Name: Game Changers: Bodyrox 'Yeah Yeah (D Ramirez Remix)'
Uploaded: 2018-04-25T15:51:27+02:00
Duration: 9 min 39 s

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After his '90s house project Lisa Marie Experience came to an end, UK DJ/producer Dean Marriott adopted a new moniker for his solo material — the Latin-sounding D.Ramirez. He soon did a track with Deepgroove, and released on labels like Choo Choo, Vudu, Junior Boys Own, Underwater, Thrust and Lot49, setting up his own Slave Recordings imprint in the process too. He was also working with Toolroom, and one day they offered him a remix of an unknown band called Bodyrox. “I signed the contract without looking at it, they offered to pay me X amount of pounds,” he says. “I started doing the remix, it came out quite well, but I didn’t really think anything of it at the time.”

The original was a sort of electro funky house piece, put together by Jon Pearn from Full Intention and partner Nick Bridges. “There was a Normski rap on there, a full vocal… quite a lot of parts,” says Dean, “so for me it was quite interesting cos there was something I knew I could use.”

DJ Mag is sat in Dean's east London studio, shooting a Game Changers film simultaneously, and Dean points to a red Clavia Nord Lead 2X keyboard at the centre of his set-up. “A friend of mine, I won’t mention any names, had royally done some bad things and had to sell all his gear, so I acquired this keyboard not thinking much of it,” he tells. “The remix came along, and I was thinking ‘OK, let’s see what this keyboard can do’. I started messing around with it, and I accidentally happened to de-tune one of the oscillators.”

He starts showing the DJ Mag crew the sounds made by turning the oscillator up and down. “I was like, ‘OK, this sounds interesting, it was almost like playing [notes] a third up,” he says. “The portmanteau [blending] sound was on over here, you can hear that glide between the notes, so it was a combination of this new keyboard, messing around, detuning the oscillators with the portmanteau that was on by accident. I thought, ‘This is a really cool sound’.”

He starts tapping out his Bodyrox riff on the synth, clanging compressed velveteen keys boinging about in an off-kilter fashion. “I’ve always been into weird wonky riffs, it took me a little while to get it,” Ramirez says. “At the time I just thought, ‘That’s really wonky and really weird, no-one’s gonna like that’. Little did I know...”

Dean remembers being at home and someone calling him from Ibiza saying, “‘We’re hearing this record in Burger King in Ibiza’, and I couldn’t believe that people were getting into this track with its wonky sound. I was doing music, carrying on doing my thing, but I’d hear people say ‘I heard the Bodyrox track in DC10’. Then somebody would call me and say, ‘We’re at Notting Hill Carnival and Norman Jay is playing it’. So it was ranging from the cooler DJs at DC10 all the way up to Norman Jay at Carnival — the range of it was crazy. Loads of people started saying ‘I heard so-and-so playing it, this person’, and I guess at that point I realised it was gonna be a big thing.”