Moodfood

Grant Cunliffe aka Grant Showbiz was a record producer who’d worked with the likes of Billy Bragg, Pretenders and The Fall, while James “JFT” Hood was a drummer who’d worked on many of the same projects. Together, like so many in the music world, they had their head turned when acid house and Balearic beats hit the UK — and in 1990 they created “Spiritual High,” whose rudimentary dub baseline, Soul II Soul beat, choirs and strings became a huge Balearic / end of rave / after party anthem. It would get bigger still with the addition of Martin Luther King samples, then transformed again into a cover of Donna Summer / Jon & Vangelis‘s “State of Independence” with The Pretenders’ Chrissie Hyde on vocals. All of that is on this album, as are silky house beats, gentle rap, Johnny Marr, Jeff Beck, and a lot of lush new age atmospherics. It remains a joyous expression of a point where the rules of genre and style had come completely unravelled and anything-goes was the order of the day.