LMC ft U2 – "Take Me To The Clouds Above"

Not being very up on my 80s pop, it wasn’t until many years later that I realised the lyrics to this were taken from a Whitney Houston song. At the time I don’t think I knew anything about her pre-Bodyguard years other than I Wanna Dance With Somebody.

TMTTCA is fine I suppose, probably worth a 5 or 6 – it’s an odd song to have been as big as it was.

Other notable tracks lower down the chart:

– Snow Patrol’s first hit Run (which I guess is technically bunnied, in a way) at #5; this owes more to the Travis/Coldplay lineage than the post-Strokes/Libertines style that was hitting the mainstream, but it’s still indicative of the rise in indie over 2004-2006. I’d give that one 9.

– Lostprophets’ biggest hit to date with Last Train Home at #8. Given subsequent revelations about Ian Watkins, there’s a lot of baggage with them, but I loved the album Start Something and still quite enjoy it whenever I give it a spin.

– Joss Stone’s first hit with a genre-adapted White Stripes cover at #18.

– Razorlight (also bunnied) having their first top 40 hit with Stumble and Fall. We’ll discuss them in here eventually.

Edit: looks ThePenSmith got there ahead of me.

I think it’s interesting to look at this from U2’s perspective in terms of their often-mutated relationship with dance music and remixes. What follows is my own research and could be potentially patchy.

In the 90s the full extent of official U2 dance remixes was incredibly high (and incredibly visible, too – the Salomé Zooromancer mix and the Perfecto versions of Lemon and Even Better Than the Real Thing were long-time superclub favourites; the latter charted even better than the real thing, the former had a spot on their PopMart Tour as U2 entered the lemon), and the stronger the band’s relationship with club culture appeared to be, the more abstract it got – an industrial remix of Last Night on Earth opening its CD2 single despite bearing absolutely no relationship to the original.

Yet Island, from the Negativland moment off, seemed naturally reluctant about remixes and samples that weren’t in U2’s name. Covers fine, of course, that was publishers’ business – Clivilles & Cole’s Pride (No. 15 in ’92), Mica Paris’ Oakenfold/Osborne-produced One (No. 25 in ’95) and Mary Kiani’s With or Without You (No. 44 in ’97) all come to mind – but some of the best 1990s dance tracks to recontextualise U2 – Hyper Logic’s Only Me, Harmonix’s Landslide – recreate rather than sample

(Not that this stopped plenty of actual samples passing through, seemingly unnoticed; the Edge pointed out in his (initially deceptive) Negativland interview that he heard their drums sampled on plenty of things, but two of the best examples came after – Smith & Mighty’s Accept All Contrasts and DJ Shadow’s Lost and Found turning Sunday Bloody Sunday into a clattering breakbeat).

Island’s apparent change of heart came around 1998, ironically the point at which U2 decided to greatly tone down their dance infatuation. A track called Re-Wired by Jeep Grrlz was doing the rounds in UK clubs and rather than sue them for sampling Wire, the label simply reissued it as a promo. The first sign of the “vs. U2″ in the charts followed in June 2001, with Musique vs U2’s New Year’s Dub (No. 15). Back in 1995, Only Me turned NYD into lonesome hardbag that sounds nostalgic for the rave era (a simple change of context turns the the piano motif into piano-house melancholy). Whereas Musique – who previously had hits as PF Project and Tzant – focus their attention more on the Edge, stretching his guitar into orangey, sunset shoegaze smogs. The effect, particularly on the 12”, I find particularly winsome.

My long and laboured point being, by the time LMC come into the picture, it is such now that Island are allowing a house remix to carry U2 that stylistically – and in terms of rock/indie-dance cred, if we will – is far removed from U2’s own dalliances with house music, which is a strange development when you consider their name is right there on the front, meaning it is counted as as U2 number one by OCC (and, hilariously, in the booklet for Now 61). This is the point in Popular at which All Around the World enter the picture, and Take Me to the Clouds Above was pretty much a permanent on mainstream dance compilations throughout the year (many of which I owned), rubbing shoulders with Special D, Flip & Fill and suchlike.

I loved it then as I love it now. Clayton’s dubby wobble is a perfect undertow but a wise move was retaining Eno’s little high shimmer of synth – in the original its just a spot of accent colouring, in here it is part of the loop, ergo the musical hook. Then there’s the layering on of disproportionate arpeggios to prevent what would have otherwise been too static a rhythm, and finally the resung Whitney vocal, whose uncertainty (“Tell me is this really love?”) is answered totally by the optimism everywhere else. And to be frank, it’s the first of quite a few 2004 number ones that carry just the right sort of yearning to stop me in their tracks as I think about what was probably the best year of my life.

9.

They asked her to bookend the album with Streets and Mothers which would make Exit her least favourite (assuming she wouldn’t have ranked one of the aforesaid below it, safely assuming she wouldn’t have ranked both below it).

U2’s The Joshua Tree opens with THREE incredible all-timers back-to-back-to-back. And then, just when you think the album can’t get any better, it doesn’t!
—Raphael-Bob Waksberg

I loved this song for a time, and the yearning guitar tones go excellently with the dancefloor. Sometime in the last few years though I’ve discovered the Whitney original and every time I hear this now a part of my mind goes ‘play REAL Whitney’. Funnily the same thing has never happened with U2, a band I’ve never really taken the time to go back and listen to and consequently don’t really get.

Regardless of all that, this is a banger and I’m going to go listen to it again.

#11 This is interesting partly because it reminds me of Tom’s comments in a past Popular entry about the most successful car designs being a mixture of both novelty and being clearly car-like – and the same logic applying to pop.

The Joshua Tree hit trio delivered this – the desert haze aesthetic allied to more conventional popcraft, including going all-in on a familiar chord structure. And LMC also delivered this – two different proven winner bits of 80s pop smashed together over route-one AATW beats.

I’m not sure which, if any, of the component songs I knew much at this point? Probably both, but possibly neither well. I was, however, disillusioned with this sample-driven dance and was pivoting to rockism at this point – the above-mentioned Snow Patrol album was a staple of my bedroom CD player for some time. Weirdly enough, it’s completely absent from Tidal and nothing else of theirs is! Do other streaming platforms have this?

Anyway, these steals are good steals, and the fact there’s two of them might be a benefit compared to other 80s-nabbing mid-00s dance. Plus the vocal steal is large enough to not be as repetitive as some in that subgenre, including and especially one that rides one tiny sample plus an egregious video to bunnydom. More on that when we get there of course, but a 6 seems right for this.

I must admit I’m a sucker for this kind of thing, so I’ll go with a 7/10. I enjoyed some of Rachel’s mid 90s hits so good to see her atop the singles charts.

Only just noticed Popular is back!
This was actually a remake of a bootleg by the Mash Up Kids that was released on white label nearly a year earlier. I remember playing it to death at the time in my early years as a DJ and it was bloody huge up North, hence why AATW got onto it and had a legit rework done by their in-house guys, although Mash Up Kids were invited to provide one of the remixes.
I agree that it wasn’t quite the same with Rachel Macfarlane on vocals. She did her best and she was probably the best vocalist on the club scene for the job, but you just aren’t going to compete with an awesome voice like Whitney’s. But it didn’t take too much away from the fact it was still an incredibly effective mash up, and I was more than happy to see it storm to the top of the charts.
Also there was a fantastic remix by Audiolush, which was pretty much the original with a donk on it, but it went down a treat alongside the big “scouse house” bangers of the time. This came out around the peak of the scouse house sound smashing the UK charts, most of it being produced by Mike Di Scala (now of Camelphat fame) under his various guises like Ultrabeat and Rezonance Q.