Simon Maginn

I had just come out of a period of what I think you could call frenzied activity: 6 novels over 7 years under 2 names. I was waiting for what came next, and it turned out that nothing, actually, came next. I had entered a career lull. But the music industry was waiting to suck me back in.

I had had an unhappy, unresolved affair with the business end of music in the 1980s. I had spent six long hard years getting precisely nowhere, and the scars were deep. I have always loved music: it hasn’t always loved me back. We had agreed to a sort of uneasy stand off.

Razak started out in my life as a student: he wanted to learn the piano, but had no aptitude and was in a tearing hurry. So I started to play keyboards for him. We spent many long, long nights, Razak and I, in his bedroom studio: the music was trance, synth-heavy and machine-like. The tracks were dance mixes, 10 minutes long and extremely dense. We developed something like a telepathic understanding of each other: I would play, he would record, and I would know just from the way he tapped the computer keys or used the ashtray whether or not it was right. Usually it wasn’t. Raz and me were getting nowhere: the old familiar journey.

But Razak had friends, in particular a DJ who I will refrain from naming. For no particular reason, one hot afternoon we did a ‘session’ with him: I played keyboards, Razak played the computer, and the DJ sat in the producer’s chair, occasionally relieving the monotony by losing something. Division of labour, team work.

The track worked. To my jaded ears it sounded much the same as everything else we had ever done, but the DJ suddenly started jumping up and down and saying, ‘Big track! HUGE track!’. This, apparently, is a good thing. We mastered it there and then, the DJ started talking about Pete Tong and Ibiza, and before I knew what had happened I was hearing it on Radio 1. It was going to be BIG. It was, imaginatively enough, called ‘That Big Track’. (Bigness, as you see, was the theme here.)

But there was more to come: a performer whose name I dimly recalled from a hit in the early 90′s had heard the track and decided he would put a vocal on it. The track could now ‘cross over’ , and within a few months it appeared on dozens of compilations, had charted, and was played a lot even in the kinds of places I would go to. I was hearing it everywhere. I started to quite like it.

Razak and I tried several times to do the ‘follow-up’, but nothing we did came out right. We were a one hit wonder, and we parted company shortly after that.

But it’s still out there. I heard it the other day in the gym I go to, and I still here it in pubs. It goes ‘Daa daa da-da-daa, da-da-da-da, daa da da-da-da’, and you may have heard it too. There is even a video, featuring three women in bikinis (daringly original: watch it here – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZZa-xGIMuA).

I have never been tempted back into the music industry, and I never will. My place in history is assured: highest chart ranking = 72. My name is Simon, and I am a one hit wonder.