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What do Erick Morillo’s first UK breakthrough, Deep Dish’s top three smashing ‘Flashdance’ and the blissful trance melodies of a certain Paul Van Dyk all hold in common? A shared ability to penetrate both the underground club floors and mainstream chart summits for starters, and the fact that they all owe their UK success to the legendary dance label, Positiva.

It’s over thirteen years since the Positiva imprint first opened its racks as the dedicated dance wing of music major EMI back in 1993. It’s primary goal? To propel the biggest dance tunes rocking clubland onto the mainstream pedestal they deserved to command. Within just twelve months, Positiva gate-crashed the UK pop charts when a little known US house producer named Erick Morillo exploded with the energetic, infectiously catchy club hit ‘I Like To Move It’. Produced under his Reel 2 Real guise and charged with the ragga chatter vocals of The Mad Stuntman, ‘I Like To Move It’ shifted a colossal 1.5 million units worldwide, smashed into the UK charts at number five whilst Erick began his journey to become one of the most iconic house DJs on the planet. The following year The Bucketheads’ wildly funkin’ disco number ‘The Bomb’ repeated the trick giving Masters At Work’s Kenny ‘Dope’ Gonzalez his first UK chart hit. Put simply, Positiva wasted no time in making its mark ‘a large iconic white cross that stamped its arm-raising ethos onto just about every corner of club culture over the coming twelve years.

“The essence of a Positiva release probably hasn’t changed much from when the label first started,” reflects the label’s Director Jason Ellis on their ubiquitous presence. “We’re all about mirroring what’s big and happening in clubland at any given time. We’re not all about changing the way clubland itself works, more on reflecting what’s really doing it out there and pushing it to the forefront.”€

To think Positiva has simply picked up the biggest hits in clubland and plonked them neatly into the limelight would be something of a misunderstanding though. Throughout its existence, the label has gone out on a limb time and again, constantly pushing against the winds of convention to blow dance music’s mainstream identity completely wide open. Back in 2002, no-one expected the stereotyped boisterousness of the UK drum and bass scene to give us the most soulful, upbeat dance crossover hit of the spring. But in Shy FX and T Power’s samba slinked ‘Shake Your Body’ that’s exactly what happened and, sure enough, it was Positiva responsible for taking the risk that broke it to the masses. Hitting number 7, unheard of for a d’n’b record at the time, ‘Shake Your Body’ lifted two underground heroes of the UK d’n’b scene into a remit where clubbers and music lovers the world over were exposed to their party crossover creation.

“We’ve never been a label that is too cool for school,” reasons Ellis on the label’s enduring pull towards good quality mainstream dance hits. “It’s always been about balancing what is commercially viable with the tracks that are ticking all the right boxes for the big DJs”

Countless top ten smashes, numerous number ones and some two hundred and fifty releases under their belt (more than half of which have hit the top forty), it’s a simple logic that’s pretty hard to argue with too. “Positively Positiva” thirteen years of the biggest crossover club records around.