A few years ago there were people on the pitch - they thought it was all over. After the abysmal 1980s, traditional rock 'n roll was in crisis, so much so that the biggest bands of the time were the dull and mediocre Wonderstuff and Ned's Atomic Dustbin. Enter stage left: a dance-friendly toon called "Charly" and dance culture had found the anthem it was looking for as it stormed the charts and clubs and threatened to consign the guitar, drum and bass format to the bargain bin of musical history.
Whether it was The Ministry Of Sound opening its doors, the smell of Vicks, the sound systems, the preponderance of sequencers and the birth of the DJ as a performing artist in his/her own right, 1991 belonged to dance and things have never really been the same since. Two crossover albums from that year, Primal Scream's Screamadelica and Massive Attack's Blue Lines sounded like they were writing "rock's" obituary.
As we know now, the shouty little brats with their electric guitars weren't going to let all that guitar tuition money go to waste, so they got themselves a good PR company which invented the term "Britpop", created Suede, Oasis and Blur, and put Gibsons, Les Pauls and Rickenbackers back in fashion. Dance, and its myriad offshoots however, still became the dominant means of musical expression in the 1990s and even though publications such as the Daily Telegraph eventually tuned in to the happening new techno beats, it remains a largely marginalised musical genre, which is curious given its massive popularity not just in terms of record and concert sales but also in its attendant "lifestyle".
For such a new musical form, dance has been around numerous blocks since the early days of Detroit Techno. Once hardcore had its 15 minutes on the dance floor, self-styled "progressive house" bore commercial fruit in the shape of Leftfield and more latterly Underworld. Out in the left-field of play, Aphex Twin was weirding it up with his ineffable recordings, while Goldie and the whole Metalheadz scene was taking it off the street and into the superclubs. James Lavelle of Mo'Wax was doing his bit by introducing DJ Shadow to the sweaty masses, while Portishead were not so much chilling everyone out as defrosting them.
As Glastonbury, Reading and Phoenix were fast promoting their dance acts from tents to the main stage, The Prodigy's "Music For The Jilted Generation" made a nonsense of dance's supposedly "cult" status as it sold by the warehouse load.
As kids everywhere set fire to their guitars and started to play with their new electronic toys, even the rawkiest of rock bands were dabbling in dance re-mixes on their B-sides and talking excitably (and less than knowledgeably) about "breakbeats".
Because dance, like every new popular musical movement, was predominantly youth-orientated and came with its own lingua france, it alienated many of the old school who found the form to have a paucity of imagination in compositional skills, little or no lyrical worth and to be full of those repetitive "dbunk, dbunk, dbunk" sounds. Such reactions come with the territory of musical evolution and denies the existence of some of the most genuinely innovative and exciting sounds to emerge over the last few decades. While some traditional guitar bands like Ocean Colour Scene, Cast and Kula Shaker are acting like curators of a retro sound that wasn't even that good the first time around, the real creators and the real people pushing things forward are the likes of Roni Size, DJ Shadow and Photex.
Two new compilation albums tell the story so far in their own distinctive way and provide more than adequate auditory evidence of where dance has been and where it's going. Pete Tong's Essential Collection, a double CD set taken from the Radio 1 programme of the same name takes in Stretch N' Vern's Go Insane and Marmion's Schoneberg alongside The Sneaker Pimps' 6 Underground and Death In Vegas's Dirt. Coming in at 27 tracks, it's a pretty darn definitive collection of every major record that clubland has been bouncing around to over the past five or six years. You may also want to know that the term "largin' it" originated on Pete Tong's show which still goes out every Friday evening from 6.30 p.m. to 10 p.m. and still sets up clubbers both here and in Britain.
Anthems For The Chemical Generation, a Virgin compilation, is more of a mainstream affair and despite its rather cack-handed nod to the use of stimulants in its title is a handy, if not overly comprehensive, overview of the scene. Tracks by Orbital, The Beloved and Primal Scream sit side by side the Madforit-Chester likes of Black Grape and The Stone Roses (who qualify under the "baggy" rule) while The Future Sound Of London, Goldie and The Sabres of Paradise provide a more authentic feel. Eminently listenable.
