First you hear the riff.
It is not especially complicated, which is precisely why it stays in your head at once. Ian Dench's guitar does not act like a typical rock foundation. It is short, nervous and rhythmic, bouncing more than it leads the melody. Instead of pulling the song behind it, it begins to dance along.
A moment later the bass enters and the whole track suddenly begins to change shape.
The guitar says rock. The rhythm answers: club. The vocal brushes against hip-hop, while the bass behaves as though it has just escaped from a funk recording.
Unbelievable does not particularly want to decide what it actually is.
Fortunately, nobody forced EMF to make that decision.
Ian Dench recalled that the riff emerged with the melody after he broke up with his girlfriend. He described its movement as something between blues and flamenco thinking. In the studio he played the figure together with bassist Zak Foley, so the two instruments practically fuse into one mechanism.
And this is where the whole trick begins.
A machine is working beneath the rock band.
Rock meets the sampler
Producer Ralph Jezzard already had a drum sample prepared, and Dench programmed additional parts to give the rhythm a stronger, more physical pressure. Add a Yamaha CS 10 synthesiser, a piano programmed on a Casio FZ 1 sampler and short sound samples scattered across the arrangement.
This is the early nineties compressed into less than four minutes.
Only a moment earlier, similar elements often belonged to separate worlds. A guitar remained a guitar, house lived in the club, hip-hop built tracks from samples, and British indie had its own venues, its own press and its own audience.
EMF arrived at the exact moment when those borders were beginning to hinder more than help.
James Atkin recalled a fascination with hip-hop, acid house, electro, Soul II Soul, Chicago house and Detroit techno. Dench balanced those impulses with guitar songwriting but did not try to silence them.
That is why Unbelievable does not sound like a compromise.
It sounds like several languages meeting and suddenly discovering that they share a rhythm.
Every element pulls the song in its own direction, yet the whole thing brazenly stays together. The guitar wants to be a riff. The bass wants to dance. The drums want to hit the dance floor. The vocal sings one moment, speaks the next and almost raps after that.
Even the famous Oh! after the chorus does not come from any member of the band. It is a sample of the American comedian Andrew Dice Clay. Dench later said the rights were cleared after a chance meeting with Rick Rubin in Los Angeles.
Today, such a montage of sounds surprises nobody.
Back then, it belonged to a new language of pop.
James Atkin barely bothers to sing prettily
What I like most, however, is the vocal.
James Atkin does not try to prove that he is a great rock singer. He sings high, provocatively, at times almost carelessly. The verses have more in common with rhythmic declamation than with conventional melodic delivery.
Then the chorus arrives.
It is absurdly simple and immediately takes over the entire track.
That carelessness was partly deliberate. Atkin recalled that he already sang the song very freely on the four-track demo. During the proper session, the band wanted to preserve the ease of its live performances, so the vocal was recorded only twice.
The first take went on the record.
And very rightly so.
As a result, Unbelievable does not sound like a single assembled by a committee for international success. Nothing was polished until the character of the performance disappeared.
Atkin leaves scratches.
You hear a person who is not standing at the microphone to display technique. He has to throw out a phrase, hit the rhythm and disappear before anybody has time to correct it.
The whole track works in the same way.
Guitar, sampler, funk bass, rapped phrases and club pulse land in one room. Nobody gives way.
And yet they all fit.
The perfect moment between 1990 and 1991
The single was released in the United Kingdom on 22 October 1990 by Parlophone. It entered the official British chart on 3 November and reached number three in December. In total, it spent thirteen weeks in the Top 100.
Just look at its neighbours.
At the time, the British Top 40 included 808 State, Deee Lite, Soul II Soul and Monie Love. The dance floor, hip-hop and pop were entering one another's studios ever more often without knocking.
EMF were not the only British band combining guitars with electronics. The press of the period compared them, among others, with Jesus Jones and Pop Will Eat Itself.
Unbelievable, however, had an advantage.
Underneath the entire stylistic hybrid lay a song with an extraordinarily simple centre of gravity.
You could analyse the sampler, funk bass, acid house, guitar figure and hip-hop phrase.
You could also analyse nothing and simply jump.
The Americans chose the second option with exceptional effectiveness.
On 20 July 1991, Unbelievable reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100. It stopped at number three in the United Kingdom, so EMF's biggest single achieved even greater success across the Atlantic than at home.
It was not anonymous in Poland either. The archive of Lista Przebojów Programu Trzeciego records seven chart appearances between 19 July and 30 August 1991. The song's highest position was number eighteen.
But numbers tell only the end of the story.
The most interesting thing happened earlier, at the moment when five boys from the Forest of Dean stopped treating guitar, sampler, club rhythm and pop melody as items from different shelves.
In Unbelievable, the guitar does not have to fight the electronics.
It can dance with them.
And that is precisely why this simple riff, more than three decades later, still cannot stand still.
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