What’s on my mind today is Robert Miles.
He wrote the club classic banger Children in 1996. I was only 17, and was an indie-kid rather than a clubber… but that song hit me, too.
Still does.
I never understood why clubbers took uppers when they could just surrender to the music.
Anyway, Robert Miles died in 2017. I didn’t realise.
A Google wormhole about why the song makes me feel the way it does taught me a few things—including why Miles wrote the song in the first place.
He got the idea as a tribute to kids who were dying as Yugoslavia ripped itself apart in civil war… but the song itself came about to save club kids’ lives.
In Italy in the 1990s, there was a phenomenon called stragi del sabato sera, which roughly translates to Saturday night slaughter. Kids would go clubbing, often driving a long way, and get high on music and probably other stuff too, and would have the most appalling car accidents on their way home.
Miles wanted to do something about it, so he wrote Children, which is much slower, gentler, more trancey, to bring clubbers down at the end of the night and send them on their way in a calmer frame of mind.
He also opened the doors for the trance music movement, for which I am profoundly grateful, because trance music is one of my sound blankets.
What’s on your mind?
Happy writing!
TTFN,
Vicky
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Notes in the Margin
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