VARIOUS: 12” 80s CLUB CLASSICS (Universal)

Back in the ‘80’s, when anything that you could vaguely dance to was added to the ‘black chart’ and an extended remix hadn’t gone much further than Tom Moulton’s literal extension of a track by adding beats on either side of the track.

12” 80’s Club Classics collects four hours’ worth of extended mixes that begins with hip hop at the beginning of the decade, acid house at the end. There’s a real treasure trove of tracks to rediscover here. The cut and pasting of samples on Grandmaster Flash’s “On The Wheels Of Steel” may sound primitive now but when you consider he created this not by the use of the sophisticated software we now use but by splicing together bits of tape to create the track, it’s no mean feat.

Elsewhere, Carly Simon’s uncontrollable funk on ‘Why’ produced by Nile Rogers, old block party shit on Kurtis Blow’s ‘The Breaks’ and the proto house of Rockers Revenge’s ‘Walking on Sunshine’ still have the ability to thrill. Slick 80’s r n b from David Joseph, Loose Ends cold CLASSIC “Hanging on a String” and the dramatic soul of SOS Band’s ‘Just be good to me’ show how soulless modern day r n b is. CD 2 goes a more electronic pop approach; Joyce Sims ‘All in All’ is sleek and minimal, Mantronix’s ‘Gotta have your love’ is a lesson in how to fuse pop and funk and Neneh Cherry’s ‘Buffalo Stance’, twenty five years after release proves how timeless a piece of pop that is.

Neneh Cherry’s classic ‘Buffalo Stance’

You know all these tunes? Yes, well that’s the main fault of 12” 80’s Club Classics, it’s highly likely that you already own these tunes. There are a number of tracks that don’t normally find themselves on compilations like these. Tracks such as Teena Marie, Thelma Houston and Skipworth & Turner but by CD 3 you’ll find over familiarity kick in, especially when the old school hip hop and acid selection kicks in. Eric B & Rakim, NWA, Bomb The Bass, Inner City, S-Express.

There are hundreds of CDs with these tracks on and after the strength of the first two CDs here, the third is like a lazy afterthought, there’s also some shoddy vinyl rips contained here, so bad, my own rips of these tracks from vinyl sound better. The lack of adventure of the third CD makes this an overlong compilation; being a two CD set would have meant quality control wouldn’t have been such an issue. 6.5/10
Chris Todd

Grandmaster Flash’s “On The Wheels Of Steel” audio