There’s a great line in Bob Stanley’s self-styled “story of modern pop”, Yeah Yeah Yeah, where he mentions the back sleeves of the three House Sound of Chicago compilations that London Records released between 1986 and 1987. It’s hard to convey how inexplicable the music on them was in the British pop landscape of the time, how alien and strange it seemed when the opening track of Volume 1, Steve “Silk” Hurley’s Jack Your Body, turned up on Top of the Pops, at the top of a chart that featured No More the Fool by Elkie Brooks, Randy Crawford’s Almaz and Genesis’s Land of Confusion. It’s easy to snigger at Radio 1’s Peter Powell announcing that he was retiring, because if music like that could get to No 1, he no longer understood modern pop, but he wasn’t the only person who felt like that. And, as Stanley points out, rather than clarify the music they contained, the photos on the rear of the House Sound of Chicago albums only seemed to compound its weirdness.
The monochrome pictures of Marshall Jefferson and Steve ‘Silk’ Hurley were reminiscent of Delta blues singers, or the deep soul singers simultaneously anthologised on the Charly label: grainy, lost, a parallel and exciting America … Where did they come from? How could this have been going on while Steve Wright in the afternoon was playing Johnny Hates Jazz? They were unknowable. Such mystique.
No artist sums up the unknowability and mystique of the early house scene quite like Virgo. How mysterious were they? Put it this way: I first heard their eponymous 1989 album in the mid-90s, when it was already spoken of in hushed tones, despite the fact that, at the time, the people who spoke of it in hushed tones didn’t seem to know for certain who it was by. This is understandable, because the Virgo album wasn’t actually by Virgo, nor was it actually an album. Virgo was one of the pseudonyms used by Marshall Jefferson, who had released an album under that name in 1986, although the same name was also used by two other Chicago producers, Vincent Lawrence and Adonis. The Virgo album – released in the UK on Radikal, the house offshoot of 80s urban label StreetSounds – was a compilation of two EPs, one by ME, one by Virgo Four. Both were the work of Eric Lewis and Merwyn Sanders, who’d apparently vanished into obscurity shortly afterwards.
The mystery surrounding the name on the sleeve fitted the album’s contents perfectly. It was a collection clearly thrown together with the minimum of care and attention – quite aside from the fact they’d managed to get the name of the band wrong, the sleeve had evidently taken about 10 minutes to design – but it sounded weirdly like an album, rather than a selection of dance tracks, as if the eight tracks on it should always have been together, in this order. It was emotionally involving, it was immersive, it flowed.
Sanders and Lewis were budding musicians, who had discovered house music via parties held at their high school – alluded to in one track title, School Hall – and Ron Hardy’s Muzik Box. You can just about imagine one track from Virgo, In a Vision, going down a storm on the dancefloor in either venue, but for the most part the music on it doesn’t sound as if it was created to soundtrack a thousand kids going wild at a dance, nor the notorious drugged-out bacchanal of Hardy’s club. If anything, it sounds like music you might make the day after a drugged-out bacchanal – wistful and contemplative, shot through with a creeping, contagious melancholy.
In contrast to the most famous record broken by Hardy at the Muzik Box, Phuture’s Acid Tracks, which is demonic and relentless and intense – you can almost smell the dry ice and feel the sweat dripping from the ceiling as it plays – there’s something incredibly graceful and dreamy about Virgo’s Going Thru Life or Do You Know Who You Are? The sound evoked the small hours of the morning, but not those small hours you spent losing your mind in front of the big speakers: it conjured up an atmosphere of 3am introspection. Even at its most upbeat, on Never Want to Lose You, or All the Time, it’s curiously opaque. The vocals on both tracks are mumbled and unclear and despondent: it feels as if you’re eavesdropping. On the former track, there’s a very odd tension indeed between them and the female voice that drowns them out, exhorting dancers to “rock your body … move your body”.
The duo were audibly fans of producer Larry “Mr Fingers” Heard, the progenitor of the deep house sub-genre, but you would never have called the music they made generic. It was too idiosyncratic: there was an odd, nagging, guitar line that ran through Do You Know Who You Are? and a spirited attempt to introduce the sound of slap bass into the lexicon of house on All the Time. There were moments when you would have sworn the whole thing was being played live, rather than constructed using sequencers. It was the sound of genuinely original artists making music without much of a blueprint to follow, before a genre had codified, and hitting on something unique and haunting.
In the wake of the House Sound of Chicago albums, and 1988’s “Second Summer of Love”, house music’s big names had escaped the confines of the city and its notoriously crooked record labels: Frankie Knuckles, Mr Fingers, Farley “Jackmaster” Funk, Marshall Jefferson et al came to Europe, where they were feted, had hit singles, remixed huge pop stars and signed major label deals. Lewis and Sanders didn’t. They released two more singles – a lumpy stab at soul called Winter Days and Summer Nights, with a local vocalist called Yvonne Gage and the overlooked Let Your Body Talk in 1992, the latter under yet another pseudonym, Ace & the Sandman. Then they disappeared entirely, in a way that was possible only in the pre-internet age.
They re-emerged in 2010, when a Dutch label reissued their album, lavishing all the care and attention on it that had been missing in the first place. The extensive sleeve notes let Lewis and Sanders tell their story – it turned out the whole thing had been played live after all – and they finally got their own grainy black and white photo on the back cover. There were 30-track outtake collections and remixes by Caribou, and a live tour of Europe. Lewis has gone on to release new material under the name Virgo Four, with a new collaborator called Terry Ivy. Their mystique has gone, but you can hardly blame Lewis for snatching his moment in the spotlight after nearly 25 years of anonymity. And besides, the Virgo album still sounds as beautiful and shadowy as it did when nobody seemed to know for sure who had made it.
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