Sonique Clarke’s first recordings arrived while she was still young. “Let Me Hold You” appeared in the mid-1980s and gave her an early taste of the record business before the house explosion reshaped London nightlife. The single itself was modest; the useful thing was the experience — studio work, songwriting and the reality that getting a record out was very different from building a long career.

The decisive apprenticeship came with Mark Moore and S’Express. By the time Sonique joined the project, Theme From S’Express had already taken sample-built club music to No.1. Working with Moore put her inside a world where records were not simply songs to perform; they were raw materials a DJ could cut, extend and reposition in a room.

Sonique later described the S’Express period as transformative. She learned stagecraft, sharpened her writing and watched Moore work as a DJ. When that chapter ended, Moore gave her a set of turntables and a mixer. It was a practical gift with a big consequence: she could now stop waiting for somebody else to decide what music surrounded her voice.

She did not immediately call herself a DJ. Her own biography says she spent roughly three years learning before playing publicly. That matters in a period when celebrity DJing was beginning to tempt plenty of people into the booth. Sonique took the slower route: records, practice, beat-matching, selection and enough hours at home to stand up in a proper club without the singer’s name doing the technical work for her.

The bookings grew through the 1990s. Cream, Ibiza and Manumission put her inside the big club circuit as a working DJ, not a PA wedged between sets. The sound moved through house and trance as both styles were becoming larger, brighter and increasingly tied to the superclub stage.

Her twist was the microphone. Sonique developed a habit of singing live over records while DJing — sometimes planned, sometimes improvised. In a scene where the DJ was becoming more visible but still usually communicated through selection alone, hearing the person behind the decks suddenly add a live vocal line changed the energy without turning the set into a conventional concert.

That double life fed back into the studio. “It Feels So Good” first reached the UK chart in 1998, peaking at No.24. Sonique has since explained that the track actually started life as a drum & bass idea before being rebuilt into the version the world knows — a useful reminder that its crossover finish came from club experimentation rather than a straight pop-writing session. The re-release in 2000 hit at exactly the point when trance, vocal house and radio-friendly club music were spilling into one another.

The record went to UK No.1 for three weeks. Its scale can obscure how club-built the song still sounds: a simple pulse, a vocal hook strong enough to carry a room and an arrangement that leaves space for the feeling to build rather than crowding every bar with production.

“Sky” followed to No.2, while the Hear My Cry album reached the UK Top 10. Suddenly the DJ who had spent years learning how to control a club was also one of the biggest crossover dance vocalists in the country. In 2001 that crossover was formally recognised twice: Sonique won the BRIT Award for Best British Female, while It Feels So Good received the Ivor Novello International Hit of the Year.

That success did not erase the decks. Sonique continued to DJ, and the surviving Hyperstate set from Oslo in September 2000 is useful precisely because it catches the two identities at the point of maximum crossover. This is the summer of the No.1 single, but the recording is still a proper trance/club set rather than a pop showcase.

Later artist-owned Mixcloud recordings keep that club identity visible. The 2015 Moscow set and her own podcast are not heritage recreations of 2000. They show an artist still using house and techno-house records as the working environment for a voice that most of Britain first learned through the charts.

That identity has kept widening rather than narrowing. In March 2024 Sonique played a sold-out headline show at London’s Royal Festival Hall with a full live band, string quartet and choir. It is almost the opposite scale to learning to beat-match alone on Mark Moore’s turntables, but the thread is the same: control the whole musical environment around the voice rather than wait for somebody else to build it.

Sonique’s place in rave history sits in that overlap. She came through the late-80s club-pop laboratory of S’Express, became a proper DJ during the 1990s and then carried the confidence of the booth back into songs that crossed over on a huge scale. The pop hit makes more sense when the club apprenticeship comes first.