15 January 2012

Dance Anthems Is Dead, Long Live Dance Anthems!

I've written before about my former love of dance anthems (pronounced dance anfems, of course) but a random conversation in the office earlier this week about late nineties and early noughties dance music sent me back to my dance/trance playlist on iTunes. I used to own hundreds of these songs, most of them bought as CD singles, but on reaching university and embarrassed by my teenage taste, I deleted most of them from my computer and chucked the CDs. Since then, I've been slowly re-acquiring some of my old favourites.

For years I listened religiously to Dave Pearce's Dance Anthems on Radio 1 on Sunday nights, which was great because they tended to play a lot of the same songs week after week and there wasn't too much D&B, which I disliked even then. Yes, you had to put up with all the listeners who had been "having a wicked weekend, largin' it in Basingstoke" calling in with their requests for shout-outs for their Basingstoke buddies. I probably tuned in to the show a few times while I was at university and had assumed it was still on in the same slot but alas! It turns out that the programme was shunted onto Radio 6, to which I have never knowingly listened, and then finished altogether last spring. Alas!

I can't even listen again to the last show but they did include the playlist and I'm pleased to note that it seems hardly to have changed since I last tuned in: a nice little opener from Armand van Helden (which, I seem to remember, often opened the show), and then Liquid, Delerium, William Orbit, Matt Darey, Rui Da Silva, Paul van Dyk, Energy 52, Underworld, Push, Mauro Picotto and Rank 1, they're all there. And with the exception of the latter, which I have just re-acquired, every single one of the songs I've just listed is still on my computer (or on my computer again), proving my point about the repetition.

Anyway, in the name of nostalgia, I've put together a list of my top five dance anthems (this is all relative, of course; only the top two get four-star ratings in iTunes):

1. Silence (radio edit) -- Delerium ft Sarah McLachlan
2. Insomnia -- Faithless
3. Liberation (For an Angel) -- Matt Darey
4. Angel -- Ralph Fridge
5. 9 pm (Till I Come) -- ATB

Forgotten gemI had completely forgotten about the Rank 1 song, Airwave (surprisingly, given that the song is also extensively sampled in another trance tune I did still have called True Love Never Dies), but after listening again to the radio edit, I conceded that either this or CafĂ© del Mar by Energy 52 would be my first reserve.

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