Jive Bunny & the Mastermixers

Jive Bunny and the Mastermixers
Origin	Rotherham, South Yorkshire, England
Past members	Les Hemstock John Pickles Andrew Pickles Patrick Perkins Ian Morgan Mark Smith

Jive Bunny and the Mastermixers were a 1980s and early 1990s novelty pop music act from Rotherham, Yorkshire, England. The face of the group was Jive Bunny, a cartoon rabbit who appeared in the videos, and also (as a human being in a costume) did promotional appearances for them.

Doncaster DJ and producer Les Hemstock created the original "Swing the Mood" mix for the Music Factory owned Mastermix DJ service. It was then taken from there and developed as a single release by father and son team John and Andrew Pickles. The name Jive Bunny came from a nickname Andy Pickles used to call a friend. Ian Morgan a fellow DJ and co-producer also engineered and mixed some of the early releases along with Andy Pickles. Morgan was replaced in the early 1990s by DJ and producer Mark "The Hitman" Smith.

Jive Bunny's three number ones were "Swing the Mood", "That's What I Like" and "Let's Party". All three songs used sampling and synthesisers to combine pop music from the early rock and roll era together into a medley.

The act had eleven entries in the UK singles chart between July 1989 and November 1991. Each track used a sampled instrumental theme to join the old songs together, in much the same way as dance music megamixes. "Swing the Mood" began with Glenn Miller's famous "In the Mood" (a recording from 1939), followed immediately by rhythmic re-editing of Bill Haley and His Comets' "Rock Around the Clock", Little Richard's "Tutti Frutti" and the Everly Brothers' "Wake Up, Little Susie". "Swing the Mood" was #1 for five weeks on the UK singles chart in 1989, and quickly caught on in the United States, where it reached #11 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart.

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