Powerhouse feat. Duane Harden 'What You Need' (Strictly Rhythm, 1999)

The original mix is on side C. Put the record on the deck and the first thing you hear isn't Lenny Fontana's record. Side A of this double pack is the Full Intention Power Mix — eight minutes and six seconds of Mike Gray and Jon Pearn's rework, with the strings and the filter and the build that made the thing a hit. Fontana's own Original Mix, the version everything else is derived from, sits at C1. Two sides in, seven and a quarter minutes, no fanfare. Strictly Rhythm knew exactly which cut the DJs were reaching for and pressed the record accordingly. 1999 was Duane Harden's year twice over. In February he was at number one in the UK singing on somebody else's record; by the summer he was number one on Billboard's club chart singing on this one, which also took him to thirteen at home in the British charts. Two chart-toppers, five months apart, from a vocalist who had been working as a computer engineer in New York not long before. He's credited three times here — lead vocals, background vocals, and co-writer alongside Fontana — and the two women singing behind him are Melonie Daniels and Angee Blake. Daniels is the detail. Harden's own first record, a year earlier, was built around her voice with his production behind it. Here the arrangement is the other way round. TRACKLIST A — What You Need (Full Intention Power Mix) — 8:06 B1 — What You Need (Full Intention Power Dub) — 5:45 B2 — What You Need (Full Intention Dub) — 5:39 C1 — What You Need (Lenny Fontana's Original Mix) — 7:16 C2 — What You Need (Olav Basoski Dub) — 7:00 D1 — What You Need (Richard F. Vox Dub) — 6:21 D2 — What You Need (Richard F. Angels Mix) — 6:49 D3 — What You Need (Acapella) — 2:04 TRACK BY TRACK A — Full Intention Power Mix · 8:06 The plug side, the chart version and the reason the double pack exists. Gray and Pearn take Fontana's track and put money into it: live strings arranged by Stephen Hussey over the top of the filter, a long patient build, and eight minutes of runway. It's the mix a generation of DJs means when they say this record. Logged as 57003, which tells you it came after the original — the label just decided it should come first. B1 — Full Intention Power Dub · 5:45 The Power Mix with the vocal pulled back rather than removed. Shorter, harder, the strings doing more of the melodic work because there's less voice to compete with. This is the version for a set that's already moving. B2 — Full Intention Dub · 5:39 The tool. Six seconds shorter than the Power Dub and noticeably barer — same architecture, less decoration. Two dubs by the same pair on the same side, distinguished by a single word in the title, is a small metadata hazard and a genuine choice on the floor. C1 — Lenny Fontana's Original Mix · 7:16 The record as written. Harden's lead sitting properly forward, Linard's live bass audible as a played instrument rather than a sequenced line, Daniels and Blake behind him, Caruso's mix from Unique Recording in New York. It's a warmer, more vocal, more songlike record than the version that made it famous, and it's the one that documents what the session actually sounded like. Filed at 57001 — the first thing logged. C2 — Olav Basoski Dub · 7:00 The other remix people still argue for. Basoski takes the track somewhere tougher and more European than either the original or the Full Intention side, and the collector consensus is unusually strong on it — one review on the release page calls it the main reason to own the record. Seven minutes, no vocal to speak of, pure drive. D1 — Richard F. Vox Dub · 6:21 Richard F. working for SS Recordings, mixed at Sonic Sound Studios. A dub that keeps the voice — the vocal used as a rhythmic element rather than a lead. The New York end of the remix package, and the one that sounds least like 1999 and most like the club it was made for. D2 — Richard F. Angels Mix · 6:49 The more expansive of his two. Longer, more melodic, more room given to the arrangement. Worth cueing next to the Vox Dub to hear a remixer solving the same brief twice in two different registers. D3 — Acapella · 2:04 Not on the label. Not in the credits. Two minutes of Harden with nothing underneath it, at the end of side D. Essential for: anyone who owns the Power Mix and has never played side C. This is the rare case where the famous version and the definitive version are on the same record and the famous one won — a vocal house record with real strings, real bass and a singer at the peak of a twelve-month run, buried two sides deep behind its own remix. Start with C1. Then put the Basoski dub on and understand why the collectors won't let it go. Subscribe to Strictly Rhythm: http://po.st/StrictlyRhythmSubscribe Web: https://store.strictly.com/ Facebook:   / strictlyrhythm   Instagram:   / strictlyrhythm   Twitter:   / strictlyrhythm   Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/user/strictl...