# 1983     Utah Saints-        SOMETHING  GOOD

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          Utah Saints, London Records, 1992


      BILLBOARD CHART
          ACHIEVEMENTS:
             Club Play:  # 7
          Modern Rock:  # 7
       Maxi-Singles Sales:  # 26
        Hot 100 Singles:  # 98


GLOBAL CHART ACHIEVEMENTS:
           # 4  in the UK


    Top 20 at  MATT RADIO
   This massive dance hit originated in the clubs.

This track samples a vocal hook from the Kate Bush song CLOUDBURSTING.

  Utah Saints are a One Hit Wonder at MATT RADIO.


Formed in Leeds, England in 1991, the dance-metal duo Utah Saints was led by Jez Willis, a onetime member of the industrial group Cassandra Complex who during the late '80s had turned to DJing in local clubs.  While working the club circuit he met fellow DJ Tim Garbutt, whose passion for house music inspired Willis to begin creating house tracks of his own.  Garbutt played one of Willis' tapes to strong crowd response, and together they honed the song which eventually became Utah Saints' self-released debut single, 1991's "What Can You Do for Me."  The track was built around liberal samples of Annie Lennox's voice on the minor Eurythmics hit "There Must Be an Angel Playing with my Heart."  Of the one thousand copies originally pressed, one made it to the offices of ffrr Records, which immediately signed the duo to a contract. 

Within three months of its wide release, "What Can You Do for Me" sold some 170,000 copies in the UK, landing in the Top Ten of the British pop charts.  Utah Saints' self-titled debut LP followed in 1992, proving successful in the US as well when issued on London Records.  After issuing the EP Something Good, Utah Saints opened for U2 on the Zooropa tour.  Nevertheless, the duo's relationship with ffrr quickly soured, and despite having signed a six-album deal they exited the label in 1996, leaving a completed LP on the shelf.  Upon signing to Echo Records, Utah Saints finally resurfaced two years later with the single "Rock."  They remain active on the live scene in the new millennium, performing DJ sets in Europe as recently as February 2005.

Sampling alternative diva Kate Bush's airy vocals from her song "Cloudbursting" (the first time Bush authorized any such assimilation of her work), "Something Good" is a fast, fun ride.  Willis and Garbutt warp and twist Bush's lyric "I just know that something good is gonna happen" every which way they can, creating a mesmerizing rave-busting anthem to joy.  The song is stunning in its power to get a dancefloor moving.  It's an enduring favorite of DJ's worldwide, even those in rural southwest Florida:  for the first two years of its internet broadcast, MATT RADIO incorporated the "Something Good" chorus into its nightly opening theme.

Poised stylistically and chronologically between the cut-and-paste acid house of Bomb the Bass and M/A/R/R/S and the towering trip-hop of the Chemical Brothers, Utah Saints were undoubtedly ahead of their time.  It took The Prodigy until 1996 to popularly fuse guitars to techno and set stages alight around the world.

On their website, Garbutt and Willis defend their creative appropriation of other artists' material.  "Sampling has always been around in one form or another, and Utah Saints see it as an honest way of using other people's music in another context, as opposed to being 'influenced' by another band and trying to sound exactly like them, as happens with many (especially guitar) bands," they write.

"Also, a lot of critics have no problem at all with samples of instrumentals, which happens a lot in hip-hop and rap records, but they have a problem if the sample is of a vocal.  It's getting better now, though, and people are beginning to see the merits of sampling, as opposed to just the 'bad' side."


sources:  Jason Ankeny, allmusic.com
              Tim DiGravina, All Music Guide
               phase9.tv
               Kurt B. Reighley, trouserpress.com
               www.utahsaints.info