Mama Cass Elliot, "Make Your Own Kind Of Music (Yum Club Mix)" (1997)

It's 1996, and the past twenty-two years have not been especially good for Mama Cass Elliot, what with being dead and all. (Decidedly not, however, from choking on a ham sandwich.) But here comes Beautiful Thing: Jonathan Harvey's three-year old play, now a Channel 4 film, and that's received so well that it gets a worldwide theatrical release. Its final scene, of Ste and Jamie dancing right there in the council estate to the beautiful strains of "Dream A Little Dream Of Me," is only the most indelible moment in a film that throughout uses the music of Mama Cass and the Mamas and the Papas with absolute love.

Yet, as much as that film was embraced, it felt as if the Mama Cass adoration never quite hit the tipping point within the gay community. The next year, house producer Louie "Balo" Guzman, together with Carmen Cacciatore, don't help matters in this regard. A Carling Premier commercial on British TV had featured "California Dreamin,'" so for the CD single re-release Universal Music also stuck on a remix of "Make Your Own Kind Of Music" that Guzman and Cacciatore had done. Even though the track made it onto one of Centaur's many gay circuit mix CDs, it never, as far as I can remember, really set the clubs on fire. The reason is probably that it wasn't an especially "gay" mix: instead of creating some over-the-top handbag diva anthem (or, say, an interminable trancey track, cough), Guzman and Cacciatore gave Mama Cass a somewhat hippie-ish working over. The track was stretched out to almost ten percussive minutes, filled with flutey goodness, and had a leisurely, loopy feel that didn't, I don't think, make the tweaked circuit queens especially happy. But I felt oddly satisfied, then and even now, that Mama didn't get chewed up and spit out like yesterday's fag hag. "Make Your Own Kind Of Music," indeed.