How we made Beat Dis by Bomb the Bass

Tim Simenon, producer

I was working as a waiter in a Japanese restaurant and studying audio engineering at Royal Holloway University of London in the afternoons. I got into splicing tape and became fascinated by chopping things up and putting samples into a different order. I was 18 years old and completely naive. Royalties didn’t cross my mind. Sugar Hill Records – where we got the “everybody in the street” line – they were very pissed off and we ended up paying them a lot to use the sample as it was the song’s hook. If you were to make Beat Dis now, you would need a good legal team to track down the rights holders of all the 1960s and 70s records we sampled.

When the track was finished I needed a name for the project. The concept was about bombarding the bass line with different samples, so it made sense to call it Bomb the Bass. Bombing was a graffiti term: bombing a wall or a train.

I grabbed a smiley face image from Alan Moore’s Watchmen for the sleeve and it transformed into this symbol for acid house which threw me off as it was never my intention. I would always struggle when people said: “You’re acid house.” Bomb the Bass was a lot of different things thrown together at once – there didn’t seem to be a name for that.

I was DJing every weekend at the Wag Club on Wardour Street in Soho. This helped me blag Top of the Pops, as all of a sudden we had to put on this charade that we were a band. The guys who were dancing were mates from the Wag and the girl “singing” is Adele Nozedar, who did our label Rhythm King’s press. She had been in the band Indians in Moscow.

The reaction we got from clubs was amazing, but it’s bizarre that it nearly got to No 1. It dropped at the right time – people were interested in funky tunes and house music. Beat Dis had elements of both genres and it sounded so different.

Our gigs were a complete disaster because the technology at the time didn’t allow for much more than playback and I was never satisfied with the end result. My next production project was Buffalo Stance with Neneh Cherry and I understood that this was what I wanted to do: stay in studios and work with people I wanted to work with. Fame wasn’t for me.

Pascal Gabriel, producer

Rhythm King wanted a medley of their releases on a 12-inch and got me to work with a hip-hop DJ called Tim, who knew their catalogue well. Tim and I realised quickly that there wasn’t enough material, so instead he said he’d bring some records over for us to go through. Hip-hop DJs would have a lot of weird records – spoken word, stuff like that. I would hear a sample I wanted and say: “That bit! That kettle.” The project was called Rhythm King All Stars until Tim came up with the name Bomb the Bass.

The first cheap sampler had come out a month before, which was revolutionary because you could completely rearrange a record at whim. Multi-tracks had been a real pain in the arse and took forever but this way was really quick.

The label pretended that Beat Dis was a US import to get the London club DJs – who were a bit of a hip mafia – to play it. Tim was DJ Kid 33 and I was called Emilio Pasquez. It became very big in the clubs, and had word of mouth, but radio didn’t play it at all. It came out the same week as Kylie Minogue’s I Should Be So Lucky, and if the shops hadn’t sold out of Beat Dis, we would’ve probably taken No 1. It made it into the Guinness Book of Records as the highest new entry by a new act.

The week of its release, we went to the Virgin Megastore in Oxford street and Tim was mobbed by people who recognised him from the video. I said: “Bye. See you later!” I was 26, but he was just a kid and shy, and he was like: “Oh god! I don’t know what to do.”

Doing this now, with the amount of samples we used, would be a logistical and legal nightmare. The label had to settle so many times that there was very little money left. We earned a fraction of what you would off a normal hit.