Disco inferno

Our in-depth look at the history of disco house continues, from 'Professional Widow' to 'Get Lucky' via Chicago, France, Italy, Detroit and NYC

"I was a hip-hop kid who made house music," says Armand Van Helden plainly. "My management company would come to me and say 'Do you want to remix Ace Of Base? Do you want to remix Jimmy Sommerville?'. I had no idea who these artists were, so I'd just say yes, take a few words or a line out of their track and build the remix around that. I didn't really care what was going on in their original version and, I have to admit, it was exactly the same with Tori Amos. I don't mean to disrespect her by saying that. These days I know a lot more about her and I think she's an amazing artist. But back then that's how it was."

Tori Amos had launched a successful career in the early 1990s with the critically acclaimed album Little Earthquakes. By 1996 she was releasing her third album, and for Atlantic Records she was a big deal. Although oblivious as to her history and standing, Armand Van Helden was about to embark upon a remix project for her that would mark a high point in both their careers, the ramifications of which would be felt through several sub-genres of dance music.

"Vicky Germaise, the head of marketing at Atlantic, called me and said 'We're going to have dinner with Tori Amos'," recalls Johnny DeMairo. "So we go to dinner and I presented her with this scenario that I was going to get these mixes done and have 3,000 copies sent to DJs globally, and the worst thing that could happen was that people who didn't know her records would get to hear of her. I sent out copies of the album to some of the harder mixers I thought could do something with her, not MAW, but people like Junior Vasquez, MK and Armand. I was such a big fan of MK, I could listen to him all day. So I gave the LP to MK and he wanted Professional Widow. Armand just told me he'd do anything. He'd kill whatever I gave him."

"My manager was Italian and Johnny D's Italian, so we would all go out to this place on 8th Avenue to get Italian food," recalls Van Helden. "One time, Johnny said, 'I have this artist, Tori Amos, she's really cool. She's more on the rock side. She's looking for something different and I thought of you.' I don't think I was really listening to him at the time, but I just said 'Yeah, send it me'. I'd done several remixes before and what did stick in my mind was that the artist themselves, in this case, was specifically asking to try something different. I guess with the success of Funk Phenomena, Johnny had thought of me. I was in a pretty good place at the time, I'd just come back from my first run in Ibiza and I was vibed from that."

Inspired by this first trip to the White Isle and fresh from the success of Funk Phenomena, Van Helden approached the project fearlessly. "There are certain architectures in music, especially in dance music,” says Van Helden. "Certain ways things groove and sometimes there's predictability. Sometimes you can get a record that's totally crazy, like The Bucketheads. That song had a different architecture, it was a different way to build a house song."

"With the Tori Amos remix, I was trying to do a different architecture. I think the reason that remix worked so well in the UK was that I've always been a big drum & bass fan. I never DJed it so it was difficult to keep up, maybe I only bought the big records, Metalheadz, DJ Hype, things like that. With the Tori Amos mix, that was really influenced by the rave breakbeat era. All of those records, specifically the early drum & bass records, had drops. No drums, just an ambient drop. So the Tori Amos mix, yes, it's a funky disco house record but, in my mind, what I was trying to do was a drop like in drum & bass.

"That and the fact I was trying to copy MK with the vocal chop! I didn't do it as good as he does it. But my idea for the remix was to copy his style, only to put it more into a funk/disco format rather than the deep house thing he does. That Nightcrawlers record, with that kind of vocal chop, was huge. It had lasted years. The oddest thing for me was, when the Tori Amos record came out, the two remixes on there were me and MK. I'd had no idea he was also doing a remix."

IT'S GOTTA BE BIG

"Armand actually came back with his mix first," explains DeMairo. "I got the DAT back and I'm in an office where next to me is the heavy metal guy and on the other side of me is this girl doing college promo. I'm basically surrounded by all these rockers. I put the DAT in the machine and the thing just takes off. Suddenly I have 20 heads in my doorway because they all know it's Tori's voice."

"I'm thinking 'What the fuck is this?' because the bassline is absolutely huge. Then there's the vocals: 'It's gotta be big… honey bring it close to my lips' and I'm thinking 'What the fuck? She is gonna freak out!'. She'd famously addressed this rape that had happened to her. But the track was undeniable. I told Armand 'This is the nastiest, most ridiculous shit I ever heard in my life' and the truth was I was shitting my pants to send it to her.

"MK's mix came in a couple of weeks later and I made a tape of some of the mixes to send to her, deliberately putting the MK mix on first, because he'd used a lot of the vocal, and leaving the Armand mix until last. I didn't hear anything for a couple of months."

"I didn't know her well at all," admits De Mairo, who was obviously nervy having had no response. "I didn't know where she was at. I just attributed not hearing from her to her being so offended by 'Honey bring it close to my lips, it's gotta be big'. But I kept hitting Vicky back every few weeks, tip-toeing around it, 'Have you spoken with Tori yet?'. Then I got a call."

"Tori says, 'My bus broke down in Germany. I had the cassette in my bag, I put it in and the bus went nuts. That Armand thing is totally crazy, we gotta do it'. That was a great moment, because it could so easily have gone the other way. It just goes to show you what kind of an artist she is. Other artists would have had a hard time with it, but she embraced it. I was so happy."

Armand's Star Trunk Funkin' Mix was a major hit all across Europe, hitting No 1 in the UK and Italian pop charts and on the US dance charts. Its disco bassline was perhaps the best to hit the clubs that year; certainly it was the most memorable. It's cited as being a major influence, alongside the productions of Todd Edwards, on the UK garage scene that was emerging at the time, and it marked the beginning of a trend of drop-outs in dance tracks, with producers attempting to ape the formula Van Helden had employed. It is Armand Van Helden's most successful remix and Tori Amos's biggest-selling single.

"At no point in my remix history has an artist ever thanked me personally," says Van Helden. "But she did. My management company called me and told me the Professional Widow remix I'd done had gone to No 1 in the UK. I was like 'Okay'. I didn't know they'd meant No 1 in the pop charts, I just thought they meant the dance charts and besides, I didn't live in the UK! They hit me up again a couple of weeks later and said, 'Tori Amos wants to talk to you'. She went out of her way to call and thank me on the phone, which was sweet, and she sent me a little basket of strange cheeses and jams, champagne, all this British stuff, the kind of thing you could go to the park with and have a picnic. Kudos to her. An artist like that, reaching out to do that for me. It was really cool."

But after The Funk Phenomena and the Tori Amos remix had made Armand Van Helden one of the biggest remixers globally, the producer seemed to shy away from the buzz around him. "When I've had times that I've hit mass appeal, I've never been very good at taking advantage of it," he admits. "If I had a certain success, it's almost like I've run away from it. The next thing I'd do would be totally weird so people wouldn't like me any more and I'd have to build it back up. Back then, having a hit record was kinda cheesy. These days, if a DJ has just one minor hit they end up with a whole team behind them and it turns into this super big business. Back then we didn't have any of that. We'd just drive away from it."

Although high profile remix work came flooding in thanks to Professional Widow, it wasn't until three years later, in 1999, that Armand returned to being a name that was simultaneously in the charts and hot property among DJs. That occurred with the release of two original vocal singles. Massive hit U Don't Know Me, featuring Duane Harden, was to become Armand's second UK pop No 1. Brash, filtered disco house that was very much of the time, it could be heard in every commercial club.

Flowerz, on the other hand, was released with little fanfare. Built around a live disco bassline, its hypnotic groove faded in and out as seasoned vocalist Roland Clark delivered a rambling, freestyled vocal atop. It caught the attention of the deeper side of club culture, Armand slaying both the underground and the charts with these first two singles from his 2 Future 4 U album.

"Those two tracks were 100% a copy of Daft Punk," concedes Armand. "Especially Stardust. I was blown away by that. I think anything I was doing in that era, I was just trying to be Daft Punk. Maybe they don't sound like them, but that's what was in my head."

BAD BOY COME AGAIN

"That and Bad Boy Records," Van Helden continues, "which was really blowing up in New York back then. The formula with Bad Boy was, take something familiar and put some new drums over it. Of course the mixdown would be great and the singer, Biggie or Mary J Blige, would be awesome, but it was a relatively simple formula for a hit record. Like a bowl of pasta, simple but amazing."