In 2012, after being away from the UK for the best part of a decade, DJ Harvey, the prodigal son, returned to these shores for a gig that has gone down in folklore. John Burgess was there and with the help of Terry Farley and co, he remembers what went down. Duran Duran hits and all…

A thousand tickets sold out in minutes. DJs took a night off and were first in line to enter the event. The weeks leading up were febrile with anticipation. Online wags predicted a beard convention due to the online tittle tattle over which tunes may get aired. Said beards were then ruffled at 3.50am when the night concluded with a Duran Duran record from 1982. It was, of course, DJ Harvey’s first night back in London in 2012, after his hiatus of ten years. 

Why Harvey had remained away from our shores for so long formed part of the folklore around him and the reason the expectations were stacked so high for his return. There were rumours he just loved the surf and sunshine of Hawaii and LA. This much was true, but he had, in fact, simply overstayed his visa and American immigration would have barred him from re-entering the USA if he’d hopped over the pond to play some tunes. In this elongated meantime there had been tantalising musical missives of the direction he’d taken via his Sarcastic Disco mix, something DJ Frank Tope calls ‘Afro cosmic’ when we reminisce about the night. “There was this great reputation building,” he says, “but you couldn’t see him which created this mythology.”

Matt Johnson, agent for Harvey acolytes like Rub & Tug in the mid-00s, recalls how long they had been trying to bring a Harvey show to the UK. 

“I had been in contact with Harvey’s manager Heidi Lawden since working at Nuphonic,” he says. “That crew and Heidi and Harvey were all old friends. When I joined Nuphonic they were full of legendary tales about Harvey and his mythical sets. So gradually enquiries about what he was doing and how he could be booked began to gather momentum. Around 2008, I wrote to Heidi to stress this interest was there. But even then nothing happened, due to Harvey’s visa issues. I was just collating an ever-growing mountain of offers. In London the interest was completely off the hook.”

When the stars did align and a promoter was required it wasn’t Harvey’s old stomping ground Ministry of Sound or fabric who got the gig but the Red Bull Music Academy who were happy to stay in the background. 

“Harvey wanted a certain venue and to control the sound system. So, it was better to work with a neutral promoter,” Johnson explains. “Heidi and I were looking at lots of different venues via calls and I think Oval Space felt fresh.” 

The Bethnal Green space was relatively new and was a big rectangular room with a high ceiling. “Harvey went and checked the acoustics, the feel for it and everything a day in advance. It felt like a good room and the right sort of size. The sound system was from Mickey and Rolf of Encore who used to do the sound at his Moist night.” With everything set and the sound sorted – something everyone attending was keen to hear and immerse themselves in – what could possibly go wrong? 

In the hours before the show London’s club promoters, DJs and dancers assembled around the East End. I met with the Disco Bloodbath chaps, Ben Pistor and Dan Beaumont, and alongside Bugged Out! pals formed what we called the TDU (Tight Disco Unit) in Dalston’s Nando’s. We then did the Nine O’Clock Drop so we’d be ready for the 10pm start. 

“The Faith mob met in some scratchers’ boozer in Bethnal Green for pre-match drinks,” Terry Farley recalls. “It was a proper London tribes turn out. We got in sharpish.” Ben Pistor remembers Farley, Rocky and Thomas Bullock at the front of the queue. Everyone seemed keen to hear the first tune Harvey would play to herald his comeback. “Then when we got in the venue he was playing whale noises.”

Something the ‘spotters could not have fathomed or foreseen would be Harvey playing someone else’s mix CD for the first part of the night, but that’s what these ambient sounds were. The DJ Adrian Cockx had put the mix together for Harvey’s Tonka colleague Felix Dickinson for his birthday. Dickinson had responded with: “Thanks, you bloody hippy.” Cockx remembers how it ended up in Harvey’s hands. “I was staying at Thomas Bullock’s when he and Harvey were making the second Map Of Africa album. Harvey saw my CD wallet and asked me what the ‘Transit of Venus’ one was. It was a mix made mostly of Edgar Froese and Tangerine Dream tracks. He asked me to burn him a copy. When I returned to the UK I was at a party and someone said that they had heard Harvey play and it was weird as everyone was entering the party and all they could hear was this ambient music playing. Once enough people were in Harvey mixed out of it and straight into beats causing a reaction from the crowd.”

This is, indeed, exactly what happened. Harvey knew the room would fill quickly with peers and pals who would all be chatting for the first part of the night, so why play them beats? “It was like being at a disco wedding,” says Pistor. “There were so many people you knew there. I’d never been to a club that had that on that scale before. The night went by in a flash due to the amount of stop and chats!” 

When the beats did finally hit I remember being close to X-Press 2’s Rocky who called out the first track (without the need for Shazam). It was Planet Patrol’s ‘Play At Your Own Risk’. Frank Tope remembers it well. “It felt like he was telling us something with his first two choices: ‘Play At Your Own Risk’ and then Hi-Tension’s ‘British Hustle’. He was choosing quite a few proto-house records and then it gradually got into this heavy groove where it stayed for what seemed like a couple of hours, the peak of the night where everyone was lost in it. There was a Maceo Plex track and a Deep Dish remix that was almost progressive house, but Harvey has a knack for making records sound fantastic that may sound odd if I tried to work them into a set.” 

It took a while for Harvey to achieve the point Tope describes when the disco wedding and London tribes stopped talking and coalesced into one Nine O’Clock Drop-assisted groove. It was the sound you see, despite the Herculean efforts to make it incredible. Farley recalls: “Sadly, the sound system never got turned up enough.” 

Johnson sheds some light on what happened. “The sound system was so powerful that when you’ve got Harvey set up in the middle of the room in the round, the monitoring becomes quite complicated. I think they almost overcooked it. Micky was wrestling with it, running around trying to make it better.” Ironically, they had discovered earlier in the day that the system was potentially so powerful that they didn’t have sufficient electrics running to the building to actually supply it. “If it had run on full power you’d have heard it in Croydon.” 

If not hitting the home of dubstep, the sound did reach a nearby man of the cloth which Farley later heard about: “Word was a vicar living within earshot was a string when it came to volumes and had the local nick on speed dial.” Johnson confirms this in less Cockney fashion: “The vicar came and knocked on the door and said: ‘You’ve got to stop this now.’ So, all this was going on in the background…” 

I remember moving around the room with Dan Beaumont trying to find the sweet spot. “Over here, it’s good in this corner!” Not that Dan was in full control of his faculties: “I bought a bottle of mezcal from Thomas Bullock and persuaded the venue to let me keep it behind the bar. I kept dipping into that…” 

Despite the mezcal and the stop and chats, Beaumont was taking notice. “I remember he played ‘I’m a Man’ by Macho and ‘Slam me Baby’ by 4 To The Bar. I started a thread on Faith the next day and everyone pitched in with tracks they remembered him playing. There was definitely a Maceo Plex one, that was the talk of the forum!”

Frank Tope had a similar experience, wrestling with the sound before settling in. “You’d have to spend a lot of money to recreate Ministry of Sound’s sonic clarity in a room like Oval Space. But after a while everyone got acclimatised to it, or Harvey got the best out of it. The last part of the set there were quite a few Harvey classics from the 90s.” 

Other tracks Ben Pistor thinks were played include Zombi’s ‘Sapphire’, Barbara Mason’s ‘Another Man’ and Zazu’s ‘Captain Starlight’. But he isn’t 100 per cent sure. The passage of time and all that (and the death of the Faith forum to go back and check). 

There was ‘one more tune’ at the end of his set, Tom Moulton’s remix of The Brand New Heavies’ version of Stevie Wonder’s ‘I Don’t Know Why (I Love You)’, which Heidi Lawden had begged for a copy of from her friend at Delicious Vinyl. However, the one song EVERYONE does remember was the penultimate track: the third hit single off Duran Duran’s ‘Rio’; ‘Save a Prayer.’ Harvey has been known for selecting opulently produced pop hits – Cliff Richard’s Devil Woman’, Phyllis Nelson’s ‘Move Closer’ or chart toppers by Queen or Frankie Goes To Hollywood. On this night ‘Save a Prayer’ fell into this lineage. I remember turning to look at Terry Farley who looked bemused, his Soul Train derailed. “Indeed!” Farley confirms. 

“Some people loved it, some people didn’t.” shrugs Pistor. “It sounded incredible, but it was hard to dance to. I rush my tits off whenever I hear it now.” 

The after effects of that party are still felt to this day. “It was a legendary night in lots of ways,” Johnson says. “It was sort of hanging on a knife’s edge a little bit at times, which I’m sure people in the thick of it maybe didn’t pick up on.” 

Despite bothersome vicars, prayers were saved and answered, and we all got to dance to Harvey again. 

Read: Our exclusive interview with DJ Harvey

This article first appeared in issue seven of Disco Pogo.