The Remixes That Beat the Original

In 1992 a Swedish producer called Sten Hallstrom asked a London record label whether they had anything old lying around that nobody wanted. Champion handed him a two-year-old flop by a singer from New York. He tried a bassline; the label turned it down. Then he reached for a preset on his Korg M1 — the organ patch, the one every studio in Europe already owned — and played six stabbed chords over the top.

That is how "Show Me Love" by Robin S. got the sound it is famous for. The single released in October 1990 is not the record anyone hums. The one people mean came two years later, made by a man who had nothing to do with writing it.

Dance music is the only major genre where this happens routinely: the remix does not accompany the record, it replaces it. The original becomes a footnote, a curiosity you look up once and never play again. Here are nine cases where that happened, and what each one actually changed.

Robin S. — Show Me Love: the preset that rewrote a flop

Written by Allen George and Fred McFarlane and released on Champion in October 1990, "Show Me Love" went nowhere. Hallstrom, who records as StoneBridge, had his first attempts rejected before the M1 organ went in. That sound — a factory preset, unedited, on a synth that had been on the market since 1988 — carried the record into the top ten in seven countries after the remix was issued in 1992.

It also spawned an entire decade of imitators. If you have wondered why so much early-nineties house shares one organ tone, this is why: the machine was everywhere, and one remixer showed everyone what it was for. The machines that built dance music rarely got famous for the sounds their designers were proudest of.

Nightcrawlers — Push the Feeling On: a new way to cut a vocal

The Glasgow act Nightcrawlers released "Push the Feeling On" in 1992 as a smooth, jazz-tinged song. It was a minor hit and would have stayed one. Then Marc Kinchen — MK, from Detroit — took the vocal apart and put it back together wrong on purpose: syllables stuttered, phrases cut off mid-word, the singer turned into a percussion instrument.

His dub reached No. 22 in the UK in October 1994, and a further edit went to No. 3 in the UK in 1995 and into the top ten across several European countries. More importantly, it defined a technique. Thirty years on, the chopped, half-swallowed vocal is standard vocabulary in house music, and producers still describe the effect by his initials.

Everything But The Girl — Missing: a slow climb to No. 2

Tracey Thorn and Ben Watt were an English indie duo, and "Missing" sat on their largely acoustic 1994 album Amplified Heart as a quiet song about walking past an ex-partner's house. Todd Terry, a New York house producer, put it over a four-to-the-floor kick.

Re-released in 1995, it became the duo's first entry on the Billboard Hot 100 and climbed for months before peaking at No. 2 in 1996, in its twenty-eighth chart week. It went to No. 1 in Canada, Germany and Italy. What makes this case unusual is what the band did next: rather than treat the remix as an accident, they followed it with Walking Wounded in 1996, an album built on drum and bass and electronic production. The remixer did not just change a record. He changed a band.

Armand Van Helden's twelve months

Two entries here belong to the same man, released within a year of each other. In 1996 Van Helden remixed "Spin Spin Sugar" by Sneaker Pimps as Armand's Dark Garage Mix — a trip-hop song rebuilt with a rolling sub-bass and jungle-derived weight. It is routinely credited with pushing speed garage into the British mainstream, and it pulled drum and bass listeners into a scene they had ignored. Anyone tracing the roots of UK garage runs into this record within about five minutes.

Then, at the end of December 1996, came his remix of Tori Amos's "Professional Widow". It topped the UK singles chart in January 1997 and remains her only No. 1 there — a piano-led alternative rock artist taken to the top of the charts by a house producer out of the New York club scene, using barely more of the original than one repeated line.

Cornershop — Brimful of Asha: from 60 to 1

Cornershop's 1997 single, a warm tribute to the Bollywood playback singer Asha Bhosle, peaked at No. 60 in the UK. Norman Cook — Fatboy Slim — sped it up, tightened the drums and turned a shuffling indie song into something that worked at 1am. Re-released in 1998, it went to No. 1.

Fifty-nine places is roughly the distance between a band being dropped and a band having a career. That is worth remembering whenever someone dismisses remixing as decoration.

2013: the year the remix became the release

Two records from the same twelve months show how the economics shifted. Storm Queen's "Look Right Through" came out in October 2010 and stayed an underground record until MK — again — delivered his Dub III. Reissued in Britain, it went to No. 1 on the UK singles chart in November 2013, three years after the original release. The chart entry credits the original artist; the reason it charted was the remix.

In December of the same year a 22-year-old Norwegian uploaded a remix of Ed Sheeran's "I See Fire" to SoundCloud. Kygo had only started posting music that April. The remix earned tens of millions of plays, was never a single he owned, and functioned as a business card — within two years he was one of the most-streamed producers on earth and the sound he used had a name, tropical house. The remix as free calling card is now a standard route in, and this is the record that proved it worked.

The Age of Love: a record reborn three times

"The Age of Love" appeared in 1990 on the Belgian label DiKi Records. Almost nobody means that version. Trance audiences mean Jam & Spoon's 1992 Watch Out for Stella mix; a later generation means Paul van Dyk's 1997 reworking. In August 2021, Charlotte de Witte and Enrico Sangiuliano released a version built for modern techno systems, and it went to No. 1 on Beatport — a thirty-year-old melody at the top of a chart aimed squarely at DJs. It is a useful reminder of what the Beatport charts actually measure: what DJs are buying now, not what was written when.

Four versions, thirty years, and no consensus on which is the real one. That is the healthiest possible outcome for a piece of music.

What the remixers actually did

Read these nine together and a pattern appears. None of the remixers improved the original in the sense a producer improves a mix. They changed what the record was for. A song about missing someone became a record for 3am. A folk-tinged ballad about a dragon became a sunset record. An indie single about a singer's voice on the radio became a floor-filler.

That is the craft, and it is why the good remixers were rarely the ones who added the most. Van Helden kept one line of Tori Amos. StoneBridge kept the vocal and changed one instrument. MK kept the vocal and destroyed its grammar. Each of them found the part of the record that worked somewhere the writer had never imagined it being played.

The version everyone knows is usually not the version that was made. It is the version that found the right room.