Team Me Up...

Hard-Fi vs. Madness vs. team9 - Better Do Better Girl
Roxy Music - In Every Dream Home A Heartache (team9 remix)

I’ve been checking team9’s special brand of things since someone pointed me in the direction of his remix of the Stone Roses’ ‘Waterfall’ late last year. Now I’m always wary of people fiddling with tracks from what I consider to be the musical canon. A friend of mine once spouted a very apt statement on hearing a rave tune that sampled Hendrix, “That’s like slipping pages of a porno mag in between the pages of the Bible.” As a rule, I would share these sentiments, but I really like what team9 does.

On Sunday night, team9 (English-Australian producer Neil Mason) rocked the Superchunk mix on Eddy Temple Morris’s XFm show The Remix. I was lucky enough to catch the back end of it driving into London after a weekend away in Dorset. ‘Twas a barnstorming mix featuring inventive booty’s not seen on these pages since Empire State Human disappeared off the face of the earth, along with team9’s own remixes of tracks by The Infadels and Arctic Monkeys. Closing the set was a mash-mix of Hard-Fi’s ‘Better Do Better’ and Madness’ ‘My Girl’. Neil doesn’t just jam one tune on top of the other, he adds his own beats and music to make it into a completely new track, in this instance managing to put Hard-Fi – a band I have previously found totally objectionable – in a favourable light. The lyrics of the two tracks juxtapose nicely – Rich Hard-Fi is pissed at his girl, Suggs appears to have pissed his girl off – brilliant! I’ve also stuck up one of the tracks that didn’t make it onto the final mix - a remix of Roxy Music’s ‘In Every Dream Home a Heartache’, which sets moody electro against Bryan Ferry’s staccato vocals. My only complaint is that it’s not long enough!

There’s a link below so you can download the entire 27 minute mix in all its glory, or, if you’ve got too much time on your hands, you can download all the featured tracks one by one and reassemble them yourself in a different order. The team9 site also features the classic Jay Z vs. The White Stripes booty which Zane Lowe played on Radio One, along with a plethora of tracks of varying degrees of quality. Graham Coxon vs. Belinda Carlisle has to be heard to be believed…

team9 website
team9 at My Space
The Remix website at XFm

Joe.