For a brief moment in 2010, Scunthorpe became the centre of the universe. A town known for its steel industry nestled in north Lincolnshire, it was a place no one had been to yet familiar to us all. By the end of that year, it was probably the most referenced town in pop culture, despite having no large attraction to it.

Shutter shades hadn’t realised the party was over, the beige chinos and Rihanna Topman t-shirt brigade had its highest number of members, and Orange Wednesdays and Nando’s was still the number one date preference for people on EMA until October that year. Choice FM was still in its original iteration and Channel AKA had yet to be fully replaced by YouTube, although by this point that was changing fast.

“Rah, have you heard that new Tinie Tempah tune?” was something I heard more than once in spring of 2010. Before long, pre-drink YouTube playlists featured “Pass Out” and, to be frank, it didn’t take long for it to be overplayed. That’s no slight: “Pass Out” was an avalanche and we all succumbed to it one way or another. On Facebook, a ‘banter’ group called “Fuck you Tinie Tempah, Nigel Adkins has been to Southampton and Scunthorpe” was created a year after the track was released, in jest of Tinie’s infamous bar and reference to the football manager. That’s probably one of many Facebook groups that existed at the time but it’s an indication of the song’s influence, even a year after its release.

“Pass Out”, featuring a then-unknown Labrinth, was given life on UK radio but grew legs and ran as soon as the anthem made it onto the university circuit. Let’s not even mention the fallen venues that are now invisible, digital time capsules etched into the memories and writings of everyone who made dancefloors their living rooms for the night. These days, the term ‘cultural reset’ is thrown around loosely, but given everything that had begun to unravel that year, whether the song appealed to tastes or not, it’s not all that surprising it grew the way it did in this country. Rihanna’s “Rude Boy” never made it to No. 1 because of it, and she was a bonafide superstar at this point.

Although Labrinth produced it, who is by no means a jungle or dubstep producer, the song did lean heavily towards that and why not? It was the prominent sound in an underground where the lines were much more visible than today. “Pass Out” was made for people who didn’t know their way to Fabric and settled for Vodka Revolutions instead. But it held a special kind of charm that allowed it to appeal broadly. Saying that, it was played in venues such as Warehouse Project at a time where niche venues did exist for particular tastes and this was when the event itself was considered underground in Manchester. The track had become a national sensation, the Scunthorpe line a cringey meme too, all in a matter of months.

The student protests of 2010 were on the horizon, fees were rising, we were about to get a coalition government and it’s somewhat peculiar that students and young people at the time were chanting the lines of the hit while life was beginning to look bleak. If “Pass Out” was the prelude, “YOLO” was the reprise to the beginning of the end of nightlife as we knew it, before overpriced clubs and bars built over sticky floors and sticker-graffitied toilets.

Another “Pass Out” couldn’t happen again unless everything socially and culturally aligned. But since 2010, there have been a string of hits from MCs that have come close to topping that moment: Skepta’s “Shutdown”, Meridian Dan’s “German Whip”, Stormzy’s “Shut Up Freestyle” and Giggs’ “Whippin’ Excursion”. It’s arguable that “Shutdown” was the closest to having an impact similar to “Pass Out”—a lot fundamentally changed after its release.

Those moments are difficult to recapture as an artist in British pop, but “Pass Out”, in 2010, was a significant cultural milestone, that in itself is impossible to quantify and maybe it didn’t leave a long-lasting legacy. What it did show was possibility, that with the right ingredients and being right where you need to be, everything will fall into place.