Erol Alkan has never downplayed the importance of the Manic Street Preachers on his artistic vision. From his legendary Trash club night to producing bands such as Ride, Duran Duran and Mystery Jets; from his Phantasy Sound label to his mesmeric DJ sets, his worldview was shaped to a large extent by the Manics’ all-consuming aesthetics and ideology.

Twelve years ago these worlds collided when Alkan acted as DJ support to two of three performances of the band’s incendiary 1994 album, ‘The Holy Bible’ at London’s Roundhouse – Andrew Weatherall played the other night.

“I recognise the importance of those shows,” Alkan explains today. “They were very important to me personally and I'm also aware of how important they were to everybody else in that room. I approached it with a real sense of care. The DJ part was drawing from something much deeper than a usual DJ set.”

To mark the band releasing a live album from those shows, Alkan has also made the set from his second performance (17 December 2014) available. “It can be listened to in pure lossless audio,” he says, smiling. “The mix presents a very important part of myself. As a DJ, it's not me live in a big room. It's not me playing some hot club somewhere. I don't get many opportunities to present something like that to people. In modern terms it's really more of a playlist than a DJ set.”

We quizzed Alkan on his love for the Manics and his memories from those two nights. “It is not a party,” he recalls…

What can you remember about how it all came together? Who approached you?

Erol: “It was between Robin Turner and Kieran Evans. I think it was Robin actually. He asked me and then came back and asked if I’d do two nights. It was a really interesting time for me; after one of the nights I went to fabric because it was the Best of British DJ Awards. I was nominated for two, Best DJ, which was rightfully won by Jackmaster, and I won Best Compilation for my fabricLive mix. It was a crazy few days. I’d had all the stuff that happened in the early 00s and the late 00s as well, and so it was weird, no, not weird, it was just quite cool to still be recognised after all those moments. And coming after supporting Manic Street Preachers, who I’ve always been very open about them being one of my favourite bands. Yeah, those few days were really important to me."

When did you discover the Manics?

Erol: “It was around the time of ‘Motown Junk’ [released in early 1991]. They were in an issue of NME with EMF on the cover. There was a two-page article on the Manics, photographed in London, and they just stood out. They looked so different. I was into The Stone Roses and the Happy Mondays and those alternative bands that were making the charts, you know, The Charlatans, the Inspiral Carpets, Cud… And then I saw the Manics in the pages of the NME and I was just drawn to everything about them. The spray-painted shirts, the slight androgyny was something that I recognised from liking The Smiths. It was androgynous but in a very kind of masculine way, if that makes sense. I read the interview and I was like, wow. It was loaded with so much self-belief and dedication and commitment.”

So you read about them before you actually heard ‘Motown Junk’?

Erol: “Yeah!”

Thankfully ‘Motown Junk’ was as exciting to listen to as the NME obviously made it sound on paper.

Erol: “It started off with a Chuck D sample and I immediately recognized it. I was a massive Public Enemy fan growing up in the mid-80s. They were one of my favourite bands, still are. It’s kind of hard to say that it resonated with me because I was a white Turkish kid in North London, you know, in the mid-80s. But something about the music was just so chaotic and just incessant; the one-bar loops and the charisma in their voices, Chuck D and Flavor Flav’s, completely different forms of rapping… this kind of ying and yang. At that point it was just incredible. So when I then heard ‘Motown Junk’ and it had ‘Revolution’ going round and round and round and that riff coming in, the sound of a guitar being plugged in and being played, as a guitarist I recognised that. It was raw, and then the energy from it… and the lyrics: ‘The only thing you gave me was the boredom I suffocated in.’ I was just like, I'm in. You know what I mean?”

It's a world, isn't it? A portal to another world.

Erol: “It was. That's the great thing about music, you lose yourself momentarily in other people's worlds and hearing those early Manics singles there was  so much going on, so many ideas, so many new words, so many new phrases. It made a lot of other music sound smaller overnight.

“It's hard when you get a bit older. When you're young you can say, ‘The Smiths are my favourite band’ and it kind of affords you a sense of belonging and the tribalism of it. You kind of align yourself with a group of other people, other like-minded people. As I've got older I still carry that thing of a handful of bands being incredibly important to me, but it's also been less about bands or artists and more about individual moments as such, and more about records. Great things can come from anywhere. But the Manics are still a band that mean so much to me. I discovered them at a point in my life where they changed a lot for me.”‍

They were loved by a lot of the dance/electronic fraternity weren’t they? The Chemical Brothers, Andrew Weatherall, Four Tet and Massive Attack have all remixed them. What was it the dance world saw - and sees - in them?

Erol: “I remember seeing a photo of Tom (Rowlands) and Ed (Simons) in the very early days of The Dust Brothers and I think Tom was wearing a Bomb The Past Manics T-shirt. It was like, wow, they know the Manics too, which looking back was obvious because of the Heavenly association. I can almost visualise Jeff Barrett eulogising about them and excitedly telling Tom and Ed about the Manics for the first time. A lot of that would have come from his prior experiences – having a foot in both camps, you know, being the press person for Primal Scream and the Happy Mondays. I think Heavenly was by its very design bringing these worlds together.

“Why did people from the dance world gravitate to them? On a musical or an artistic level they do attract a lot of respect. I don’t know how you could listen to some of those records or read some of those lyrics or just look at them and not see it for anything other than how fantastic it is, you know?

“You don't get many guitar bands that are like post-Manics. You don't get many citing the Manics as an influence. I think it's because the Manics are really hard to copy without sounding like you're copying them. There were a few at the time, especially during that New Wave of New Wave era. You got a few bands who were trying to be like them and they'd have the hair and they'd have the blouses or whatever, but they didn't have the language, they didn't have the syntax, they didn't have the musicality. It didn't have any of those things. And then you realise, wow, the Manics really are something. It's not just posturing. It's not just scissor kicks. It's not just pouting or wearing a dress or any of those things. It's so much more than that. They inspired the films I watched. They inspired the books I read. They inspired other records that I listened to.”‍

There's a lot of world building going on.

Erol: “Absolutely. They are a major part of what happened at Trash. They are like the architects, no pun intended, for how I approached Trash. Majorly.”

When you came to DJ at these nights in 2014, all these years later, can you remember much about the sets that you played? Did you choose your records carefully ahead of the sets or did you approach it like a normal DJ set?

Erol: “Whenever I DJ, my number one thing really is for there to be some kind of narrative, or some kind of conversation with a room full of people, to draw them in and lead them somewhere. I knew by the very nature of the occasion I was going to start playing to an empty room and I was going to be building towards a band that everybody in that room had come to see. I am not the focal point, but I'm there. I'm there to build a feeling. I'm there to create, to work with the anticipation that's in the room and also to kind of in my way probably trace some of the musicality that ‘The Holy Bible’ has always implied to me."

What did you play?

Erol: "A lot of post-punk music. It was a lot of music that felt it could make you feel slightly uneasy. Some records by bands who may not directly sound like they influenced ‘The Holy Bible,’ but I had an inkling, or from knowing the band a little, I understood that they were a bit of an influence. I didn't want to be obtuse. It was more about amplifying the tension. I knew I wasn't going to play dance music, even dance music that was sympathetic to a band or a live show situation. These records were never recorded to be mixed or for them to be part of DJ sets as such. I saw it as a challenge.

“I remember starting off with William Basinski. And this was 2014 bear in mind, before he was a household name, you know in the right houses. I started off with his ‘The Integration Loops’. To me, that's a Holy Bible adjacent piece of music.

“So things like that and Magazine, New Order, David Bowie, Killing Joke, PiL, Siouxsie & The Banshees... Post-punk and slightly gothic music. Stuff that felt in line or felt in key with ‘The Holy Bible’ and the feeling of ‘The Holy Bible’.”‍

Did you choose the majority of the set beforehand or were you reacting to the crowd?

Erol: “I knew that I would get no reaction. There's some gigs that you have to concede you are the support. You're there to play records, do things that are going to be interesting to people, create a narrative. Don't have an expectation that people are going to be dancing around or going wild. It was the same eight years before when I supported Madonna. People want Madonna at a Madonna gig, People want Manics at a Manics gig. But you can do something that supplements and builds towards it. Just don't go in there thinking it's not going to be a success unless everyone's dancing and going crazy. It's not that kind of occasion. We're here to listen to one of the most intelligent yet bleakest records I've experienced in my lifetime. It’s not a party.”

Did you play the same set on both nights or was it slightly different?

Erol: “It was slightly different, but not that much. It was definitely similar in its design. I was thinking it might not be the same crowd twice. If you've got something that you feel works and is right, then the second time around is a chance to fine-tune it, make it better, not to completely throw away the other one.”

What was the reaction like? Did you did you did you get a sense that people were listening?

Erol: “It felt right. It felt like it I wasn't trying to intrude or impede what's coming next. It wasn't about me. I mean, myself and Andrew being invited to do it, I think, were the right choices. You go into it with a real sense of respect for the occasion and you understand the gravity of it and what it means to people, especially a lot of those people coming together to hear it. What was crazy though was I finished and I walked out into the crowd to watch the show and they came on to The Dust Brothers’ remix of ‘Faster’. It was great because it was the first dance music you heard and it's the remix. It was really powerful.”‍

Did you put that on or was that them?

Erol: "They put it on. That was their choice. That was their walk-on music, that's what they used to go on stage to back then. So, they came on to it and they played ‘The Holy Bible’ start to finish. It was incredible. And then they walked off and they were like, ‘We're going to come back and do a few more’. So I'm just standing there. I didn't know they were going to do this, but they then came back on to my remix of ‘Europa Geht Durch Mich’. I'm just like, what? It was crazy because in that moment, of witnessing them playing ‘The Holy Bible’, them coming out to The Dust Brothers/The Chemical Brothers remix of ‘Faster’, that's loaded with so much for me and then to hear my own thing come on, I was just blown away.”

Did they request any songs?

Erol: “No. But because I know James… I actually met James around the time of ‘The Holy Bible’ and we kind of became friends. We would talk a lot about music, so I had a bit of insight as to the breadth of his taste in particular. I knew the stuff he liked. He would pop up to the side of the booth on the night.

Was your set in some respects a tribute to them, a love letter to them?

Erol: “It's strange. I don't think it was a tribute to them. I would say it was probably like an acknowledgment of the variety of feelings that ‘The Holy Bible’ has given me as a record. It's one of those records that taken on more weight than even the band that made it. Do you know what I mean? All the best albums, all those things… it comes with books as well and films, they become greater than the sum of their parts. It's not even a record that you listen to. It's a record that kind of happens to you. And because of that, how you draw from your feelings of what it's done to you, there's quite a lot of complexity to it. It's weird, there was a real weight to it and prestige but I knew I had to approach it carefully.”

Was it an emotional experience then? Drawing on or revisiting those experiences and emotions from 1994. Like you say, the complexities and the weight of that record, was it emotional?

Erol: “It's interesting because that record's one that I could very easily just put on now if I was walking somewhere or whatever, I could listen to it. It's quite astonishing how I took to that album at that point in my life. To be so young and for it to mean so much to me and to listen to it much older and to decipher it in a different way with a different head but it still be as affecting, maybe even more so than it was when it first came out.

“It came out at a time when so many pivotal and important British albums were released which changed the course of music globally. None of those albums have stuck to me like ‘The Holy Bible’ did. And I'm sure it didn't sell anything like what those other albums sold. I've never grown tired of it either. There's a depth and mystery to it that I still find absolutely inspiring.”

Read: James Dean Bradfield’s Top Manics Remixes

Listen to Erol Alkan's set at the Roundhouse