Nu Shooz
I first heard ‘I Can’t Wait’ by Nu Shooz in a shop on the high street. I can’t remember which shop, but it can’t have been one of my usual haunts (the second-hand record shop, the comics store, or the model shop with a sideline in role playing games). They didn’t play that kind of chart music.
‘I Can’t Wait’ is an echt piece of mid-‘80s chart music, with that peculiarly crystalline ‘80s production that sounds machine-made. It is full of stuff, and yet full of space. There are all kinds of odd noises: insistently chiming percussion, stabs of tinny synthesised horns, gasping emulator barks like a robot faking an orgasm. Each of these noises was selected with care and skill and placed into an delicate but unbending structure, like lab-grown gems in a surgical steel tiara.
I wasn’t in the habit of listening to this kind of chart pop in 1986. I wasn’t entirely immune to chart music, but I was listening to Q-approved album rock like Paul Simon’s Graceland and crate-digging for second-hand copies of Japan obscurities. ‘I Can’t Wait’ reached number 2 in the UK charts, but I hadn’t heard it until I walked into whichever branch of whatever it was.
That meant that I didn’t know what it was. Which was a problem, because I really wanted to know what it was. I heard the hook, the ‘ah-ah-ah-ah-ah’ of the over-excited android, the big galumphing steps of the bass; but I had no way of knowing to whom they belonged. This was 1986: there was no Shazam, no internet (that I could use). Dial-a-Disc might have worked, but I didn’t even know that this was a chart hit. I knew nothing about it and could find out nothing about it, until I turned on BBC Radio 1 and managed to catch a DJ back-announcing it.
In a world of narrow media channels, that radio DJ’s act of curation was vital. Curation was how you discovered new things, whether they were new to the world and or simply new to you. In the week ‘I Can’t Wait’ reached number 2, John Peel’s show on Radio 1 featured — among many other things unlikely to trouble the official Top 40 — Eric B and Rakim, The Minutemen and some ‘60s ska from Roland Alphonso and the Ska-talites.
But even a daytime DJ off-handedly crashing the outros on the assigned playlist could perform crucial acts of curation, helping to build and refine the tastes of listeners. Even if their curation only confirmed the fact that you couldn’t stand Simply Red, freshly ousted from the Number 2 spot by Nu Shooz.
I Can’t Wait
But by 1986, DJs didn’t just play the hits.
‘I Can’t Wait’ originally appeared on Nu Shooz’s 1985 album Tha’s Right, but that version did not become a hit. The version that did was a remix by the Dutch DJ Peter Slaghuis.
John Smith, the founder and chief songwriter of Nu Shooz, claims Slaghuis didn’t like the song and ‘didn’t fool with it very much’. A lot of what he did do sounds terribly ‘80s now; basically a man playing around with new effects he’s found on his synthesiser. But it was undoubtedly his remix that made the song a hit.
The album version is eminently ignorable funk-pop, an indistinguishable wash of horns, guitars and vocals. It’s actually quite hard to pick the hook out from it. The production in Slaghuis’s ‘80s remix pares the song down to its elements, emphasising every sting and riff; if you’ll excuse the pun, it makes it pop. His experience of what worked on the dance floor no doubt informed his sense of what would work as a chart hit.
This reinvention is integral to the DJ function. Even if a DJ is just playing records at a wedding disco, they are always constructing: building an experience out of individual songs, building a taste out of influences or, as with hip hop DJs, building completely new music using a mixture of old and new parts.
The ‘80s DJ explosion was enabled by new, cheaper technologies. 1986 saw the launch of the Rane MP 24 (a mixer that updated club DJing) and the Casio SK-1, a consumer-level sampling keyboard that could (in theory) make the same robotic moaning noise as Peter Slaghuis’s E-mu emulator.
The collision of the punk DIY ethos, new independent record labels and newly affordable technology meant anyone with a Saturday job could sidestep a considerable part of the traditional music industry. Two people with a keyboard could be a whole band, like those ‘fire and ice’ synth-pop duos of the early ‘80s (or, indeed, like Nu Shooz themselves, who had considerably slimmed down from their original 12-person line-up). One person with two turntables and a stack of old soul records could be a hip hop DJ. Add in a sampler, a drum machine and a four-track recorder, and you too could reinvent dance music. As well as empowering creative people, new technologies were spawning new genres: techno, acid, rave. These genres were underground and, in the late ‘80s, practically outlawed, but they were about to completely revolutionise mainstream pop.
Now, anyone can create a polished production on their phone and broadcast it to the whole world. Amateurism — the act of doing or making something principally for one’s own amusement — has begun to feel like an odd, endangered pursuit; if technology can produce something with the veneer of pinpoint professionalism, it becomes hard to insist on the personal and creative value of making things that are slightly shit, things that no sane person would want to spend money on. (The repeated act of making slightly shit things is, of course, the means by which you gradually become able to make something that is not shit.)
Meanwhile, the ease of making professional-grade outputs apparently demands the simulacrum of a professional-grade distribution network, and so technology busies itself with the generation of artificial DJs. On Spotify I can activate ‘DJ X’, an AI host with a fantastically irritating upbeat American ‘voice’. DJ X can play tracks from my playlist, interspersed with authentically inane chatter. DJ X is awful but, more importantly, it is also useless. It plays songs that Spotify knows I like; it isn’t offering songs that I might like, but don’t yet know. It’s not going to play me anything from Radio Freedom: Voice Of The African National Congress And The People’s Army Umkhonto We Sizwe, as John Peel did in June 1986.
I’m not really a DJ guy, but I think we need DJs more than ever. Now that we have torn down the barriers to making music, we need curation at the other end. We need taste and expertise; people who can hear a muddy jazz-funk album track and realise it can be remixed into a banger. People who will add that banger to a high street shop playlist, where it can catch the ear of an unwary shopper.
And this time, I will have Shazam at the ready.
It might even be someone making a record by sampling the bass line from ‘Cavern’ by Liquid Liquid
I love this song, and it's worth noting that it's one of the only songs on my 80s playlist that gets a resounding "Let's play it again!" from both of my brutally honest, hard-to-please kids.
Thank you for writing about the experience of hearing a song in passing, and having no information except a giant question mark in your mind about it until you manage to hear it again. I was so excited when the era of always-knowing arrived, and I had no idea how much I would miss that sense of mystery.
I had never heard this song before. Great piece! Excellent summary of where we are now. It’s such a long time since I’ve listened to the radio. I feel like the world of music has become so fragmented and vast that even radio stations have become “algorithmic” such that finding something you want to listen to will probably feed you more of the same rather than broadening your horizons. I don’t mean that I won’t hear new things, just that they might already slot neatly into my comfort zone rather than challenging my expectations. A good listening experience should do a bit of both.