100 Greatest Songs of the 80’s #96 Stakker Humanoid – Humanoid

Released : 1988

It’s arguable that one way or another, the members of Future Sound of London have been responsible for two of rave’s most potent and material diversions into the mainstream. The second of these – 1991’s opalescent Papua New Guinea, released under their name – was the musical embodiment of being at one with the strangers around you, synthesised birdsong and all.

The first was, at the apex of their hysteria, the one the tabloids warned you about. Stakker Humanoid were in part Brian Dougans, later of FSOL. Their spawn took the lysergic darkness of a bad trip and turned it into an endless loop of futuristic abandon: starting out as an ordinary sounding club track, gradually the intensity built and at the dropping of the title phrase – sampled from an arcade game – everything started to spiral dangerously out of focus.

Also a hit, for worried social commentators it signaled that, heard for the first time outside the underground, this drugs and dares a go-go movement was a corrupting force threatening the moral purity of our nation’s youth. And they loved it.