There are songs in this world that are perfect: “So Weit Wie Noch Nie” by Jurgen Paape. Cherrelle & Alexander O’Neal’s “Saturday Love”. “Burning Airlines Give You So Much More” by Brian Eno. The Avalanches’ “Since I Left You”. “U Don’t Know Me” by Armand Van Helden.
There are things in this life that are perfect: Small glasses of perfectly chilled lager drunk by quiet swimming pools on cloudless August afternoons. Prawn cocktail crisps. Boxing day walks. That first blast of heat that bowls into your face upon leaving a foreign airport. “U Don’t Know Me” by Armand Van Helden.
The internet tells me — though I will continue to deny this till the day I die — that the record came out in January, 1999. This is flagrantly not true.
During thar summer between extinguishing my old life (sixth form) and starting my new one (university) the song became an inadvertent crutch. I was primarily working in the toy shop of a local, independent department store, and to break up my long, joyless days of selling Sylvanian Families to the children of day tripping boating families, I was occasionally sent over the road to man the tills at “Children’s World” — a spectacularly joyless box stuffed with cheap, terribly done Croc rip-offs and two-promotional-cycles-behind branded pyjamas. I did what I was told because I needed the money; money I immediately ploughed through upon arrival in London, confident as I was in the idea that happiness and self-reinvention and acceptance lied at the bottom of student union double vodka and lemonades, or cans of K Cider, or in packs of Transform-a-Snacks.
In the toy shop, homemade Disney compilation CD-Rs were on constant rotation. The same twelve songs rang round the premises, following me from the pocket money aisle to the jigsaw wall, seeping into arts, crafts, Action Men and Barbies. As a miserable, self-involved eighteen year old who’d pledged allegiance to Kompakt, Michael Haneke and the Guardian — marking me out in the staff canteen as the sneering prick I undoubtedly was — this was aural torture. There were moments when I was on my hands and knees on a Saturday morning restocking teddy bears when the soundtrack became too much and murder scenes played out before my eyes while “Do You Believe in Magic” plopped out of the concealed speakers.
In my head this was a halcyon period of peerlessly innovative music appealing to the masses, or at least tune after tune of good-time, no-nonsense club filling chart smashers.
My time at Children’s World was, largely, an exercise in the kind of oddly pleasant terminal boredom that makes life feel like an eternal set of overcast November Sundays. It is pleasurably suffocating; an evocation of Englishness at it’s finest. Every so often, Children’s World would empty entirely, for relatively long periods at a time. With no customers to watch, with no stock to restock, no phone in my pocket to check, and that day’s paper stuffed in my locker, I would be faced with two entertainment options. The first was to conduct a rapid-fire run of circuits round the shop floor, seeing how many I could squeeze into a minute. This was always tempered by my constant awareness of the in-store CCTV and my acute worry that the end of my shift would see me being swooped up by lads in white coats. The alternative — slightly safer — was to sit in the changing room. In the changing room was a cheap, bulky, ugly CD player with one CD.
That CD — whose exact name has eluded me ever since I pulled a tatty G2 out of my locker for the last time and made my way, Dick Wittington style, for the big smoke — was one of those dance compilations that are perfectly fine for BBQs and staff parties but utterly redundant when looked at critically. So we won’t do that. The tune I kept coming back to in those solitary changing room sessions was Armand Van Helden’s magisterial, sensational, epochal, life-changing, fucking incredible “U Don’t Know Me.”
I would play it on repeat until the door’s bell chimed and tinkled and I had to immediately vacate the curtained-in changing room and take my place behind the cash register. That, then, is my Armand Van Helden story. I’ve got another, which we’ll get to later. For now, though, let’s look at the song itself, and try and work out exactly why it’s as undeniably fucking amazing as it is.
Let’s look, before we actually look at the song, at the context it lived within. The thing that shocked me most when conducting my research for this piece was the track’s release date. The internet tells me — though I will continue to deny this till the day I die — that the record came out in January, 1999. This is flagrantly not true. I maintain it came out in 1997. In my hazy memories of the late 90s, a period in which I was beginning the transition from Y-fronts to boxer shorts, HB pencils to Stabilo gel pens, “U Don’t Know Me” sits alongside endlessly sunny endless summer holiday days, Rentford Rejects, the communal post-Euro 96 hangover, Kangol bucket hats, Chris Evans, a curly haired Jamie Oliver sliding down banisters, Blair’s grin, turkey twizzlers, Channel 5 and The Dandy.
1999 feels different somehow, distant somehow, and in my head, at least, everything I remember about dance music from that period — “Music Sounds Better with You”, “Finally”, “9PM (Till I Come)”, “Turn Around”, “Synths and Strings”, “Synchyme” — came out in 1997 regardless of when it came out. I have no idea why 1997 has become so pivotal in my remembrances, but there you go. We do not pick our memories.
I was forced to accept reality as it is and decided to examine the context with which I would have been familiar with. Van Helden’s club credentials don’t need explaining or explicating. He’s Armand Van Helden for fuck’s sake. With that in mind, I decided to peer into the charts.
The charts, back then, back in 1999, even though it should have been 1997, meant more than they do now. We were, if memory serves, a nation hooked on the top 40, a country of slack-jawed screen-gazers who whittled away the week until Top of the Pops and CD:UK wound round and gave us the fix of music we so desperately needed. They seemed democratic, genuinely representative of what was going on before we all decided to start our own micro-cultures and exist in self-serving, self-involved communities. Or something like that: I didn’t actually buy a single till 2001 (the cassette of “The Real Slim Shady”). In my head, though, this was a halcyon period of peerlessly innovative music appealing to the masses, or at least tune after tune of good-time, no-nonsense club filling chart smashers.
As a record it sounds perfect in any setting, at any point of the day or night, in any club or at any party.
The distant past is a very, very foreign place. On Sunday the 7th of February 1999, Armand Van Helden sat between Blondie and Tatyana Ali. The rest of the top ten was taken up with now-forgotten R&B wibble (Dru Hill, TQ); Student Union-approved irony (Bryan Adams and Mel C, Steps); heinously awful fratrock (the Offspring); something I literally have no recollection of (A+, anyone?); and another top tier pop-house banger (Soulsearcher’s Gary’s Gang sampling “Can’t Get Enough”). Further down and names you’d chosen to forget — Mansun, Idlewild, Gay Dad — mingles with ones the world’s chosen to ignore ever since — Bass Jumpers (?), Adam Austin (??), Greece 2000 (???). There’s Sebadoh and Robbie Williams, Johnny Vaugh and Busta Rhymes, Englebert Humperdink and Jay Z. Today’s charts are probably as eclectic, but there’s something oddly depressing about the retrospective possibilities the download system offers. It’s not reflective of cultural consciousness in any way. Still, the charts aren’t for the likes of me any more, so any potential for parallels as been quashed by my predilection for shutting down discourse when it suits me.
The point is: memory fails. There was never really this golden age of radio friendly floorfillers that I’ve conjured up from half-forgotten memories of hazy car journeys: eternal stretches of four to the floor back from beaches and theme parks, museums and shopping malls. These are moments that probably never exists, or if they did, don’t match the ones I’ve decided to create and propagate as part of my own mythmaking. And that’s fine. That’s what we all do.
And that’s the power “U Don’t Know Me” has over me. It exists both as a literal, real, perfect example of the euphoric power of house music (that intro! Those vocals! That sample! Those stuttering kicks!) and as a stand-in for something I want but doesn’t exist: a perfect memory of youth.
As a record it sounds perfect in any setting, at any point of the day or night, in any club or at any party. There’s a reason why DJs still rinse it to this day. It avoids the ‘haha, 90s house music, lol!” trap in a way few other massive records from that period do. The only tune I can think of that comes anywhere near is Robin S’ “Show Me Love” which, let’s face it, is the best vocal house record ever made.
For an object lesson in “U Don’t Know Me”s power, Jackmaster‘s legendary/seminal/notorious Dummy mix from 2010 — a 40 minute rinse through every big, summer-holiday-car-journey-with-mum-friendly house record of the 90s — does the trick. Listen to the way it struts in there round the 6 minute mark, barging through everything sublimely. Proof of perfection is such a thing ever existed.
“You remember your first experience with that record in a club and I guarantee it’s a happy memory”
Oh, right, my second “U Don’t Know Me” story. Let’s end with that. I found myself in a converted bowling alley at Butlins this January past, stone cold sober on a Sunday night, watching a DJ I’d wanted to catch properly for years. I’d seen ten minutes of one of his sets in 2014 but was forced to leave the Turin club I was in because the considerably older men I was with got very, very pissed and very, very close to a mafioso’s girlfriend, fyi.
What was going on was Kerri fucking Chandler absolutely smashing it. As I stood there watching a master at work work masterfully, I was troubled by the lack of traction he was getting. Classic records went by relatively unnoticed. Incredible things none of us have ever heard before limped on by un-commented upon. It was dying.
Then something changed.
Ever so slightly, something undeniably huge edged into the mix, something massive, something gargantuan. It was “U Don’t Know Me.” It went off. Royally. Massively. Hugely. It was one of those clubbing moments you cherish and think back on. It united a dancefloor. I saw the man play it again the other week, during a late afternoon set in Croatia. It got the same reaction: polite pandemonium.
I called him up to talk about it, incidentally. So I’ll leave the final words on Armand Van Helden’s masterpiece to Kerri Chandler.
“That record has reached so many people of so many ages over the years. You remember your first experience with that record in a club and I guarantee it’s a happy memory. It unites people. People sing it back to you. The girls get happy and when the girls get happy, the guys get happy too. It’s an ice breaker. It melts the dancefloor. Put it this way: you might be looking over at a girl or guy all night, and they smile because this song comes on, and you might go over and talk to them. That’s why I play it.”
