The RAH Band were a studio group put together by the English producer Richard Anthony Hewson. Now 67 years old, Hewson drew dubious inspiration from his initials and formed the band in 1977, putting together and releasing singles comprising a mixture of collaborative live performance and rudimentary electronic synthesis and drum programming. One of those singles was “Messages From The Stars”, which at the time was a slightly innocuous – arguably derivative – piece of disco funk that limped to #42 in the singles charts.
Flash forward to today, and this previously unspectacular track positively explodes in a new context. It’s got everything that the sleazier side of deep house aspires to – real songcraft, sparkling sex-inspired vocal, and a killer swaggering bassline that makes listening to this guilty pleasure slightly less guilt-ridden.
The RAH Band – “Messages from the Stars” (TMT Records, 1983)
When you hear it on a proper soundsystem though, it withers. 1980s electronic music production wasn’t nearly so obsessed with sculpting the bass for the Funktion One, and its underwhelming punch makes convincing a crowd that this song is something more than a novelty an exceedingly difficult task; Mr Cher has witnessed this one drop and bomb in the rare instances it has been played at the peak-time party. In fact, some weeks ago Mr Cher tweeted that this was “screaming” for a re-edit.
Martin ‘Atjazz’ Iveson of Derbyshire – a jack-of-all-trades jazz, deep house and…. computer game composer (seriously) – has apparently answered the call, though initially his EP of “Messages from the Stars” edits seems deeply disappointing. The “Atjazz remix” drops some conventional house keys and a stuttery beat with some bizarre UK-bass sounding claps, taking only the spaced-out vocal and some weird cosmic noises from the original – losing all that is good and funky. You can imagine what the instrumental is like…
The RAH Band – “Messages From The Stars” (Atjazz remix)
The ‘Original Astro Mix – Atjazz Re-Edit’, is, thankfully, glorious. The minute-long intro resembles a galactic drum-roll that builds to a crescendo before dropping into a beefed-up version of the original funky bassline with obligatory undercut 808 kicks whilst still holding on to all of the elements that made the original such a great track. It’s a beautiful example of taking something retro and making it big enough to drop on a decent system, hats off to him. Not sure about the remix though.
The RAH Band – “Messages from the Stars” (Original Astro Mix – Atjazz Re-Edit)
This post was contributed by our good friends at Welovetocher: Deep House and Disco.
Illustration by Craig Wilson.
