INTERVIEW: BLACK BOX
On producing the biggest dance track of the decade
The end of the 80s sparked a watershed time for commercial dance music in the UK, with the joyously groovy likes of Inner City, Lisa Stansfield and Rebel MC charting high, and providing pop fans with welcome relief from the nightmarish dominance of Stock, Aitken and Waterman, then at the height of their powers. At the tip of the spear, however, were Italian production trio Groove Groove Melody, whose Italo house stormer
Ride On Time, released under the name Black Box, held the Number 1 spot for six weeks and came in as the biggest-selling single of the year.
GGM – comprising DJ Daniele Davoli, keyboardist and engineer Mirko Limoni, and classically-trained clarinetist Valerio Semplici – had actually made the Top 10 in August of the same year as Starlight, with Numero Uno, but
Ride On Time proved a truly spectacular crossover triumph. Even the most po-faced of dance purists couldn’t find fault in its frantic piano and synth string riff, unforgettable bassline and gutsy sampled vocal, lifted – controversially and, ultimately, to the band’s financial cost – from Loleatta Holloway’s Love
Sensation, and mimed in the video and on stage by French model Katrin Quinol, who served as the ‘face’ of the outfit until 1993.
“We thought it would take some time, but within six months, we already had a number one record”
The worldwide success of Ride On Time led on to an equally well-received album, 1990’s Dreamland, from which a whole barrage of further global hits was launched, including
Everybody Everybody, I Don’t Know Anybody
Else and a cover version of Earth, Wind and
Fire’s Fantasy. Since that time, Black Box have never really stopped doing their pop-dance thing: the second album, Positive Vibration, dropped in 1995, surrounded by a handful of singles, and Daniele continues to perform live DJ sets around the world, these days accompanied by Bristol-based vocal phenomenon Celestine Walcott-Gordon, as well as a live percussionist and guitarist.
Black Box’s 30th anniversary was celebrated with the release of Superbest on their own Groove Groove Melody label – a compilation of remixes that puts a new twist on the Black Box sound across the decades, from Ride On Time to 2018’s cowbell-hammering epic, Everyone Will
Follow. It also struck us as the perfect time to grill Daniele and Mirko on the Black Box story, and their particular angle on music and production. We began by asking how the band came to be in the first place.
Daniele Davoli: “It wasn’t a clear plan – Ride On Time was one of the many records we were making at the time. We were releasing records one after the other, different ideas, different names – we were just trying our luck. Our first record together was House Machine ( under the name DJ Lelewel which I went by at the time); and the second one was Starlight’s Numero Uno, which was top ten in the UK as well. That was the record that opened the door to Black Box and Ride On Time, really. It was the first record that was snapped up by Beggar’s Banquet, who licensed it for the UK.
“At the same time, we also made Airport (as Wood Allen), in 1989, which was another record that was well received by DJs and the public alike in the UK. So Ride On Time was just another one of those records, and we didn’t have big plans – we just wanted to sell 1500 copies, 2000, hopefully, so we could buy a piece of gear for the studio and carry on. We did have a long-term plan, and we knew it wasn’t going to be easy and that it would take some time, but within six months of starting, we already had a number one record in the charts!”
: Ride On Time is a truly seminal dance/pop crossover record. What are your memories of producing it, and did it come together easily? DD: “Ride On Time used sampled vocals, which I used to do already in my DJ sets, on top of other records. I used to play the sampler, just to show the public that I had a bit of an edge over other DJs. I could play the keyboards, although it wasn’t really playing the keyboards as a musician would do – I was playing samples and loops. But the public didn’t know what a sampler was, so they saw me pushing buttons on the keyboard and they thought I was actually playing it.
“Virtual synths are so close to the real thing that we usually go for them, not hardware…”
“Mirko Limoni came on Saturday night, just to have a drink in my club where I was DJing, and looked at what I was doing. On the Monday, when I went back to the studio, he said, ‘There was something that you were doing on Saturday night, with this female gospel vocalist who was going crazy, screaming, and it’s very impressive. Bring it in and we’ll see what we can do with it’.
“I told him that was a sample I was playing over the record, and gave him the floppy disks of the [Akai] S900 I was using, and we loaded it up and started playing with it. We thought, ‘Oh, blimey, this is quality, man’. I had an idea for a piano that went with it, and I sang it to him. Obviously, it wasn’t properly accurate, so, being the musician that he is, he put the right chords to it and there you go – we then had the piano line and a few vocal parts.
“After that, we already had the ‘woah, woah, woah’ and ‘ride on time’ vocals, because they were already doing it in the club. Everything else was 100 samples all over the keyboard, and we didn’t know where to put them, in what sequence. So that took us three days. Then it took us another month to put the vocal sequence in a correct order, as we couldn’t figure it out. There were a lot of headaches and sleepless nights, but eventually we managed it.”
: Ride On Time was described by the press at the time as the definitive Italo house track. Would you agree with that categorisation? DD:
“It really isn’t defining of the Italo house sound, because Italo house records of the era were rather different. It is obviously a pop record, which it wasn’t intended to be. We were trying to emulate People Hold On, by Lisa Stansfield – we really liked what Coldcut did in that record, the piano line and the sounds… And although that record sounded ten times better than Ride On Time in terms of quality, it’s probably because he managed to mix it in a proper studio, which we didn’t. For us, that was the ultimate goal. We didn’t achieve that, but we thought we had something different and rather quirky, so we took our chances. It was clear from the very first moment we had the idea that it could have been a