Tom Tom Club Tranquil About Spice Girls Sample
Talking Heads/ Tom Tom Club duo Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth owned up to being big fans of the Spice Girls this week, after press reports revealed that 90s Girl Power pop quintet have recorded a new song using elements of their 1981 groundbreaking hit ‘Wordy Rappinghood’.
The Spice Girls track was briefly posted on Youtube after being ‘uploaded from a cassette that member Mel B previously sold at an auction’, Digitalspy reported, provoking a remarkably relaxed response from Chris and Tina.
“Tina and I were highly amused when we got the Google alert about this in Tokyo,” Chris told Skrufff. “It’s not really a sample but a replay of our keyboard part, an interpolation. This was news to us.”
“Tina and I thought they were great and they had an intelligent humour.” Chris added. “Too bad Posh can’t hang for another go round,” he said.
The track was previously covered by electroclash scenesters Chicks on Speed in 2004 and more recently Ed Banger starlet Uffie and has become widely recognised for being one of the standards of pre-house music dance music.
Discussing Tom Tom Club in 2004, the Prodigy’s mainman Liam Howlett eulogized them for making ‘real f**ing club sounds’ while Orde Meikle from Slam went even further.
“Wordy Rappinghood is one of the seminal all-time songs, it rings all kinds of bells in our early musical development,” he told Skrufff (also in the same year).
“The beats, the hooks, the sounds and the overall feel of the track were amazing; it was fresh and happy, it had so much in it and it caught both our ears. It reminds us of a really eclectic era.”
Chris chatted further about the genesis of the track this week which they recorded at Compass Point studios in Nassau at the invitation of Island Records guru Chris Blackwell who promised them that if he liked it, he’d commission an entire Tom Tom Club album.
“It was the first song that Tina and I ever wrote on our own and Tina’s sisters Laura and Lani were a big part of it. We put everything we had into it,” Chris recalled.
“When we recorded this song during a Talking Heads hiatus in 1981, we were trying to create a track that club DJs would play so that we could hear it at Danceteria and the Mudd Club. It’s great that people are still talking about it.
How much do we believe the creative process to be magical? We believe in magic. We also believe in hard work,” he added.
Chris concluded by correcting a Wikipedia entry which claims Wordy Rappinghood ‘uses part of the 1971 Rolf Harris song “A Ram Sam Sam’.
“We have never sampled Rolf Harris or heard his song,” said Chris.
“Tina and her sisters learned the “Ram Sam Sam” chorus during their childhood in France in the year 1959. They believe it originally came from North Africa and made its way to the schoolyards of France.”
Jonty Skrufff: https://twitter.com/djjontyskrufff
