Songfacts®:

• This house music classic was a staple at raves in the early '90s and holds up as a defining song of the genre. It was the first single from N-Joi, the English duo of Mark Franklin and Nigel Champion. The vocals are sampled from three different songs:
  
  "Peanut Butter" by Gwen Guthrie (1983 - "I'm in love with you, want you to love me too")
  
  "I Found Love" by Darlene Davis (1986 - "True love can be hard to find")
  
  "Back To Life (However Do You Want Me)" by Soul II Soul (1989 - "Feel the melody that's in the air")
• The singer in the video is Saffron (Samantha Sprackling), who later fronted the band Republica. She sang it with N-Joi when they performed it live and says she inspired the song.
  
  "That song, actually, was written about me," she told Songfacts.
  
  Saffron was friends with Franklin and Champion of N-Joi when they were working on the song - all three were part of the club scene in London. Saffron had some experience with musical theater - she was in a play called Starlight Express - so she knew how to sing and dance.
  
  "In 1988, acid house music hit the club scene and the gay scene in Soho, and me and all my friends were going to all these places, and this new music was amazing," she said. "It was coming out of Chicago and Detroit and Ibiza. People were making their own records in their bedrooms. It was this massive underground movement that changed the whole culture and social landscape.
  
  N-Joi and The Prodigy, we were all friends. They were like, 'We want to make records and DJ. You sing on the stage, do you want to come with us?' So I did. We were playing in fields and illegal warehouses and things like that. It was completely underground, organic. It was something new but something that anyone could get involved in. Just get a TB-303, an 808 or a 909 drum machine and add your beats. It was open to anyone."
• The song slowly found a following. In the UK, it charted at #45 when it was first released in 1990, then went to #8 when it was re-released the following year. In America, it permeated the house music scene but didn't chart until a new version ("The New Anthem") was released in 1996 and went to #1 on the Dance chart. By this time, the duo had found a following in America, where they had a #1 Dance hit with "Mindflux" in 1992.
• "Anthem" plays in the 2013 video game Grand Theft Auto V on the radio station Non-Stop-Pop FM.