Stars On 45

Responsible for starting the mega-mix craze of the 1980s and 1990s, Dutch production team Stars On 45 put together snippets of pop hits into medleys that were ideal for nightclub dancefloors of the time. The idea began when DJ Michel Gendreau was working in a club in Montreal and given a roughly made tape of Beatles tracks spliced together with disco beats. He cleaned up the mix and made a more professional version with studio whizz Paul Richer and the bootleg became a regular club favourite in Canada, where it attracted the attention of Dutch producer Jaap Eggermont. To avoid copyright issues, Eggermont recruited studio musicians to re-record parts of songs by The Beatles, Buggles, The Archies and Madness, alongside a funky, strutting backing track. They called the medley Stars On 45 and it proved to be a big international success, reaching number one in the US and number two in the UK in 1981. They applied the same technique to ABBA songs on Stars On 45: Volume 2 and to a mix of the Star Wars theme, Kung Fu Fighting, Baker Street and around 20 other catchy extracts on Volume 3; while their debut record, titled Longplaying Album, topped the UK charts and made the US top ten. They also cut together the greatest hits of the Rolling Stones, Stevie Wonder and Frank Sinatra and released seven albums in total, but other acts such as Jive Bunny adopted the idea and the fad died out in the mid-1990s.

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