Apollo 440 - Electronic Beats, Electric Guitar

Between the late Eighties and early Nineties, the British electronic scene was in a state of ferment. Many DJs were busy reshuffling ambient, techno, acid-house, trance and dance sounds, while at the same time giving birth to new genres like drum'n'bass or jungle. Important electronic acts were taking their first steps, such as Orbital and Underworld, while already established rock bands like Primal Scream were beginning to evolve their sound towards greater experimentation, blending disco-dance, electronics and pop-rock. Finally, in the mid-Nineties, artists like Fatboy Slim, the Chemical Brothers and Prodigy emerged, whose success, almost in passing, brought rave culture into the global spotlight and, above all, drew the attention of press and public alike to a movement that composer Ian Williams had dubbed "big beat".

While these groups were climbing the charts almost immediately, over in Liverpool two brothers, Trevor and Howard Gray, were raising their hands alongside James Gardner and Norman "Noko" Fisher-Jones, making a name for themselves with their dance remixes of various well-known artists. The group chose the name @440, taking inspiration from the musical note A (whose frequency sits at 440 Hz) and from a synthesizer model called the Studio 440. Almost immediately they changed it to Apollo 440, in reference to the Greek god, although for many years it would be written out directly as Apollo Four Fourty.
Always keen to range across very different sounds and assemble them together with an approach that was at once retro and attuned to more contemporary tastes, Apollo 440 would over time become one of the best-known names associated with the dance and big beat scenes, even though in reality the English group pursued an original path that drew on a great many other sounds.

Although they had already started out playing clubs back in 1991, it took Apollo 440 a while to get into gear. They only began entering the British charts in 1994 and 1995, with the singles "Astral America", "Liquid Cool" (featuring inserts of latin-rock riffs and exotic percussion) and "Don't Fear The Reaper" (a remix/cover of Blue Oyster Cult), and the international charts two years later.
During this period they set up their own label, Stealth Sonic Records, and made their debut, with a few session guests in tow, with their first album, titled Millenium Fever, which included the aforementioned singles and was recorded in London (where they had meanwhile relocated). It's a tribute to French postmodern thinker Jean Baudrillard, who is referenced more than once. The tracks are, all things considered, fairly predictable but catchy and danceable, stretching out the grooves with beats up to 140 bpm, over which the English duo lay keyboard melodies and samples in small doses. For this debut they lean mainly towards a dance sound enriched with futuristic textures, dashes of house inspired by Leftfield, trance-adjacent atmospheric touches and small dub phrasings (as in the evocative "Omega Point", inspired by the homonymous spiritual concept coined by the French Jesuit De Chardin).
The group also has a thematic fixation with cryogenics and the Alcor company, to the point of referencing them in several tracks, such as "Liquid Cool" itself and the title track. The most successful piece is perhaps the closing "Stealth Requiem", steeped in a noir, urban atmosphere, embellished by electronic effects that range from effective backdrop to driving melodic backbone.
But this isn't yet the Apollo known to the wider global public, and all in all they're still a bit removed from the big names of big beat, which was exploding at the time.

Real recognition for Apollo 440 arrived in 1997 with Electro Glide In Blue, which also shows a significant step forward in the quality of the songs on offer and in the personalization of their sound. In the meantime, Gardner had left the group, which was now essentially a trio made up of founding brothers Gray, Noko, and various occasional guests. The title is a nod to a film by James William Guercio, which in turn referenced the stereotypical motorcycles of American highway patrol officers. The album shows a much more ambitious band, more aware of its own potential, trying to make its musical vision concrete by taking apart and reassembling the most disparate sounds, breaking free of previous tracks and drawing on more varied influences.
The best-known and most successful singles are the dynamic, catchy "Ain't Talkin' 'Bout Dub", which remixes Van Halen's "Ain't Talkin' 'Bout Love" in a jungle key, and the supremely catchy "Krupa", which samples the rhythms of "The Ballroom Blitz" by glam rock band The Sweet, as well as paying homage to Polish jazz drummer Gene Krupa. Also fairly popular is the exotic "Tears Of The Gods", with its southern riffs, maracas, hip-hop scratching and well-measured electronic effects, which many probably remember from the advert for a very famous drink (hint: "Welcome to paradise").
But the band is at its best on the more atmospheric, stylistically detailed tracks, such as the electro-country of "Altamont Super (Highway Revisited)", the downtempo/chillout of the nocturnal title track (which owes a great deal to Underworld and features Ewan MacFarlane as a guest with an expressive, intense bluesy vocal turn), or the atmospheric "Pain In Any Language", which navigates between electro-dark and trip-hop (the melancholy Bowie-style voice this time belongs to Billy MacKenzie, shortly before his death), and above all on the closing "Stealth Mass In F#M", which blends new-age atmospheres with tribal percussion (featuring Betty Gray's aching female vocal).
There's also no shortage of funky touches (as in "White Man's Through"), surf-rock mixed with spy-story film motifs ("Carrera Rapida"), disco, drum'n'bass ("Vanishing Point") or breakcore ("Raw Power", not included on every edition).
It's a varied, driving, highly melodic and atmospheric record. Unfortunately for the album, it arrived after the commercial boom of other famous electronic names who were getting more attention at the time by virtue of their sharper, more immediate identity: the Chemical Brothers had already gone international with their debut "Exit Planet Dust" in 1995 and were simultaneously releasing the acclaimed "Dig Your Own Hole"; Prodigy had already put out "Music For The Jilted Generation" in 1994 and, around the same time, "The Fat Of The Land"; only Fatboy Slim had yet to release his second LP, "You've Come A Long Way Baby", which would go on to be a massive hit.
Apollo 440 seem to compete in terms of chart and dancefloor popularity for their singles, but they're trounced in album sales, where they probably come across as too cross-genre and ill-defined compared to the names above.

Having broken the ice this way, the English group finally achieve full stylistic consecration in 1999 with Gettin' High On Your Own Supply. Although the press lumps them in with big beat, Apollo 440 are certainly more "borderline", dance-oriented and even rock-leaning, to the point that on this album they move effortlessly between the most varied electronics and guitar-driven singles. What their actual intentions are isn't entirely clear, to the point that the band itself seems to ironically wonder as much on the opener "Are We A Rock Band Or What?...", obviously composed by nothing more than... a synthesizer. And throughout the record the spirit one picks up on is that of a breezy electro-rock, which draws just as naturally on 70s rock bands as on disco music, hip-hop effects and 90s club electronics.
In truth, if the group has one purpose, it's precisely to churn out catchy singles, purely for fun and without pretension. Their most famous song of all time is "Stop The Rock", which between films, adverts and video games is perhaps one of the most famous tracks of the Nineties, with its gutsy riff and lyrics laced with a touch of irony ("stop the rock, can't stop the rock", "dancing like Madonna into the groove" etc.). It's actually based on "Caroline" by Status Quo, from which it lifts the very same riffs. The group, however, never credited them, instead crediting it as an original composition along with guest vocalist Ian Hoxley.
The album remains, in any case, the band's most cohesive and mature work, never skimping on melodic sparkle and fizz even in its most atmospheric digressions. From the more retro tracks ("Cold Rock The Mic", vaguely glam) to the sunnier ones (the hit "Lost In Space", from the soundtrack of the film of the same name), Apollo 440 have by now firmly established their style around verve and eclecticism. The stadium anthem is perhaps "Stadium Parking Lot", an epic march in which a Led Zeppelin-esque riff à la "Heartbreaker" is driven along by an anthemic vocal, scratched effects, melodic background keyboards and a simple yet thoroughly irresistible drum part.
Strong electronic components animate the intriguing "The Machine In The Ghost" (a title lifted from The Police, who in turn were quoting a phrase coined by philosophers Gilbert Ryle and Arthur Koestler), set in a trip-hop/downtempo scenario with noir atmospheres. "Heart Go Boom" is colourful and schizoid: it samples reggae, country, surf-rock sounds and gunshots from western films, all immersed in a jungle framework, with the usual guitar flourishes and alternative-rap influences thrown in. "Blackbeat" sounds like a tribute to Kraftwerk who suddenly morph into the Chemical Brothers in a more frenetic vein. The album is closed out by "The Perfect Crime": muted, nocturnal atmospheres, saxophone and dark-jazz effects, perhaps suggesting to the listener that the "perfect crime" the English group pulled off was convincing the public that an electronic act could naturally slip into the clothes of a rock band, only to change costume once again.
The record is well arranged and rich in melodic potential, but the Damoclean sword hanging over the group is having stitched together ideas and "sonic quotations" that had already been around on the scene for a while. This is reflected in the commercial success of the album, which proves contradictory (it climbs noticeably in the British charts, but drops sharply in the European ones) and which would decline rapidly straight afterwards. Meanwhile, all the charts were about to be flooded with new trends. Few electro-rock bands, such as Grand Theft Audio, took their cue from Apollo 440, but they lasted little more than an album.

In 2000 the group released an energetic, previously unheard track for the soundtrack of the film "Charlie's Angels", which proved very successful, though it's little more than a recycling of "Cold Rock The Mic". The English group also went back to doing remixes, this time however under the moniker Stealth Sonic Orchestra.

Having kept a fairly low profile behind the scenes, the group returns to the fore four years later with Dude Descending A Staircase (an ironic title which, together with the cover art, parodies a famous painting by Marcel Duchamp). The album is the English group's longest work, a full 18 tracks spread across two discs for over an hour and a half of music enriched by various guests, and follows a retro-futurist attitude tinged with the sounds of both Isaac Hayes and St Germain. The first disc sees their style take a step back, setting the guitars aside for most of its runtime and reconnecting with dance music, partly with 70s soul and elegant, consistently catchy disco-funk idioms. The second disc gives more room to acid-jazz, chillout and downtempo influences.
There's certainly no shortage of melodic, enjoyable moments, both in the more atmospheric passages ("Christiane", "Children Of The Future") and in the livelier ("Time Is Running Out", "Bulletproof Blues") and vintage ones (the title track, amid lounge keyboards, futuristic electronic flourishes and brash vocal lines in collaboration with hip-hop group The Beatnuts).
The group's ironic streak is - as already mentioned - plainly evident, delivered with absolute nonchalance (exemplified in particular by tracks like "Disco Sucks", a catchy, mocking 80s-style dance number, perhaps just a touch repetitive, which seems to parody Daft Punk, who had become a global success phenomenon only a few years earlier). But overall the group seems to have fewer genuine ideas to put on the stove, and several other tracks come across as classier filler, if not downright predictable and mannered ("1, 2, 3, 4" is basically a slightly funkier, Jamiroquai-esque "Stop The Rock" that recycles Kraftwerk-ish vocal hooks; "Diamons In The Sidewalk" is a brief sonic nod to Bark Psychosis and Mogwai but goes nowhere; "Rope, Rapture & The Rising Sun" is a downtempo/r&b/dub piece that's too flat and watered-down). Trimming the runtime and the number of tracks to focus the effort would probably have helped, because, taken individually, there are plenty of intriguing ideas scattered across the LP. This impression is also backed up by the fact that half the tracks are credited not to Apollo 440 but to the Stealth Sonic Orchestra, which is always the same group but with more ambient-oriented intentions: perhaps the release is the result of condensing what were originally meant to be two separate releases.
Unfortunately for the group, Dude Descending A Staircase was perceived as "behind the times" by both public and press, and proved to be a commercial flop, failing even to chart in Britain. Other 90s electronic acts were luckier, continuing to tap into listeners' evolving tastes, reinvent themselves, and find success.

At this point begins a long period of relative silence, during which the group composed minor soundtracks under the name Stealth Sonic Orchestra, broken after almost ten years with The Future's What It Used To Be. This time it's their shortest album, just over 40 minutes, opened by a track already under three minutes long, driving and energetic, "Stay Frosty". Even from the title it's a tribute to the English group's more celebratory side, and it comes across as a sincere attempt to retrace the sounds they'd explored in the past, combining 80s electronics and rock with more current sounds, right up to the Dubstep that emerged in those years, itself partly inspired by big beat. The album thus ranges across anthemic tracks (the title track), which brush up against dance-funk ("Motorbootee"), disco-rock ("A Deeper Dub") and even arena-rock ("Fuzzy Logic"), as well as more atmospheric, bluesy and psychedelic pieces ("Love Is Evil"). The closing "Music Don't Die", finally, sounds as if it were bringing together U2 and Archive. The record still shows a few lacklustre moments, but overall it feels sharper than its predecessor, mainly because it's also blatantly nostalgic and therefore driven by clear goals, even if somewhat formulaic ones. All in all, it's a work recommended more to fans of the group looking to experience a more "modern" variant (in the sense of updated to trends that had emerged a few years earlier) than to anyone seeking sonic revolutions, not least because promotion for the album was practically non-existent. Indeed, neither the wider public nor the scene itself seems to have taken much notice.

And here, for now, Apollo 440's recording career comes to an end. Having long since "faded" in popularity after a brief (and intense) golden era, dotted with appearances in over 50 films, TV adverts, video games and other media outlets, they have nonetheless managed to embody a quotation-happy, witty, breezy, cross-genre and sparkling spirit with spontaneity, never once sacrificing melody along the way.

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