It’s time for Jeremy Sylvester’s UK dance music coronation

It’s hard to imagine, but even Sylvester would succumb to creative burnout. “When that time came, I’d go somewhere else to chill out and come back. I sometimes go to the club to hear something and get re-inspired again, come back on Monday reinvigorated.” He talks about his mind as though it were a bomb that could go off at any moment. “All I need is a little spark, it could be something on the radio or watching TV, I hear a track [in my head] and it sparks me off,” he says, clicking his fingers next to his head.

By the late ’90s, Power was noticing the compatibility of garage and R&B, and employed a strategy of providing bootleg R&B cuts under the table. “At the time, R&B was big, all these big American acts like SWV,” Sylvester remembers. “George used to say to go down the record shops, find these American releases and get the acapellas from them, then bring it back and add your own touch to it.” No R&B record was safe from his hands, and one such alias that achieved notoriety for its bootlegs was Club Asylum, a collaboration between Sylvester and Paul Emmanuel which would grow into a career peak. “A lot of the pirates were loving it, as well as the Kiss FMs and Radio 1s. Every time you turned it on, you were hearing our beats.”

“That’s when the majors got in touch,” he sighs with a weight of importance. “They said, ‘I see what you’re doing. Okay, you’ve took our vocals, but we like what you’re doing’.”

Wiping away the rawness of the original Nice ‘N’ Ripe material with a 2-step sheen, Club Asylum became the producers of choice for bringing garage to sexy R&B cuts — Another Level’s ‘Freak Me’, Ginuwine, ‘What’s So Different’, Adina Howard ‘Freak Like Me’, Dionne Rakeem’s ‘Sweeter Than Wine’ and All Saints’ ‘Bootie Call’ were all given the Asylum treatment. Most famously, their remixes of Shola Ama’s ‘Imagine’ and Kristen Blond’s ‘Love Shy’ chopped up acoustic guitar into serene grooves, and sped-up lyrics to bring out a giddiness in vocal runs. Along with Sunship and Artful Dodger, the duo were responsible for a new form of R&B that was distinctly UK, and you can hear its impact today in the works of Erika de Casier and PinkPantheress (when I asked him about the latter, Sylvester grabs a pen and writes her name down).

But as they reached chart success, the bubble quickly burst. “We were getting asked to do a load of remixes, but just [the same] as the last remix, for someone else,” he explains. “We got tired of that. We’re always looking for something new, but when you’re constantly being asked to make something that’s already out there, we slipped off and started doing our own thing. We just went our separate ways, it was a mutual thing.”