The Sun God
Well-Known Member
The Grid - Flotation (Mark Barrott’s Return to Sa Trinxa Remix) played on Chris Coco's Melodica show last week ahead of a full release along with more MB interpretations. Sounds ace.
Mixcloud
www.mixcloud.com
love Floatation. All-timer
In this excerpt from a 2020 interview, Richard Norris told the story behind it:
“I’d kind of heard about Ibiza, but it wasn’t that well known outside of the scene, so I said to the NME editor, ‘You’ve got to send me and my girlfriend to Ibiza for two weeks to find out about this new music’. I could have said anywhere, Torremolinos or Benidorm, but amazingly he said, ‘Brilliant, let’s do it’. That was the summer of 1989, so going there had an impact on The Grid’s ‘Floatation’. The basic idea of the track was to make a slower record you could play on the beach in the open air.
“When Dave and I had finished the album, Cally said, ‘Can you just do one more track?’. Begrudgingly, we ended up back in the studio a couple of weeks later to record the track that would become ‘Floatation’ and Dave was saying, ‘Let’s try and do something that sounds like the end title credits of a film’.
He’s obsessed with John Barry and was always playing these two Barry-esque chords, but they didn’t resolve, they needed another chord, so between us we got the chords together. So although Ibiza was in the air, it was actually more about John Barry.
“We asked Andrew Weatherall to remix the track and it was one of his earliest remixes, either the second or third mix he did. I’d met Weatherall through clubbing. In fact, when me and Genesis P-Orridge went to Shoom for the first time, the very first person we saw there was Weatherall, who proudly showed us his Psychic TV tattoo. Gen was very pleased about that.
“The final version of ‘Floatation’ was an 11-minute instrumental, which people seemed to like, so we thought we’d put some words to it and make it a single. We got our friend Sasha, who we’d met at Shoom, to do some breathy, sub Gainsbourg vocals. I’ve still got the DAT of us doing it. You can hear me and Sasha in the booth and Weatherall in the control room, and we’re basically making it up as we go along. It probably took about five minutes.
“There are a few samples on the record, various bits and pieces and a little film dialogue, which you absolutely wouldn’t get away with nowadays. Most of it, like the clarinet and all the keyboards and the drums, were ours, but Weatherall did put a bit of Stone Roses on it at the end. The original mix was done at Battery Studios in west London and the Roses were in the studio next door, so he borrowed a copy of their album for a loop. From what I heard, Ian Brown gave it his blessing.
“There was a big buzz when the single came out. I remember going to shops in Soho and there’d be signs in the window saying, “No copies of ‘Floatation’ left”. It didn’t chart massively, and I think the fact it didn’t crack the Top 40 was one of the reasons our days were numbered at Warners. They were used to people like Simply Red getting high chart positions, so this strange, left-field band born out of ‘Jack The Tab’ wasn’t quite doing it for them. In the end, ‘Floatation’ was more influential than it was successful, but I’m happy with that.”
