Simply Red – Freedom

Paul Oakenfold may be a laughable joke character in dance music these days, with his famously shonky beatmatching augmented with his increasingly immobile Botex'd face and his propensity to play terrible update mixes of the same trance anthems and small pool of film score excerpts he's been bashing for 25 years now... (takes deep breath) BUT there's no getting away from the fact that his early production catalogue - enabled enormously by the studio talents of the brilliant Steve Osborne - is an absolute treasure trove in a wide variety of styles. It's especially worth digging through their string of "Perfecto Mixes", which invariably gave some dancefloor class to some of the biggest pop and rock acts of the early '90s. On this rare promo, they deliver a beautiful mid-tempo Balearic house re-touch to the terminally uncool Simply Red. In the right hands at the right time of night this will make a dancefloor swoon. A hidden gem if ever there was one.