PETE HELLER'S BIG LOVE - (PENN) BIG LOVE

Pete Heller's Big Love is an alias of English house producer Pete Heller. Pete Heller's biggest hit, Big Love, was released under this alias. Pete created Big Love in 1998, sampling the guitar riff and vocals from Stargard's song "Wear It Out". Upon release, the track "blew up big time", charted in the US and UK, and was regarded by Billboard as the "number #1 dance track of 1999". Pete released Big Love initially under Junior London, then Subliminal and eventually Essential. The iconic Keith Haring-inspired sleeve comes from the Essential release. In 2019, esteemed record label Defected Records rereleased Big Love on streaming platforms under their sublabel, Glitterbox. The Junior release contained a B-side, "Atlanta", and the Subliminal/Essential releases also contains a The Dronez remix. Pete Heller's Big Love is a mainstay of the French Touch/filter house movement in the late 90s to early 2000s. It uses several characteristics of filter house - a repetitive sample, and filters. Pete uses a flanger and low-pass often in the track. It is often erroneously believed that Pete only sampled the vocals from Wear It Out. A Defected Records blog post mentions the story of Big Love: It’s 1998. Pete’s long-time studio partner Terry Farley has gone to watch his beloved Chelsea FC play. Pete has a few hours to kill, and a vocal snippet from Stargard’s disco standard Wear It Out stored in his trusty Akai sampler that’s been nagging away at him. 12 hours later, he had the outline of Big Love. At least to his mind it was just the outline. “I saw it as a demo really, it was pretty rough and ready,” Pete tells us. “Initially it was 15 minutes long. I managed to get it down to 10, but the filtering was taking so long, I left it, and thought I’d come back in later and do it properly.” Filtering allows producers and DJs to play around with frequencies and thus the sound the listener hears. Imagine you’re in a bar area at club with a wall between you and the main room…you can just about make the music out, but it’s muffled. Now think of the tracks that recreate that sound – you’re dancing to filter house / disco. Initially in the mid-90s the style was dubbed ‘French touch’, which dates back to a marketing slogan from France’s first key house label F-Communications (“we give a French touch to house”), and was used to band together the new wave of French producers such as Daft Punk, St. Germain, Motorbass and Etienne De Crecy. Roule, the label run by Thomas Bangalter from Daft Punk and home to his Stardust offshoot, was key in pushing the filter style, which began to spread to other countries, the most notable US example arguably DJ Sneak’s You Can’t Hide From Your Bud; and from the UK, Big Love. Pete Heller's Big Love continued to be a big hit over the coming years, and was even played by DJs like Thomas Bangalter from Daft Punk, Todd Edwards, Porter Robinson, and perhaps many more. In 2018 and 2019 respectively, Big Love was remixed by Dr Packer and David Penn. The David Penn remix in particular remains popular, outnumbering the original's streams on Spotify in a ratio of 2.5:1. One noteworthy thing to mention is that despite Pete Heller never making another filter house track citing its oversaturation in the house music scene, he did make a "spiritual successor" track, that being his remix for Jamiroquai's Supersonic, appropriately titled "Pete Heller's the Love Mix". Another thing worth mentioning is Big Love isn't the only track released under the Pete Heller's Big Love alias - he has in fact released another single called Stargazin', however, it has been vastly overshadowed by Big Love and its remixes. Read more on Last.fm. User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License; additional terms may apply.