How Redanka Got “Vertigo”

Original Story (U2Wanderer.Org) (2006-01-20)

That remix by Redanka on U2’s “Sometimes You Can’t Make it On Your Own” single? Redanka himself tells the story of how it happened over on his myspace page:

“Having taken over the living room and turned it into a makeshift studio, much to the annoyance of his family and neighbours, Andy spent a few months messing with ideas for an album until one sunny October morning an email dropped into his inbox with a link to the new, as yet unreleased, U2 single ‘Vertigo’. Someone, somewhere had posted it up on a website and fellow U2 fanatic Mick Park (of Tilt fame) found it and shared the info with him. Having always wanted the opportunity to work with his favourite band in one form or another, Andy decided to do a bootleg – an unofficial version. Various studio tricks were utilised to get what he could from the original – reversing of phase, filtering, eq’ing and time-stretching.

Beats were slammed on top to create a club monster that he only wanted for himself initially, but felt it had turned out so well that he had to share it with others. He sent a copy to Radio One’s dance music guru Pete Tong, more out of hope than anything else, only to receive a call late one Friday night from U2’s radio plugger Dylan White telling him the band had heard the mix on Radio One. Andy feared the worst, thinking some kind of court case was going to arise from his stupidity, but the opposite was true. The band loved it and wanted to send the original parts across so he could do a proper job and the mix could get an official release.

Having been a fan since 1982 this was something beyond his wildest dreams. To see his name on the CD sleeve of a U2 record was beyond what he’d ever thought possible, but there it was on the ‘B-side’ to ‘Sometimes You Can’t Make It On Your Own’ – a song which hit number one in the UK charts in 2005.

The interest that this generated was incredible. The mix was a Club and Buzz Chart number one, and DJ’s from all genres were playing it. Ali Dubfire, half of US house production duo Deep Dish, sent Andy a video of him and partner Sharam dropping the mix at Creamfields, South America to 50,000 crazy Argentinians. It was the stuff of dreams and suddenly Redanka was the name on everyones lips. The Happy Mondays, Fatboy Slim, Faithless, INXS, The Music and Snow Patrol (the mix of ‘Open Your Eyes’ was a number one in Brazil in it’s own right in 2006) were just some of the artists who requested the ‘Redanka’ sound, as he quickly gained a reputation for turning their tracks into dance anthems with a rocky edge. U2 offered more work from ‘How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb’ – work that has yet to see the light of day but may well do in the future. Andy himself considers his mixes of ‘Miracle Drug’ to be some of his finest work to date.”

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