Republica's Saff on Making 'Ready to Go': 'We're Gonna Be Massive'

Republica singer Saff still remembers the exact moment she knew the band would break through. "The day Saff came into the studio with red hair, I said, 'We're gonna be massive!' It was the missing link." The remark anchors her account of how the group built its 1990s anthem "Ready to Go" from scratch in a self-built London studio.

The band had a clear plan from the start, Saff explains. "We always had a vision of mixing acid house with indie rock." To realize it, they rented a space in London's Shoreditch and built their own studio — "long before it got trendy," she notes.

The setup was homemade in every detail. Saff named her vocal booth Hattie Jacques, in honour of the Carry On films and, she adds, because the name works as Cockney rhyming slang. "We spent all our money rewiring it," she says.

That booth became the production hub for "Ready to Go." "That's where we wrote, recorded and produced Ready to Go – 100 mixes later!" The song went on to become one of the defining singles of the decade, fusing the dance and rock impulses the band had set out to combine.

Saff's account, published by the Guardian, frames the track as the product of obsession rather than accident: a rented room, spent savings, a rhyming-slang vocal booth and a hundred attempts at the mix. Her story offers a reminder of how much 90s dance-rock was engineered by hand, in pre-gentrification Shoreditch, before the genre reached the charts.