If the average hit single by U2 or Eminem sells about 40,000 copies in this country, you can imagine the surprise of young 2FM DJ, Mark McCabe, when his Maniac (2000) single of last year racked up 120,000 sales, making it one of the biggest selling songs in this country here. "It was totally mad, totally unexpected and really took everyone, especially the music industry, by surprise," he says. Based on a well-known sample, it's now a de rigueur closing song at commercial dance clubs around the country.
Success brought its own problems for McCabe. "I'm certainly not ashamed of the song as some people seem to think I should be. Sure, it got knocked for being commercial, but the sales prove that it is the sort of song people want to hear," he says.
Unlikely to figure in any Most Influential Dance Records Of All Time list, the song, which was released on an independent label, did its business by appealing to both the teenage market and the 40 and 50 - somethings who remember from first time around the sample McCabe used.
"Discos, weddings, any sort of gathering and you'll hear Maniac being played," he notes. "It's just one of those songs that seems to have become an anthem."
McCabe is now signed by a major label for a six-album deal. The follow-up, a re-mix of Love Is In The Air, is released with an album to follow.
McCabe is excited, both of him.
"What people don't realise is that there are two Mark McCabes - there's the Mark "Dance" McCabe and the Mark "Pop" McCabe and they're two different people." The former is the 2FM dance DJ whose weekend shows showcase the best of the commercial end of the genre while still enabling him to hold down a gig at the recent Creamfields festival. The latter persona is the one who plays monster gigs around the country, and when he plays "the hit" will step out from behind his turntable, take a mic and exhort the audience into teenage poptastic participation. "Oh Christ, I've seen myself on some of those videos - I'm desperately trying to buy them all up so no one else can see them," he says.
Starting off as a DJ on the pirate dance _station Pulse FM, the Dubliner was soon poached by 2FM for their weekend slots before he started worrying the upper reaches of the charts with his own work.
"Bringing the single out got me a whole load of new opportunities, but I think it might have changed me in terms of how the hardcore dance community see me. But I'm happy to play the game and don't feel that I have to explain myself. I certainly am intent on seeing through my album deal, but I'd also like to be in the position of someone like Fatboy Slim who used to release different types of music under different names.
I think I'm versatile in that I can play the poppy stuff for the under-18s but I also can do the heavier, dance stuff in the nightclubs."
He's proud that he's written "about 70 per cent" of the album himself and says it's going to be "commercial but not cheesy commercial". He seems frustrated by other DJs who he feels "let their credibility get the better of them" by ignoring commercial dance. "But then, all I'm really interested in doing is playing stuff that people want to hear."
Hoping for similar crossover chart success but approaching it from a different angle is another Irish dance act, also signed to a major.
StewartdotDoogan, the collective name for local DJs Tommy Stewart and Colm Doogan, have just released O Fortuna 2001.
Using a sample from Carl Orff's Carmina Burana opera, but better known as the music from the Old Spice ad or the Omen films - depending on your age - the song is picking up the sort of daytime radio airplay not normally associated with the genre.
Both veterans of the Irish dance scene, the pair had a shared interest in musical direction, and once they heard the Carmina Burana sample on an old Doors record, they went to work on the single. Colm Doogan thinks the old barriers in the dance world are slowly collapsing.
He says that O Fortuna sounds just as good on the radio as it does on the dancefloor: "I think that most hits in the charts now are dance records anyway," he says, "so dance has become the new pop. Even tracks which start out as underground tunes cross over and become commercial hits. It's the way things are right now and this is a very good European dance-pop tune, I think."
Managed by Valerie Roe of Lillie's Bordello nightclub, Doogan says that with dance now fragmenting so much - in terms of who buys the records and where they are played - they're flexible. "The next single could be something a bit tougher than this one, or it might even be something funky with vocals like Spiller, or we might even do some R 'n' B pop mixes. We're not stuck in any one style, and neither should anyone else be."
