This is a request I had from one of my subscribers. Side note guys and i don’t
promote this enough. If you guys have topics you’d like to see me cover go
use the link in the description box and submit as many ideas as you wish
cause i look at it quite frequently. Today let’s talk about whatever happened to the British group
EMF. They undoubtedly had one of the biggest hits of the early 90s with unbelievable but fell off
the radar afterwards and would soon be struck by tragedy. Stay tuned for the full story .
Hailing from the English region Forest of Dean vocalist James Atkin,; drummer Mark Decloedt,
bassist ; Zac Foley, and keyboardist ; Derry Brownson would meet in school and play in
different bands around the local music scene. They would come up with the monicker EMF which
stood for Epsom Mad Funkers, a term that was coined by a writer of New Musical Express for
fans of the group New Order. In the early 90’s as the band rose to prominence there was a lot
of media coverage over what EMF stood for with The washington post who profiled the group in
1991writing ‘The band officially claims it stands for "Epsom Mad Funkers." But if you follow the
pop scene at all, you've heard another meaning: "Ecstacy Mother {expletive}", which you can hear
in a rude, manic chant heard on the flip side of their hit single.” The band’s drummer would tell
the paper "I think the latest one we've heard was 'Eat More Fruit,' " And there's some that I
wouldn't like to repeat. I remember one show, a girl came up with a list,of a hundred different
names she had made up. I'm sure the {British band} KLF get the same problem" he'd say.
The four members would meet keyboardist and guitarist Ian Dench at a local battle
of the bands contest. Dench proved to be the missing piece for the band as he had already
been playing in the music scene for nearly a decade mostly in the group Apple Mosaic.
Dench would drop out of his art program Oxford University to pursue music and soon learned
that his run down home he lived in was next door to a serial killer named Fred West.
After Apple Mosaic fell apart, Dench would be dumped by his girlfriend who thought his
prospects looked pretty grim. He would recall to the Guardian. I hitched a lift home and the lorry
dropped me on the M50. I remembered this cool kid called James that I’d met at Glos Music Co,
who had kept saying: “You should come to the Forest of Dean. We’ve got this great band.
We wear Afghan coats and play death metal.” I phoned him from a call box, 10 minutes later
he arrived with Zac, we went out and got drunk and I didn’t go home for three days" he'd recall
Dench who was older than the rest served as a type of father figure for the band
and gave them a musical direction. Dench lived in the town of Gloucester, but his bandmates
hailed from the small village of Cinderford. Dench suggested to the LA Times that some of
EMF’s perspective and personality were tied to the isolation of their village life revealing
“People in Gloucester (glaster) always say, ‘Oh, don’t go to Cinderford, funny people there,
funny people.’ But they’re really kind of warm, friendly, energetic, drunken, mad people,
inbred sort of. Some small community that’s kind of gone wild in the middle of these woods.
That’s the most notable thing about the people in the band, is that they have that sort of
oblivious energy, do their own thing. I think that’s one of the driving forces.”
After adding Dench to the lineup they would hold rehearsals at a clothing store owned by Brownsen.
Brownsen would tell Seattle Times "We didn't sell a lot of clothes. It was just a good
place to hang out, listen to records and get wrecked. I finally went bankrupt. So I had to
do something else. We got the band, and it's been decidedly downhill ever since" he'd say.
By the point Dench joined, the band already had a name with EMF, but hadn’t yet written any songs.
One of the first sources of inspiration and the biggest song the group wrote would be their huge
hit unbelievable. That girlfriend who broke up with Dench served as the inspiration behind the
track with him telling the guardian One day, I was riding my bike home, still obsessed with
this girl who had dumped me, and the idea just came to me: My dad was a classical guitarist,
so I’d learned classical guitar and also loved the blues. The guitar riff goes from
blues mode to flamenco mode, like the two conflicting sides of my life" he'd recall
Frontman James Atkin would tell the Guardian how their they wrote the song and their first
album recalling“We’d sit around Ian’s mum’s piano with this really primitive synthesiser
and wrote the 10 songs that ended up on Schubert Dip. I said “I want to be Chicago house, Detroit
techno” but Ian pulled us back into crossover indie/dance. Ian had Unbelievable pretty well
formed. The band was initially unhappy with the original sound on their debut record schubert
dip and brought in a new producer with Dench telling the new york times "More than the music,
E.M.F. are about an attitude. And that attitude comes more from punk than anywhere else."
As the 80’s came to a close, young people in the UK
turned turned to a new drug culture and rave scene. It was this culture that seeped
into EMF’s music with Dench telling Fred Bronson’s Billboard Book of Number 1 hits
“I’ve always had a white-rock background — the Smiths, Echo And The Bunnymen,
that type of stuff. I was coming from that direction more than sort of hip-hop. But the
hip-hop thing was all around us, and you couldn’t help picking up on it he'd say.
The band would blend together guitar rock with dance music & The washington post would write
about the group’s fans “At an EMF show, you're likely to encounter voguers, rockers, slam-dancing
stage-divers and teeny-poppers, crowds which ordinarily don't hang together.”A lot of the media
coverage of the band woud lump them in together with other british bands with the washington post
writing in 1991 Traditional rock music hasn't been making it on the charts lately. Dance music rules,
and in England that goes double, with London's influential warehouse/rave scene dominated by
DJs and house and hip-hop. EMF joins a wavelet of young British bands -- Jesus Jones, Happy Mondays,
Charlatans UK, Pop Will Eat Itself -- who figure if you can't beat 'em, pick up their beat.
EMF soon started staging concerts in local barns and pubs
in addition ot having their own mini-raves with Dench telling the new york times
"There'd be about 100 people messing about in the woods, getting drunk,
skinny-dipping and having fun," .
It didn’t take long for the record labels to invite the band to London to play showcases
for them, but instead the band turned the tables inviting the labels to their neck of the woods,
allowing them to witness the local scene that EMF had helped foster..
Atkin would tell The Guardian.” People were literally climbing through the pub
windows trying to get in to our gigs. Before we knew it, Virgin,
Island and EMI were offering us big bucks. We looked to American hip-hop for fashion,
and we used our first advance to buy really big dodgy puffer jackets like East 17.
EMF would be signed by label EMI after only four gigs under their built.. Spin magazine
would claim that the band only signed with after their label rep agreed to swim naked
across a lake at 3 in the morning.Less than half a year after signing with EMI,
EMF’s single unbelievable would become a worldwide hit. Apart from being one of
the most popular songs of the early 90’s it was also notable for it’s use of sampling.
The ‘Oh’ part of the song was sampled from comedian andrew dice clay. It would be Def Jam
the record label owned the rights to that sample with Dench recalling to the Guardian, “we couldn’t
get hold of anyone in the Def Jam office to clear it. We were flown out to Los Angeles to meet EMI
and I happened to see Rick Rubin, the founder of Def Jam, sitting in the Rainbow Bar and Grill on
Sunset. I asked if he’d clear the sample, he said: “Fax my office in the morning” and he
did it for free. The success of unbelievable pushed their debut record to go platinum.
As the band hit worldwide fame the british press fawned over them with melody maker labeling EMF
as and i quote “the Sex Pistols of indie dance crossover” while Spin magazine would claim that
Axl Rose called himself a fan and offered the band a chance to open for his group.
But the band also had their detractors. Some claiming they were a manufactured
act that with NME referring to them as and i quote New Kids on The Block but with attitude.
But the sudden rush of fame took the band by surprise with the group’s drummer telling the
washington post "We did it in this real budget studio, and you know, we were all excited about
just recording anyway," "Suddenly, everyone's saying you're No. 1, your album's selling a
million or whatever. And you don't know how to feel because it's just happening so quick."
…The English press build you up and knock you down as quick as you can. And you get lazy journalism
where people keep comparing us with other bands," On top of dealing with fame and the British press,
the band soon hit controversy and legal problems with their follow up single titled Lies,
which opens with John Lennon assassin mark david chapman reciting the lyrics to the
Lennon song watching the wheels. Lennon’s widow Yoko Ono was infuriated with the track
and threatened legal action against the band and their label to have it the song removed.
The band’s drummer would tell the Washington Post "We're having to re-press the album,"
"All the copies that are left now with Chapman on, that's it -- once they're gone, they're
gone. We've attended to the court business, and we've paid our fine. None of us had got anything
against John Lennon. He was a legend and everybody knew him and respected him, and we didn't want to
glorify {the murder} at all. It just fitted the mood. But some people did get hurt, obviously,
so . . . We still use it live, though" he'd say. Within just a year the band was selling out
venues in America including the 4,500-capacity Hollywood Palladium
The band would put out an EP titled unexplained in 1992 that offered glimpse of where the band was
headed in the future. Dench would tell billboard in 1992 “The EP was a testing ground to see how
people took the change in direction and to see how comfortable we were with it” That change in
direction would see the band take the dancing beats that propelled songs like unbelievable
and put them on the backburner embracing a more rock sound. The band didn’t care about being
commercially successful telling billboard that there were no big singles on their proper follow
up effort. And the record label EMI seemed fine with this admitting to billboard that Stench would
appeal to hardcore fans of the band, the half a million people who bought the group’s debut
album before Unbelievable became a huge hit. As for their other half a million fans who took to
the group after the single blew up Dench would tell billboard “people who were into
us because we were five good looking blokes will be far more interested in boyz 2 men now
and good riddance to them.” The band’s second LP and their follow
up 1995’s Cha Cha Cha both proved to be commercial disappointments. The band would break up in 1997
with James Atkin woud tell XSNoise why the band split up in 1997 following their
third record which underperformed revealing it did make it hard because you have to be
selling records to have a record deal and you have to have a record deal to pay your wages.
When you’re that age you’re really confused, you don’t know why things aren’t happening
the way you want them to. Simply we didn’t make a great record. Stigma didn’t sell that well either
compared to the first album. We were all growing up as people and doing our own thing, the gang
mentality had gone out of us a little bit. We were maturing and having girlfriends and going
off doing other projects, we weren’t all living in the same town. In hindsight looking back,
I can see that’s how we lost our way after all that success you kind of lose yourself a bit
The band would reunite a total of 5 times starting in 2001.. Biut Sadly, one year later In 2002,
bassist Zac Foley died of a drug overdose at the age of 31. and they put out their first album of
original material with this year’s Go Go Sapiens. Outside of the band the members have been pursued
ther musical projects with Guitarist Ian Dench being a senior executive at Epic Records in New
York and co-writes songs regularly for some of the biggest popstars in the indsutry,
including Beyone and Shakira. . That does it for today’s video guys
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