Lovesick (Underdog Remix)

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In the fall of 1997, British producer and designer Trevor Jackson, operating under his alias The Underdog, licensed Lisa Germano’s “Lovesick” from Excerpts From a Love Circus and issued a reworked version on his Output Recordings label. The single appeared in two formats—a CD and a 10″ vinyl—making it one of the few instances of Germano’s work being remixed and officially released by an outside artist during her 4AD years. Both formats are now long out-of-print and are considered rare collector’s items.

Background

By the time The Underdog remix was released in September 1997, “Lovesick” had already established itself as one of the standout tracks from Excerpts From a Love Circus (1996). Along with “Small Heads” and “I Love a Snot,” it received considerable airplay on college and alternative radio in both the US and the UK—a rare distinction in Germano’s catalog, given how resolutely uncommercial her music tended to be.

Trevor Jackson had spent much of the mid-1990s building a reputation as one of the UK’s most eclectic and adventurous remixers. Working as The Underdog, he had reworked tracks for artists as varied as Massive Attack, U2, Run DMC, UNKLE, and the Gravediggaz, a roster that illustrated his ability to move between underground and mainstream contexts without appearing to belong fully to either. In a later interview for Red Bull Music Academy, Jackson described his approach: he would typically strip away the original’s entire musical landscape and build his own hip-hop, dub, and electronic terrain around a song’s core elements, prioritizing the song’s identity over preserving its original production.

Output Recordings, the label Jackson had recently founded, would go on to become one of the most respected British independents of its era, home to early releases by Four Tet and LCD Soundsystem. The Germano single arrived during the label’s formative period, when Jackson was using Output as a vehicle for exactly this kind of curated, artistically-driven release.

Themes

“Lovesick” is one of the more emotionally direct songs on Excerpts From a Love Circus, though “direct” in Germano’s world still means arriving at truth through surrealism and wounded humor. The song’s central lyric — “You’re not my Yoko Ono / you said those words to me” — was drawn from a real incident. Germano explained the line’s origin in a 1996 French interview, later archived on this site:

“Someone said that to me. I was caught up in a toxic relationship where I let the other person lie to me. When we broke up, I couldn’t accept that it was over… One night, he said to me: ‘You’re not my Yoko Ono.’ It was both funny and awful. It said everything: ‘You’re not my soulmate, you never were, you’re not strong. You’re not someone I respect or want to share my life with.'”

The song uses that dismissal as its foundation, building around it a portrait of a relationship marked by cruelty disguised as clarity — a lover who delivers devastating verdicts in the language of compliment. Reviewers noted the song’s “menacing, Eastern-influenced” sonic character on the original album, and one Amazon reviewer described it as having been “deliberately rescued from the threat of serious unit-shifting by alienating instrumentation” and featuring “a wonderful middle-eight tribute to Yoko Ono.” Rate Your Music described it simply as “weary dream rock… disgusted with love and beauty.”

Jackson’s Underdog Remix reframes “Lovesick” within the UK electronic and trip-hop idiom that he had spent the mid-90s developing — a style rooted equally in hip-hop beat architecture, dub space, and psychedelia. The pairing is less incongruous than it might initially seem: Germano’s vocal carries a melancholy and restraint that sits naturally in the spaces Jackson tends to build, and the song’s Eastern undertones in the original translate fluidly into his production aesthetic. The instrumental version strips the vocal entirely, reducing the track to its rhythmic and textural core.

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The Underdog Remix was reproduced and mixed by Trevor Jackson, with bass provided by Luke Hannam and electronics by The Gingerbread Man. The session was engineered by The Sea at Milo the Garden. The original version of “Lovesick” had been produced by Paul Mahern and Lisa Germano for Excerpts From a Love Circus, with the album recorded at Echo Park in Bloomington, Indiana.

The single was released on September 29, 1997, simultaneously on CD (catalogue no. OPRCD8) and 10″ vinyl (catalogue no. OPR 8). Both formats carry the same two tracks: the Underdog Remix with Germano’s vocal, and a corresponding instrumental version—a structure typical of club-oriented releases, where the instrumental provided DJs with a mix-ready version free of vocal cues.

Publishing credits on the single list the original composition as owned by Emotional Wench/Polygram Songs, BMI, with the copyright held by 4AD Records (1997). This confirms that the licensing arrangement ran through 4AD rather than directly with Germano.

Personnel

Bass: Luke Hannam
Electronics: The Gingerbread Man

Original version produced by Paul Mahern and Lisa Germano
Reproduced and mixed by The Underdog (Trevor Jackson)
Engineered by The Sea at Milo the Garden

Written by Lisa Germano
Published by Emotional Wench / Polygram Songs (BMI)

Output Records, OPRCD8 (CD) / OPR 8 (Vinyl 10″)
© 1997 4AD Records

Lyrics

You’re not my Yoko Ono
You said those words to me
You say some hurtful things now
None cut so deeply

Those visions of beauty
Those visions haunt me
Illusions of hope
And they drive me crazy

You’re not my Yoko Ono
You said those words to me
You have too many problems
Always in therapy

Lovesick

You are a constant patient
You stop me being mean
Give me some inspiration
Is that why you hit me

Lovesick
Lovesick

Those visions of beauty
Those visions haunt me
But I like them
I’ll keep them
I’ll just go crazy

You’re not my Yoko Ono
You said those words to me
You say some hurtful things now
None cut so deeply

Lovesick
Lovesick
Lovesick

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