It was February of 1995 and snow had fallen in Sendai, Japan. Looking out onto the empty street from his hotel room, Jamiroquai frontman Jay Kay — in town while on tour with the band — wondered where everyone was. Heading outside, he asked a woman trudging through the snow, who advised that everyone was underground.
Inspiration pinged, and Kay, the English musician born Jason Luís Cheetham, went back inside and transcribed the lyrics forming in his head onto hotel stationery. “Oh now there is no sound/For we all live underground” became a standout line of “Virtual Insanity,” the acid jazz funk band’s 1996 treatise on a dystopian future defined by humanity’s reliance on technology.
“Those lyrics, you would be able to turn around and say that it’s kind of come true,” a chatty and cheerful Kay says while speaking to Billboard over Zoom from his U.K. home.
“Virtual Insanity” landed on four Billboard Charts, including No. 38 on Alternative Airplay and No. 34 on Dance Club Songs. But its status as a cultural phenomenon was not only a function of its warm groove, but its instantly iconic music video directed by Jonathan Glazer, who’d go on to direct films including Sexy Beast and The Zone of Interest.
