1994 Tony Di Bart: The Real Thing

While I can own up to have done a fair bit of clubbing during the early to mid nineties, I was never what you might call a 'professional clubber'. My choice of venue was always dictated by whoever was running the best deal on vodka, and the sort of club that would let me through the door weren't the kind of places to employ DJs who'd get in a lather over the latest 12 inch, white label remix. So seeing as this is a 1994 remix (of Di Bart's 1993 original) that generated exactly that kind of excitement amongst the hardcore, I feel self consciously unqualified to be commenting on it.

Despite the name and track's Italian house-lite feel, Di Bart was an English DJ who created his music Joe Meek style in a recording studio above the bathroom shop business that formed his day job. In its first incarnation, 'The Real Thing' had the straighter structure of basic pop; the remix added a set of dance remoulds in the form of an almost ambient groove that coaxed you onto the dancefloor instead of bludgeoning you there. But in so doing, 'The Real Thing' becomes too polite for its own purpose, too wordy for its own chilled moodiness and too inconsequential to be memorable; like the ripples from a small pebble tossed into a deep pond, 'The Real Thing' asks for nothing, gives nothing and drifts past me leaving no discernable impression save a shoulder shrugging indifference and a vague feeling of guilt that I don't have anything else to say about it. Except to comment that 1994 is not shaping up to be a vintage year.