Tim Liken, producer
I was 19 when we made Ripgroove. It was 1997 and we had all this equipment we didn’t know how to use. We literally had the manuals in our hands, saying: “How do we do this?” It was such a steep learning curve, but that kind of naivety is important: making mistakes, fumbling around and doing things we just wouldn’t do now.
We spent four hours making the record. It all happened very quickly. Some people think the bassline is an interpolation of Tainted Love by Soft Cell. It’s not. Melodically, its shape is the opening notes of Mozart’s Piano Concerto K491, second movement – 1785 had lots of jams, you know!
We found the most dissonant interval, at least to our ears at the time, and used that throughout. It has this horrible rub with the rest of the track and the bassline. It never resolves and, along with the siren-esque quality of the Never Gonna Let You Go vocal sample, just produces this very dark, unresolving texture. Technically it’s all wrong. It shouldn’t work – but it sounded just right and conveyed the type of mood we wanted. The extreme time-stretch effect was a staple in the jungle scene, but wasn’t really a part of the garage or house production vocabulary. We’d gone all in, adding spinbacks and dub bleeps for extra spice.
DJ Spoony was the first person to hear and play the track. He was a regular visitor to our kitchen studio in London. We played Ripgroove to him only a few hours after finishing it. He said: “You lot are mad!” That Sunday night, Omar called me at home after seeing Spoony drop it at his [legendary garage night] Twice As Nice residency. “They went nuts,” he said. Omar had been so nervous about the crowd reaction that he’d hidden behind the pillars next to the DJ booth. The Twice As Nice crowd could be very unforgiving, but when Ripgroove kicked in it was clear this was going to become something special.
It charted just as an instrumental, which was kind of unheard of. I’ve still got the name tags from the dressing rooms at Top of the Pops, because I went round and took them off the doors as a souvenir. It was Michael Bolton, Blackstreet, Dannii Minogue, the Charlatans, the Spice Girls and us. Michael Bolton came in a private jet. We were in an Addison Lee.
Omar Adimora, producer
There was no cooking being done in my kitchen at all – it had been commandeered for studio use. It was like the first scene in Back to the Future when Doc Brown has wires everywhere. We shoved in as much kit as we could afford: where the meat trays should have been, we had the S3000 sampler. It was very haphazard, like a nutty professor’s studio, but it all kind of worked.
When we made Ripgroove, there was no way Tim and I could have known it was something that would last 25 years. But it became apparent, as soon as it started to get played on the pirates and in clubs, and with major labels coming in for it, that we had something. It just didn’t sound like anything else. That’s why it’s stood the test of time.
Top of the Pops was weird. It was like a wedding or a big birthday, where it all seemed to race by in a bit of a daze. You knew there was miming, but we also had decks set up that weren’t plugged in. It was just a mad experience. I was sitting there thinking: “This is great, but people are going to think we’re a couple of clowns because we’re not actually doing anything. Nothing’s plugged in.” Of course, when the lights are flashing and strobes are on, nobody notices. But for us, it was like a fake moon landing.
