“We were solid, bungling amateurs on little mixing desks”: D:Ream on their road to platinum success with classic 1993 album D:Ream On Volume 1

Their debut would achieve platinum status, peaking at a heady fifth in the UK album charts – propelled by Things Can Only Get Better – a number one smash that takes on more cultural significance with every passing election.

But, it wasn’t an overnight success story, according to the duo of Peter Cunnah and Alan Mackenzie. “It was 11 years to overnight success,” says Peter. “But, when I met Alan in the early ’90s and formed D:Ream – that’s when it really kicked up a notch.”

Peter, armed with a back catalogue of songs, would watch Alan spinning dance music to clued up London clubbers – imagining a middle ground where his lyrics met the house music grooves this captivating DJ was serving up. “I’d watch Al play these amazing records on the weekend,” says Peter. “I was a geek. I’d just hang around the DJ booth and watch like a hawk.

“I’d take note of the sections where the strings would happen, and the breakdown – and how people reacted. I was internalising these things, thinking, ‘I’ll have a bit of that’.”

The pair, now agreeing to collaborate, pooled songwriting savvy with dancefloor knowledge, and out came U R the Best Thing. “It was the first thing we did,” says Alan. “And it just caught fire. Pete Tong made it his Essential Tune, and then the same with the Sasha remix – so it got two, which was unheard of.”

An album was almost inevitable. And the eventual tracks, first made in Peter’s home studio, were given new life after bringing in producer, Tom Frederikse. “We were solid, bungling amateurs on little mixing desks and what have you,” says Peter. “Then along came Tom, and the next thing you know we’re in Jerry Bron’s studio, which was the Roundhouse. He had an E Series SSL, which was the pinnacle. It just had that warmth and that depth.

“Now it was all about building on this sound we had – taking the DNA of dance music, and mixing it with these songs. That was special for us. That was our thing.”

“I had a little home setup then, based around the Atari 1040 STE running C-Lab Creator. It had a little outport on the side for a locking synchronisation unit, which I used to link up to my Fostex M80 8‑track so I could get vocals done on top. Then I had a Yamaha DX7, an Akai S900 with four seconds of sampling time on it, and a Roland S10 sampler – that’s where we’ve got the choirs and strings from.

“So, between that and an Allen & Heath GS3V mixing desk, we managed to make that sound [laughs]. When the record started selling, we could expand more. I finally got up to an Akai S1000 with 12 seconds on it, and that was a revelation. You could maybe have a whole kit running, with the bass and possibly a keyboard. I remember, you had to sample them in on the keys and be careful about the stretch, because you could hear the swap over looping points. It took a lot of time.”

D:Ream On Volume 1 track-by-track

1. Take Me Away

Al Mackenzie: “We’d done U R The Best Thing and Take me Away was a natural progression from that.”

Peter Cunnah: “We couldn’t get that track into its skin, ever. What I’ve learned since then is, don’t spend two days getting the right kick. Stop at the one that’s closest, and EQ it and compress it, and then you’re there [laughs].”

Al: “And, to be fair, the Brothers In Rhythm remix of that was so good we ended up putting that in our live sets. They put the strings in and the lovely flutes…”

Peter: “In terms of the lyrics, I was being ironic. I’d heard so many tracks with, ‘Take me away’ in. I was just commenting on how much people were repeating themselves.

“The video was interesting – we did a lot of work with green screen. And I got a friend, who’s an ex-para, to jump out of an aircraft in Spain dressed as me in the chorus.”

2. U R The Best Thing

Peter: “This was pretty much the first record Alan and I worked on.”

Al: “When I met you, it was something you’d been struggling with to get it to the ‘dance-side’. But, you already had the song.”

Peter: “I’d go and watch Alan play at The Brain club [Soho, London]. I was almost a spectator, making notes and commenting on the tracks he played. I loved it. He played a lot of melodic, Italo piano house stuff. So, Al said he’d come over and listen to the track I’d written.

“I played it to him from the mixing desk and he was like, ‘That’s not right. You need to make that kick drum last for, like, 32 bars’. And I was going, who the fuck’s going to listen to 32 bars of kick drum?!

“He said, ‘It’s not for you. This is for all the DJs, to lock in with the other record they’re mixing.’

“I didn’t know about any of that before. But, that was the real penny drop moment.”

3. Unforgiven

Al: “This started as a remix when we were signed to Rhythm King. Because of that, it’s the clubbiest song on the album.

“We were getting well known for remixes, so just knocked this together. We didn’t use many of the vocals, because [whispers] they weren’t that brilliant.

“Then, as we sat in the studio, we went, ‘Why the hell are we giving this away? It makes no sense whatsoever.’ And we’d got time to write lyrics, and make it our own.”

Peter: “I’d just seen the Clint Eastwood movie, hence the title, and why it’s got that sort of spaghetti western feel to it, with the whips in there and harmonicas [played by Dazed & Confused co-founder, Jefferson Hack].”

Al: “I sent it to Paul [Daley] from Leftfield and he stopped working on their album to remix it. It was their only remix that year, which was really nice of him.”

4. I Like It

Al: “127 – disco heaven! And that’s definitely what the tempo is.”

Peter: “I was in [notorious Leicester Square club] Love Ranch one night and the idea just came to me. Even when I was out clubbing, I had a portable tape recorder with me. It just popped into my head – something Prince-like, disco-y.”

Al: “And this was the one where we discovered flanger for the piano. We were like, ‘Ooh!’”

Peter: “[Backing vocalist] Linda Duggan took that to another level. If you listen to her scat, she’s got a high C, which is just… it’s all power. And she made that record. She absolutely made it.”

Al: “I put the acid in that to make it disco acid. It was really difficult, back then, to get filters to work, especially on the [Yamaha] DX7. They were buried in a load of sub pages and stuff.”

5. Glorious

Al: “This is a favourite of mine. And we did that very early. I think it might be the second track we ever did.”

Peter: “I just wanted something that was more of an instrumental, just to break up all this, you know, ‘songiness’ that was going on. Then I had a friend who could play flamenco come over with these beautiful, old Spanish guitars. I just sang him the riffs, and he played them in. And the vocal things are just me singing into an SM58 and then I sampled it on the [Akai] S900, and just chopped it up a little bit. I don’t know, we’d taken it on a little bit of a journey on the album, so far, and this track sort of broke things up.”

6. So Long Movin’ On

Peter: “At the start, the sound you hear of the key and the door shutting – that’s literally me leaving my little flat in Ladbroke Grove, heading around the corner, going to the tube station, and getting up to Camden to go to the studio.”

Al: “For the beats, we’d been listening to lot of Tony Humphries, in addition to a lot of the New York house guys.”

Peter: “It was on groove D in [Atari ST sequencing software C-Lab] Creator, with a little bit of percentage – 53%. There’s all crossover points in the grooves, in the way they block it down to the sub beat on all four of them. You can write it out, how it moves them. I’d made this hand-written chart. So when you go to B, there’s still a bit of A overlapping B, and that’s D. Creator had better grooves than modern Logic does.”

7. Picture My World

Peter: “This was another one of my catalogue songs.”

Al: “With loads and load of loops over the top.”

Peter: “I was a huge fan of [’70s Brit rockers] 10cc. So I loved turning synths into sort of a shoreline and really setting the atmosphere. I just wanted something that sounded warm and intimate, because that’s what the song’s about. And I got all these lovely chords that were just kind of, to me, interesting, because I just wasn’t doing a block chord, like a three-chord trick or a four-chord trick. It’s got lots of, you know, interesting moments going on within it.”

Al: “And you got the old falsetto out as well, didn’t you?”

Peter: “I had a higher range, then. And then [Sasha’s production legend] Gaëtan [Schurrer] showed up with that blue suitcase keyboard, with lots of wires. And he could pull any sound you liked out of this thing.”

8. Blame It On Me

Al: “That was one of your stock songs from Ireland, wasn’t it?”

Peter: “I had an indie band in Belfast, before I met Alan, called Tie The Boy. We were signed to U2’s Mother Records, and they brought us to London. So, I have a rock and roll version of this song. Then, when it came time to put the album together, I played this song to everyone around me, and they thought it was great. But, it was very much a sort of indie thing, and I had to move it into a sort of Soul II Soul vibe.

“At that stage, I’d got the first Gota Yashiki sample CD and the Zero-G one, which were my sole suppliers of samples at the time, apart from the bits I’d pick up from Alan on vinyl. So, this track is based off a loop we got off one of those, and we bumped it up a bit.”

9. Things Can Only Get Better

Peter: “This track was a breakthrough for us in terms of getting our sound together. It came out on a four-track EP in 1992. And I remember filling my mountain bike’s panniers with vinyl and biking around London. I went down to Black Market, I went to Rough Trade, I went to see Boy’s Own, and a couple of other places. And I managed to drop five off, on sale or return. And, then, the next Friday, I went back and one said, ‘I want 20. So, I had to go cycle up home and grab them.”

Al: “I took 25 to one shop and [Balearic beat icon] Alfredo was there and said,’ Oh, I’ll have one’. Then everyone saw that, and they all wanted one. I sold all 25 out of the box in about two seconds!”

10. Star

Peter: “I’d already had the kernel of an idea about the theme of this, and a lovely set of chords, but I didn’t have the chorus.

“We were working on the album. And it was getting close to like, I’ve got to finish these lyrics. And one particular night, I spent the whole night getting up. And every time I went to sleep, another line would come into my head. And that happened on and off until I eventually had it. And it just seemed that a song with lines like, ‘I love you till the end of time’ would be a nice way to finish the album. It’s funny, because I was just talking to [former D:Ream keyboardist and now renowned TV star and particle physicist] Brian Cox about what ‘time’ is. And he says, ‘Well, we don’t really know’.”

Fresh from their debut appearance at this year’s Glastonbury festival, D:Ream are currently finishing up what will be their as-yet-untitled fifth album. Their greatest hits package, The Best Thing, dropped at the end of last year on CD, digital download and DSP. And the New State Music label has recently released a full remastered version of the On Vol.1 album featuring four bonus tracks, available now.

“Apple Music will be doing a special Spatial Audio with Dolby Atmos version of the album as well,” says Peter. “It’s a new kind of three-dimensional sound thing that they’ve got, and they’ve chosen that album as, I don’t know, a guinea pig, which is great. We’ve had no hand in it, but I’m looking forward to hearing it”

For all the best links to D:Ream’s music and socials, hit up their website .