BiG beAT
THE HEAVY-HITTING DANCE MUSIC THAT WAS THE UBIQUITOUS SOUNDTRACK TO HALF OF THE 90s
STEVE O'BRIEN
What is it?
It’s a sobering thought that the sounds of Big Beat are now nearly as bygone as Merseybeat was when Fatboy Slim, Propellerheads and Groove Armada burst onto the dance scene in the midto late 90s. If Britpop was guitar music’s contribution to Cool Britannia, Big Beat was its blissed out, drugged up (and it definitely was up) sibling. Yet in the last years of the century, there was more crossover between the Britpop and dance crowds than there had ever been between rave and indie, that musical gap being bridged by collaborations such as Noel Gallagher, Paul Weller, Tim Burgess and James Dean Bradfield with The Chemical Brothers, Richard Ashcroft and Thom Yorke with U.N.K.L.E., Liam Gallagher with Death In Vegas.
If there’s a genre that managed to bottle the heady optimism of the era, then it’s more the party-ready sounds of
Battleflag, The Rockafeller Skank
or
Bentleys Gonna Sort You Out!
than
Country House
,
Common People
or
Sonnet
. Hell, Big Beat was so ubiquitous at the fag end of the 90s and the infant days of the Noughties that Channel Four used it as the theme for their new reality show
Big Brother
(courtesy of Elementfour, aka Paul Oakenfold and Andy Gray), while many of its signature
bangers were cribbed for the
blockbuster movies of their day (
Ya Mama
turns up in
Charlie’s Angels
,
Busy Child
’s in
Gone In 60 Seconds
and
Spybreak!
soundtracks one of
The Matrix
’s money shot moments).