Easy Piano 1998 Hot Pop Singles Dan Coates

This week, Billboard is celebrating the music of 20 years ago with a week of content about the most interesting artists, albums, songs, and stories from 1998. Here, Billboard looks at the curious case of two very different '98 U.K. hits that used the same obscure disco sample — house DJ David Morales' "Needin' U" and indie-pop outfit Spearmint's "A Trip Into Space" — and what connection, if any, can be drawn between them.

In many ways, 1998 was a year of doubling up. In film, there were two movies about Earth being threatened by a giant asteroid, two movies featuring the inner worlds of anthropomorphic, computer-animated insects, even two movies throwing back the end of the disco era. Music was no different: Not only did two different Hot 100 top 10 hits ride the same sample of a Steely Dan album track, they both involved Lord Tariq & Peter Gunz.

But one of the most interesting such examples of a 1998 two-fer came from two fairly different corners of the musical universe: David Morales, a Brooklyn-born DJ who'd found success in U.S. clubs and the U.K. mainstream as a house producer (as well as a go-to remixer for megastars like Mariah Carey and Janet Jackson), and Spearmint, a critically acclaimed but relatively underground British indie-pop band. Both scored their biggest U.K. hits in '98, with "Needin' U" and "A Trip Into Space," respectively, and both hits derived from the same relatively obscure sample: Rare Pleasure's "Let Me Down Easy," a 1976 disco-soul single on Cheri Records that never reached theBillboard charts.

As a song, "Let Me Down Easy" is a relatively straightforward lush '70s disco-soul production, with horns, scratching guitar, galloping percussion and a lovelorn diva vocal. But the song is best-remembered for its intro loop, which reappears throughout the song: a racing piano riff laid over a blanket of bass and two-stepping drums, whose combination produces what is simply one of the most rapturous grooves in the history of dance music.

"I used to play 'Let Me Down Easy,' it was one of my favorite records from back in the day," the now-55-year-old Morales tellsBillboard over the phone from Italy. "I was into those classics. It was Rare Pleasure, and the other sample [used in 'Needin' U'] which was 'My First Mistake,' by the Chi-Lites. Those were two of my favorite records from that era."

When Morales would spin in the years before "Needin' U," he would often drop a mix of the "Let Me Down Easy" loop into his sets. "I was really just making a tool for myself to play," he explains. "So I took the piano, and I recorded different samples, the piano break, and I took some drums, and I took some other things…" The "tool" he created was effective, but he never intended for it to be anything more than that. "I never even meant to release that record, at all," he insists. "It was just something for me to play. And it was just something that worked."

However, the response from listeners that the mix elicited was greater than the DJ expected. "People would ask me, 'Yo, where's this track, where's this track?' 'Oh, it's just something that I put together.' And they used to be like, 'Oh man, when is it coming out?' I'm like, 'I'm never putting this out.'" He was incredulous that his rudimentary track really could cause the excitement of his bigger-budget productions. "I mean, I've worked with Mariah Carey, Donna Summer…" he rhapsodizes. "These are the kind of quality records that I make, and I spend money. ['Needin' U'] is a record that I slapped together in three hours!"

But public demand for the record was too great, and eventually Morales gave in to common sense. Upon release, "Needin' U" took off almost instantly, and with the assistance of an Ibiza-filmed video that captured the decadence of the dance scene on the popular vacation island, it became both a club anthem and a top 10 hit in the U.K. "It's just a fluke!" he remarks today of the song's unexpected success. "When I made it, I knew that it would work in a club. That much I knew. That was the whole purpose of the record! Did I ever think that it would've had the effect that it had on the world? Never in a million years."

While Morales' hit would make it all the way to No. 8 on the Official Charts Company's ranking — and then again to No. 11 in 2001, with a vocal edit entitled "Needin' U II" — Spearmint's success was significantly more muted, reaching a peak of No. 84 in the U.K., a couple months before the debut of Morales' single. Its roots were also humbler: While Morales discovered the power of "Let Me Down Easy" in the clubs (and eventually through his own DJ sets), Spearmint located it digging through old vinyl compilations.

"There were these great collections of Northern Soul which came out on vinyl on Kent in the '80s… I think the Rare Pleasure track was on The Funk 'N' Soul Revolution," recalls Spearmint frontman Shirley Lee over email. "It's a stand-out track, and at the time we were thinking about how the sampling, which was really being exploited so brilliantly in hip-hop and dance records, could be used in an indie setting… So we got a few great samples off those Kent albums, and the Rare Pleasure riff seemed an obvious winner."

Unlike Morales' hit, which relied on a fairly straightforward rendering of its core sample, Spearmint twisted the Rare Pleasure groove at the beginning of the track, slowing it down to a narcotic crawl before speeding it up to normal time a little under a minute in. "At the time I was also a bit obsessed with how the old Ella Fitzgerald and Sinatra tunes in the '40s and '50s would have slow introductions that bore no resemblance to the rest of the song, almost like they were disguising the song that was coming, so that it was a pleasant surprise to the audience once it started properly," Lee explains. "I was experimenting with this idea on our songs. I still like that approach, in fact."

Spearmint's single also differed from Morales' in another significant way: While the only vocals in "Needin' U" were a vocal snatched from the Chi-Lites that intoned the title, "A Trip Into Space" had an anguished (if ambiguous) lyric about wasted potential and lost promise, with a repeating refrain of "How on earth are we supposed to help him?" It was inspired by sad stories about a member of my family," Lee says. "I didn't want to be too explicit so I disguised it a lot, with gender switches and deliberate obscurity. I've never told anyone what it's about. My Mum figured it our early on and was angry, so I made it even more obscure!

"Another thing that interests me about some old songs, like the Everlys or Buddy Holly or a lot of Country tunes, is how they will have very dark, tragic lyrics but match them to uplifting music," he continues. "It makes sense really, turning something dreadful into something wonderful. That is very much a Spearmint trait: a deep or dark lyric sugar-coated by the music."

Indeed, despite the widely differing moods of the two songs — the dancefloor euophoria of "Needin' U," or the near-tragic melancholy of "A Trip Into Space" — the Rare Pleasure sample slides beautifully into both, its adaptability part of its singular magic. "Nobody can replay that sample and make it sound that way," Morales explains of the song's unique power. "Because don't think that when it came to redoing that song [I didn't just] have someone try to replay it. But because the actual [groove] in the song is the piano and the bass together… if I was to have someone replay the bass, and have someone replay the piano, it still wouldn't have that feel, that swing, that the original has."

So was it just a coincidence that two songs that were hits in the same year ended up sampling the same little-known '70s song? Morales says he was unaware of the Spearmint song at the time of its release and doesn't recognize the artist name or song title today, but Lee says the DJ might've encountered an early version of it, relating a story from Spearmint bassist Andy Lewis dating to the mid-90s, when the group would play an early version of "Trip" called "Get the Roof Back On," before Lee changed the lyrics (and ultimately the title) at his mother's assistance.

"We used to play on Saturdays at a club night at the Wag Club in Soho, where Andy Lewis would DJ. Andy would record the shows on DAT and started playing odd tracks including this one as part of his DJ set, as they weren't available on record yet," the frontman recalls. "According to Andy, David Morales was at one of those club nights and asked him about the track." (Lewis did not respond to aBillboard request for comment about his story, and Morales' emailed response to word of Lee's story was simple and decisive: "BULLSHIT!" Even Lee acknowledges some ambiguity in the situation, adding, "But I don't know about that, I bet David has a different story!")

Regardless of whether there was any connection between the inspiration for the two songs, Lee says he wasn't annoyed by Morales' song becoming such a big hit. "It didn't bother us that he had a similar tune out – it was almost like a remix of our song," he relates. "His track and ours were on the radio a lot (at least in London)… it all made it very 1998."

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Source: https://www.billboard.com/music/music-news/david-morales-spearmint-rare-pleasure-piano-sample-1998-8458936/

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