- 30 years on, Carlos Hawthorn tells the story of an acid house anthem.
- Rewind is a review series that dips into electronic music's archives to dust off music from decades past.
Before Adam Tinley, AKA Adamski, topped the charts in Belgium, Zimbabwe and the UK with "Killer," his collaboration with the singer Seal, he had had a smaller hit a year earlier called "N-R-G."
"I was the first instrumental act they'd had on Top Of The Pops for a decade and they didn't really know how to put me," Tinley told me over the phone. "I had a guy that MC'd with me, Daddy Chester, but he wasn't on the record, so he was just dancing and then they made me use these cheesy BBC girls with trainers with tinsel on them because… Argh fuck! Sorry, my wife just put a really hot cup of tea in my hand."
Tinley, speaking from the UK, was a hilarious interviewee, quiet and polite before peppering his stories with sound effects and random bits of German. He began with the day he produced "Killer," a "Tuesday morning or something like that" in summer 1989. Back then, he lived in a small bedsit above a mini-cab office on York Way in North London. Every day, he'd bang out at least one new track. This particular tune, originally called "The Killer" because "it sounded like the soundtrack to an assassination scene in a film," took him about 15 minutes to make.
Tinley thinks he debuted "The Killer" later that year at the closing party of Amnesia in Ibiza. It was just another "throwaway" track bulking up his live set. But Seal, who heard it for the first time in Tinley's studio several months later, felt differently. The pair had recently hung out on the dance floor at Solaris, one of London's best clubs at the time. Tinley remembered Seal as the guy who had given a demo tape to his roommate and MC, Daddy Chester, at a seminal UK rave called Sunrise 5000 in May '89.
"He was in a jazz-funk band touring bars in Thailand, and he'd just come back," Tinley said. "A friend of his said, 'Oh, you gotta check what's been going on in England while you've been away!' So he took him to Sunrise 5000 and they walked into this massive warehouse with 8,000 people and I was playing."
Tinley admits he "wasn't really looking for a singer." He was already forging a decent career playing live with a keyboard, drum machine and Daddy Chester. But him and Seal hit it off, plus Tinley "loved his voice." After picking out "The Killer" from four or five options, Seal got on the mic and laid down two verses.
Seal cooked up the famous chorus—"Solitary brother... solitary sister"—with Guy Sigsworth, a pop mastermind who went on to work with Bjӧrk, Britney Spears and Madonna. (He's now a professor of 16th-century harpsichord music with a penchant for death metal.) The final version of the track, now renamed "Killer," was recorded on January 27th, 1990, in London's Advision Studios not far from Trafalgar Square, where, on that same day, thousands of ravers had gathered for Freedom To Party, a rally against the introduction of the Criminal Justice Bill. Tinley and Seal took breaks from recording to join in the drinking and dancing with their friends.
"I used eight tracks of a 48-channel mixing desk," Tinley told The Guardian in 2013. "All the music came from my keyboard, which I played using two fingers. I added a Roland 909, which was the staple house music drum machine after pioneers such as Mantronix used one. The track has a mournful feel: a lot of that early house music was quite melancholy. The cheesy, happy chords came later."
Seal's hearty vocals gave "Killer" crossover pop appeal, but the track's pièce de résistance is its gruff, funky bassline. Paired with huge kick drums, it's a force of nature, one of the most iconic from the acid house era. Ricardo Villalobos, who prefers an instrumental edit, is a big fan. When the track went to #1 in the UK in May 1990, selling more than 400,000 copies, teenagers would shout the bassline at Tinley from across the street.
Tinley's life changed in other ways, too. "I started getting invited to more fancy parties," he said. "I went from raving in dungeons and illegal warehouses, scaling barbed wire fences, to being invited to Elton John's parties and West End theatre premieres. It was all a bit weird. I had disposable income, which I'd never had, so I started having fun, buying clothes and funny hats. And I got busy travelling."
Tinley and Seal performed "Killer" live all over the UK. They also went to Germany, where the track had caught on in a big way after the fall of the Berlin Wall. To UK ravers, Seal's lyrics about love and the fight for freedom felt familiar, but to ex-East Berliners, suddenly free following decades of repression, they captured the zeitgeist. Across the former Eastern Bloc, "Killer" became an anthem.
So you want
To be free
To live your life,
The way you want to be
Will you give,
If we cry?
Will we live,
Or will we, die?
"It just sort of came together really, really easily, it fell together with no effort, no one was trying," Tinley said. "I see it really as it was all meant to be. A gift, a blessing, from the universe. My little stubby, nicotine-stained, chemical fingers clodding away at a synthesiser in North London and I made a living for 30 years off of it."
TracklistA1 Killer
B1 Bass Line Changed My Life
B2 I Dream Of You