Every Song I Love is a series where I attempt to write about every song that I love, or die trying. Sometimes I’ll explain why I love them, sometimes I’ll tell the stories behind how I fell in love with them, sometimes I’ll do both. Most importantly, I hope you love them too.

The Baron of Techno they called him, or at least John Peel did. It was somewhat in jest, but, as these things so often do, it stuck. We knew him as Dave Clarke, one of the resident DJs at Bugged Out in Liverpool. It was the late 1990s and early 2000s a time when, for me and a small cohort of my Manchester student friends, clubbing had become our lives. Bugged Out was the highlight of our month, and his techno sets were the highlight of Bugged Out, always ending the night on a high. Whilst he played 90% techno, his roots were in hip-hop, electro & post-punk, and occasionally we might get a bit of that, or a synth-pop or new wave classic in amongst the relentless beats.

One night, from the depths of the functional techno an unexpectedly catchy synth line emerged, then some semi-spoken, heavily processed vocals, building to an incredibly catchy chorus. The lyrics I couldn’t quite make out “we don’t need to be much of nothing, we don’t need to tear away” perhaps? The crowd went wild. This was the days before Shazam, and we had no obvious way of finding out what this song was. But he played it again the next time we went, and again the time after, and somewhere along the way we found out it was Emerge, by something or someone called Fischerspooner.

I can’t date that first hearing precisely, but it was well before it was officially released (Clarke had a remix on the first single release, so presumably had access to an advance copy). It officially came out in 2001 but failed to make much of a splash, and we all assumed it would remain one of those songs beloved by a few, but soon forgotten and never known by most.

As it turned out, Emerge did not die. Perhaps because they were coming up in New York at the same time as DFA records, The Strokes, Yeah Yeah Yeahs et al (as detailed in the excellent oral history Meet Me In The Bathroom), Fischerspooner started to get hype. They signed to Ministry of Sound for a reportedly huge advance, and prepared for a re-release of ‘Emerge’ clearly their most commercially viable song.

I was excited. I had loved this song for a long time already, and it was about to get the recognition it deserved. I genuinely thought it could and should be a huge hit. I was not the only one. Ministry of Sound cranked up the hype machine still further, going so far as to put out adverts in the music press reading.

1977 : I Feel Love
1983 : Blue Monday
2002 : Emerge

This was widely seen as an act of massive hubris at the time, even more so after the fact. It was as if JJ72 had put out an advert saying:

1980 : Love Will Tear Us Apart
1991 : Smells Like Teen Spirit
2000 : October Swimmer

I may have been one of the few people who genuinely believed Emerge belonged in the same league as I Feel Love and Blue Monday, which is not speaking lightly for me, as they are two of my favourite records of all time. The world, alas, did not agree. Emerge came out and limped to number 25 in the UK, failing to chart at all everywhere else (unless we’re counting the Billboard Dance Club chart or Ultratip Bubbling Under Flanders). This wonderful record had been hyped, heard and rejected.

The band continued on, releasing four albums in total, none of them especially successful, over almost two decades, before splitting in 2019. They were a one hit wonder, whose one hit barely met that definition, and by all rights should now be forgotten. There were a lot of songs and bands I loved 25 years ago that I barely listen to or even think about now. Emerge, though, has stayed with me. If anything I love it even more now than I did then. It’s a giddy, joyous exuberant record, and perhaps quietly more influential than it is given credit for, given a lot of the music that followed that decade.

Some records just stick with people, and the people who love Emerge love it deeply and permanently in a way that is not true of all that many records. It crops up fairly regularly on social media, and occasionally in TV shows. It has 4 million views on YouTube, which is hardly Taylor Swift numbers but more than many bands who were hyped by the music press at that time, and certainly more than almost all the records Dave Clarke was playing.

Even knowing how much I love Emerge, I still surprised myself when selecting my top 50 songs of the 2000s, by putting it top of the list. It was a decade when I listened to a huge quantity of music, when my taste was largely formed. Of the thousands of songs I heard that decade to be my absolute favourite is quite something. Fischerspooner may not have been as commercially successful as hoped, they may have been mocked as style over substance, but they made at least one song that is still loved a quarter of a century on. And for some of us these words still ring true.

1977 : I Feel Love
1983 : Blue Monday
2002 : Emerge