1999 ATB: 9pm (Till I Come)

A common theme amongst music journos in the nineties was to question whether electronic dance music had finally killed off guitar based rock for good. It's not a theory that's ever troubled me because, frankly, I think it's a load of nonsense, but it makes me smile to wonder what those self same doubters would have made of trance anthem '9pm (Till I Come)' and the plucked steel guitar motif that skips all over it. Basically the work of German producer André Tanneberger (but with a complete absence of Eurocheese), the delight of '9pm (Till I Come)' stems from its knowing when to get busy and when to shut up. The main body of the track is an unremarkable dance pump, but by swinging across it that guitar riff bites chunks out of its hardcore piston thrust to leave acres of space that are filled in with a spiky anticipation and sexually charged female vocal come-ons to create a dance track that manages to be both frantic and calm. Simple yet effective, for me it's the trippy yet hardcore essence of the 'trance' branch of dance (sorry!) and, along with Robert Miles' 'One And One', sums up for me all that was good about the whole of the nineties dance scene in four minutes and makes me yearn for memories of nights at all the Ibiza clubs I never went to when I was young enough not to stand out like a glob of blood in a bottle of milk.