The Apeskin Dance

This is an oldie. In high school we had a teacher by the name of Mrs Aitkin who taught French. I personally never had her for a class but like everyone else I had a few run in's with her. She was the head of the French Department and was notorious for handing out the dreaded lines or sometimes even a detention. Her classroom was at the end of a corridor which was a one-way corridor and she loved to patrol it between periods to catch people taking a short cut the wrong way and then handing out the lines. She was pretty strict and didn't take much crap but people just loved to get her wound up.
One day in 1997 I believe it was, Ja'o and Harrold, who weren't in Mrs Aitkin's class, were doing some serious messing around. They had a somewhat incompetent teacher and being in foundation French didn't really give a shit. Their particular classroom was fitted with cassette recorders and microphones to record conversations in French. Ja'o decided just to start one recording and leave it going for a lesson with the intension of retrieving the tape the following lesson to listen to the previous days' antics. And what a day! Since their teacher was so incompetent and Mrs Aitkin's room being next door, she often had to pay a visit to chuck some people out and punish the offenders with lines. She made an appearance on the day when the cassette recorder was running!
The next day the tape was taken home and listened to with much hilarity. It was when Wheeler and I came into possession of the tape that it was about to become a bit more mainstream. Back then not many people had computers but Wheeler and I being the school year geeks had our own with eJay 1 installed. I had always been into sound and music and was already copying the tape onto the computer when the idea came about; we'll make a dance mix of Mrs Aitkin! About 2 hours later we had the following made, it is pretty crap but we were only 15 and the technology just wasn't what it is now-a-days.



Click here to download the song if you want to keep it or can't hear anything above

Lyrics:
There will be silence in this class and there will be silence in this class NOW!
Now, Right, Right, Right
Just go out when you're told
Just go out when you're told
Just go out when you're told
Just go out when you're told
Just go out when you're told
Just go out when you're told
Just go out when you're told
You, You, You, You
Claire, Jenna
Out, Out, Out, Out
Out, Out, Out, Out
You, Out, You, Out
You, Out, You, Out
You, Out, You, Out
Claire, Out
Jenna, Out
Now the rest of you get on with your work
Now the rest of you get on with your work
Now the rest of you get on with your work
Right, You, Out, Right, You, Out
Right, You, Out, Right, You, Out

And so the ApeSkin Dance was born.
What I think is best about the samples is that each 'you' and 'out' was only used twice because she said it so many times!
Our friend and class clown even drew a picture for us to put on the cover of the CD.


A very true likeness

A small anonymous website went up as well so that the song could spread round the school. Now I personally was shitting it in case I got in trouble for it so perhaps because of that the song never really did well... until about 2 years later when I was at college. The school had got PCs installed in every room and they were all on the 'net. Wheeler and my brother were still at the school and they decided to resurrect the song. One day I was having my lunch at the town centre when a group of random school kids came up to me and said "You're the guy who did the ApeSkin Dance". I was in shock! Later that night I asked my brother what was going on and he told me that every computer in the school had the song sitting there on the desktop, I found this hard to believe but Wheeler confirmed it. There were even reports of people claiming the song for themselves and making up imaginary big brothers who 'made that song'.
Mrs Aitkin was presented with a copy of the song on CD complete with cover on her last day before she retired, god knows what she thought when she heard it. No-one got in any trouble for the song even though the MP3's tag had 'MC Ross & DJ Wheeler' stuck in it.
So that is my claim to fame. Of course it could not have been done without Wheeler and most importantly Ja'o (who didn't rate the song highly at all!).