Back in the early 1990s house music was having perhaps its most fertile and
creative
period. The original house from Chicago had blown up back in the ‘80s and left
nothing
short of a cultural revolution in its wake, with regional variants springing up
all over the US,
the UK and Europe.
London in particular was a global hub for house music, with a whole slew of
clubs and a
long established underground scene that had taken house to its heart. A key
mover-and-
shaker was a young Jeremy Newall, who worked successively at a whole bunch of
record
stores including Catch-A-Groove, where the likes of Tony Humphries would come
and
hang out when in town (Humphries used to record his shows at a flat above the
shop with a wide-eyed Jeremy soaking in the vibes), and latterly Release The
Groove, where he could
be found well into the twenty-first century. A close association with Paul
‘Trouble’ Anderson saw him repping for the big fella when Trouble was unable
to do his Kiss FM
radio show, and as the resident alongside him at Trouble’s much loved Loft
Sessions in
Camden. He also played on many pirates, at all the best parties in London,
Europe and
beyond. Jeremy’s position as the go-to guy behind the capital’s hippest
record store
counters saw many visiting US jocks passing him records that barely saw the
light of day in
a scene where superb new tunes were coming thick and fast. Therein lie the roots
of this
compilation … a collection of overlooked, unreleased, and just hard-to-find
gems to put
alongside some of the better-known and overplayed classics of the era.