The long, hot summer of 1989 belonged to Soul II Soul. The UK collective’s colossal hit “Back To Life (However Do You Want Me)” reached No 1 in the UK and No 4 on the US Billboard Hot 100, selling a million copies in the US alone. But chart positions and sales figures can’t give a true impression of how ubiquitous “Back To Life” was. It was the moment when the sound of London’s underground club scene went mainstream – when a group who came of age around the capital’s sound system culture, blues parties and illegal warehouse raves were suddenly ruling the radio airwaves, blasting out of car stereos and boomboxes all over the world.
“Back To Life” took influences from soul, reggae, dub, house, new jack swing and hip-hop, blended them and put a distinctively London and defiantly DIY twist on it. The track became a touchstone for club culture and, unsurprisingly, remixers all over the world were eager to put their stamp on it. In 1993, a white label 12” appeared featuring an epic, jazz-tinged, seven-and-a-half-minute house remix of the track from legendary New York production duo Masters At Work, aka ‘Little’ Louie Vega and Kenny ‘Dope’ Gonzalez. MAW’s euphoric remix gave the club classic a new lease of life and showed how the track resonated with cultures a long way from its London roots.
Soul II Soul recognised the power of the remix and included it on their 1993 hits and remixes compilation Volume IV – The Classic Singles 88-93. More recently, the MAW remix was selected to open RE:VERSAL 001, the first in a series of 12”s curating and reissuing classic, rare and collectable dance music from the late 80s to now.
This ageless dancefloor filler was originally an a cappella track by vocalist Caron Wheeler tucked away towards the end of Soul II Soul’s debut album Club Classics Vol I. Wheeler had first come into the orbit of Soul II Soul when founder member Jazzie B heard a tape of her singing and invited her to sing backing vocals on their 1988 single “Feel Free.” The song was an underground club hit, and, impressed by Wheeler’s audition on backing vocals, Jazzie B asked her to sing lead on a new track, “Keep On Movin’”. Wheeler seized her moment, though she didn’t realise that initially, as she told NME’s Sean O’Hagan in September 1989, “I wasn’t satisfied with it. I’d had to wait 12 hours to lay it down, and I was only on the second take when Jazzie went ‘That’s it.’ I begged him to let me do another cut, but he maintained he’d heard something in the grooves that he’d connected with.”
Jazzie’s instincts proved correct and “Keep On Movin’” became Soul II Soul’s breakthrough hit, reaching No 5 in the UK and No 11 on the US Billboard Hot 100. It also led to Wheeler becoming a full member of the collective and paved the way for her soul-searching, stripped-back meditation, “Back To Life” on Club Classics Vol One. But the song might’ve remained as a moment of reflective respite on the album, were it not for the input of a sound engineer. “The arrangement for ‘Back To Life’ came after Arabella Rodriquez, the sound engineer, and I were playing back the tapes,” Wheeler told The Guardian in 2012. “She thought if we brought the funky beats in before the bridge, almost at the start when it’s just me singing, it would sound better. Jazzie and our producer Nellie [sic] Hooper walked into the room at that exact moment and said: ‘Right, let’s do it.’”
“Back To Life” represented a new dawn in Black British music and proof that dance music could have sophistication and poignancy. And it could all be traced back to his formative years working on sound systems. “When you nurture a sound,” Jazzie told The Observer in October 1989, “And build the system yourself, like Soul II Soul, you know your speakers very well. But then you need to know your studio monitors, your mixing and cutting and every separate stage of record production. And, more important than all of this, is giving it that emotion.”
Years later, he looked back with pride and some modesty at the song. “Everything about this single was magic,” Jazzie told The Guardian in 2012, “We weren’t trying to follow any trend or fit into any category – we were just doing our own thing.”
