If a vote was held in the morning to choose a new national anthem, Mark McCabe’s smash hit Maniac 2000 would rack up a sizeable percentage of the votes.
More than 20 years after the “rough and ready” song came from nowhere to spend 10 weeks on top of the Irish singles charts, Mark McCabe chatted with us about the legacy of the song, how he has evolved as a musician, and how the chart landscape has changed.
We warmed up with a question about his set at the Champions Festival at Leopardstown this weekend, and McCabe said his job on the day was to keep the energy up after a day of horse racing.
McCabe will be joined on stage by vocalist Mimi Lane, and he says his task is to keep the audience happy with some crowd-pleasing floor fillers.
“It’s a slightly different crowd to what I usually expect,” he said, recalling his roots of playing raves and indeed, his seminal track Maniac 2000.
Any interview with Mark McCabe will naturally pivot towards a discussion of the track, and what was most surprising was his openness in discussing the track and how it became “bigger than me.”
“There is this misconception that I hate Maniac 2000 and want nothing to do with it, but that’s not true at all,” he said.
McCabe still holds the rights to the song but has elected not to release the song on streaming services.
“The track was on streaming services for a time there in the mid-2010s, but the long and short of it is there are some rightsholders who would rather the track is not put on streaming services, so I will respect their wishes.”
McCabe was 21 years old when the track topped the Irish singles charts for 10 straight weeks in 2000, holding off acts like Madonna, All Saints, Westlife, Backstreet Boys and R.E.M. off the number one slot, and by McCabe’s own admission, he said “it’s a long time to live with a track like that.”
“I’ve always felt the track overshadowed me,” he admitted and said it was a “bit frustrating” that it has cast such a long shadow over his career.
“I would like to make it clear I’m not ashamed of the track,” he said, but remarked upon the success he has had outside the track, pointing to hits he scored by remixing tracks by Gavin James and James Arthur.
In a 2019 interview with The Sun, McCabe said that Maniac 2000 is “a mammoth that refuses to die,” and when that quote was relayed to him, he said he still holds those views.
McCabe found himself on the other side of the chart divide when he presented the National Chart Show on RTÉ 2FM in the mid-2010s and said the world of chart data and stats is “more intricate” than it was during his spell on top of the charts.
“Back when Maniac 2000 was out, you’d get the midweek charts on a Wednesday, if you were number one on a Wednesday afternoon, you knew you were going to be number one on a Friday, but it’s much more complex and data-driven now,” he says.
“Nowadays it’s a thing of a song being number one on the Irish version of iTunes for like an hour, you check it again, and suddenly it’s down to number three, and of course, iTunes charts are just one way of tracking how charts are compiled these days,” he explained.
Belters Only have followed in the footsteps of McCabe in scoring massive chart hits, and McCabe said that dance music is an inherent part of the Irish identity.
“If you think about it, the céilí is a very old-school way for Irish people to express themselves through dance,” he mused.
McCabe can hold a legitimate claim to being the godfather of Irish dance music and said that he’s working on a new project that will help him evolve as an artist.
“Whenever I do a set these days, I play a track that goes 125 BPM, Maniac 2000 is 140 BPM the whole way through. The secret to dance music is that you always have a consistent beat,” he said.
“More recently, Calvin Harris has been experimenting with a more happy hardcore style of trance to great success. When you hear a track by Calvin Harris or Disclosure or watch one of their sets at festivals, they are always playing at the same tempo. In truth, that isn’t something I haven’t quite cracked as a musician.”
McCabe said he was “still a work in progress” as far as DJ’ing is concerned, and said that there are certain elements of music production and live shows that “make a lot more sense to me now than when I was 20!”
“There are elements of putting on a live show to me now that come naturally to me, but went totally over my head 20 years ago,” he said.
There has been a cult campaign to send Maniac 2000 to the Eurovision, but McCabe has already had decent success at the Eurovision.
McCabe produced Ireland’s 2018 entry, Together by Ryan O’Shaughnessy, and unlike recent Eurovision entries by Ireland it qualified for the grand final.
The entry finished 16th, which marks Ireland’s 4th-best finish of the last 20 years.
When asked if we could see McCabe on stage at next year’s contest in Malmo, McCabe laughed and said “don’t count on it!”
“People have always come up to me and said you should send Maniac 2000 to the Eurovision,” he said, but remarked that entries to the contest must be original songs which sadly puts paid to the idea of Maniac 2000 helping Ireland reclaim its title of most Eurovision titles.
“Every good musician is looking for that one thing that helps them progress and move forward – I’m still looking for it.”
Mark McCabe will play the Irish Champions Festival at Leopardstown on Saturday, September 9th