A graffiti writer and an indie guitarist walk into a Leeds club where both are DJing — and somehow, the result is a group named after a misheard phrase about U2. Tim Garbutt and Jez Willis formed Utah Saints not out of religious fervor or American geography, but from a mumbled snippet — 'U2's in the Saints' — that stuck. The duo met in that club, their backgrounds already a collision of subcultures: Garbutt had played in an indie band, Willis had been part of a hip-hop crew and spent time painting walls. That friction between guitar music, hip-hop, and the rising pulse of rave would define everything they did next.
By 1991, British rave culture was exploding, but Utah Saints wanted to drag it somewhere it hadn't been — straight into the pop charts, with samplers as their only instruments. Their debut single 'What Can You Do for Me' arrived that year, built around a vocal hook lifted from Gwen Guthrie's 'Ain't Nothin' Goin' on But the Rent'. The sample was not cleared. Guthrie sued. It was a blunt introduction to the legal machinery behind music, and a lesson the duo would take to heart. From that point on, Utah Saints became obsessive about securing official permissions for every fragment they used, a practice that would lead them to one of the most famously guarded artists in British music.
The next single required a phone call that most producers would not dare make. For 'Something Good', released in 1992, Garbutt and Willis had constructed an entire track around the vocal from Kate Bush's 'Cloudbusting'. Bush rarely — almost never — granted sample clearance. The track sat in limbo until she listened to it herself. She approved it personally. That green light transformed a legal risk into a cultural landmark. 'Something Good' shot to number four on the UK chart and became a defining anthem of the rave era, its euphoric piano stabs and Bush's soaring voice capturing a moment when dance music felt unstoppable.
The sound was a deliberate hybrid — rave energy, pop structure, and the cut-up logic of hip-hop production. Utah Saints described their music as a mix of rave, pop, and techno, and they performed it using samplers and drum machines rather than traditional instruments, among the first in Britain to do so live. Their debut album, simply titled 'Utah Saints', arrived later in 1992 and cracked the top 10, eventually earning a silver certification. Alongside 'Something Good' and 'What Can You Do for Me', it included 'Believe in Me', which sampled The Human League's 'Love Action' — another clearance secured, another conversation with pop history.
The duo's sampling instincts grew more aggressive. In 1993, they took on Slayer, lifting a fragment from 'War' for their track 'I Want You'. That same year they played Glastonbury, bringing their sampler-driven show to a festival still dominated by guitars. The visual side mattered too — the video for 'Something Good' went into heavy rotation on MTV in 1992, and Willis later built a parallel career directing clips for other artists. Meanwhile, the group's US and European tours throughout the 1990s spread their hybrid sound far beyond the Yorkshire clubs where it began.
Then came a long silence. Seven years passed before a second album appeared. 'Two' finally arrived in 2000, featuring Chrissie Hynde of The Pretenders on vocals — another improbable collaboration made real. The gap reflected a changing industry, but also the duo's refusal to rush. They had founded their own label, Echo Beach, giving them control over their output. The rave moment they had helped define was over, but the music kept moving.
In 2008, 'Something Good' came back. A remix titled 'Something Good '08' returned the track to the UK Singles Chart, landing at number eight — 16 years after its original peak. The same hook, the same sample, the same Kate Bush vocal, now reaching a generation that had been children during the first wave. It was not nostalgia so much as proof that the architecture of the song was sound enough to hold weight across decades.
Four years later, Utah Saints stood on one of the largest stages imaginable. At the closing ceremony of the 2012 London Olympics, they performed a mashup of 'Something Good' with Bon Jovi's 'Always', a collision of stadium rock and rave-pop broadcast to a global audience. The choice was strange and perfect — two Yorkshire DJs, a sample of Kate Bush, and a New Jersey power ballad, stitched together for the end of the Games.
The track later surfaced in the soundtrack to the film 'Idiocracy', a dystopian comedy where it played as a relic of a smarter past. That accidental commentary fits. Utah Saints built their career on asking permission, clearing samples, and turning legal paperwork into dancefloor euphoria. Jez Willis was born on August 14, 1963 — 63 years ago as of 2026. The duo still tour and DJ, their catalog a document of what happens when rave culture learns to write a proper pop song.