Hip And Cool

All Records

Hip And Cool was one of the founding ideas behind The Young Punx, although it has never had a full formal release.

We used to open our very first DJ sets with samples from Howard Jones’ “New Song”, focusing on the key phrase: “I don’t want to be hip and cool / I don’t want to play by the rules.” It seemed a very compact way of expressing the nascent TYP identity: a puckish middle finger to the dominant DJ mentality of keeping everything deadpan serious, which always seemed counterintuitive when the whole point of clubbing is to have fun.

Our approach to DJing was fairly counter-cultural too. We built everything in Ableton Live, which in 2003 was essentially unheard of, allowing us to run multiple tracks at once, in key and in time, and make live mashups on the fly. Twenty-odd years later, with sync and stem separation in common use, none of this sounds particularly radical. But in 2003, when vinyl still dominated DJ culture, our oddball approach got us noticed very quickly: guest mixes on BBC Radio 1 and XFM, followed by our first live show, which somehow turned out to be an aftershow gig for Radiohead at Earls Court Arena (!) after our experimental approach to DJing caught the band’s ear.

Those early sets always opened with a live New Song / Hip And Cool mashup, setting out our stall before we went any further.

We also intended Hip And Cool to open our debut album, and for a while that looked increasingly likely. Howard Jones’ management ended up becoming our own managers following this early collaboration, as well as our work on Mohito’s “Slip Away”, which also sampled Howard.

But Hip And Cool became one of those tracks that fell by the wayside. I could never quite get it to sound the way I wanted, and the rights issues around the sample were complicated. In the end it never made the album.

This version did eventually get a small official release as a bonus track on the Japanese CD edition of our third album, All These Things Are Gone. It also shares a lot of production DNA with our debut release, “Dance With Someone Else”: essentially the same track, but with the Howard Jones sample in place of the Madonna sample.

After a few enquiries from fans about where they can actually get hold of Hip And Cool, I’m now putting this mutant 2003-meets-2014 version up on Bandcamp for download.

I’m still in touch with Howard, and I do hope one day we’ll make a definitive new version and give the track the proper release it never quite had.

For now, though, we have this.

Throw off your mental chains!

(Wooo hoo hoo.)