Connected

Casey and Finch are credited through the sample of Jimmy Bo Horne's "Let Me (Let Me Be Your Lover)" (1978), whose bassline and drums it uses. Birch told Songwriting magazine in 2015 that he built the groove in his Battersea flat on Lavender Hill by looping a tiny bass drum and snare section with an 808 drum machine, that the title came from a record he believed was T-Connection's "Totally Connected", that the chorus came to him on a bus, and that the words just kind of tumbled out. The band had the backing track for at least six months in Brixton and finished it at Workhouse Studios on the Old Kent Road; raps tried in the booth were rejected by Hallam, and on the engineer's suggestion they jammed instead, so the first improvised vocal, inspired by the LA riots and London tensions, became the verse. They finished that afternoon and mixed the next day. Wikipedia adds that the vocal hook was retriggered by hand on a basic sampler, and that Birch injured his finger. Hallam told Billboard in 1993 that it is about human beings and the lack of connection there is between anything today.

The single was released on September 14, 1992 on 4th and B'way and Gee Street, with B-sides "Disconnected" and "Fever"; the album version runs 5:16 on the song article and 5:14 on the tracklist, the single edit 3:59. It reached 18 in the UK, 20 on the US Hot 100 (some sources say 11 on another chart), 5 on US Modern Rock, 5 in Austria, 6 in Switzerland and 8 in Sweden. Matthew Amos directed the video, nominated for Best Dance Video at the 1993 MTV Video Music Awards. Larry Flick of Billboard praised its contagious chorus, and the Telegraph put it at 34 on its 2015 list of dance songs.

It was used in Hackers (1995), Saving Silverman, You Don't Mess with the Zohan, The Vampire Diaries (2014) and the ESPN series The Last Dance (2020). Setlist.fm shows it in 116 setlists, and it was played mid-set in Cambridge, Massachusetts on January 25, 2025. We found no covers.