Ian peel’s a to z of pop

N IS FOR…

NINETEEN NINETYNINE (BPM)

It’s perhaps only with almost 25 years of hindsight that we can make sense of the strange tectonic plate shifts that took place in pop music at the end of the last century. As we were all busy worrying that planes would fall out of the sky, thanks to the millennium bug, and as every media outlet painstakingly reviewed the previous 100 years of news and culture, trance overlaid itself on the charts and pop went crazy, getting faster and faster and faster.

This phenomenon reached its absolute peak with the Gouryella Remix of Binary Finary’s 1999. Introduced by Gail Porter on Top Of The Pops when they went on an outside broadcast to the Revolution nightclub in Edinburgh, it’s a brutal, relentless and uplifting electronic instrumental that reached the dizzy heights of 140 beats per minute and includes an epic synth breakdown that modern day Depeche Mode would be proud of.

It’s almost unthinkable that a record as fast and frantic could even be a hit these days (Binary Finary made UK No.11 in August of 1999). But the very end of the last century was a strange period. Equally fast and furious were the likes of Delerium’s epic Silence (May 1999, at 138bpm) and Energy 52’s Three N One Mix of Café Del Mar ’98 (No.12 in July 1998 at 133bpm).

For a little context, a classic ballad like Phyllis Nelson’s Move Closer is about 84bpm. A New Pop-era dance track like ABC’s The Look Of Love ups the ante to 121bpm. But by 1999 we had things in the charts like System F’s Out Of The Blue (No.14 in April 1999) at a staggering 140bpm.

But is this very 90s trance-boom classic pop worthy of Classic Pop magazine? Well to reference the three-pronged credo that’s been printed on our front cover for the past 12 years, it’s certainly “electronic” and “eclectic”. As for “Eighties,” you could argue that 80s pop was at the heart of 1999 trance, too. Fragma could not have reached UK No.11 with Toca Me (September 1999, at 135bpm)