The early-90s were a golden age for techno innovation. Slam’s ‘Positive Education’ is certainly compelling aural evidence. Not bad for a track whose genesis took a mere 30 minutes…

‍Origins

By 1993, Slam (Stuart McMillan and Orde Meikle) were firmly established as the faces of Glasgow’s post-acid house dance scene. As DJs, their explosive sets at The Sub Club (also home to the city’s other feted duo, Harri and Domenic) were already the stuff of legend. This status was further burnished with the release of their first single, ‘Eterna’ in 1991 and the label which issued it alongside subsequent tracks by One Dove and Rejuvination, Soma, of which they were co-founders, with Jim Muotune and Glenn Gibbons (Rejuvination) and Dave Clarke. In 1992, Slam and Rejuvination recorded a one-off track, ‘Seduced’ as G7. As 1993 dawned, McMillan and Meikle were desperate to get back in the studio…

Stuart: “At this point we shared the studio with Jim and Glenn. They were our engineers – we still worked with engineers at this point – and also the co-founders of Soma. It was a kind of collective: the four of us and Dave [Clarke] and a guy called Nigel Hirst. We built the studio in Nigel’s basement. We literally ran Soma from there.” 

Stuart: “All these ideas had been building up and we were itching to get in the studio. The basis of the track came together in about half-an-hour. You would know the track as ‘Positive Education’ from that 30-minute recording. I think we sampled a Todd Terry kick drum. Everything was sequenced through a Ensoniq EPS sampler.”

Orde: “It had 12 seconds of sampling time. That’s all we had to work with.”

Stuart: “It would worryingly crash every fucking 10 minutes. That was running everything. Then we had the idea for the hook. Which was run through a Jupiter 6.”

Orde: “My favourite, well, our favourite keyboard.”

Stuart: “There was one sound on there… this oscillating sound, which basically if you let go of it would eventually just go off into nothing. We ran that through the Roland TR909 which has a trigger output – you can trigger external sources using the rimshot at the trigger. This was running a 16-note trigger which was sent to the Jupiter 6 for the main oscillating bass line.”

Orde: “I think the sound Stuart is referencing is commonly known as the Walla-walla. You know: ‘Walla-walla-walla-walla-walla-walla-walla-walla…’”

Orde: “Because the J6 is an old analogue keyboard it was quite temperamental. We made the mistake of turning it off expecting the sound to be there when we turned it back on again. Of course, when we turned it back on the sound wasn’t the same. These old keyboards sound different when they heat up. We managed to get it back. But for the rest of the session, the J6 stayed on. It stayed on for days.”

Stuart: “Within that first half-an-hour we had the kind of deep bonky sound: bom-bom, bom-bom. And there’s two of those. There’s one from a DX 100 Yamaha, which is a kind of stabby sound, and the other one is a sample. We sampled the sound. I can’t remember what it’s from, some Belgium record or something. And then we played it in harmonies on the keyboards to get that distorted sound and then we added the delay. So, all of that was kicking round. The basic drum pattern –  TR-909. The hi-hats were in there.

Orde: “I think the bassline was a sample from a Steve ‘Silk’ Hurley record.”

Stuart: “We’re gonna get sued now, aren’t we!”

Orde: “It was recreated, you know!”

Stuart: “You know when you have something that’s good. And that usually happens quite quickly. I remember me and Orde were standing outside the door going: ‘This is brilliant. This sounds fucking brilliant.’ I think for fine touches and tuning we were in there for a further two weeks.”

Orde: “At least. One of the things I always remember about it was that structurally it didn’t matter what bit came in and what bit dropped out. It didn’t matter how you put the parts together, it just always sounded good.”

Stuart: “Yeah, they were modular. They were interchangeable. You could have many different arrangements of that song. That was the other thing that took a long time – getting the arrangement there. Obviously Glenn was putting his touches on the Roland R8. Because it’s not just a straight-up techno track. It has a lot of swing and it has a lot of groove in there as well.” 

Orde: “Dancefloors in Glasgow at that time were quite hedonistic. The nights’ always built to a euphoric kind of climax. I would be surprised if there wasn’t some form of a nod to the dancefloor in the way it was structured.”

As ever when it comes to creativity there was a certain amount of serendipity – alongside judgement – involved. For most of its gestation, ‘Positive Education’ had a very different hook running throughout – something closer to the Sheffield sound than Glasgow. And that wasn’t the only eleventh-hour switch…

Stuart: “We had this bleepy hook in there. Had we left it in it wouldn’t have been the same record. At the eleventh hour I swapped it out for strings, which I think I played on the DX 100. The melody basically going through the track – the string melody – was added at the eleventh hour and that’s what made it sit perfect.”

Stuart: “I think the vocal sample was brought in quite late as well. You brought the vocal sample in didn’t you? Was it from that NuGroove track?”

Orde: “You are lining up a litigation case this year! But, yeah, it was a vocal sample from the end of an old NuGroove record. We’ve never been able to find it again - thankfully we’d sampled it and still have that.”

Stuart: “The cool thing about it is it says: ‘Positive education always corrects error’. And then the guy goes: ‘Peace’. So, it spells Peace. We used that ‘Positive education always corrects error’ a few times in the track, but the main vocal hook is ‘Positive education’.”

Stuart: “At that point we were big fans of the Dance Mania label. We were big fans of Detroit techno. Back then, techno was a broader church. It wasn’t just about tracks sounding similar and homogenised like they do now. It was quite a broad range. Obviously music from Germany sounded different from music from Chicago which sounded different from Detroit. We were big fans of DJ Pierre’s Wild Pitch.”

Orde: “Belgian New Beat.”

Stuart: “Then again I don’t think it sounds like any of those things. I think if you were to have a proper distillation of what went in there you could see those influences, but those influences were kind of collected and put into this track. It probably wasn’t what a guy from Chicago would have put into a track. But people from Glasgow who were privy to all this imported music, would have thought: ‘Right, I’ll take a bit of that, and I’ll take a bit of that, and I’ll put it all together and see how it sounds.’”

The reaction

The amalgamation of all these influences led to a track that floored everyone that heard it. Brutally hypnotic yet allied to an insistent all-encompassing tenderness, the experiment in mind-bending oscillation resulted in a tension that built and built until it exploded in an orgasmic climax and dancefloor-slaying delirium. 

Stuart: “It was made for our residency at the Sub Club. Anything we make in the studio is always kind of something that we wished we bought that week. ‘Positive Education’ was definitely a product of everything we were playing and certainly the end product was something that we played to death – probably so much so that we couldn’t play it again. Actually, we played it again recently. But yeah, it’s known as the albatross, because it’s the biggest track. Well, it’s not the biggest track, it’s known as a defining track in the career of Slam, to the point where releases that came after would always be described as: ‘Not as good as ‘Positive Education’.’ When we put out ‘Step Back’ from the ‘Snapshots’ EP [1995], that ended up becoming a mini-album because we didn’t think any of the tracks were as good as ‘Positive Education’. So, we had to put more on it… Turns out ‘Step Back’ is a bit of a classic as well.”

Orde: “I remember going down to London, going to The Cutting Room and getting it cut and getting that first acetate. And bringing it back. If I remember rightly, it was played in The Sub Club for the first time. And the reaction was, yeah… [affects stunned silence…]”

Stuart: “We played it at The Sub Club that night and at least 10 people came up to the booth and went: ‘What the fuck is that record?’”

Orde: “The reaction was instant. We knew straight away. I remember the goose bumps on the back of my neck watching the club explode to this record. The second time we played it was a place called Boogie Buffet down on the harbour in San Francisco and it had exactly the same reaction.”

Stuart: “The weird thing about that record is it kind of reached so many different people. People like Jon Pleased Wimmin played it and then Richie Hawtin and the Detroit guys. They were like: ‘This record’s sick’. We played in Detroit and they were down, all the Detroit guys. We idolised all these guys, and they came down to hear us play.”

One of those very same Detroit pioneers Kenny Larkin described it as one of the most perfect techno records ever. But it was techno that owed as much to Chicago house as it did to the Motor City groove. And then there were the European influences too – from Belgian New Beat to the man-machine rhythms of labels like Djax-Up Beats…

Stuart: “In the early-90s there wasn’t as much what you would call hard techno. I mean the Chicago stuff, the Dance Mania stuff, that had a groove element to it. A house guy would have said it’s not house. And maybe a Detroit guy would say it wasn’t techno. Maybe it sits somewhere in-between. But it’s definitely not tech house! It’s a techno track. A techno track with a melodic influence.”

Orde: “It kind of magically appeared. As Stuart said, that first half hour. You just knew. Well, we knew we liked it.”

Stuart: “It came together frighteningly quick. Sometimes you have no idea why something happens. I also think our lack of musical knowledge at that point was a bit of an asset. I kind of err towards the rudimentary. I’m not saying the track is rudimentary, but had we learnt how to read music and all that I don’t think we’d have made a record like that. There’s things that shouldn’t fit together, but they do. We had no interest in rules – or learning any.”

Stuart: “It was the record that opened us up. We started getting on flights and playing places. It was our calling card to start doing gigs abroad really.”

Orde: “It was amazing how far it travelled. We were getting licensing requests from absolutely everywhere across the globe. It also was a calling card for the label. It kind of broke Soma to a huge audience. The number of demos we were sent went through the roof. Lots of people wanted to release on Soma after that.”

Stuart: “We had a lot of Chicago guys submitting stuff, Felix Da Housecat… a lot of Detroit guys were submitting demos to the label. It definitely brought people in. Because things were quite isolated and things were less homogenised, you had people from different areas making different tracks. You had a lot of great records that were really unique. Things like (Joey) Beltram’s ‘Energy Flash’. No-one went and made another ‘Energy Flash’. And then Dave Clarke’s ‘Red’ series. As a DJ it was interesting putting those sounds together in a set – a record from Detroit, a record from London… a record from Glasgow… you had to make all that work.”

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It was also the record that turned two young neophytes from Paris, Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Man de Homem-Christo, on to Soma…

Orde: “Yes, it was. That’s why they came to Soma. That’s why they presented their first demos off the back of having heard ‘Positive Education’.”

Stuart: “They met us in Paris because they’d heard the record. The Euro Disney rave weekend.

Orde: “We met them at a restaurant called Chartier and then we went back to one of their friend’s flats. And that was the first time we heard the demo of ‘Alive’. And yeah, the rest is well documented.”

Afterlife and legacy

Over 30 years on and the track has lost none of its irresistible potency. And as a pair of producers who subscribe to the Drexciyan maxim that techno is nothing without innovation it still sounds incredibly fresh. 

Stuart: “It’s taken a long time to sit back and go: ‘Yeah, the albatross is cool’. We dig the albatross. [But] I’ve never stopped loving it. Like we said, it was a track that we spent more time on than any other track perfecting. There’s not a thing in it that gets on my nerves. I can listen to other tracks of ours and I might think: ‘Oh, I wish we’d spent more time there’, but ‘Positive Education’ we fine-tuned. I can’t find anything in it that I’d change. If we’d left certain things in and not changed them at the eleventh hour we might have looked upon it differently and other people would too. It’s funny how these things come together.”

Orde: “Mary Anne Hobbs is a big supporter of it. She plays it every couple of weeks basically!”

Stuart: “I think it’s fucking playlisted on 6 Music. When I’m driving I hear it all the time, but it’s not the right mix that they play. It’s a remix that we didn’t like.”

Orde: “The first remixes came from Luke Slater, Derrick Carter and Richie Hawtin. All three of them took it in different directions, equally well.”

Stuart: “To me, techno is all about the sounds – you can’t imagine how they were conceived. When you make techno it should sound like machines have made it. It should sound like you wouldn’t know how to do it. Usually, when we know how to do something we get bored of it really quickly. We’re always trying to achieve the unachievable.”

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This feature first appeared in issue five of Disco Pogo. Which you can buy here.

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