Robert Miles — Children. Success, drama, plagiarism. Story behind the track

How did it all begin? It started with a great love of music. Robert already listened to experimental records by Stockhausen, complex jazz by Miles Davis, German krautrock, soul, funk, and classic electronic music, but in 1988 (when he was 18 years old), his friends showed him foreign house vinyls and he got lost. He started collecting records and learning to play trendy electronic music, first at local discos, then regional ones, and finally he reached clubs in Milan. At the same time, he worked at radio stations and spent all his earnings to build a small 4×4 studio in the garage of his house in the very north of Italy where he lived with his girlfriend at the time.

Then, there was the DJ scene with musicians and entrepreneurial people who wanted to develop the Italian market for dance electronics. In 1994, under the name Roberto Milani, Miles released his first records in one of the club subdivisions of Severo Lombardoni’s production centre, which was responsible for a large share of Italian music in 80s and 90s. Roberts’s curator was a young Nando Vannelli, who worked at Lombardoni’s department responsible for artists and their repertoir. At the end of 1994, Nando brought the discs from his department to his older brother, Joe T Vannelli, a big Milan DJ. At the time, Joe T Vannelli was just getting momentum as a producer and musician. He was passionate about the New York house sound and his label Dream Beat eXtreme was veering between deep house, progressive trance, and tribal house. Vannelli had a lot of connections and a tenacious character. He was close with all the DJs and was constantly touring: Miami, Tokyo, Lisbon, Berlin, Paris, New York. So Joe knew how to make electronic dance music without the aftertaste of Italian pasta.

The brothers signed up Robert’s first record under the name Robert Miles. Vannelli claims that it was him who convinced Robert to change his name because of his favourite song by John Miles: “Roberto, dear, we will look so much cooler with an Anglo-Saxon name.” The record had the first, guitar version of Children, and three average techno tracks, clearly used as fillers. The EP with 500 copies started selling in January, 1995, but nothing happened. Vannelli and Miles were touring around the country, pestering major labels with the licence for Children. They claimed that it was going to be the next big hit but no one believed the young musicians. Vannelli didn’t give up. He finished his performances with Children and put it on the answering machine of his own label while the secretaries were not allowed to pick up the phone. He understood that Children needed to be released separately, but one track is almost nothing. So he asked Robert to record a few versions for the single. To accompany the less known vocal version (Children of the world / Scream your dream), Miles sent the piano track, the dream version that would be associated with Children.

In the summer of 1995 Joe made a test pressing with the piano version of Children and flew to Florida to play in Firestone, one of the best clubs in the American South. When Miles’ record was playing, the local DJ Kimball Collins approached Vannelli and offered 200 dollars for Robert’s disc. The tracks with a throbbing bassdrum were exactly his thing. “I’m going to London tomorrow and I want to play your music there!” shouted the DJ. “And you sold it?” asked the interviewer. “No, I gave that record as a gift. I’m not a jerk,” answered Vannelli.

Joe T Vannelli

When Kimball played Children in London as promised, the founder of the British label Platipus, Simon Berry, happened to be in the same club. Through Joe T Vannelli he bought the license to release Children in the UK. The track was sent as a promo to Radio 1 where it was played in the sets of several DJs. The reason it didn’t get a daily rotation was the lack of vocals. But the number of listeners asking for the track changed the editorial policy and the instrumental track was now played a few times a day.

The growing popularity of the single in the UK made the labels fight for it. Three months after its release in the UK, Platipus started experiencing problems with its distribution. The small independent label hadn’t anticipated the snowballing demand for Miles’ track. Vannelli re-sold the licence for the single to Deconstruction Records, which belonged to BMG. The contract was signed before Christmas of 1995. The deal with BMG secured support and the promotion of Miles’ brainchild, not only in the UK but all around the world since the third biggest media company in the world had offices in 50 countries and an HQ in New York. The US was finally open for Children. And it conquered it.

Miles’ debut singles spent around six months in the Billboard chart. Vannelli hit a jackpot: European labels queued up to buy a licence to release Children in their countries. In 1995-1996, the single was at the top of 18 European charts, a phenomenal result for an instrumental track. In some countries, it was the club DJs that unleashed the wave; in others it was radio DJs. Together, they secured the constant demand for the coveted disc in shops. Already in 1996, it was reported that 4 million copies of Children had been sold in less than 12 months. “I am surprised because the first time around it sold a maximum of 3,000 copies and I thought that was it,” said Miles. “I’m happy with that.”

Miles was snapped up: he received awards, statuettes, gold, platinum and multi-platinum discs as well as the constant interview question about how he’d come up with Children. Those who read at least five such interviews know the two main versions. The first is that Children was written as a response to the horrors of the war between the countries of the former Yugoslavia in the early 90s. The second is that Children was written for Italian ravers to come down after the loud and fast music. As one note said, “Miles recognises both versions as true”, though recently people started to think for some reason that the version with innocent children suffering from their homes being shelled was made up by Deconstruction’s PR department. However, Robert himself willingly used this version in the later interviews, after he’d left Deconstruction. And even his official bio on his official site says that Children was a response to the atrocities in the disintegrating Yugoslavia. So it doesn’t seem that Robert hates the PR version. In an interview to a local TV channel, his father Albino Concina said that, in the early 90s, he volunteered on a humanitarian mission, bringing food and medicine to the camps of the victims of the Balkan conflict and talked about it with his son, who wrote the guitar version of Children a couple of days later.

The ravers’ version relates to the events called stragi del sabato sera (Saturday night slaughter) in the Italian media. Ravers, excited by the fast music as well as too much drugs and alcohol, took an expensive car at sunrise and crashed it into concrete columns at 200 km/h. Over the first half of the 90s, the number of ravers who died this way was almost two thousand, so concerned parents raised the alarm all over the country. As the Mamme Antirock movement, they pestered the authorities, calling on them to save the youth from the detrimental influence of clubs that worked till sunrise. One hand of the government closed the clubs, but the other annulled such decisions. The first pages of newspapers and TV screens showed that the public agreed to neither ban these clubs, nor make them close earlier. There was an idea, however, to make the music quieter and slower. Miles himself loved to play hard techno, but, together with his colleagues, he slowed down the tempo in the last working hours, just before everyone went home.

“I wrote Children with the intention of taking the listener’s excitement away, to calm them down,” explained Miles. “When I finished the track, I couldn’t wait to see how people would react. I was anxious to see how people would take to this piece. The following Sunday morning I opened my DJ set with Children, feeling both scared and excited... the DJ just before me had ended with a very heavy piece. To break the existing mood with a melodic tune and a long intro could have simply cleared the floor. The people in front of me stopped in their tracks, their eyes fixed to the console almost in annoyance. I felt my blood run cold and I remember lowering my eyes in fear. The record reached its soaring climax. From the floor came a thunderous noise... I lifted my gaze and saw a sea of hands reaching up high and a smile stamped on every face. A girl approached me in tears. What music is this? she asked me. I don’t think I shall ever forget that moment, when I realized that my feelings had been conveyed through my music. My dream turned into reality.”

However, fellow DJs couldn’t forgive Robert for his popularity. “I don’t understand it,” said Miles. “When Children was only selling 3,000 copies, the underground DJs loved it. When it was a hit, they didn’t seem to like it anymore. This record was played by all more or less underground DJs (including those who don’t play anything but house). And now that this track is known all over the world, my colleagues say that it’s no longer underground. Although I, despite all the hype, still feel like a DJ from an underground club in Milan. But they say to me, Noooo, you’re one of the stars now. And I don’t want to be a star, I’ve become one involuntarily. It’s a vicious circle: both stars and little-known DJs are against you. I understand my people, because if I were an underground DJ, I’d also be annoyed with the young upstart. The good thing is that nobody says that we put lame music in the clubs. On the contrary, people recognise that we’ve always played only quality records. And I’m glad that a lot of people, after they heard Children, became interested in electronic music, got involved in it, went to the clubs where the right guys play. So I don’t understand what my fault is. A lot of people didn’t know about Future Sound of London or other kinds of experimental music. Now they’re listening to it. And in general, no matter what happens next, I’m already happy that I’ve brought new people into the clubs.”

But that wasn’t the problem. In the summer of 1997, Frank Zappa’s former keyboardist and now new age musician Patrick O’Hearn shocked news agencies and sued the most famous Italian DJ. It turned out that in the guitar version of Children, Miles used a motif from Patrick’s 1985 track At first light. And if you think about it, it makes sense: Miles’ early compositions, released before Children in 1994-95, can’t be called either masterpieces or even well-crafted. They are mostly exercises in working with sequencers or timid attempts to express himself through music. But in the bulk, these are records of the second and third class, while Children is a guitar gem, a breakthrough and a new creative step. It doesn’t even matter whether it was done intentionally or whether the forgotten music of another person came to mind while working on the track (in Landscape, Miles happily quoted the guitar part from Pink Floyd and the piano part from Marco Masini). The thing is, the beginning of both tracks sound obscenely similar. Miles himself once said: “I recorded this track almost as a joke”, and at another time he called the guitar version “overnight doodle”.

For Joe T Vannelli, the news of plagiarism was out of the blue. He was in the middle of preparing the promo for Robert’s second album 23 am, and suddenly he learned this news. Since Patrick O’Hearn was an American citizen, things escalated quickly for Miles’s American management. According to Vannelli, all payments from the US were immediately blocked and sales of the debut album Dreamland with Children, which contained the “stolen” guitar version, were suspended. Vannelli quickly got lawyers involved and the case was hushed up. Patrick O’Hearn, who had previously demanded 10 million dollars, was satisfied with two million dollars in payoffs and, apparently, some other advantages, which they decided not to make public.

Another case of (possible) borrowing is the similarity between the piano part in Miles’ dream version of Children and the trumpet solo in Garik Sukachev’s song Napoi menia vodoi (Russian Give me a drink of water.) They were written a couple of years apart (Napoi menia vodoi in 1993, the piano version of Children in 1995). But all the arguments are based on the coincidence of one fragment in the two tracks. Nobody has any concrete facts or official statements that somebody stole something from somebody else. Garik was asked about this in 2011. He said: “I got a call from an Italian artist or band who wanted to use the melody from Napoi menia vodoi in some sample or something. I said: Be my guest, why not? That was it.”

Of course, Children, as a global superhit, couldn’t help becoming a target for covers or remixes. Children laid down the rules for dream house tracks. And those who wanted to repeat or come close to the glory of the 1996 number one hit diligently copied Miles’ style. The genre couldn’t take it and collapsed within a year. For Robert himself, Children became not only his hallmark, but also a breadwinner song. It made his fortune and allowed him to keep his creative independence, build a studio, and open a label to release his music. Children also helped Robert to open his own real radio station in Ibiza. In order to buy broadcasting equipment, a frequency and a million other important things, Miles sold the copyrights to Children and used the money to create the OpenLab radio station and play the music he loved, offbeat electronica in particular, to all of Ibiza and the world. With his own radio station, Miles gave platform to the young, handpicked music from little-known but interesting artists and made his own hour-long programme. Interestingly enough, OpenLab is still running today, even after Robert has passed away.