Bonkers Part 5

 

One soppy love song too many amongst other things meant that towards the end of 1998 I was completely disillusioned with happy hardcore. I was still listening to other styles of dance music and had started listening to non-dance music too.

I did however think this was just a blip and that things will change and it will get better again. Fast forward to 1999 and having encountered one stuck up twat too many who listens to house music I started to get back into happy hardcore again.

That's how I ended up purchasing Bonkers 5 which I bought 2nd hand on cassette from Cash Converters. The problem was that this was from 1998 which I still considered a bit of a dark period, but more importantly it was 1999 and I was more interested in what was happening at that moment in time. A year really made a difference in those days.

As a result this never really got much of a listen. The fact I had it on tape rather than CD didn't help as if I was going to listen to a tape I was more inclined to listen to one from a rave. 

A decade or so later this was the only cassette I had which was also available on CD. I tried giving it away to a charity shop but they no longer accepted cassettes. I ended up giving it away to a Cash Convertors equivalent where the person behind the counter thought it was a computer game initially.

Onto the music then and once again we have the Hixxy, Sharkey and Dougal line up. This time though Hixxy was no longer on Essential Platinum. Instead he had a label called Legendary Music and 6 tracks in his mix were from that label. The only one of these records to get released was "Back In Business" by Hixxy & UFO which ended up coming out on a different label.

Also amongst these 6 tunes was a vocal version of "Legends" from the Bonkers 3 album which naturally wasn't as good, but not bad. The record "New Day Dawning" on the other hand is cringeworthily bad.

Having rarely featured on any of the Bonkers albums to this point, there are 3 Vinylgroover records in the Hixxy mix with 2 of them as part of Elevate. Me and a mate used to call him Mr Cheese and the tunes "Bright Eyes" and "Together Again" certainly live up to the name but are amongst the better tunes in the mix. The other is "Virtual Dreams" which is a fantastic record and gets the balance right of being not too cheesy and not too freeform.

Speaking of freeform, the Sharkey mix is somehow a big improvement on his previous 2 efforts. The tunes "Warped Reality" by DJ Energy and "Distant Dreams" by Sharkey himself are the standout records in the mix. I still wouldn't buy it as a stand alone mix though.

Dougal is very much flying the flag again for Essential Platinum in his mix with 9 of the 16 tunes coming from the label including 8 of the first 9 tracks. Of these, 4 are remixes of older records and to me they illustrate how the music had changed in that time. Confusingly there is also a tune called "Back To The Future" by Dougal & Mickey Skeedle which is a different tune to the one of the same that Dougal & Mickey Skeedle released in 1996. The best one from Essential Platinum in the mix in my opinion is "Peace Of Mind" which features Jenna on vocals, but this wasn't released until 2002 and was seemingly never played at raves.

Outside of Essential Platinum it's really the good and bad of cheesy vocal tracks. There's the Unique (aka Styles) remix of "Shooting Star" which I think is better than the original and I do like "Higher Ground" by Unique. I get irritated with "Better Day" by Faber though because of the autotune vocals that Cher was doing around that time on it.

Bonkers 5 had to battle with the fact this wasn't a good time for happy hardcore. I quickly became obsessed with all things rave in the mid-90s and it was a big part of my youth. As a result I grew to like some of the cheese that came out later on that perhaps I wouldn't have otherwise. If this album was my introduction to happy hardcore I probably wouldn't have ever got into it.

It was clear that something needed to change and by the time Bonkers 6 came out something did change. More on that next week.