Classics

Strings of Life: the story of the record

A racing piano, swelling strings, drums that keep stopping and starting, and no bassline at all. "Strings of Life" was built in Detroit in 1987 from a piano part a friend had left on Derrick May's sequencer, named in Chicago by Frankie Knuckles and turned into an anthem by the raves in Britain. Almost forty years later DJs still use it to lift a room. Here is how it came about.

At a glance

A symphony without a bassline

"Strings of Life" came out in 1987 on Transmat, Derrick May's own label in Detroit, under the name Rhythim Is Rhythim. It has a racing piano, swelling strings and drums that keep stopping and starting, and no bassline at all. May later admitted to Insomniac that it had never dawned on him that the track had no bass.

It never became a pop hit. In the UK a 1989 remix only reached number 74 in the Official Charts. Yet in polls of the greatest dance records it keeps landing near the top, and DJs still use it to lift a room. In October 2026 a new remix of a later vocal version turned up in 36 of the DJ charts we count for our own chart.

Derrick May and the Belleville Three

Derrick May grew up with Juan Atkins and Kevin Saunderson in Belleville, a small town outside Detroit. The three are known as the Belleville Three: Atkins the originator, May the innovator, Saunderson the elevator, whose Inner City hits like "Good Life" took the sound into the charts.

They were close to Chicago too. In the mid-1980s May turned up at Frankie Knuckles' club, the Power Plant, with a Roland TR-909 wrapped in a towel and told him it would take them to the future, as MusicRadar recounts. Knuckles bought it.

In a clip from the documentary "Pump Up the Volume" May describes what he was after with a famous image: Kraftwerk and George Clinton stuck in an elevator with one keyboard between them.

A friend at the piano

The track starts with somebody else's music. Michael James, a friend from around the corner, came to May's house and asked if he could use the keyboards. He played a long piano ballad for hours, and May recorded it into his sequencer for him. The piece was called "Lightning Strikes Twice" and ran at about 80 beats per minute.

Much later May went through his sequences and found it again. In a film by Matthew Norman and Elliott Eastwick he describes the moment: about three and a half to four minutes into the eight-minute sequence there was one short passage. He stopped, sped up the tempo and let it loop for an hour. Then he set up his keyboard, added the strings, and listened over and over. The more he listened, the more scared he got, because he knew he had made something he had never made before.

The gear was simple. Roland names its TR-909 drum machine. Attack magazine hears a digital piano with a built-in sequencer, an 8-bit Ensoniq Mirage sampler for the strings and TR-727 bongos. May himself called his tools pretty primitive.

The name came from Chicago: Frankie Knuckles played the demo in his club and suggested "Strings of Life", The Vinyl Factory reports. The first Transmat 12-inch, credited "Produced by Mayday", carried "Strings", "Strings of Life" and "Kaos". A pair of its labels is now in the collection of the Detroit Historical Society.

Slow burn in Britain

"Strings of Life" did not take off overnight. The British label boss Neil Rushton was importing Detroit records on Transmat, KMS and Metroplex and called May just as the track came through. In an interview with Bill Brewster for Red Bull Music Academy he remembers it as an underground record, not an instant hit. In 1988 the compilation he put together for Virgin's 10 Records gave the Detroit sound its name: "Techno! The New Dance Sound of Detroit".

The breakthrough came with the outdoor raves. In 1989 Juan Atkins remixed the track as "Strings of Life '89". Red Bull Music Academy's history of Detroit techno in the UK tells how May closed a night at the Juice Bar in London by cutting up two copies of it until the sound system gave out. Frankie Bones remembers hearing it on 24 September 1989 in an abandoned warehouse near Ipswich with around 17,500 people, and says nothing was the same afterwards.

In the charts the '89 version reached number 74 for two weeks. On the dancefloor it became one of the defining records of the era, and it also shaped Orbital's "Chime".

What DJs say about it

Mark Moore of S'Express says he played it at Pyramid at Heaven in London when it first came out, long before the summer of love in 1988, and was probably the first to play it in England. "The crowd went crazy," he told Music Week in December 1995. A couple of days later he played it in a straight club, and it cleared the floor.

For Robert Owens, the voice of Fingers Inc., the record leads back to the Music Box in Chicago. "This is an all-time classic. I play it anywhere," he said in Music Week in April 1997. The remixes had almost worn it out for him, so he put it away for six months, "but it will always resurface."

Carl Craig, who would become the next big name in Detroit, called it a great party record in Music Week in July 1995: at home it might not move him, but when he hears it in a club, he trips out.

Why DJs still reach for it

"Strings of Life" is less a track than a moment in a set. It can open a night, rescue a flat room or close the last hour, and it works for house and techno crowds alike. In "Pump Up the Volume" May tells of a man in a Chicago record shop who did not know whether to dance to it or to waltz. That, May says, was exactly the point: to show how sophisticated dance music could be.

The record keeps coming back in new shapes. In January 2005 Soul Central turned it into a vocal song with Kathy Brown, "Strings of Life (Stronger on My Own)", which went to number 6 in the UK. That version still lives on: in October 2026 the Sgt Slick remix showed up in 36 of the DJ charts we count for our chart, 25 times in a top 10.

May himself has a complicated relationship with it. He does not consider it his best work and has said bluntly that he doesn't need to hear it played. Some records simply belong to the dancefloor more than to the person who made them. Records like this turn up every month in the "Still in the bag" corner of our chart, and the Classics page collects their stories.

Questions

Who made "Strings of Life"?

Derrick May from Detroit, recording as Rhythim Is Rhythim. The piano part comes from his friend Michael James, who is credited as co-writer.

When did "Strings of Life" come out?

In 1987 on May's label Transmat. A remix by Juan Atkins, "Strings of Life '89", followed in the UK in 1989.

Is "Strings of Life" house or techno?

Both camps claim it. It was made in Detroit and counts as a founding record of techno, but it was named in Chicago by Frankie Knuckles and has been a house classic from the start.

Why is there no bassline?

There never was one. May has said it simply never occurred to him that the track had no bass.

Who sang on "Strings of Life"?

The original is instrumental. The vocal version "Strings of Life (Stronger on My Own)" by Soul Central with Kathy Brown reached number 6 in the UK in 2005.