EMF

There are songs that are youth in a bottle, and "Unbelievable" is one of them: guitars, a dance beat, shouting and an energy you cannot fake. It sounds like being twenty and believing yourself capable of anything. The odd part is where it came from. Not from London or Manchester, the two capitals of British cool at the time, but from a village of three thousand inhabitants tucked into a forest. And from there it reached number one in the United States.

From the Forest of Dean to the radio

EMF formed in October 1989 in Cinderford, in the Forest of Dean, a rural area in the west of England. James Atkin sang, Ian Dench played guitar and wrote, Zac Foley bass, Mark Decloedt drums and Derry Brownson took charge of the keyboards and the samples. They were young, noisy and they arrived at exactly the right moment.

That moment was called baggy: the British current that put indie guitars together with the rhythms of dance music and rave culture, and that for a couple of years made pogoing and dancing the same thing. EMF took that formula to its most electric version. The name had its spark too: the official version said "Epsom Mad Funkers", tied to a New Order fan club, and less publishable readings of those three letters always circulated. The ambiguity was part of the business.

Rick Rubin's fax

"Unbelievable" came out on 22 October 1990. It carries a sample of the voice of the comedian Andrew Dice Clay, that "oh!" that became its trademark, and the story of how they got it is better than any lawsuit.

Ian Dench ran into Rick Rubin in a Los Angeles bar. Rubin was the producer and head of Dice Clay's label, so Dench, who had nothing to lose, asked him for the licence right there. Rubin told him to send a fax to his office in the morning. And he granted it free of charge. No lawsuit, no negotiation, no lawyers: a chance encounter and a fax.

The result was disproportionate. Number three in the United Kingdom and, what almost nobody expected, number one on the Billboard Hot 100 on the chart dated 20 July 1991, for a single week. Their album Schubert Dip, from the same year, confirmed the sweet moment.

They are always filed as a one-hit wonder, and the label needs adjusting because as it stands it is not accurate: "Lies" reached number eighteen on the Hot 100 and "I Believe" number six in Britain. The correct thing to say is that in the United States they never returned to the top ten, which is a different thing and considerably less humiliating. In any case baggy went out of fashion fast and the band steadily lost ground. They split up, came back, recorded new material and went on playing intermittently for decades, without the pressure of repeating anything.

Zac Foley

The hard chapter has a date and a cause, and the euphemism is no use. The body of Zac Foley, the bass player, was found in Camden on 2 January 2002, although several sources date the death on the 3rd; let us say, then, in early January 2002. He was 31. The autopsy found heroin, cocaine, ecstasy, barbiturates and alcohol. The police found crack and a pipe in the room. The coroner returned a verdict of accidental death on 20 May 2002, and at the inquest something was heard that makes it sadder: Foley had a date to enter a clinic for his addiction. It is not "how fragile life can be". It is polydrug use that caught up with him weeks before he was due to start treatment.

On 18 March 2025 a blue plaque dedicated to the band was unveiled on the clock tower of The Triangle, in Cinderford. Zac Foley's name is on it.

What to remember

EMF left behind a song that is still getting people out of their chairs thirty-five years later, and it left it from a place on the map where nothing was happening. That is the fact that counts: there was no need to be in the right city, or to know the right people, or to fight over a licence. What was needed was a very good song and a fax.

The Cinderford plaque closes the story well, and it closes it completely. A small town acknowledging that a number one in the United States came out of there, once, and putting on the same bronze the name of the one who did not live to see it.

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Sources

EMF formed in October 1989 in Cinderford, in the Forest of Dean (Gloucestershire), England, with James Atkin (vocals), Ian Dench (guitar and songwriting), Zac Foley (bass), Mark Decloedt (drums) and Derry Brownson (keyboards and samples). The name was officially attributed to "Epsom Mad Funkers", linked to a New Order fan club, with informal alternative versions. The band belonged to the British "baggy" or indie-dance scene of the early nineties. Their debut single "Unbelievable" was released on 22 October 1990, reached number three in the United Kingdom and number one on the Billboard Hot 100 on the chart dated 20 July 1991, for one week; it includes a sample of the voice of the comedian Andrew Dice Clay, whose licence the producer Rick Rubin granted free of charge after a chance encounter with Ian Dench in Los Angeles. The album "Schubert Dip" was released in 1991. The single "Lies" reached number eighteen on the Billboard Hot 100 and "I Believe" number six on the British chart; in the United States the group did not enter the top ten again. The body of the bass player Zac Foley was found in Camden, London, on 2 January 2002, at the age of 31; different sources place the death on 2 or 3 January. The autopsy detected heroin, cocaine, ecstasy, barbiturates and alcohol, and the police found crack and a pipe in the room; the coroner returned a verdict of accidental death on 20 May 2002. During the inquest it was reported that Foley was scheduled to enter a treatment clinic for his addiction. On 18 March 2025 a commemorative blue plaque dedicated to the band was unveiled on the clock tower of The Triangle, in Cinderford, bearing the name of Zac Foley. Profile compiled for Rebobinados with fact-checking; interpretations of the meaning of the work are offered as the author's reading. No song lyrics are reproduced, for copyright reasons. Information drawn from Billboard, BBC News, Official Charts Company, The Guardian, Wikipedia and other coverage.

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