THE 90s DANCE DUO WHOSE CLUB ANTHEM BECAME A POP HIT THAT SUMMED UP AN ENTIRE DECADE
BETH SIMPSON
Peter Cunnah was the cute tartan-suited frontman, Al Mackenzie the DJ; club buddies who became pop stars and yes they wrote that epoch-defining hit. But there is a lot more than just Things Can Only Get Better in D:Ream’s story – we’re talking a brilliant platinum-selling debut LP, drug epiphanies, cocaine addiction, a falling out over whether or not to support Take That and eventually reconciliation...
How did the pair of you first meet?AL: I used to run a night at the Brain Club in Soho. We met via my ex-wife. Pete used to go down there and one night she said to him, ‘Look, Al’s doing music, you’re struggling with something, why don’t you have a chat with him?’ I hadn’t been in a studio before where it was in a bedroom. Was there a bed in there?
PETER: No, I kind of sacrificed the bed so that I could sleep on the floor and have all my synths around the wall.
Peter, back then the story was that you’d had this epiphany in a club...
I did. I was being led astray, quite willingly by various people. I was with this girl at the time. One night she said, ‘My friend is running this club in the Elephant’. I heard all this music and she gave me half a pill and I just went off my head. I had this moment where I felt so connected to the universe and the music – and ‘cause I’m a synesthesiac I could see the colour of the sounds. I was blown away by the whole thing. That was my road to Damascas moment.
To what extent were early D:Ream tracks inspired by that experience? U R The Best Thing sounds like a hymn to ecstasy.
PETER: Quite possibly it was. It could be about a drug. It could be about a person. It doesn’t matter. It just has that feeling, that euphoria you get when you’ve been searching for something and then all of a sudden you find it. Things Can Only Get Better is: ‘I’ve found the scene, I’ve found the people, I’ve found Alan’. That line: “You sort the wood from the trees/ You bring in the light”, that’s specifically about Alan bringing his vibe to the table. It’s about that epiphany moment.
Al, is it true you left because you didn’t want to tour with Take That?
I just got sick of the whole machine. I liked making the music but we weren’t making any. Once you get into the whole promo round you’re not doing anything and for me that wasn’t any fun.
Things Can Only Get Better was reissued and reached No.1 in 1994. Why do you think the country was ripe for
