Ennio Morricone - Harmonica Sample.

Once Upon A Time In The West

Here's the first, of invariably many Ennio Morricone posts, with music from the spaghetti western classic, "Once Upon A Time In The West".

"Man With The Harmonica" - Ennio Morricone


Knocking back Sinéad O'Connor's "Nothing Compares 2 U" after a month at Number One, Beats International - the brainchild of Norman "Fatboy Slim" Cook - was a clever bit of underground sampledelics with Cook crafting a brilliant pop song by mixing Morricone's harmonica sample with the bassline from
"The Guns of Brixton" from the Clash and overlaying it with a cover of the SOS Band's
"Just Be Good To Me".
(Could have done with out the "mmm-mmm-mmm" rap in the middle though.)

"Dub Be Good To Me" - Beats International.


Beats International were, themselves, knocked off the top position by another dance act, Snap, with "I Got The Power". Norman Cook kept going, of course, but Beats International themselves were a one-hit-wonder but their contribution was noteworthy.

In those days, sampling was still a pretty new phenomenon, as was the legal wrangling which ensued (if you excuse the pun) with everyone from Coldcut to Public Enemy, KLF to Shut Up And Dance just grabbing samples willy nilly and often getting in trouble because of them.
Beats International, too, got landed in the shit, not just because of the SOS song, but because of the bassline from the Clash, and, well, I for one wouldn't want to be on the Clash's shitlist.

But y'know, these were the nineties and these guys were the trendsetters. It's not like the majors didn't catch on either. And whilst Public Enemy and James Brown were playing tug-of-war with the beat from Funky Drummer, Vanilla Ice was ripping of Queen and MC Hammer was tellin' Rick James "You Can't Touch This".

1990 was the year that the Industry finally realised the potential of sampling and dance music in general. Remember this was in the dark days when dance music was still in its infancy and Stock Aiken and Waterman were pumping out one horrendous manufactured pop stars like Kylie, Sonia and Rick Ashley at a rate of 5 a minute.
Took them a while, obviously, and they made a whole lot of noise about how sampling was going to the destroy music industry. (sound familiar) but then the Industry finally realised that they didn't even need to bother making songs, or even covering them, they could just sample them. This was the year that fat record execs finally got their greasy fingers on defenseless Akai S1000s
and started unleashing a whole new audio plague far more sinister than even Stock Aiken and Waterman, when the remix finally entered the mainstream.

Thankfully, the good Doctor Patterson had the remedy.

"Little Fluffy Clouds" - The Orb.


Mixing ambient beats with the ramblings of Rickie Lee Jones, Little fluffy clouds was not your standard new age ambient gibberish, it was something much, much more. It was, on the one side, meaningless, but in the context of psychedeilia it was a rather profound statement prompting the music press to likening it to the chemical generation's Dark Side of the Moon.


"The Man With The Harmonica" - Apollo 440


Finally, here's a brilliant tech-dub cover by Apollo 440.