What do Erick Morillo's first UK breakthrough, Deep Dish's top three smashing 'Flashdance' and the blissful trance melodies of a certain Paul Van Dyk all hold in common? A shared ability to penetrate both the underground club floors and mainstream chart summits for starters, and the fact that they all owe their UK success to the legendary dance label, Positiva.
It's over thirteen years since the Positiva imprint first opened its racks as the dedicated dance wing of music major EMI back in 1993. It's primary goal? To propel the biggest dance tunes rocking clubland onto the mainstream pedestal they deserved to command. Within just twelve months, Positiva gate-crashed the UK pop charts when a little known US house producer named Erick Morillo exploded with the energetic, infectiously catchy club hit 'I Like To Move It'. Produced under his Reel 2 Real guise and charged with the ragga chatter vocals of The Mad Stuntman, 'I Like To Move It' shifted a colossal 1.5 million units worldwide, smashed into the UK charts at number five whilst Erick began his journey to become one of the most iconic house DJs on the planet. The following year The Bucketheads' wildly funkin' disco number 'The Bomb' repeated the trick giving Masters At Work's Kenny 'Dope' Gonzalez his first UK chart hit. Put simply, Positiva wasted no time in making its mark - a large iconic white cross that stamped its arm-raising ethos onto just about every corner of club culture over the coming twelve years.
In summer 2000, Positiva even toughed it out in one of the most hotly contested UK number one battles since Blur and Oasis, when Spiller's Sophie Ellis-Bextor sung house anthem 'Groovejet', battled it out with Victoria Beckham's Dane Bowers collaboration 'Out Of My Mind'. As tabloid gossip concerning the pair spiralled the stakes rose but it was Spiller's 'Groovejet' that came out trumps, edging out Miss Posh for the number one prize.
In more recent years, the label has displayed an instinctive knack of finding those grade A dance crossover hits time and again too. At the tail-end of 2003 it was Positiva's A&R head Jason Ellis who had the foresight to snap up a bewitching string-draped instrumental track by a then undiscovered duo named The Shapeshifters. It only took one listen, on the floor of the 'shifter's infamous Nocturnal Groove party, but like all those tracks it rarely takes more.
Not only was the epic, elegant vocal house version of the seductively funky 'Lola's Theme' the jewel in the crown at the subsequent Miami Winter Music Conference but its universal take-over of club floors and radio airwaves alike breathed a fresh life into the funky house sound. In July 04 it reached an almost inevitable No.1 berth and remained one of only two dance music No.1's of that year. And you don't need to call on anyone to know which was the more credible.
It certainly wasn't the only time Positiva struck pure dancefloor gold that year either. Deep and melodic yet charged with an unbridled electricity, the pop gleamed stadium trance of Motorcycle's 'As The Rush Comes' had already knocked on the door of the top 10 back in January, whilst another one of the biggest club smashes of the year was just round the corner.
The track, of course, was Deep Dish's stomping guitar beast 'Flashdance', a sexy, gritty vocal house anthem that seemed to have its (**disco-fried feet**) glued to just about every summer dancefloor in the world. Like all the best cross-over smashes, its unstoppable whirlwind took its force directly from the biggest club DJ sets around - Tong, Cox, Jules et al were all on bang on it - and by the time the hedonistic gales of Ibiza centred summer drew to a close 'Flashdance' had found itself at number three in the national UK pop charts. No mean feat and yet another emphatic reminder of Positiva's ability to unite the underground energy of modern club culture with the universal appreciation of the mainstream pop charts.
'The essence of a Positiva release probably hasn't changed much from when the label first started' reflects the label's Director Jason Ellis on their ubiquitous presence. 'We're all about mirroring what's big and happening in clubland at any given time. We're not all about changing the way clubland itself works, more on reflecting what's really doing it out there and pushing it to the forefront.'
To think Positiva has simply picked up the biggest hits in clubland and plonked them neatly into the limelight would be something of a misunderstanding though. Throughout its existence, the label has gone out on a limb time and again, constantly pushing against the winds of convention to blow dance music's mainstream identity completely wide open. Back in 2002, no-one expected the stereotyped boisterousness of the UK drum and bass scene to give us the most soulful, upbeat dance crossover hit of the spring. But in Shy FX and T Power's samba slinked 'Shake Your Body' that's exactly what happened and, sure enough, it was Positiva responsible for taking the risk that broke it to the masses. Hitting number 7, unheard of for a d'n'b record at the time, 'Shake Your Body' lifted two underground heroes of the UK d'n'b scene into a remit where clubbers and music lovers the world over were exposed to their party crossover creation.
'It's a record we heard very early on and knew it could break out of the drum and bass scene and crossover' explains Jason.
We put a lot of effort into each event, they're all fully themed. Of course, it was nothing new for the label. It's worth remembering that just before the UK's club nation got swept up in the all-consuming wave of euphoric European trance circa 1997 Positiva was already responsible for breaking chart hits based on epic breakdowns and magical melody riffs. A club classic to this day, BBE's '7 Days and One Week' had already hit No.3 for Positiva back in September 1996 and when the crest of Dutch trance broke in 1997, Positiva spent the next two years giving the Gatecrasher generation some of their most magical trance-floor moments. From Marc Et Claude's blissfully soaring 'La' to Ayla's unstoppably catchy 'Ayla' and, of course, Paul Van Dyk's defining remix of Binary Finary's '1998', each one remains a classic to this day, the very records that snapshot all the unbridled, euphoric ecstasy that the era's fluro-coloured trance scene embodies.
'It's all about timing' says Ellis on Positiva's ability to pick out the hot new trends at just the right moment. 'Keeping an eye on what's going on and trying to hunt out those defining records from any given genre whether it be trance or house or the current electro sound.'
In a present context, no record sums up Positiva's ability to catch the emergent winds better than Chocolate Puma's ass-shaking 'urban house' groover 'Always and Forever'. An underground, infectiously funky house cut, the record has steadily built from the credible house floors, through the classic rites of passage of Pete Tong's Essential Selection to become one of the largest big room house anthems of 06. Perhaps more surprisingly, was the track's breach into the underground pirate stations of urban London and the normally r&b and hip hop dominated 'urban' dancefloors. In September 06, it even found itself being playlisted by BBC Radio's iconic and showcase 'urban' station, 1 Xtra - a precedent for a vocal house track.
'It was a very natural process' explains Ellis. 'It was something we noticed very early on. I was hearing 'Always & Forever' on pirates like Passion and Unknown FM and thinking 'this record is really working in areas we didn't expect'. It certainly wasn't a pre-meditated thing, all about having the right record at the right time.'
As much as Positiva remains dedicated to breaking the biggest singles in dance, its post Millenium era has been equally well defined by its growing interest in developing dance artists to their full potential. Hitting out with chart smashing long players from the biggest names in dance (read Deep Dish, The Shapeshifters, Paul Van Dyk and Ferry Corsten), Positiva has given the top end of modern dance music a deserved presence at the forefront of the albums market. Once again it's an endeavour that is driven by a foresight far beyond the initial glance. Darling of the Dutch trance scene, Ferry Corsten was the golden boy of the late 90s Dutch trance sound, almost single-handedly defining the lowlands all-powerful melody breakdowns through his myriad of synth-rushing releases under countless aliases. Yet beyond his capacity to conjure instant dancefloor euphoria (take Positiva smash 'Carte Blanche' as Veracocha for example), Corsten always held a lesser documented discography that covered deep ambient and even drum and bass. Through his two Positiva released LPs, however, Corsten has had a platform to display the full palette of his innovative talents to the dance music sphere at large. Featuring the ahead-of-its-time electro-trance anthem and chart smash 'Punk', 2004's 'Right Of Way' touched on electro-grooved trance and even melodic pop styled vocals whilst 2006's genre defying 'L.E.F.' took the baton and ran one step further. A perfectly balanced selection of raw electro-house, unique trance fusion and bewitching vocal tracks, 'L.E.F.' firmly established Corsten as one of the most versatile and visionary artists in dance whilst collaborations with Duran Duran's Simon Le Bon, 90s icon Howard Jones and cult rapper Guru added further weight to the project.
Meanwhile in the house domain, Positiva's insightful nurturing of The Shapeshifters has gone the whole nine yards, rounding off with 2006's classy ensemble, 'Sound Advice'. As with all The Shapeshifters' biggest club hits, 'Sound Advice' was a soothing, freshly brewed blend of seductive dance grooves and sweeping, instrumentation but touched on everything from the soulful avant-garde r&b of 'You Never Know' to electro-house in 'Really Feel', guitar strummed downtempo on 'Over Me' and the '80s electro inflections of 'Little Green Men'.
Other major albums have included 2005's massive 'George Is On' by Iranian-American house superstars Deep Dish and 2004's 'Reflections' by the twice-voted world's No.1 DJ, Paul Van Dyk. Both a model ambassador for dance music and one of the most experienced producers in dance, Paul Van Dyk is now currently putting the finishing touches to his fifth full artist album due out in Spring 2007. Collaborations are mooted as being eye-brow archers of the highest order with some of the most respected names in pop and rock due to appear on the trance giant's awaited LP. But then you'd expect little other than the best from the world's No.1 DJ.
'The branch into albums has given us a whole new lift' reckons Ellis. 'It's really allowed us to push artists to progress and develop their sounds to their fullest.'
Most importantly, though, Positiva continues to understand the simple, arm-raising pleasures of a 3am dancefloor without getting bogged down in fashionista snobbery or fake media hype. In 2006, singles releases have ranged from the underground acid house grooves of 'Strobelight' by the MYNC Project and the iconic Danny Rampling to the Soul Avengerz' feel-good funky house anthems and Axwell's sun-licked guitars and seductive bass grooves. At the same time, Positiva hasn't been shy of looking to the past and putting out club happy reworks of classic tracks in the form of Queen Vs The Miami Project's 'Another One Bites The Dust' and Blondie Vs Edison's 'Heart Of Glass.' Both of which have caused quite a stir on the music TV schedules and dancefloors alike.
'We've never been a label that is too cool for school' reasons Ellis on the label's enduring pull towards good quality mainstream dance hits. 'It's always been about balancing what is commercially viable with the tracks that are ticking all the right boxes for the big DJs'.
Countless top ten smashes, numerous number ones and some two hundred and fifty releases under their belt (more than half of which have hit the top forty), it's a simple logic that's pretty hard to argue with too. Positively Positiva - thirteen years of the biggest crossover club records around.