British indie pop band Bastille exploded on the international music scene back in 2013 thanks to the success of their first studio album, Bad Blood, which featured the megahit anthem “Pompeii.”
The album was originally released in March of that year, but an October reissue, updated as All This Bad Blood, featured a hidden gem of a track titled “Of The Night,” which the band had first released on their free 2012 mixtape Other People’s Heartache. The highly danceable track is a mashup cover of two iconic early 90s Eurodance hits that you might remember from those Much Dance Mix compilation CDs: “Rhythm Is a Dancer” by the German duo Snap! and “Rhythm of the Night” by Italian act Corona. Bastille’s take on these classics was released as a single to promote the reissue of Bad Blood and it was an immediate hit, debuting at #2 on the UK singles chart and garnering a positive critical response.
The origin story of this mashup cover is an interesting one. The band’s guitarist Will Farquarson explained it in a 2014 interview with Billboard Magazine:
“That’s a strange one. It’s kind of a tongue-in-cheek thing that we did that kind of got out of hand. It started off because Dan [Smith, the band’s leader singer] got really ill when we first got signed, and so to ease his way back into vocal recording we decided to do some mixtapes using old songs that we listened to growing up. These were interesting songs you wouldn’t expect us to cover and try to reinvent in a more current kind of way, and then it became one of our biggest songs. Then we started doing it live just because it was a cool song and was fun to play, and audiences started to really kind of dig it. And it all started off like a little experiment.”
That little experiment was certainly a success, as this track has become a staple on all my party playlists. Take a trip down memory lane with the original versions of the two songs that inspired this cover below, and check out Bastille’s new album Wild World, released just last month.