While young listeners today shuffle between genres while streaming, music listeners’ habits were more regimented back in 1992 when electronic music duo Utah Saints released their self-titled debut album. The industry tried to pigeonhole artists to make it easier to sell them. If an artist didn’t seem to have a home genre they were slotted into something. But producer/DJs Tim Garbutt and Jez Willis did not view music in those terms, and Utah Saints featured samples from different genres that were mixed into their own distinct milieu. The album was recently reissued by London Records with an added disc of extra bonus tracks which allows fans to revisit that era.
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The most famous examples of samples on Utah Saints are their first two Top-10 UK hits. Each sampled an Annie Lennox vocal part from the Eurythmics hit “There Must Be an Angel (Playing With My Heart)” for “What Can You Do for Me.” Then they impressively managed to become the only group to get Kate Bush to approve a sample—specifically vocal and strings—for their second Top-10 hit “Something Good.” Both reinterpretations were very different from their source material.
Seeking Cinematic Sounds
If one listens to the rest of the album there were some interesting musical bits that were brought in. There is a riff from Slayer’s “War Ensemble” in “I Want You,” and a vocal line from Human League’s “Love Action (I Believe in Love)” in “Believe Me,” among others. At the time, sampling was generally a lazy way to jump-start a new song, such as Vanilla Ice cribbing a Queen bass line for “Ice Ice Baby” and MC Hammer working a Rick James guitar riff into “U Can’t Touch This.”
That’s not what interested Utah Saints. The duo did the reverse—creating a template for a song, then integrating other music into it. They wanted something more cinematic. It also made them ahead of their time.
“I think what the current music scene is showing us is that people are less partisan than the music industry assumed they were in the past,” Willis notes. “There’s also a disconnect now between fashion and music. You used to be able to look at the way somebody was dressed and make some assumptions as to what type of music they were in. With possibly the exception of some metal, that’s trickier to do now.”
Eclectic Beginnings
The first concert Willis attended as a teen was by hard rockers Thin Lizzy, and their overload of light and sound left a big impression on him. That’s when he says he decided he wanted to make music. He also saw hardcore punk icons Bad Brains back in the day. His pre-Utah Saints bands were equally eclectic: gothic-electronic group Cassandra Complex, electronic rockers MDMA, and surf band Surfin Dave And The Absent Legends with future Rollins Band guitarist Chris Haskett.
“My claim to fame is when I was 19, I was driving a car in Leeds with Ian MacKaye from Fugazi and Henry Rollins in the back of my car, driving them back and forth to the studio,” Willis recalls of his youthful punk connection. “My electronic music was all very much European, and Tim came from hip-hop and house.”
Garbutt’s first concert was Depeche Mode, and that was coupled with him getting his first set of decks. He stayed in his bedroom, learned hip-hop, and taught himself to scratch. “I’d say probably two of our biggest influences are Public Enemy and KLF,” Garbutt says. “KLF had the pop sensibility, and then Public Enemy had the kitchen sink mentality of just throwing stuff at a track.”
Bonded by Diversity
“I think when you go back to what you said about all the different influences that came into the album, we weren’t trying to pick a track that has a metal sample or a dance thing,” Garbutt explains. “It was just that our musical knowledge and background was so diverse, yet we did have a common thread in electronic dance music that worked. It probably worked better for us in America because you guys latched onto it a little bit more in terms of using samples that are not originally from dance music. Whereas in the UK, it was a little bit more segregated, and we were seen as a dance act. But because we sampled Slayer, or because we did a Simple Minds cover, the dance community were a little bit more unsure of us because they didn’t want to totally champion us. They couldn’t quite make out where we were coming from. When you get a Chicago house DJ, you know what you’re going to get. Whereas with Utah Saints, they didn’t know what they were going to get next. So they didn’t want to put everything behind us because they didn’t know what they were going to get. Whereas in America, you’re a little bit more open-minded.”
Part of the reason Utah Saints covered Simple Minds’ “Gold Dream” is they related to it as they thought it had a trance feel to it.
“Their first two albums in particular had that cinematic electronic rock thing because they had a guitar and they presented as a band with a real drummer,” Willis explains of Simple Minds. “But they had a lot of electronic sequences going on [in the] early days. They never quite fell into that New Romantic thing. And then, of course, they had ‘Don’t You Forget About Me’ and that made them a stratospheric rock band. I think they perhaps struggled to get back to that, but the core of them was always really clever use of synthesizers, in my opinion. We wanted to do that cover because it had those chords at the beginning which just felt really, really dancy. It actually helped us a lot because we ended up supporting U2 a bit later on [in 1997 with a five-piece band], and we opened with that track. It was really helpful track to have in the set.”
A Debut That Still Holds Up
Thirty-two years after Utah Saints’ debut arrived on these shores, it still holds up because of its mixture of moods and grooves. The duo sought to construct songs with a pop type of structure rather than just generate extended dance sequences. “Something Good” remains popular and became the most streamed track in the UK when it was rereleased in 2008.
“I think the album was still a DIY album,” Willis says. “It was made in a little studio in Leeds, and I think that’s what we’re proud of, that it didn’t have huge resources behind it. Nobody expected it to really catch on. What worked to our advantage is that people underrate us a little bit, which is frustrating sometimes, but when we turn up and can deliver stuff it works to our advantage.”
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Photo by Josh Williams
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