Blue Boy – “Remember Me” 1997
by Richard Cracknell
It must be a curious life to be a DJ seeking fame and fortune in the music industry. On the one hand, you make your living taking mixing samples and scraps of other people’s work, creating seemingly endless soundscapes to guide and influence the rhythm of hundreds (or tens if you’re not that great ) of gyrating people on the dance floor, whilst on the other hand you know that in order to make it into the big time that is the Holy Grail of radio air play, someone else is going to come and take your masterpiece, pull it apart, jiggle it about a bit, then put it back together again as a more compact and sellable product. It happened to Beethoven, it will happen to you:
I preferred “The 5th Symphony”, but you’re right, “DUN DUN DUN DUNNN” does have a better ring to it
One such hopeful “rhythm bringer” was the DJ Alexis “Lex” Blackmore. Plying his trade and earning valuable Scottish pound notes as a DJ in Glasgow, he made the move over the border and down into London in ’92, learning all he could about the business by touring with British Techno outfit The Shamen.
“The Shamen” – Techno role-models, if ever I saw one
After three years of having the life sucked out of him by listening to an endless rendition of Ebaneezer Goode, Blackmore decided the best thing to do would be to follow the advice of any child leaving their embarrassing parents – accept they’re holding you back, stand on your own two feet, then change your name.
Thus, in ’95, the guise we now know as Blue Boy was born and his first creation “Ascension” was released as a single. Feeling the need to make up for lost time; this was shortly followed by the four track EP “Scattered Emotions”. Although both these releases achieved little success, Blue Boy continued with his work and was thankfully rewarded with his biggest hit, and the topic of this article, “Remember Me”.
Originally seeing the light of day in ‘96 as a seven minute turn on Mark Farina’s compilation album “Mushroom Jazz”, Blue Boy’s creation hits you straight out of the traps with a repetitive, addictive bass line accompanied by a reverbed, snare filled drum loop, which rarely deviates from the safe 4/4. The variation in the song is left to the focus point, a vocal sample taken from Marlena Shaw’s rendition of “Woman of the Ghetto” from her 1973 “Live at Montreux” album, which winds around and embeds itself in the central drum and bass core of the song. We are treated to a powerful female vocal, which seems to be imploring the listener of the song with all her energy, not to help, but to heed her words. Upon first listen, I, as am sure many others, would have believed that this dignified woman is a lover scorned, imploring to the father of their children to come back to her. The truth, however, runs far deeper, as can be seen by a verse from the original song below:
“How do you raise your kids in a ghetto?
How do you raise your kids in a ghetto?
Do you feed one child and starve another?
Won’t you tell me, legislator?
Enthralled through
I know that my eyes ain’t blue
But you see I’m a woman
Of the ghetto”
Based on a polemic poem delivered by a woman from the black American ghetto, the theme of the song surrounds the treatment of black maids raising the children of rich, white, families for very little pay. With references to prostitution, drugs and starvation, the song is quite simply a demand for fairer treatment towards the people who cared and raised their children.
Marlena Shaw – The “Real” Slim Shady
A whole 2 years before Moby had started to pillage “The Sounds of the South”, Blue Boy had used Marlena Shaw’s haunting demand as an undeniable hook of the song. It is also worth noting that this was neither the first nor last time Shaw’s music would be utilised by the techno / hip-hop genre, as her voice can be found in the works of Ghostface Killah, DJ Shadow and Lodus Dei, a particular favoured piece being the highly recommended “California Soul”.
The potential of the song was noticed by Jive Records, who picked up Blackmore’s creation and passed it on to several production companies to “remix” into a commercially viable 3 minutes 50 seconds (see the first paragraph of this article). By February 1997 the song had entered the social conscious of any radio listener, peaking at #8 in the UK pop charts and #2 in the USA dance chart.
Sadly, the fame of the song appears to have outlived the artist themselves. Although Blue Boy used the success to get his next single “Sandman” to #25 in August ’97, his work now seems to reside mainly on compilation albums or as endless remixes. Even trying to find a credible picture of the man himself proved to be too much a task.
The single’s royalties had been used to gain the lifestyle he so craved
Nevertheless, Blackmore’s creation can still be counted as one of the 90’s memorable hits, even at a time when Britpop reigned supreme. Whilst thoughts of that decade are often symbolised with the whine of a Gallagher or “moon” of a Cocker, the song still seems to live on deep within the recesses of our subconscious and is not surprisingly, still being carried on by other artists. Helping to line Blue Boy’s royalty pockets, Australian rock band “Tame Impala” recorded a cover as a b-side to their “Sundown Syndrome” single, which was voted #78 in the Triple J Hottest 100 2009, whilst Walk Off The Earth’s Gianni Luminati, when not sharing a guitar in a bid for stardom, has been viewed over 1 million times performing his own interpretation of the song. Thus suggesting, if anything can improve a song, it’s a hammock.
Remembrance Sunday 