36: Sub Sub featuring Melanie Williams, “Ain’t No Love (Ain’t No Use)” (no.3, 1993)

Honestly, you wait ages for one Sub, and then two come along at once. A sort-of one-hit wonder, in that Sub Sub’s key personnel (Jimi Goodwin and brothers Jez and Andy Williams) were later to regroup as Doves; and was there ever a greater discrepancy in sounds between one push for musical success and another? After the nonsensically high BPM of acid house, “Ain’t No Love” arrived as a conspicuous (and conspicuously welcome) return to the disco round, complete with mirrorball, assertive female vocal (whatever did happen to the gorgeous Ms. Williams and her prominent underarms?) and everybody-on-the-floor bassline. Aptly enough, it was an inferno of sorts - a fire at the Williams’ recording studio in 1996 - that cleared the way for the group’s current sound; it might be a aural stretch, but can we not hear trace elements of the soulfulness that was to recur in “Lost Souls” and “The Last Broadcast” somewhere in the mix here?