100 Greatest Songs of the 00’s #18 Mylo – Drop The Pressure

Released: 2004

Disappearances – not thankfully of the Jimmy Hoffa kind – are quite common in the arts. Often the protagonist finds that having struggled to reach it, the crock of gold at the end of the rainbow is merely full of something else; disillusionment occurs, followed by a transition back to a less mentally and physically demanding straight world.

In the case of Myles MacInnes however the vanishing was one of the strangest of all. Hardly your archetypal industry fodder, the one time resident of the Isle of Skye left Oxford University at the end of the last century with a first class degree in psychology, before – somehow – five years later he released his debut album, Destroy Rock & Roll .

Rooted in clever sampling of 70’s and 80’s soft rock, it was a record that was high on nostalgia but simultaneously Balearic and contemporary, a banger-fest which rarely let up. Radio friendly and equal parts sweet and wicked, this first outing for an almost complete unknown went on to shift 100,000 copies in the UK alone, and the wait for a follow up began straight away in earnest.

Nineteen years later, it goes on. MacInnes surfaced in 2016 trailing clips of new material, stating vaguely that to that point he’d been prevented from releasing anything for legal reasons. Since then, nothing. So let’s take a ride in the wayback machine and love Drop The Pressure again, a tune which builds, falls and bubbles relentlessly, it’s x-rated refrain one for school playgrounds everywhere. Mylo it seems has never been away, but we still may never hear from him again.