came from on Popular, including one rather obscure bunny you wouldn’t have heard of 😉 Far better than this dross, it scrapes a 2 for at least not distressing me as much as Mr. Blobby or Cinderella Rockafella.

Great video as well with the kid building the model aeroplane and meeting “the band.” I loved the TV-within-the-TV “chart show” parodies of Sabrina (Samantha – Luv on the Beach), Robert Palmer (Dave Stavros – Hot Lipz) and Monstarr Bunch – Step on It, which for a few seconds, fooled me that some people in France actually listened to Oi!

Music Sounds Better With You is negative-proustian for me, taking me instantly back to miserable nights out at shit clubs, everyone else apparently enjoying themselves while I counted down the time until I could leave. Blame this on the wrong company and the wrong drugs, I suppose, but can’t hold them responsible for the guy in halls with two copies of MSBWY who practiced his turntable skills by mixing the record into itself for the best part of a term. In another world I perhaps could appreciate it, but it’s spoiled forever in this one.

First time I’ve heard Gymtonic, and lacking similar baggage it’s a pleasant enough listen. Gym and Tonic, much less so.

ONE. It’s comparable to a Cher Lloyd bunny. Just because it’s…tedious. Even “Grandma” was marginally better.

A rare number 1 from this era that I genuinely haven’t heard since it came out (it’s not on Spotify). I can’t deny that it put a grin on my face. I’ll be generous and give it a 6.

I never cared for Music Sounds Better With You though.