Jack Your Body: where were you when house music broke?
When I was about 17, I went on a date with an absolute knobhead in shiny shoes who was well into house music. He was 25, so he’d been out raving at cool clubs in the 80s while I’d been at home watching Going Live.
I was too young, I’d missed the boat and frankly I didn’t give a toss. I was happy ploughing through the 4AD back catalogue and spending my money on baggy trousers and skate shoes instead of expensive nightclubs. House music was for townies.
He told me he was going to see Graeme Park at Media, and when I professed my ignorance he became hysterical, claiming this was the DJ who brought house music to the UK and all this stuff. Sounded a bit shit to me, and I probably said it.
No second date, needless to say.
Turned out Graeme Park was pretty influential (shiny-shoes was still a dick though). In fact, Park had heard Jack Your Body for the first time about fifty yards away from where my date and I were having our argument — in Nottingham’s Selectadisc, where he used to work.
Park told the Guardian in this 2017 interview: “I remember screaming “This is the future!” My workmates were goths and hated it, but I knew I was right.” He was DJing at the Hacienda at the time, trying to convert the crowds to these new sounds, with mixed results.
The simplicity of this new sound, acid house, was less reliant on its disco roots. It started to gain a foothold in the clubs. Then it began to creep into the charts.
The first Chicago house record to break through was the more vocal-based Farley Jackmaster Funk and Daryl Pandy with Love Can’t Turn Around (incidentally, Steve ‘Silk’ Hurley claims was pretty much his arrangement that he wrote when he and Farley were room-mates — Farley totally ripped it off).
Then came the stark simplicity of Hurley’s Jack Your Body, which came seemingly out of nowhere into the number one spot in January 1987.
Acid house was suddenly everywhere. It was a proper youth revolution. I didn’t understand it, my parents didn’t understand it, my older step-sister was definitely sneaking out and raving to it every weekend.
It was proper counter-culture. I feel envious whenever I think about it.
But by the time I was old enough to go out, dance music was a husk of its 1980s self. Commercial and joyless, the rough-and-ready community spirit had been drained from it. Its audience turned into smart-shirted 20-somethings who could continue to explore the boundaries of hedonism with their freshly minted marketing executive’s salaries.
I learned to love the music eventually (you can read about that here), but I have no regrets for slagging off a DJ I’d never heard of and having a full-blown row in Market Square about his legacy.
I might have been wrong about the music, but I suspect I dodged a shiny-shoed bullet.
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I’m Penny, a freelance writer and content strategist. I have a half-hearted go at all the other social channels but in all honesty, the best place to follow me is on Instagram.
