Deee-Lite - Groove Is In The Heart (12" Meeting Of The Minds Mix)

Deee-Lite - Groove Is In The Heart (12" Meeting Of The Minds Mix) / 12 Inch Extended Remix (HQ Audio)

Groove Is In The Heart is a product of DJ Dmitri (Dmitri Brill) and Lady Miss Kier (Kierin Kirby)'s time on the New York club scene in the 1980s. The couple met when Kier sold Dmitri a pair of silver platform boots and a glitter blue spacesuit for his band, Shazork. They would go out most nights of the week around this time with Dmitri DJing and Kier selling outfits she had made to other clubgoers. In the late 1980s the couple formed Deee-Lite along with the Korean-Japanese artist, record producer and DJ Towa Tei and began producing funk and electro inspired dance tracks. In 1988 Lady Miss Kier sent a demo tape and fan letter to Bootsy Collins asking if he would feature on their records should they ever get a record deal. To their surprise he wrote back and said yes, and Kier was in touch a year later when Deee-Lite signed to Elektra Records. Kier had already written the lyrics to Groove Is In The Heart and worked out the melody whilst listening to a Herbie Hancock record ('Bring Down The Birds') that Dmitri was playing. The track was built from this combination, backed by a drum loop and penny whistle sound from Vernon Burch's 'Get Up' and a number of fills including cowbells and a finger pop. Bootsy Collins features on the 12" mix here and more extensively on the "Bootsified to the Nth Degree Mix" - his contributions were excluded from the 7" radio edit (known as the 'Peanut Butter Mix'). The icing on the cake is a 16-bar rap by Q-Tip of A Tribe Called Quest who visited the studio during the recording and after listening to the track asked for 15-minutes to write the lyrics, then delivered the vocal. The resulting track is joyful and a gift for nightclub DJs, uniting crowds by not fitting any genre of the time (the closest perhaps being De La Soul's sample-heavy 3 Feet High And Rising album which also featured Q-Tip and which sampled Parliament-Funkadelic). Groove Is In The Heart was released in August 1990 and reached number 2 in the UK chart. It was kept of number one spot by a reissue of The Joker by The Steve Miller Band even though the chart reported sales as tied for the week in question. The tie-breaker at the time was to look at whose sales had improved most during that week. The rules were changed after this tie to allow joint number ones in the future. However a more detailed look at sales figures showed unrounded numbers meant The Joker had been the outright winner by a handful of copies anyway. The track here is the extended Meeting Of The Minds mix from the UK 12" single. As with all Deee-Lite releases the single featured cartoon-style artwork conceived by Lady Miss Kier, and Groove Is In The Heart was supported by a similarly styled video featuring their friends from the New York club scene and a cameo from Bootsy Collins. Deee-Lite's 1990 album World Clique reached the top 20 in the US and UK album charts and whilst the album was well received and well liked it did not deliver any further top 20 hit singles. Their only other top 40 hit was Power Of Love which reached number 25. The band broke up in 1995 after the end of Dmitri and Kier's relationship, with Groove Is In The Heart their finest moment as Deee-Lite, with over 2 million record sales worldwide and over 150 million streams. Year: 1990 Label: Elektra Cat no: EKR 114T