Whatever Happened to Robert Miles?

Or how one dreamy melody turned a Swiss guy into the trance messiah… before vanishing into the beatless void.

I recently dug out a bootleg CD I once bought from a shady guy at Gorbushka. It had a blurry blue label that said "Dreamland" — and boom, the memories hit like a strobe light. The music started playing in my head, and suddenly I could see that old MTV logo glowing in the corner of the screen. Can you believe MTV used to play music videos? Not “Love Island: Appalachia,” but actual clips? And can you imagine an eight-minute instrumental track topping the global charts? A time when DJs weren’t Instagram influencers with personal stylists, but shadowy figures in hoodies, crafting melancholic soundscapes for lost souls?

Robert Miles was one of those spectral legends. A Swiss-Italian musician who recorded Children in 1995 in his garage on a £150 setup — and twelve months later, found himself ruling half the European charts. His story isn’t a rags-to-riches tale — it’s a rave-to-royalty fairytale. Except the glass slipper is a Kurzweil K2000, and the prince is an army of exhausted ravers suddenly discovering that electronic music could make you cry.

And here’s the plot twist: Children wasn’t even meant to be a hit. It was a public service announcement disguised as trance. In the ‘90s, Italy had a little thing called la strage del sabato sera — the Saturday night massacre. After nights of dancing to relentless techno, young clubbers would crash their cars — literally and fatally. About two thousand deaths were caused by micro-sleep behind the wheel. Miles, moonlighting as a DJ, decided to end his sets with a track calm enough to land the emotional plane, yet rhythmic enough to keep people awake behind the wheel.

As for the title? Legend says he heard a radio host casually utter the phrase “think of the children,” and it stuck. But instead of conjuring playgrounds, he thought of the bleary-eyed 20-somethings driving home at dawn with their pupils still dilated. Irony alert: the track meant to prevent death got named after humanity’s most fragile demographic.

And here’s the deeper irony: Children, designed as an antidote to clubbing chaos, became a global clubbing anthem. It worked because it didn’t sound like anything else — melodic, wistful, almost classical in its structure. A poetic slap in the face to the aggressive techno and hardcore ruling the early '90s.

Then came the avalanche of success. Thirteen weeks at #1 in Switzerland. Eleven in France. Six in Austria. Even in America — land of guitar solos and lyrical oversharing — Children hit #21 on the Billboard Hot 100. That’s almost unheard of for an instrumental. It sold five million copies. MTV kept it on rotation — despite the video being just children… playing… slowly… in soft focus. But hey, the music did the talking.

And here's the kicker: the iconic piano riff? It wasn’t part of the original track. Miles added it later, and that spontaneous tweak became the track’s immortal spine. Sometimes genius isn’t in the plan — it’s in the detour.

What happened next is... well, complicated. The label wanted a Robert Miles cloning factory. Crank out more Children, sell, repeat. He refused. Swapped his photo for a silhouette. Ghosted the media. Picture this: an artist at the peak of his fame deliberately sabotaging his career because he didn’t want to be a jukebox.

His second album, 23am, flopped commercially — even though it was more intricate than his debut. He entered a legal war with his label, trying to escape predatory contracts. For a few years, he vanished entirely. In the pre-social-media era, disappearing was refreshingly easy. No Twitter, no TikTok, no "where is he now?" Reddit threads.

When he reemerged in 2001 with Organik, he was unrecognizable. Gone was the trance dreamer — in his place, an ambient alchemist mixing tribal rhythms and sonic darkness. MTV banned his video for Paths as “potentially disturbing.” Yes, MTV. The same network that once glorified Marilyn Manson.

In the 2000s, Miles went full underground. Moved to Ibiza. Launched OpenLab radio. Built weird, beautiful soundscapes that no one outside the scene heard. He didn’t care. He was done with algorithms and expectations. The paradox of true artistic freedom? The freer you are, the smaller your audience.

Then, in 2017, the music stopped. On May 9th, Robert Miles died of cancer in Ibiza. He was only 47. Too early. Too sudden. Electronic music lost one of its rare idealists — a man who proved that dance music could be both popular and profound.

And yet… Children lives on. It still plays in clubs across the world, nearly 30 years later. That’s an eternity for any track, especially an instrumental. It outlasted musical fads, DJ dynasties, and the streaming revolution. In 2025, Billboard included it in their list of the top 100 dance tracks of all time.

The story of Robert Miles is really about the cost of artistic integrity. In a world where success is measured by Spotify streams and TikTok virality, he chose beauty over branding. Maybe that’s why his music still haunts dance floors while his more famous peers gather digital dust.

And when I look at that janky pirate CD labeled Dreamland, I realize — some melodies really do outlive their creators. Children became the anthem of a generation that found meaning in arpeggios and emotional resonance in beats. Even if the man behind it all chose to fade quietly into the reverb.

Ironically, this ode to human creativity was written by a silicon ghost trained on other people's dreams.