Looking Back at the UK Chart's Brief Flirtation with Decent Dance Music

As autumn begins to cradle us ever closer in her perpetually clammy and chilly grip, smoking areas become clogged with the mulch of a thousand dead leaves trodden into tarmac, and the warmth of your ecstasy-jacket has to be supplemented with an actual jacket made of actual clothes, we're reminded of the hundreds of little deaths that UK club culture's endured as it limps lamely down the lane towards the twilight of its life.

Above us clubbers, hovering omnisciently and malevolently, ready to pounce, are the property developers and licensing boards, the local politicians and the high courts, police forces and the force of the mass culture industry. It is the weight of an anodyne and anonymous world that threatens to crush nightlife into total nothingness. All that will remain will be the museum piece memories of something truly beautiful that we, as people, were allowed to once enjoy.

When cosmologist Carl Sagan compiled the Golden Records for the launch of the Voyager Spacecraft in 1977—a collection of music by Bach, Stravinsky, Chuck Berry and Kesarbai Kerkar—he hoped that intelligent life somewhere in the universe might one day discover the spacecraft and the messages the records held, and understand a little about how we live, or lived, our tiny lives here on Earth. The record is a golden bottle floating in an immense ocean, the records will pass the red dwarf star Gliese 445 in forty thousand years time, seventeen light years from our Sun.

So when THUMP editor Josh Baines experienced the first ever zero-gravity DJ set this month, and DJ Mike Cervello dropped Daft Punk's "One More Time" as the soundtrack to this historic moment, I couldn't help but wonder what can this tell us about club culture 30,000 feet below in the towns and cities of the UK?

Daft Punk are renowned for distinctive productions that manage to straddle and often redefine the difficult territory between the underground and mainstream. By the time "One More Time" arrived in November 2000, Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo had adopted their now-infamous robot personas. While their earlier material was raw-edged and hulking, "One More Time" and the rest of its parent album Discovery saw them mine a kitschy retro-futuristic sonic aesthetic that had one foot in the incredibly French electronica of Didier Marouani and Space, and the other in sample-heavy deep house melodicism. It was the sound of a future that never arrived.

With its signature audacious brass-rips tearing through the track weaved from an ingenious sampling of Eddie Johns' 70s funk explosion "More Spell On You," coupled with acid-house séducteur Romanthony's phreaked out vocals, it became the Daft Punk spirit incarnate. A re-discovery of the old, made new. Yet even after going straight to number one in the French and US charts on its release and holding the number two spot in the UK, by the early 2000s "One More Time" was an increasingly rare phenomena—underground-approved dance music sunning itself in the glow of the mainstream.

With "One More Time" sharing chart-space with acts as diverse as Richard Blackwood, Alan Braxe, the Wu-Tang Clan and the Tweenies, it's evident that this was an incredibly confused time for pop music in Britain. The millennium had arrived and we hadn't really caught up with it. The nation was slowly approaching a moment that we can feasibly term "Peak Sanchez." July 2001 was the last time a (vaguely) solid dance track held the UK number one spot, in the guise of New York house doyen Roger Sanchez's monumental, albeit a little drippy, love-heart-shaped-candle of a tune, "Another Chance," a title which today can't help but resound with a sad prophetic irony.

After Sanchez's single week in the sun, he was tethered to a spit and carried off kicking and scream between Hear'say and Robbie Williams like a meat-deodorant salesman who wandered into a cannibal convention—quite simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. In the following years, Death, Famine, War and Conquest —DJ Ötzi, DJ Casper, DJ Pied Piper and Eric Prydz —the Four Horsemen of the mainstream dance music apocalypse, would guard the UK charts like stone gargoyles. They ensured that idea of the DJ in the mainstream would now become some inflated caricature, appearing periodically like children's entertainers or low-league football club mascots, always with one hand cupping an ear.

Now that contemporary chart music resembles a stock exchange of initialisms and virtual download figures moving upwards and downwards in accordance with their respective sponsors and interests, maybe there's something we can learn from the successes of "One More Time.'" After all, it was a time when the likes of Sonique and Rui Da Silva—whose timeless "Touch Me" rang around the most recent Mister Saturday Night in London like a call to arms from God himself—rubbed shoulders with the bonafide popstars of the day. This is now a distant memory, a sign of a culture that's long since drifted into the gunmetal grey of the North Sea. The idea that artists like that were able to race up the charts and into the hearts of the public is now as unimaginable as a Peckham based broken-beat producer jostling with Little Mix and Bruno Mars for the Christmas no.1.

With the steady removal of the club context from our towns and cities, DJs, artists, promoters and partiers are exercising their ingenuity with smaller events and more private parties. Radical club culture is shape-shifting, far away from the mass public. Yet while every club track cannot—and should not—be a chunky crowd pleaser like "One More Time," there's just something inherently fascinating about the potential in the boundary-crossing spirit of the record, of the filter-house French underground rising primed and activated out of the earth into pop music like some past alien civilisation's buried iron giant.

Dance music has the power to puncture and redirect popular culture, and when Mike Cervello dropped "One More Time" at zero-gravity, or Carl Sagan selected the Golden Records, or in 1987 when the cosmonauts on the Russian spacestation Mir gave Didier Marouani's album the honour of being the first CD to be played in space, they all testified to this power. Holding public office for as long as Marouani's been holding keytars, Jeremy Corbyn has awakened this spirit in the British electorate. But unlike Daft Punk, the political left is struggling to find the populist votes enjoyed by their opponents; likewise UK clubs struggle to survive amongst the slanderous populist narratives deployed by property developers, local authorities and the police. More than ever for the artists, promoters and patrons of dance and club culture and their allies on the left, tracks like "One More Time" offer us the mysterious power of unity in the dance, and the hope for a future reconciliation between progressive club culture and the deserving mass public.

Tom Glencross is still not on Twitter