After gaining underground recognition in the early 1990s, Basement Jaxx burst properly into the electronic music scene in 1994 when they started holding a club night of the same name in Brixton, South London. This is also where they met Daft Punk and bagged a gig as the opening act for the French electro-house duo's first concert tour.
However, for Felix Burton and Simon Ratcliffe international fame would wait until the late 1990s, when Felix Buxton and Simon Ratcliffe signed to the legendary XL Recordings and began working on their debut album.
“When we recorded Remedy, we had an Atari sequencer; press go and all the lights would start blinking because everything's talking – all these little organisms doing their own thing,” Simon Ratcliffe reminisces about magic in a Future Music magazine interview from 2015.
Remedy was an instant success, and rocketed to number four in the UK albums chart. Singles Red Alert, Rendez-Vu, Jump n' Shout, and Bingo Bango hit a nerve among club-goers and radio listeners alike. Basement Jaxx' winning recipe of house, dancehall, garage and drum N bass, with hefty sprinkles of influences from world music, was like a breath of fresh air in the land of club music, at a time when some thought the scene had started taking itself too seriously.
Photo: Tore Sætre / Wikimedia
The duo went from strength to strength after Remedy, and have released seven albums in total so far. They have also collaborated with artists like Kylie Minogue, Yoko Ono, Justin Timberlake, Pharrell Williams.