Jack Your Body

In January 1987 Jack Your Body, a house single by the Chicago producer Steve “Silk” Hurley, reached number one on the UK singles chart and stayed there for two weeks. It was the first house record to do that. Farley “Jackmaster” Funk’s Love Can’t Turn Around, with Darryl Pandy’s gospel shout, had already cracked the British top ten in 1986. Hurley’s record finished the job. A music that had been a local dialect of disco, made on drum machines in apartments and in the wake of the Warehouse, was for a fortnight the most popular single in the country. Official Charts lists it as LON117. Alexis Petridis, writing in the Guardian on 15 June 2011, put the number-one date at 18 January 1987 and noted the absence of the usual promotional machinery.

The record is a drum-machine pattern and a chant. Kick, an off-beat snare, a rushing hat, a bass that pumps. The words are the title, jacked until the phrase is a rhythm. There is no verse to learn and no singer to put on a television couch. Britain sang a Chicago dance instruction. That is the whole pop event. House producers in Chicago had been cutting records like this for the clubs already. The chart did not invent the form. It told a different country that the form could be a number one without becoming a song.

Later house number ones arrived with singers, videos and campaigns. Jack Your Body is the one that got there almost mute. If you want the British story of house, start with Pandy’s shout in 1986 and then with Hurley’s chant in January 1987, catalogue LON117, two weeks at the top, no conventional push. The Warehouse had already done the cultural work in Chicago. This single is the week Britain’s chart admitted it.

Sources

• Official Charts, Steve “Silk” Hurley, Jack Your Body, catalogue LON117: two weeks at number one in January 1987.
• Alexis Petridis, The Guardian, 15 June 2011: 18 January 1987, Love Can’t Turn Around in the UK top ten in 1986, and the lack of conventional promotion.