Mark McCabe discussed the chart-topping hit with JOE.
MANIAC 2000 (25th Anniversary Edition) is now available to stream for the first time ever!
Before the re-release of the the chart-topping hit Mark McCabe sat down to discuss the anniversary edition with JOE.
When asked what fans can expect from the new version, McCabe replied: “We fixed a few problems.
“We really didn’t know what we were doing when we first released the track it was pretty much just thrown together.
“So I managed to at least make it sound like your head doesn’t turn inside out when you’re wearing headphones, that’s the first thing.”
Despite making these changes, McCabe said it was ‘really important to keep the original feel’ of the fifth biggest selling single in Irish chart history.
“It wasn’t going to be ‘this is a new version’, I wanted it to be that you would listen to it and almost go, that sounds exactly the same. That’s the way it should be.”
The hitmaker said he enjoyed going back and reconstructing the hit, which was orginally made in a cricket club.
“When we recorded it everything just went wrong. There was the kids that were in the place, this cricket club where we recorded it. They were too loud and they were louder than the PA system, the speakers that we had, so that all started distorting and falling apart.
“When we actually brought it back to try and mix it into a track, we didn’t have the right audio, so we had to go back into another studio, overdub the audio and then try and make it sound like it was normal.
“So if you listen to the original, you can actually hear there’s two vocals sort of sitting on top of each other.”
McCabe revealed that he walked away from the track for a while due to ‘confusion around what was happening with music’.
“What was happening in Dublin in particular was not really sort of dance music focused. There was a scene for sure, because all the super clubs from the UK were having an influence over here.
“All of this kind of cool, credible dance music was around, but at the same time, there was this kind of commercialisation of dance music and that’s where it really took off, but it’s where it stopped being so underground.
“So as a dance DJ or as a DJ releasing a dance track as far as mainstream media was concerned, the underground and the cred heads were like ‘this isn’t dance music, this isn’t what we’re about’.
“There was a real struggle for me as an aspiring DJ to try and match what Maniac was to what I was kind of doing in the spaces because I was playing techno or tribal house or progressive house or trance on one side, but then on the other side it was like ‘oh you’re the guy that does maniac’, ‘do maniac’ and it just didn’t fit, it didn’t seem like it was right at the time,” continued McCabe.
The artist continued to explain how he struggled with being defined by the song’s success.
“I struggled with it and walked away from it because it was just too much… [There was] hate and negativity towards it, and it wasn’t really where I wanted to be musically.
“This was my calling card. This was supposed to be: ‘Let’s just put this out, let’s see what happens.’ It wasn’t supposed to be the definition of what I’m about.
“I knew at the time I said, you know, in interviews, ‘this is going to take me 10 years to get over it, and 25 years later, still not over it.”
He continued to say he has ‘no problem with it now’.
“I’ve released records on Twisted, which is an American house label founded by Danny Tenaglia, which is one of the coolest labels on the planet. I’ve had two 12 inches out with them.
“I’ve remixed for Gavin James, that’s done stupid numbers across Europe and on Spotify. I’ve had collaborations with the Sunset Brothers, stuff like that, so I’ve managed to do all of these things in a way that’s kept me satisfied, but that nobody really cares about because it’s just about Maniac.
“The realisation that Maniac means so much to people is what settled it to me, because I realised that it isn’t about what that Trainspotter DJ thinks of the track, at the end of the day it’s about the person who’s on the other end of it and is listening to it and has made that part of their life and has lived the last 10 or 15 or 25 years with that track as part of the soundtrack to their life, and that’s something that..it’s a real privilege to have that bestowed on you, if that makes sense.
“A lot of people, that’s what they aim for, their whole career, and they might never get there,” he concluded.
Maniac 2000 spent 10 weeks at the top of the charts in 2000, and now, it is available to stream for the first time ever.
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