I’ve never been a big fan of House music outside its natural habitat of a club in Ibiza with a massive sound system. Especially when there are vocals.

But I do like the trancier instrumental side of the genre where the dub elements in the production come through. Like they do here, on the B-side of Move Your Body – aka The House Music Anthem.

Move Your Body – initially titled The House Music Anthem – does exactly what it says on both those tins. And for me it’s the B-side, Dub Your Body, that does it best for me.

Marshall “Virgo” Jefferson was working the graveyard shift at a Chicago post office in 1985 when he gave house music its first true anthem – reinforcing the point by naming it exactly that.  

h visiting a music store with a guitarist friend when a salesman showed him a new synthesizer – the Yamaha 284 – and told him you could play it like a pro keyboard player without a single lesson.

Inspired by the salesman’s pitch, he spent $9,000 on credit to buy the sequencer along with a keyboard, drum machine and a mixer, and took the equipment home. Two days later he wrote his first song.

Not long after that he persuaded a pair of co-workers to come to his home studio and, with Jefferson playing the piano and bass – slowly (because he was still learning the instruments) then speeding up the recording – they banged out this track in six hours, including travel time and mixing.

Jefferson was convinced he’d made something special but his friends and co-workers were less confident, and local music mogul Larry Sherman of Trax Records was unimpressed, declaring that it was “not House music.” 

Their main objection: pianos had never been featured in a House track at that time but, inspired by Elton John, Jefferson was determined to blend his piano melody into the tough, sweaty groove with rapid-fire percussion.

Then came the killer element, when Jefferson persuaded another friend from his late-night shift, Curtis McClain, to sing a lyric celebrating Chicago’s biggest contribution to music since the blues: “Gotta have House, music, all night long / With that House, music, you can’t go wrong / Give me that House, music, set me free / Lost in House, music, is where I wanna be.”

Despite the lack of enthusiasm greeting his tune, he got a friend to take a cassette to the Music Box, the club where DJ Ron Hardy was laying the foundations for deep house by mixing soul, funk and disco.

Jefferson couldn’t go to the club himself because he was still at work, but his friend Derrick ‘Sleezy’ Harris – a local music producer – took along a cassette and persuaded Hardy to play it. The crowd went crazy, resulting in him playing it six times in a row. 

After that Move Your Body spread like wildfire, first in other Chicago clubs, then – belatedly released on Trax Records in 1986 – nationally and around the world, turning deep House music into a global movement.

Since then the song has gone on to have a life of its own: Jefferson’s 2019 collaboration with Solardo brought it roaring back to festival stages, while the 2025 rework Life Is Simple (Move Your Body) with Maesic and Salomé Das introduced it to yet another generation.