Back in 1990 and 1991, the Adelaide-based Triple J radio program Club Escape did episodes at the end of the year called “Perfect List”, featuring its choice of the best dance music released for the year. I’ve just updated my copies of those lists with links to the tunes.

For your listening and nostalgic pleasure, here are the Perfect Lists for 1990 and 1991.

Those old blog posts explain the story, but the short version is that I was one of the program’s presenters in 1990. It was a great time.

Two things come to mind as I look back at these lists…

First, I’m amazed at how few of the links I’d originally set up still worked. Linkrot is a problem for every website manager, but it’s not made easier when people delete their account or when the music distribution companies insist that you have to link to their version and all the others get deleted. I don ‘t know why they think this helps.

And second, well, I’m really hit by the feeling that time has moved on. Those programs were two decades ago. And yet some people want to wallow in their past. I listened to a few of the songs as I repaired the links, but I felt no urge to spend a lot of time “reminiscing”.

Perhaps I’m unusual in that I prefer to live in the present. Or even the future.

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• John Thompson-Mills: John was the producer of Club Escape, the dance music program I presented with Scott Thompson on Triple J back in 1990 or whenever it was. Happy to have stumbled across this.
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While digging out the videos for the Perfect Lists I stumbled across another fave from LFO: this wonderful video for Freak. The music isn’t as good as the more famous LFO but man, that video! Nothing to do with the Silverchair song or Daniel Johns.

OK, I lied. I have managed to find a hard copy of the Club Escape Perfect List from 1991.

As before, this is a list of the “best” dance tracks released in 1991, as chosen by the crew at Club Escape, the Adelaide-based dance music program on Triple J.

I wasn’t involved in Club Escape that year. I’d already gone on to The Core magazine — and indeed this list is taken from The Core issue 12, from 15 January 1992. So the people to blame for this list are producer John Thompson-Mills (”JB”) and presenter Paul Kitching.

[Update 6 September 2007: I've linked to as many of these songs as I can find on YouTube. Some of them may not be the exact mix played on air, but you get that. Enjoy. And if you find any others, please let me know.]

[Update 27 January 2011: I've just updated all the links back to the songs on YouTube. So many had suffered linkrot over the last few years. Not all of the links will be to the same mixes that were originally played on the radio.]

Top 10:

1. De La Soul: Ring Ring Ring (Ha Ha Hey)

2. Quadraphonia: Quadraphonia

3. The KLF: Last Train to Transcentral

4. Enigma: Sadeness

5. Rozalla: Faith (In the Power of Love)

6. T99: Anastasia

7. Crystal Waters: Gypsy Woman

8. PM Dawn: Set Adrift on Memory Bliss

9. LL Cool J: Mama Said Knock You Out

10. Sabrina Johnston: Peace (In the Valley)

Part 1, 28 December 1991:

Creative Thieves: Nasty Rhythm
Brothers In Rhythm: Such a Good Feeling
Clubhouse: Deep In My Heart
Double Dee: Don’t You Feel
De La Soul: A Rollerskating Jam Named Saturday
Heavy D and The Boyz: Now That We’ve Found Love
Spectrum: Brazil
Human Resource: Dominator
Joey Beltram: My Sound
Gary Clail and the On-U Sound System: Human Nature
Massive Attack: Unfinished Sympathy
Sonya Roche: Love Itch
Slam Slam: Move
Black Box: Strike It Up
DJ H & Steffy: Think About
Clubland: Pump That Sound
Frankie Knuckles: The Whistle Song
Sue Chaloner: I Wanna Thank You
Naughty By Nature: OPP
Gang Starr: Love Sick (You can see some wanker mime to it, at least.)
A Tribe Called Quest: Can I Kick It?
DJ Professor & Zappala: We Gotta Do It
Utah Saints: What Can You Do 4 Me?
NDX: Higher Than Heaven
Hookline & Singer: Night Time

Part 2, 4 January 1992:

Living House: To Talk
Velvet: Hold Me
Ginny: Keep Warm
Public Enemy: By the Time I Get to Arizona
Young Disciples: Get Yourself Together
Lisa M: Love’s Heartbreak
Digital Boy: Gimme A Fat Beat
GTO: The Bullfrog
Brand New Heavies: Never Stop
Driza Bone: Real Love
Bomb the Bass: Air You Breathe
Eve Gallagher: Love Come Down
The Badman: Magic Style
LA Style: James Brown Is Dead
Final Exposure: Vortex
Massive Attack: Safe From Harm
Shabba Ranks & Maxi Priest: Housecall
Bomb the Bass: Love So True
Audio Deluxe: Sixty Seconds
The KFL: Amerika: What Time Is Love?
Midi Rain: Eyes
DJ Jazzy Jeff & The Fresh Prince: Summertime
Queen Latifah: Fly Girl
Afrika Bambaataa: Just Get Up and Dance
Jennie: Bring Back the Bus Stop
Rozalla: Everybody’s Free

Part 3, 11 January 1992:

Fits of Gloom: Differences
Rozalla: Born To Love Ya
Alison Limerick: Where Love Lives
3 x Dope: Mr Sandman
Digital Underground: Packet Man (YouTube has a live version)
Djum Djum: The Difference (remix)
Moby: Go
Space Trax: Atomic Playboy
Natasha: AM/FM
Enigma: Principles of Lust
Incognito: Always There
Alison Limerick: Come Back for Real Love (remix)
Nomad: (I Wanna Give You) Devotion
Ce Ce Peniston: Devotion
… and the Top 10

Apparently there was time to include some other tracks in the programs which weren’t in the Top 75, but still considered good — but The Core doesn’t say what they were.

What strikes me about this list compared with the previous year’s are:

• My god, it really was the year of Italo-house, eh? I mean, three Rozalla tracks? Sheesh! Maybe it’s just that JB was in luuuurve…
• Where’s the English electronica gone?
• Why are there so few tracks that I actually like?
• Nice to see Moby launching his career.

There was also a…

Club Escape Listeners’ Top 10:

1. Rozalla: Everybody’s Free

2. Human Resource: Dominator

3. Moby: Go

4. LA Style: James Brown Is Dead

5. T99: Anastasia

6. Naughty By Nature: OPP

7. Final Exposure: Vortex

8. Stereo MCs: Elevate My Mind

9. Bassomatic: Funky Love

10. Marley Marl: The Symphony

You know, I reckon the listeners chose better — or maybe that’s just me?

Before The Core magazine, there was Club Escape, a dance music radio program on Triple J which went to air on Saturday nights in Adelaide during 1990 and 1991.

I had the very great pleasure of presenting this program during its first year, along with promoter Scott Thompson — who also ran the coolest nightclub in the history of the universe, Metro on Rundle Street.

Club Escape was created by John Thompson-Mills (“JB”) who, through anally-retentive production, made Scott and me sound like stars.

I know I only wrote about The Core the other day. But on Facebook today someone’s brother saw that I was a “friend” and asked him to ask me if I had the Perfect List from 1991.

I don’t.

Well, I might have the audio somewhere, but not the list of tunes. Actually, I do have it, see this post.

However I do have the Perfect List from 1990 — our choice for the best 50 best dance music tracks released that year. And here it is.

How many of these tracks do you remember? And which ones would you prefer to forget?

[Update 6 September 2007: I've linked to as many of these songs as I can find on YouTube. Some of them may not be the exact mix played on air, but you get that. Enjoy. And if you find any others, please let me know.]

[Update 27 January 2011: So many of the videos I linked to have suffered from linkrot. I've just re-linked all the tracks. Not all of the mixes are the same as the ones we played on the radio.]

Top 10:

1. BBG: Snappiness

2. Orchestra JB: Free Spirit (Slow Burn mix)

3. The KLF: What Time is Love

4. Blue Pearl: Naked in the Rain (Blue Pearl Dub mix)

5. Ambience: The Adored

6. De La Soul: Tread Water (Italian Tour special remix)

7. A Tribe Called Quest: Bonita Applebum (Hootie mix)

8. Blackbox: Fantasy

9. LFO: LFO

10. 808 State: Cubik (Kings Country Perspective mix)

Part 1, 29 December 1990:

We broadcast the full list of 50 tracks over two weeks, in no particular order apart from the Top 10 at the end.

Major Problems: The Rush (Freak Out Mix)
A Homeboy, A Hippie & A Funkidred: Total Confusion (Confusion mix)
Barrie K Sharpe & Diana Brown: The Masterplan (remix)
Family Stand: Ghetto Heaven
Jungle Brothers: Doin’ Our Own Dang (Do It To the JBs mix)
Adamski: Killer
Bassomatic: Fascinating Rhythm (Lisa Loud mix)
She Rockers: Jam It Jam
Silver Bullet: 20 Seconds To Comply
Moodswings featuring Chrissie Hynde: Spiritual High
The Grid: Flotation (YouTube has a bootleg live version)
Space Opera: Space 3001 (Part One mix)
GTO: Pure (remix)
Queen Latifah & De La Soul: Mama Gave Birth to the Soul Children
Monie Love: Down to Earth
Deee-lite: Groove is in The Heart
Together: Hardcore Uproar (Boomtown remix)
Earth People: Reach Up to Mars (Martian mix)
BBG: Some Kind of Heaven (Heavenly mix)
Soul II Soul: A Dreams a Dream
Snap: The Power
Westbam: The Roof is On Fire
The Orb: A Huge Evergrowing Pulsating Brain that Rules from the Centre of the Ultraworld (YouTube has a bootleg live version)
Guru Josh: Infinity

Part 2, 5 January 1991

Ce Ce Rogers: All Join Hands
Touch of Soul: We Got the Love
CPO: Homicide
Above the Law: Untouchable
Magic Concept: Unstoppable
49ers: Touch Me
Blackbox: Everybody Everybody (Le Freak mix)
2 in a Room: Do What You Want
Tony Scott: Gangster Boogie
Tribal House: Motherland
Blue Pearl: Little Brother (Little Sister mix)
Capella: Get Out of My Case (Philly Style remix)
Technotronic: Get Up (Dave Morales remix)
The Adventures of Stevie V: Dirty Cash (Dime & Dollar mix)
MC Wildski: Warrior
… and the Top 10

Wow, what a list! Looking back, I can see that we were consciously trying to cover all the genres, rather than choosing our personal favourites. I’d have had a lot more English electronica and Detroit techno, for instance. Scott would have picked more hands-in-the-air stuff — I reckon he had surprisingly girly music tastes for a straight man.

And this is such an Adelaide list! So, so different from anything playing in Sydney of Melbourne at the time.

It’s two weeks since I posted the last thing from my deep past, the Script Challenge, and no-one’s solved it yet. So I’ll post something less cryptic, a little less demanding — an extract from The Core magazine, which I worked on back during the brief period when I was cool.

Plus it gives me a chance to reminisce about The KLF.

The Core dates from a fantastic period of my life. I’d been working for ABC Radio for a few years, and along with club promoter Scott Thompson — does anyone know where he is now? — I presented Club Escape, a dance music program on Triple J created by John Thompson-Mills that aired in Adelaide in 1990-91.

Club Escape was hot. We had 11% of the total radio audience on a Saturday night, which means we probably blitzed the 15-25yo demographic. Nightclub owners told us their venues were deserted until the clock struck midnight and we were off the air.

It Was So Much Fun.

But I was getting tired of the ABC.

Dance music enthusiast Acb Tyson griped that there wasn’t a local magazine about dance music, and The Core was born. The first issue hit the streets on Wednesday 23 October 1991, and I left the ABC in February ’92 to concentrate on it full time.

I’ll write more about The Core another time. I’m even tempted to put all of the content online, since it chronicles an important period in the evolution of dance music in Australia. But for now, here’s an article from The Core number 6, published 27 November 1991. Enjoy!

KLF: WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON?

With a new version of The JAM’s It’s Grim Up North, and The KLF about to stomp the US charts with America: What Time is Love?, Stilgherrian tries to explain dance music’s most confusing people.

“The KLF’s weird, right? I mean, seriously weird, y’know what I mean? But it all seems to make some strange kind of sense…” If that’s your reaction to The KLF, then read on, because it all does make some strange kind of sense…

For a start, The KLF is two people — the same two people as The JAMs, the Timelords (remember Doctorin’ the Tardis?), Disco 2000 and, to some extent, The Orb. According to the official biography, they started working together in January 1987.

One half of The KLF is Jimmy Cauty, alias Rockman Rock. At age 17, he drew that greenish-grey poster of Gandalf and Frodo that became the biggest selling print of the 70s. He lives at Transcentral, which doubles as The KLF’s working space. He played in Brilliant, a thrash-pop band, and owns that American cop car that features in the Timelords and KLF videos.

The other half of The KLF is Bill Drummond, alias King Boy D. Born in Scotland, he played guitar with Big in Japan, who in turn owned the Zoo label, who signed Echo and the Bunnymen and A Teardrop Explodes. He’s married with two children and lives on a farm not too far from London.

Now here’s the first big connection. The KLF’s other incarnation, The JAMS, is one of the forces of chaos in a set of three wildly chaotic books called Illuminatus! — it even stands for exactly the same thing: the Justified Ancients of Mu Mu. If you really want to understand what the fuck is going on, you’ll need to read those books, because 90% of everything the KLF does ties in with Illuminatus!.

Illuminatus! was written back in the 70s by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson. In rather confusing detail, it explains (if “explain” isn’t too strong a word) how a secret society called the Illuminati attempts to “Immanentize the Eschaton — a mystical ritual when thousands of people are killed so a select few can become immortal. Along the way, they explain the assassination of John F Kennedy and most other conspiracy theories in history.

If you’ve never heard of IIluminatus!, don’t panic. The only people under 35 who’ve read it are nerdy science fiction fans with the wrong-shaped glasses, brown corduroy trousers and desert boots — odd, really, because the books are full of underground political thought, rampant drug abuse and explicit sexual activities between varying numbers of people of various genders. (Why do people who read SF looking decades even centuries into the future dress as if the 70s never ended?) Illuminatus! has even been called a training manual for subversives.

Any decent dictionary will tell you the Illuminati (which means “the enlightened ones”) was a secret society founded by Adam Weishaupt in Bavaria in 1776. Some people claim the Illuminati still operate in secret today. Illuminatus! explains that they’re “structure freaks”, the bad guys who want everything to be ordered, under control.

Three loosely-allied forces of chaos fight the Illuminati. The Legion of Dynamic Discord (LDD, the Discordians) is headed by a lawyer and engineer turned pirate, Hagbard Celine, who travels the world in a submarine. The Erisian Liberation Front (ELF) is more mystical, worshipping Eris, the Greek goddess of confusion, (I don’t need to point out that “ELF” isn’t too different from “KLF”, the Kopyright Liberation Front, do I?) And the JAMs worship the Babylonian goddess of chaos, Mummu. They’re led by John Dillinger, whose first robbery was in 1923. In every robbery, Dillinger used the JAMs’ motto, “Lie down on the floor and keep calm”. You’ve heard that on Last Train to Transcentral, and the cover notes even credit Dillinger with the sample!

John Dillinger isn’t the only tie-in. For the Illuminati, the numbers 17 and 23 are important, because of the Law of Fives. A pyramid has five points, four at the bottom and one at the top. Both 17 and 23 are prime numbers, with five numbers in between them. If you look closely at history you’ll see the signs of the Illuminati when 17 and 23 appear. For example, Imelda Marcos currently faces 17 criminal charges in the Philippines and Jimmy Cauty’s cop car is number 23.

Pyramids — especially pyramids with eyes — have been used as symbols by the Egyptians Pharaohs, the Freemasons, the Illuminati, Dr Timothy Leary (a American still prevented from entering Australia due to his more than liberal attitudes towards LSD) — and of course The KLF (although their pyramid has a ghetto blaster).

The KLF video Stadium House: The Trilogy is allegedly recorded live at Woodstock Europe, the location of the Illuminati’s attempt to Immanentize the Eschaton — even the stage is in the form of a pyramid. There’s the submarine. Last Train to Transcentral has a “Live from the Lost Continent” mix — one version of the Illuminati story says they were really founded on the Lost Continent of Mu.

On top of everything else, there’s ELF’s Operation Mindfuck (OM), The guiding philosophy is that the only strategy your opponent can’t predict is a random strategy. The KLF’s efforts at OM include playing heavy metal music at a Dutch house rave. Art historians call it Situationalism: using symbols and objects in unusual situations to subvert the established order.

Call it Situationalism, call it Operation Mindfuck, Bill and Jimmy have taken on the music industry in a series of guerilla strikes.

The first JAMs Single, All You Need is Love, on the KLF Communications label, sold 6500 copies to rave reviews. The LP followed, 1987 (What the Fuck is Going On?), more of that sample’n'scratch. The cover said “In the name of Mu we hereby liberate these sounds from all copyright restrictions without prejudice.” It didn’t work.

One track. The Queen and I, sampled Abba’s Dancing Queen more than the band liked, and they sued. Typically, the JAMs didn’t send in their own lawyers — they took Jimmy’s cop car on a ferry to Sweden to talk it out with Abba, with all the remaining copies of 1987 in the boot. But when they arrived in Gothenburg at 3am (note the time!) no-one was awake. So the JAMs found a fat blonde prostitute and gave her a gold record labelled “presented to Bjorn, Benny and Stig to celebrate sales in excess of 0 copies of The Justified Ancients of Mu Mu’s LP 1987“. They took a photo. Then they burned the rest of the records in a field — and took a photo of that, later used on the cover of the album The History of the JAMs — while a Swedish farmer shot at them.

The only live performance by the JAMs took place on the ferry on the way back to England. They were paid in Toblerones. The second album was called Who Killed the JAMS?, and the JAMs officially ceased to exist at midnight at the very end of ’87.

In ’88, house was king and Bill and Jimmy wanted a number one. To finance it, they advertised five remaining copies of 1987 in The Face for £3,000 each, They found three buyers, The Timelords’ track Doctorin’ the Tardis was designed specifically to be a hit — and it worked, selling more than a million copies worldwide. They wrote a book, The Manual: How to Have a Number One the Easy Way, to tell others how to do it.

Then comes the huge success of The KLF. In ’90 the singles What Time is Love? and 3am Eternal; in ’91 the ambient house LP Chill Out, a 40-minute video Waiting, and the single Last Train to Transcentral, which entered the UK charts at number 3 and stayed at number 2 for three weeks — kept from hitting the magic 1 by a woman called Cher.

Somewhere in there, The Orb released two ambient house tracks, A Huge Ever-Growing Pulsating Brain that Rules from the Centre of the Ultraworld and Little Fluffy Clouds with plenty of input from Jimmy Cauty. Bill and Jimmy are also Disco 2000, responsible for the singles I Gotta CD, One Love Nation and Uptight.

The KLF is also full of references back to previous projects. The chants of “Mu Mu”, the references to the Justified Ancients of MuMu — and the continued use of sheep. One idea for an album cover photo was a line of sheep, each with The KLF painted on the side. But real live sheep don’t line up when you want them to — which is why certain photos of The KLF show them just holding sheep instead. The cover for The White Room still shows Bill and Jimmy holding sheep.

Confused? Worried there’s some sinister cosmic conspiracy? Hey, anything sounds mystical if you’re in the right mood. Meanwhile, The KLF insist they’re not taking the piss.

The KLF have consistently declined interviews. Instead, on the solstice they took journalists from around the world to the Lost Continent of Mu — actually a remote Scottish island — to take part in a pagan ritual which they called the Rites of Mu.

Despite the successes. Bill and Jimmy aren’t rich. The money goes back into more silly projects. And with dozens of projects happening at once, most don’t get finished. Still in the works are the movie of The White Room (£250,000 in the red. but we hear it’ll now be financed by Stephen Spielberg), the singles Love Trance, Turn Up The Strobe and Go To Sleep, a comic book, Bill Drummond’s book Zenarchy: A Case History, and the film of the Rites of Mu.

Now. with record company execs telling them The KLF will never succeed in the US, they’ve released America: What Time is Love? with just one purpose — to get to number one in the US before Christmas. My money says they’ll do it.