Smart E’s, formed 1991 in Essex, comprised of Luna-C (Chris Howell), Mr Tom (Tom Orton) and Nick Arnold.
The first tune Smart E’s released was on Boogie Times Records, an offshoot of the parent label Suburban Base Records, and was called Bogus Journey. It was a simple hardcore track which featured samples from the film Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure. It only sold a few hundred copies, which wasn’t unusual for a first release on a small hardcore imprint. They then produced a track sampling the theme from Sesame Street. At the time, many hardcore tracks sampled what could be considered silly things, and as Chris recalls, “the hardcore scene had a sense of humour”. By this time the Boogie Times Records label was no longer used, so this track would appear on Suburban Base. A number of promos were pressed and, quite unexpectedly for the Essex trio, interest in the record skyrocketed. Steve Jackson hosted a house music show on London radio station Kiss FM, and began playing the record every day. Suburban Base and Smart E’s saw an opportunity and realised that the record had the potential to be a big seller. They drafted Steve Jackson to do a remix for the main release of the record. The record was being played at all the raves and on all the pirate radio stations (which were the main channel for hardcore music being played on the air - the commercial stations, other than a select few like Kiss FM, chose to ignore underground dance music entirely). The number of copies of the record requested by the distributor shot up from 1,000, to 10,000, to 50,000. When the record was finally released it reached number 2 in the UK pop charts, which at the time was the highest debut single entry ever.
|Smart E’s - The dizzy heights and the backlash
The success of the Smart E’s track thrust Chris and the Smart E’s into the media spotlight. Many dance music magazines panned the trio as a joke, and, at worst, money grabbers who had only come into the rave scene to jump on the bandwagon and make piles of money. Neither of these had really occurred to the three Essex lads when they went into the studio to make Sesame’s Treet but Chris freely admits now that the tune and the onslaught of copycat records sampling a whole array of children’s television themes, computer games, and old songs did hurt the rave scene considerably, though that was certainly never their intention. Many have argued that in retrospect it couldn’t really be said that they were a rave group which had “sold out”, as the first and second records were novelty records of sorts. Sesame’s Treet was picked up for distribution all over the world, and the Smart E’s were signed up to Atlantic Records in America and toured the states, doing 29 live PA’s in 32 days. Luna-C felt that the group were ripped off by many people during this time, and although the Smart E’s produced one album for Atlantic Records, he didn’t feel that he could continue working under the Smart E’s name. |
