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The answer to that question demands a crash course in UK youth culture, class and race politics and the north-south dicide, not to mention a dissection of rock criticism and a brief history of US anti-disco campaigning. But you can be spared all of that. In the final analysis, it doesn't matter how many pundits claim the superiority of guitar rock and 'literary' lyrics over dance culture because the undeniable fact if that DJ dance culture has been a central and formative part of UK pop since the sixties.

Motown and Stax, northern soul, funk, disco, jazz funk, electro, hi-energy, rare groove, house, garage, acid, techno, Euro, swing, hardcore and jungle, finally the rise of the massive Ninties dance clubs. Genres come and go but the urge endures to club, to dance, to get silly, to fall over exhausted at the end of a good night. Like the Pet Shop Boys, M-People have condensed this swerving, fickle obsession of DJ culture and dance mania into a form of dance-pop that can cross over to anybody, any age, with or without the urge to dance, who enjoys uplifting emotional music.

Look at the diverse careers of each M-People member prior to the release of 'How Can I Love You More' and Northern Soul and you have the genesis of Ninties dance culture in bite size chunks: Mike Pickering DJing house tunes in the Manchester Hacienda or vocalising and playing saxaphone in the NYC garage-latin style Quando Quango, released on Factory records, the source label for Indie-dance crossover; Heather Small, deep soul vocalist with a much praised trio called Hot House; Paul Heard, programmer and keyboard player for a string of rock/jazz/latin/rare groove/acid jazz bands, including Orange Juice, Working Week, Trouble and Ace of Clubs; and Shovell, percussionist with Natural Life, a bunch of lads straight of the building sites who played blissed out, post rave dance rock about dolphins until they blew all their advance money. 'Now here I am, Charlie bananas' says Shovell, toasting the retrieval of happiness from the jaws of Spinal Tap future with a bottle of mineral water.

Charlie Bananas or not, listen to M-People's version of the Small Faces' Itchycoo Park and you hear how all these strands coalesce. Particularly you hear how M-People have taken a now established undercurrent of UK music - gospel - and fused it with house beats and psychedelic rock. This gospel feel, a guiding principle of the New York underground dance scene in the early Eighties, has been at the core of M-Peoples sound, whether they're talking romance or all-purpose feel-good anthem type stuff. 'Beauty all around me' sings Heather at the end of the track. Maybe that's a source of cynicsm for some, but what it's all about is celebrating the positive. With 5 top 40 singles and EP's, 7 top 10 singles, a number 2 album, followed by a number 4 album, even a rechart for their debut album, 3 years after it's initial release, the sentiment has not gone unnoticed. That's more than 3 million people wanting to share in some positivity.

Not to get patriotic about it, but there is something distinctively British about M-People. Male, female, black, white - a band, getting up on stage and playing dance music, playing intruments, singing live, no backing tapes. No disco diva club PA's here. In the USA, disco is still regarded as a thing that 'sucks'. With the exception of the megastars, dance is mostly consigned to the margins, seperated off as black R&B or white pop, most acts divided along racial lines and rarley crossing over the great divide. In Europe, on the other hand, the majority of dance acts are modelled on the techno duo format the machines fronted by added vocalist and rapper dressed as space age ticket collectors.

But all four core members of M-People had played in working bands, Heather in hot House trying to fathom the bizarre behaviour of the Barry White entourage at elevated venues such as the Royal Albert Hall, the rest of them staggering around an educational circuit of venues ranging from fashionable shoe boxes to excessively disinfected rock warehouses. A lot of valuable lessons learned then, even before M-People convened in 1991, all of them culminating in the band's ability to construct a strong, song-based, danceable and very human show that works blindingly anywhere from Birmingham to Brazil, Glasgow to Glastonbury. This commitment to a stage show emerged fully on record with Bizarre Fruit and continues as the band travels the globe. Guitar fads come and go, the beats mutate every month but the dance is eternal.

Reference: http://www.deconstruction.co.uk/l3mp.html