“It was three weeks before the release, and he said: ‘I know it will be number one’”: How ATB accidentally came up with the hook for the chart-topping 9PM (Till I Come) while showing off his studio to impress a date

ATB '9 PM (TILL I COME)' | The Making Of A Dance Anthem - YouTube

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Released in 1999, German producer and DJ André Tanneberger’s 9PM (Till I Come) is a bona fide club classic, featuring one of the most recognisable hooks in dance music’s history. But did you know that this iconic lead line was improvised not in the hopes of creating a chart-topping trance anthem, but to impress a date that had swung by the studio for a tour?

The artist better known as ATB revealed the origins of the track’s infectious hook in a recent interview with DJ Mag, confessing that the melody line – a pitch-bent flourish of sampled guitar, likely produced by a Roland JV-1080 – was casually improvised while he was showing off his music production set-up to a female companion. 

“I met a girl, and I think we had a plan to go to the cinema,” recalls ATB. “She was interested in how I was producing music, and I had a really nice little studio.

“So I showed her, here, I can do a beat, here is a guitar sound,” he continues. “I played this melody, and right in this moment I recognised, oh – that’s kind of an interesting melody. I started to work the melody out, and it was going further, I put a bass in it, and I finally forgot she was there. 

“After a time she said, ‘very interesting, but we have to go to the cinema’. Alright, let’s save it. You always have working titles when you save a track, and it was 9PM in the evening, so I said 'okay, I’ll save it as 9PM'.”

“The next day I went back to the studio and finished the track, but there needed to be some vocals on it. My manager, he always had a lot of records and he gave one to me and I was listening to these a capellas. There was this little ‘till I come’ in it, so I took it out, put it into the track and that was 9PM (Till I Come).”

Perhaps due to the speed at which the track came together, ATB was initially uncertain about its prospects: “In the first days I thought nobody would ever buy it,” he says. But record labels and promoters soon came calling, including one that successfully predicted the song’s stratospheric success. 

“We were sitting there and they said, ‘I think we have something big here’. I got a call from a UK promoter and he was like, ‘André, I want to talk to you personally and congratulate you on your number one.’ It was three weeks before the release. I was like: ‘what are you talking about? You don’t know that.’ He said ‘I know it will be number one’.”

Sure enough, 9PM (Till I Come) soared to the top of the UK charts and hit top tens across the globe. “9PM is so important for my life, it changed everything for me,” says ATB. “But it was kind of, not an accident, I would say, but it wasn’t planned. That’s what I always think: you can’t plan hits or classics.”