1996 – Dance House & Club Anthems

Dance Music continues to grow… The compilation.

In 1996, Vicious started its ‘Dance, House & Club Anthems’ CD compilation series. The label went to great lengths to ensure the correct and often hard to find versions of tracks were included. Elusive remixes, or lesser commercially known club cuts, were key to the compilations success in Australia. The CD’s showed the label’s connection to clubs and DJs in a very real way and reflected Andy, John and Colin’s ongoing DJ aesthetic, which still runs through the label today.

With dance music growing in popularity nation wide, these compilations delivered underground tracks to a more mainstream audience and were early adopters of future crossover hits. One example is the 1997 volume 3 compilation which featured Jason Nevins’ remix of “It’s Like That” by Run DMC. Looking back the song was an obvious commercial hit and it was available first on one of these Vicious compilations. The track itself went on to be one of the biggest selling singles of that year. It again showed the value of finding the right music for clubbers and adapting it to the “Dance, House & Club Anthems” compilation series.