Raw Stylus was a London-based
dance music
Dance music is music composed specifically to facilitate or accompany dancing. It can be either a whole piece or part of a larger musical arrangement. In terms of performance, the major categories are live dance music and recorded dance musi ...
outfit
Clothing (also known as clothes, garments, dress, apparel, or attire) is any item worn on a human body. Typically, clothing is made of fabrics or textiles, but over time it has included garments made from animal skin and other thin sheets of ma ...
whose core members were Jules Brookes, Ron Aslan, and Donna Gardier.
Originally, Raw Stylus released
white label White label may refer to:
* White-label product, a permitted replication and rebranding of a product
* White label record, records with plain white labels attached.
* White Label Music, an independent record label based in the United Kingdom
* ''Wh ...
vinyl records
A phonograph record (also known as a gramophone record, especially in British English) or a vinyl record (for later varieties only) is an analog sound storage medium in the form of a flat disc with an inscribed, modulated spiral groove. The g ...
into the London
club scene in the early 1990s, and played live with an expanded band (featuring keyboard players
Ski Oakenfull and Rickardo Reid, drummer Andrew Missingham, bass player Yolanda Charles, guitarist Nemo Jones and backing vocalists Sharon Shannon and Lucy Vandi). "Pushing Against the Flow" was a popular underground song, and later became the title track of their album. Early singles included "Bright Lights, Big City", "Pushing Against the Flow", "Many Ways (Mo' Wax)" and "Use Me (Acid Jazz)".
In 1995, they released the single, "Believe in Me", which reached
number 1 on the US
Hot Dance Club Play
The Dance Club Songs (also known as National Disco Action, Hot Dance/Disco Club Play, and Hot Dance Club Play) was a chart published weekly between 1976 and 2020 by ''Billboard'' magazine. It used club disc jockeys set lists to determine the mos ...
chart
A chart (sometimes known as a graph) is a graphics, graphical representation for data visualization, in which "the data is represented by symbols, such as bars in a bar chart, lines in a line chart, or slices in a pie chart". A chart can repres ...
.
It was a minor success in the United Kingdom reaching number 66 on the
UK Singles Chart in October 1996.
After original singer Deborah French left, Donna Gardier replaced her and they recorded an album. Their sole album was
recorded States
State most commonly refers to:
* State (polity), a centralized political organization that regulates law and society within a territory
**Sovereign state, a sovereign polity in international law, commonly referred to as a country
**Nation state, a ...
ide, with
Steely Dan
Steely Dan is an American rock band formed in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, in 1971 by Walter Becker (guitars, bass, backing vocals) and Donald Fagen (keyboards, lead vocals). Originally having a traditional band lineup, Becker and Fagen cho ...
record producer
Gary Katz
Gary Katz is an American record producer, best known for his work on albums by Steely Dan. Katz has also produced numerous other recording artists and assisted in the discovery and signing of a number of subsequently successful acts. He has four ...
,
and an array of musicians including cameos from
Donald Fagen
Donald Jay Fagen (born January 10, 1948) is an American singer-songwriter and musician who is the co-founder, lead singer, co-songwriter, and keyboardist of the rock band Steely Dan, formed in the early 1970s with musical partner Walter Becker ...
and
Bernard Purdie
Bernard Lee "Pretty" Purdie (born June 11, 1939) is an American drummer, and an influential R&B, soul, funk and jazz musician. He is known for his precise time-keeping and his signature use of Tuplet, triplets against a half-time backbeat: the P ...
. The group
toured as a nine piece until they split at the end of 1999. Brookes went on to become managing director at the award winning
pointblank Music School based in
Hoxton
Hoxton is an area in the London Borough of Hackney, England. It was Historic counties of England, historically in the county of Middlesex until 1889. Hoxton lies north-east of the City of London, is considered to be a part of London's East End ...
, London.
See also
*
List of number-one dance hits (United States)
''Billboard (magazine), Billboard'' magazine has published Billboard charts, charts ranking the top-performing dance music songs in the United States since 1974. Originally a top-ten list of tracks that garnered the largest audience response in N ...
*
List of artists who reached number one on the US Dance chart
A list is a set of discrete items of information collected and set forth in some format for utility, entertainment, or other purposes. A list may be memorialized in any number of ways, including existing only in the mind of the list-maker, but ...
References
British electronic music groups
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