Jamiroquai

There is a shot almost everyone has seen and almost nobody has understood. A man in a hat walks across an empty room, the sofa slides towards him, the walls stay where they were and the floor seems to glide under his feet like an airport travelator. The explanation that has circulated ever since is that the floor was moving. It never moved. It was a grey floor, smooth, without a join or a pattern to give anything away, and what was turning was the whole room.

The set was on wheels

The video for "Virtual Insanity" was directed by Jonathan Glazer, hired for what he had just done with Radiohead's "Street Spirit (Fade Out)". It was shot on the twelfth of August 1996 at the Academy Films studios in London, and it was resolved in four takes. The four walls of the set were mounted on wheels and pushed by stagehands out of frame; the camera was bolted to one of those walls, so that it travelled with them. What the eye reads as a moving floor is the only motionless element in the shot.

The original concept was exactly the opposite. Moving the floor for real was costed at some two hundred and eighty thousand pounds for the mechanism alone; someone on Glazer's team proposed moving the house instead of the floor, the idea was thought ridiculous first and brilliant afterwards, and Glazer called Jay Kay at around one in the morning to sell it to him. The shoot ended up costing some hundred and fifty thousand pounds, half as much. The refinement is in the furniture, which had castors: in some shots the sofas are bolted to the walls —they really do move, but they look still— and in others they are loose on the floor —they are still, but they look as though they are moving. The cuts are hidden exactly at the moments when the camera tilts and threatens to reveal floor or ceiling. Glazer described it as a magician's trick: not one computer effect, and the audience staring hard at the one thing that does not move.

The video reached the MTV Video Music Awards of the fourth of September 1997, at Radio City Music Hall, with ten nominations, and it took four prizes: Video of the Year, Breakthrough Video, best special effects and best cinematography. The following year the song won the Grammy for best pop performance by a duo or group with vocal.

The song, moreover, is not about technology in the abstract. Jay Kay and the didgeridoo player Wallis Buchanan had visited the underground city of Sapporo, in Japan, and what Kay remembered from it was that everything was covered in snow and there was absolutely nobody there: out of that image comes the buried humanity of the lyric, which deals with overpopulation, human genetic enhancement and ecological collapse. On the album version it opens with a fragment of Alien, the Nostromo's distress signal. A detail from the trade: it was a rough demo and it was only finished when the label asked for another single for the record, so it was the last song properly recorded for Travelling Without Moving. It is credited to Jason Kay and the keyboard player Toby Smith, it was produced by Al Stone, it came out on the nineteenth of August 1996 and it reached number three in Britain.

1993, and they were already number one

The usual account starts in 1996, and that is where half the story gets lost. Jamiroquai was formed in London in 1992 and the name is a fusion of jam session with the name, slightly altered, of the Iroquois confederacy. The first single, "When You Gonna Learn", came out in October 1992 on Acid Jazz Records —the label that gave the movement its name— and reached number fifty-two in Britain. The debut, Emergency on Planet Earth, was released on the fourteenth of June 1993 and was number one in the United Kingdom. 1996 was not the breakthrough: it was the global breakthrough. The difference matters because Travelling Without Moving, the album of "Virtual Insanity" and "Cosmic Girl", stalled at number two in Britain. What it did was open up the United States, where the group charted for the first time with a number twenty-four on the Billboard 200, and open up the rest of the world: number one in Hungary, two in France, three in Switzerland, four in Sweden, six in Japan and six in Australia. Four times platinum in the United Kingdom, platinum in the United States, three times platinum across Europe.

From that album hangs the primacy that is always repeated wrongly, and that this time turns out to be on the record. Travelling Without Moving is listed in the Guinness World Records as the best-selling funk music album —"Best-selling album of funk music"—, with more than seven million copies according to the Guinness entry; Billboard was already putting the sales at more than eight million in August 2001. It is worth reading for what it is: a registered category record, not an exhaustive measurement of the genre. Records with far greater sales and obvious funk content, those of Michael Jackson or Prince, are classified elsewhere. In total the band has sold more than twenty-six million albums.

Only one man signed the contract

Jamiroquai, contractually, was never a band. After the Acid Jazz single, Jay Kay signed alone with Sony Soho Square a contract for eight albums and a million dollars, something unheard of for an artist with a single released single. He was the only member under contract and the arrangement was that he would share his own royalties with the musicians according to their contribution as instrumentalists. The line-up that built the sound was Jay Kay on vocals, Toby Smith on keyboards and as writing partner, Wallis Buchanan on didgeridoo and Nick Van Gelder on drums; the bass player Stuart Zender came in through an audition around 1993 and was nineteen when he recorded the debut. Derrick McKenzie replaced Van Gelder in 1994 —he recorded his audition in a single take and is still in the job thirty-two years later— and Sola Akingbola was on percussion and backing vocals from that same year until 2025.

From that contract hangs Zender's departure, who left in 1998 in the middle of recording the fourth album. The reason was not musical differences: he was claiming writing and production credits for the big hits, "Cosmic Girl" and "Virtual Insanity" among them, and disputing the division of the money. A spokesman for the group added to the explanation his wish to spend time with his partner and their newborn baby; the two versions coexist in the sources. It matters to be precise about what he was claiming: he was collecting royalties on all the songs of the first three albums, and what he was asking for was his name printed underneath them.

What reveals how badly it ended is what they did afterwards. The group scrapped all the tracks Zender had recorded for Synkronized and hired Nick Fyffe to record them again from scratch, in order to avoid lawsuits. Throwing an album in the bin to protect yourself is not a clash of egos: it is a lawyers' calculation. And it is worth spelling out, because this is the part that gets told wrongly: there was never a lawsuit, or a trial, or an out-of-court settlement. There is no court case between them; there was a latent threat that was dodged by wiping tapes. The practice changed in plain sight on the next sleeve: "Virtual Insanity" is credited to two people and "Canned Heat", the first single of the following album, is credited to six — Jay Kay, Sola Akingbola, Wallis Buchanan, Simon Katz, Derrick McKenzie and Toby Smith.

The only number one was not from any album

Jamiroquai had a single number one in the United Kingdom, and it is not on any of their eight studio albums. "Deeper Underground" was made to order for Godzilla, Roland Emmerich's 1998 film, and it came out on Godzilla: The Album. In the United Kingdom it was released on the thirteenth of July 1998, topped the official chart dated the twenty-fifth of July, spent a week at the summit and eleven on the chart. It is credited to Kay and Smith, it was produced by Rick Pope and the bass is by Stuart Zender: one of his last recordings with the group. The band's only number one does not belong to their own body of work but to the soundtrack of a monster film.

The order of the hits also gets told backwards. "Space Cowboy" really is earlier —from 1994 and from The Return of the Space Cowboy—, but "Alright" is not: it is a single from Travelling Without Moving, released on the twenty-eighth of April 1997, later than "Virtual Insanity" and "Cosmic Girl", number six in Britain and number seventy-eight on the Hot 100. And "Canned Heat" came after "Deeper Underground", not before: on the twenty-fourth of May 1999, number four in Britain and number one on the American dance floors. Its second popular life also has a date and a film: the closing dance scene of Napoleon Dynamite, in 2004.

The next two albums were number one at home: Synkronized, on the eighth of June 1999, the first without Zender, and A Funk Odyssey, on the twenty-ninth of August 2001, the last with Toby Smith. Smith left the group after the 2002 tour to be with his family and was afterwards a producer and manager; he died of cancer in April 2017, at forty-six. He was the co-writer of the three songs through which the world knows Jamiroquai.

The man in the hat

Jay Kay's name is Jason Luís Cheetham and he was born on the thirtieth of December 1969 in Stretford, Lancashire. The stage surname comes from his mother: Karen Kay, born Adrianne Judith Pringle, a jazz and cabaret singer, comedian and impressionist, who made her professional debut at sixteen in Blackpool and went on to have her own series on British television in 1983. The middle name comes from his father, the Portuguese guitarist Luís Saraiva, whom he did not meet until he was twenty-eight. And there was an identical twin brother, David, born the same day, who died of brain damage within a few weeks. He was brought up by his mother, much of his childhood in rural Suffolk because of her schedule, then Manchester and at thirteen West Ealing, with boarding schools in Devon and Colchester along the way; he left home at sixteen, went through a period of homelessness and worked as a break-dancer before he sang. The falsetto everyone compares to Stevie Wonder did not come out of a conservatoire.

On his record there is one final conviction and it is a traffic one. On the twenty-sixth of February 2004 he was stopped on the A9, near Perth, in Scotland: a single-carriageway road with a seventy-mile-an-hour limit, on which he was doing a hundred and five while overtaking a line of vehicles. His explanation in court was that he had spent four hours stuck in slow traffic. He pleaded guilty by letter, without appearing, and on the sixth of September 2004 the sheriff Robert McCreadie called his conduct "entirely unacceptable" and imposed a fine of seven hundred and fifty pounds and a six-month driving ban. He has also acknowledged a considerable cocaine habit, which he gave up in 2003. And he carries a contradiction that has been put to him to his face: he has been singing about ecological collapse since 1993 and by around 2013 he had hundreds of vehicles, among them a Ferrari Enzo and a green LaFerrari unique in the world; his documented answer is that he drives some three thousand miles a year and that he can only drive one at a time.

What to remember

Jamiroquai did not start in 1996 but in 1992, was already number one in Britain in 1993, was never a band in the contractual sense and made its only number one for a monster film. The album that changed everything stalled at number two in its own country and even so is listed in the Guinness World Records as the best-selling funk album. And the video that defines the group in everybody's memory works exactly the other way round from how it is told.

What does hold up without qualification is the craft. On the nineties albums there are musicians playing and arrangements written down, the school of Earth, Wind & Fire and of jazz-funk brought up to date with a glossy production. That sentence, however, does not cover the whole body of work: Automaton (2017) is a deliberately synthetic record, with vocoder and programming, produced by Matt Johnson and Jay Kay, and since then the group has carried a permanent Ableton Live station on stage. They are still active: they signed with BMG on the twenty-fifth of February 2026 and the ninth album, finished recording in June and in mastering, is announced for 2027. In Santiago they played on the fifteenth of September 2026 at the Claro Arena, with Los Tetas opening, eight years after their last visit to Chile.

If anyone recognises their own story in the cocaine part, in Chile SENDA's Fono Drogas y Alcohol, 1412, is free and confidential. And when that bass plays and the falsetto comes in over the top, there is the whole trick of Jamiroquai: music that seems to glide along effortlessly because there are four walls being pushed by hand out of frame.

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Sources

Jamiroquai is a British funk and acid jazz group formed in London in 1992 around Jay Kay (Jason Luís Cheetham, Stretford, Lancashire, 30 December 1969), with Toby Smith (keyboards, 1992-2002), Wallis Buchanan (didgeridoo, 1992-2000), Nick Van Gelder (drums, 1992-1994) and Stuart Zender (bass, brought in by audition around 1993; born 18 March 1974). The name is an acronym-fusion of "jam session" and the slightly altered name of the Iroquois confederacy. First single: "When You Gonna Learn", October 1992, Acid Jazz Records, no. 52 UK. Albums: "Emergency on Planet Earth" (14 June 1993, Sony Soho Square, no. 1 UK), "The Return of the Space Cowboy" (17 October 1994, no. 2 UK), "Travelling Without Moving" (28 August 1996 in Japan, 9 September 1996 in the United Kingdom, January 1997 in the US; no. 2 UK, no. 24 Billboard 200, no. 1 Hungary; 4× platinum UK with 1,219,197 copies, RIAA platinum with 1,400,000 shipments, 3× platinum across Europe), "Synkronized" (8 June 1999, no. 1 UK, no. 28 US), "A Funk Odyssey" (29 August 2001, no. 1 UK, no. 44 US), "Dynamite" (15 June 2005, no. 3 UK), "Rock Dust Light Star" (1 November 2010, no. 7 UK) and "Automaton" (31 March 2017, Virgin EMI, no. 4 UK, no. 94 US, no. 1 Italy; produced by Matt Johnson and Jay Kay). Declared total sales: more than 26 million albums. "Travelling Without Moving" is listed in Guinness World Records as "Best-selling album of funk music" with "more than 7 million" copies according to the official entry; the figure of more than 8 million comes from Billboard of 25 August 2001. "Virtual Insanity" (single: 19 August 1996; no. 3 UK, no. 1 Iceland, no. 38 US Alternative Airplay; platinum UK with 600,000) is credited to Jason Kay and Toby Smith and was produced by Al Stone; its video was directed by Jonathan Glazer and shot on 12 August 1996 at Academy Films, London, in four takes: the floor stayed motionless and what moved was the whole set on wheels, pushed out of frame, with the camera fixed to one of the walls and the furniture on castors. The budget for the original mechanism, which envisaged moving the floor, was some 280,000 pounds; the final shoot cost some 150,000. The video won 4 prizes out of 10 nominations at the MTV Video Music Awards of 4 September 1997 (Radio City Music Hall): Video of the Year, Breakthrough Video, Best Special Effects and Best Cinematography; the song won the 1998 Grammy for Best Pop Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocal. The lyric, which came out of a visit by Jay Kay and Wallis Buchanan to the underground city of Sapporo, deals with overpopulation, human genetic enhancement and ecological collapse; the album version opens with a sample of "Alien" (1979). Other singles: "Too Young to Die" (March 1993, no. 10 UK), "Space Cowboy" (1994, no. 17 UK), "Cosmic Girl" (25 November 1996, no. 6 UK; video by Adrian Moat in Cabo de Gata, Almería), "Alright" (28 April 1997, no. 6 UK, no. 78 Billboard Hot 100), "Deeper Underground" (13 July 1998 in the United Kingdom; no. 1 UK on the chart dated 25 July 1998, 1 week at no. 1 and 11 on the chart; produced by Rick Pope, with bass by Stuart Zender; released on "Godzilla: The Album", soundtrack of Roland Emmerich's "Godzilla", 1998), "Canned Heat" (24 May 1999, no. 4 UK, no. 1 US Dance Club Play, credited to Jay Kay, Sola Akingbola, Wallis Buchanan, Simon Katz, Derrick McKenzie and Toby Smith; reused in "Napoleon Dynamite", 2004), "Little L" (2001, no. 5 UK) and "Love Foolosophy" (2002, no. 14 UK). Jay Kay was the sole signatory of the contract with Sony Soho Square —eight albums and a million dollars— and shared his royalties with the musicians according to their contribution as instrumentalists. Stuart Zender left the group in 1998, during the recording of "Synkronized", over disputes about writing and production credits and the division of money, to which a spokesman for the group added family reasons; the group discarded his recordings and redid them with Nick Fyffe in order to avoid lawsuits. There is no record of any court case between Zender and Jay Kay. Derrick McKenzie has been the drummer since 1994; Sola Akingbola was on percussion and backing vocals between 1994 and 2025; Rob Harris (guitar) since 2000, Matt Johnson (keyboards) since 2002 and Paul Turner (bass) since 2005. Toby Smith died of cancer in April 2017, aged 46. Karen Kay, Jay Kay's mother, was born Adrianne Judith Pringle on 18 July 1947 in Blackburn, Lancashire; a singer, comedian and impressionist, she had her own television series, "Karen Kay", in 1983. His father, the Portuguese guitarist Luís Saraiva, was not known to Jay Kay until he was 28. His identical twin brother, David, born on 30 December 1969, died within a few weeks of brain damage. Speeding conviction: offence on 26 February 2004 on the A9, near Perth (Scotland), at 105 mph on a 70 mph road; he pleaded guilty by letter and on 6 September 2004 the sheriff Robert McCreadie, at Perth Sheriff Court, called his conduct "entirely unacceptable" and imposed a fine of 750 pounds and a 6-month ban. Jay Kay has publicly acknowledged a cocaine habit given up in 2003. The group signed with BMG on 25 February 2026; its ninth album finished recording in June 2026 and is announced for 2027. The Latin America Tour 2026, built around the 30 years of "Virtual Insanity", passed through Santiago de Chile on 15 September 2026 at the Claro Arena, with Los Tetas as guest band, eight years after their last appearance in the country. 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 Wikipedia, Guinness World Records, Grammy.com, the Official Charts Company, Billboard, Deseret News, NME, UPI, Fox News/AP, Irish Examiner, CNN, Pollstar, Carscoops, VideoStatic and the Chilean press of September 2026 (Cooperativa, CNN Chile, Futuro, La Máquina).