Undercover Agent - Five Tones (Juice Records, 1997)
For Day 5 of my DnB Advent Calendar I thought I'd go for this well rinsed banger of a tune from Undercover Agent AKA Daz Ellis, the producer of classics such as 'Dub Plate Circles''Oh Gosh' and 'Babylon' (as Splash). Ellis and the Juice label were in a rich vein of form around this time with other big tunes including 'Hypnosis' and 'Hard Disk' (as M.T.S. with Darren Hickey AKA Fellowship).
'Five Tones' appeared on the B-Side (or Z-Side as Juice Records labelled them) to 'Hypnosis Remix' but could easily have been the lead cut. It opens with drums using the Hot Pants break and spacey synths before a nice squelchy bassline comes in. The vocal sample "Play the Five Tones" originates from the film Close Encounters of the Third Kind but is sampled from Gene Page's cheesy disco take on the theme tune where a few lines of dialogue are redone at the beginning.
The tune was hammered by Brockie so he was the logical choice for the remix (alongside his Undiluted partner Ed Solo) which appeared on the double pack Cyndicut EP in 1999 on lovely red vinyl (the other plate was yellow). The EP shares its name with the radio station Daz Ellis setup with some friends way back in 1989, so I'm guessing marked a decade in the game. Brockie's version doesn't differ vastly from the original but is a worthwhile update of the tune. You can hear it around half way through his set at One Nation's Millennium NYE bash with regular accomplices Skibadee and Det on the mic. Also worth checking is this unreleased VIP.