In the Mix: Saturday 12″ Mix

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This week the Saturday Night Party (Saturday at 8pm) stretches out after 9. No radio edits, no fading down at three minutes — this is nearly two hours of the long versions: twelve-inch singles, club mixes, extended remixes, the full-length business the way it was meant to be heard. We open on something only days old, Madonna and Kylie Minogue finally on the same record with the Afterhours mix of “Love Sensation,” and we close in 1987 with six-and-three-quarter minutes of Echo & the Bunnymen‘s “Lips Like Sugar.” In between there’s brand-new Soft Cell — a track from Danceteria, the album Dave Ball finished two days before he died last October and which will be the band’s last — plus Martin Garrix and U2, Ellie Goulding back on the dancefloor, Dublin’s Jazzy, Swedish House Mafia with Lykke Li, and seven and a half glorious minutes of Eric Prydz‘s “Pjanoo,” a record its own maker shelved for two years after a club full of people ignored it.

The back half is where the ghosts come out. Bebe Rexha has done what nobody has managed in thirty years and got Faithless to hand over “Insomnia” — Maxi Jazz’s voice and all — while Daft Punk‘s “One More Time” arrives in its full eight-minute twelve-inch form, Romanthony singing his heart out through the Auto-Tune. Then we go back to vinyl: Depeche Mode‘s “Behind the Wheel” in the Shep Pettibone mix, with a bassline built out of a sampled vacuum-cleaner tube; Big Pig‘s “Breakaway,” a New Zealand number one in 1988 made by a band with no guitars and no bass in it at all; Katrina and the Waves with the song their record company wanted to release instead of “Walking on Sunshine”; and Brisbane’s Boxcar, remixed by the great Arthur Baker. Listen closely and there are threads everywhere — Rollo turns up three separate times across thirty-two years, Anton Corbijn directed two of the videos, and the show quietly ends up bookended by the two New York remixers who built the sound of the eighties dancefloor. Pour something, turn it up, and stay for the long ones.