Musical origin stories are by their very nature incredibly thorny. Culture – art – does not suddenly appear out of nowhere; it’s not created in a vacuum. Juan Atkins, who has sadly died aged 64, understood this better than most.

Despite being routinely referred to as the originator of techno, that futuristic strand of electronic music that sprang out of Atkins’ native Detroit in the 80s and which went on to conquer the world, Atkins recognised that his releases as Cybotron and then Model 500 were part of a lineage that formed the bedrock of a new musical genre. He would regularly cite the influence of Kraftwerk and other electronic pop pioneers such as Giorgio Moroder, Yellow Magic Orchestra and Gary Numan, alongside George Clinton’s cosmic P-Funk collective and whatever the influential Detroit DJ The Electrifying Mojo was spinning on his Midnight Funk Association show, as building blocks on the sound of techno.

When Disco Pogo writer Ben Cardew interviewed Atkins in 2019, Atkins was modest to a fault, claiming he didn’t know what “the first techno record was. I coined the term ‘techno’, but electronic music is the precursor to techno”.

That, you might say, is the detached, considered view anyway. And while true, that doesn’t mean we should discount the opinions of those techno practitioners who followed in Atkins wake. For the likes of Kevin Saunderson, Laurent Garnier, Moodymann and many, many more, Juan Atkins was and always will be the godfather of techno. In their eyes, Atkins wasn’t only the person to give this sleek, minimalistic, man machine music a name, he did so having given the music a sonic blueprint too.

Reacting to the news of his death in Mexico City over the weekend (31 October), Saunderson, who alongside Atkins and their fellow junior high school friend, Derrick May, was part of The Belleville Three, techno’s OG titanic triumvirate, said: “Juan was the originator of Techno, a true visionary who opened the door for so many of us, myself included.” Dave Clarke referred to him as “the Teacher”, Garnier pegged him as “one of the founding fathers of our music” and Richie Hawtin said: “Juan imagined Techno before any of us.” Ken Ishii noted: ““Without him, techno simply wouldn’t exist.” Unearthing a prior homage to Atkins, Moodymann reiterated his belief that Atkins had nothing to do with the big [Belleville] three. He was, rather, the big one.

Atkins pioneering tendencies began early. He mastered the guitar and drums at a young age and bought his first synthesiser when he was 15. At college he met Vietnam veteran Richard Davis and the pair formed Cybotron. The duo’s technologically-charged music was equally informed by the post-industrial decline of Detroit as it was Afrofuturism and the writings of philosophers and sociologists such as Alvin Toffler. Indeed, Toffler’s seminal 1970 book, ‘Future Shock’ and its use of the phrase ‘techno rebels’ would eventually give Atkins’ music its name.

Inititlally, Cybotron tracks such as ‘Alleys of Your Mind’, ‘Cosmic Cars’ and ‘Clear’ could be broadly described as electro. However, after splitting from Davis in 1985, he refined his sound and re-emerged as Model 500. Tracks such as ‘No UFO’s’ and ‘Night Drive (Thru Babylon)’, released on his Metroplex label, were tougher and more propulsive - it was he sound of man and machine coming together in perfect harmony. Atkins was, as has been duly noted in many tribute posts, soundtracking the future in the present. Today, over 40 years since those first Model 500 tracks were released, plus later records such as ‘The Chase’, ‘Infoworld’ and ‘Off to Battle’, and for dance music enthusiasts of a certain dotage, they still sound like harbingers of a future utopia.

Magic Juan’s preternatural production skills proved invaluable for Saunderson and May as they took their first musical steps, and when European journalists caught on to these exciting new sounds coming from Detroit and Chicago, Atkins was able to theorise why Detroit created the music it did, telling The Face writer Stuart Cosgrove: “Berry Gordy built the Motown sound on the same principles as the conveyor belt at Ford’s. Today they use robots and computers to make their cars and I’m more interested in Ford’s cars than Gordy’s music.”

Following the acid house explosion in the UK and the adoption of house and techno across the globe, Atkins’ standing was something close to a deity in the 90s. His DJ sets were akin to holy communions – Bugged Out! resident James Holroyd tells a colourful tale of picking up Atkins in his battered Fiat Uno from Manchester Airport before he belatedly made his first appearance at the club his records helped shape. Another one of his aliases, Infiniti, delivered many of the tracks (‘Game One’ in particular) that would soundtrack mid-90s nights at the club’s first home, Sankeys Soap.

That decade he forged a fruitful partnership with Berlin producers Moritz von Oswald and Thomas Fehlmann as 3MB, releasing on the city’s influential Tresor label. In 2005, Missy Elliott lifted the spine of ‘Clear’ for her smash hit ‘Lose Control’, thus honouring a musician whose collectivist and liberating views on technology guiding our future were worlds apart from the malevolent tech bros of today who seek to divide us with machines.

His enquiring mind and optimistic worldview was captured in an exchange with writer Kris Needs for the NME in 1992. “I’ve always been fascinated with science fiction...just that feel. When 'Star Wars' came out and Kraftwerk came out that just did it. I just wanted more. There’s more imagination and possibilities to me with things to come. There’s always hope because tomorrow is another day. I’m always thinking ahead. I’ve always got something up my sleeve.”

The techno originator will be sorely missed. Rest in power, Juan.

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Photos taken in Detroit and Windsor (Canada) in 1994. Used here with kind permission from Mark McNulty.

To coincide with the release of 'The Holy Bible Live' and the accompanying Erol Alkan DJ support set from the same gig at London's Roundhouse in December 2014, we quizzed Manic Street Preachers singer James Dean Bradfield about his favourite Manics remixes. Here's his starting eleven...

David Holmes: ‘If You Tolerate This Your Children Will Be Next’ (The Class Reunion Of The Sunset Marquis Mix)

“I’d met David at The Heavenly Sunday Social and we’d talked about shared bits of history, about places like The Limelight Club in Belfast where we played at the start of the 90s, around the time of ‘Motown Junk’. I really got on with him, and he had a great line in pink shirts at that point. Pretty sure I did too. I bought his album ‘This Film’s Crap, Let’s Slash the Seats’ which I really enjoyed, to the point where I’d tried to sample bits from it for B-sides and things.

“We went on to do work together on Know Your Enemy which I really loved - Freedom of Speech Won’t Feed My Children is incredible, and he got Kevin Shields to play on it. I began to understand David as somebody who really knew that there’s so much you can do with one chord. There’s so much life in one chord; his music brilliantly investigates that.

“Before that, he did an amazing job on ‘Tolerate’. It sounds like it could have been in ‘Out of Sight’, which he did the soundtrack for.”

Stealth Sonic Orchestra: ‘Kevin Carter’ 

“Howard Gray was one of my favourite engineers in the 80s. He’d worked on Simple Minds’ ‘Sparkle in the Rain’, so he’d created these massive soundscapes on tracks like ‘Waterfront’ and ‘Speed Your Love to Me’, records I’d properly grown up with. Rob Stringer, our A&R man, knew him and introduced us. 

“We ended up doing the track ‘Prologue to History’ with him which was a good experience, but for some reason we left it off ‘This Is My Truth Tell Me Yours’. 

“Before that, Howard did some of his Stealth Sonic mixes for tracks off ‘Everything Must Go’. This mix was just beautiful. It’s the closest we’ve ever got to the soul of Ennio Morricone, to the meaning of Ennio Morricone. His version of ‘Kevin Carter’ really manages to bring out the crime-noir element of the song.”

The Dust Brothers: ‘La Tristesse Durera’

“The Chemical Brothers were the Dust Brothers when they did this, and I was thrilled when they took it on. They’d just made what I consider one of the greatest dance records of the 90s: ‘Chemical Beats’. I have such great memories of listening to ‘Chemical Beats’ next to ‘Under the Influence of Love’ by Love Unlimited at the Sunday Social. It’s a really vivid memory for me. So when they were up for doing this in the same year that ‘Chemical Beats’ came out, I was absolutely made up. It turned out amazing.”

Andrew Weatherall: ‘Peeled Apples’

“I met Andrew Weatherall through Jeff Barrett many times. He was always such a chap, and so lovely, and his music carried on being brilliant every time he shifted. I remember loving ‘Clock Factory’ and ‘RSD’ on the first Sabres Of Paradise album (‘Sabresonic’). When Andrew agreed to remix this track, I was intrigued by what he’d come up with. His version is even more stripped back than the one we recorded, and heavier too. On our original recording, we’d imagined the track as though PiL had been recorded by Steve Albini. Without knowing that, Weatherall’s version was even closer to that target than ours. Just amazing.”

Saint Etienne: ‘Jackie Collins Existential Question Time’

“I wasn’t quite sure about this at first – Bob, Pete and Sarah see the world through a different lens to me. Now though I absolutely love it, even though it took me a couple of years to come around to the way this track fits into the lyric itself. Then one day I put it on and realised that Richey would have absolutely loved the double-down, satirical nature of what they did. Beyond that, it’s just played with such taste. Everything fits together like the most beautiful jigsaw. It just shows what a little bit of maturity can do for your own judgement.”

New Young Pony Club: ‘Marlon J.D.’

“This remix sounds like Charli xcx to me. It’s almost like one of those time-travel stories. It’s quite startling how up to date it sounds. This mix was part of a good trade-off. [James did NYPC’s ‘Chaos’ (South Wales Swamp mix) around the same time]. Their mix is just brilliant and future-thinking. It could have been done yesterday.” 

Adem Ilhan: ‘Facing Page: Top Left’

“Sometimes, when you get a great remix done, it can be exciting but also really deflating, because you think, ‘Wow, I wish this person had produced the track.’ That’s definitely the case with this one. Every time I go back and listen to it, it makes me realise how interesting it would have been to do a whole record with Adem, to see what he would have done with our ideas, with my voice, with Nicky’s voice – just to see what he might have done with any of the loose concepts we usually start a record with. What he did to this track is slightly disturbing, but also utterly perfect.”

The Avalanches: ‘So Why So Sad’

“Again, another example of wishing we’d actually put the remix out instead of our own version. It’s got so much swing and joy to it. Swing and joy aren’t necessarily the easiest emotions for Manic Street Preachers to access in the studio, but the natural swing and joy The Avalanches brought to this song is undeniable, and so addictive. This remix should have been the first single from ‘Know Your Enemy’.”

Cornelius: ‘Tsunami’

“It was really hard for somebody to remix one of our songs at that time, because they were such big hits and such a huge part of the cultural landscape. For somebody to take one of these songs on and make it their own was a challenging task, but Cornelius did it with this. You can hear the XTC reference points in his remix, and it came close to making me feel as though it could have been the original release, rather than what we did in the studio. It was a close-run thing. I love this mix.”‍

Steven Wilson: ‘1985’

“When growing up in the Valleys, I was starting to get into rap: things like Ultramagnetic MCs, Public Enemy, Ice Cube. Through those records, I tried to work out what 12-inch remixes were. We were coming out of the era of Frankie Goes to Hollywood putting out extended remixes every week. That led to a young, innocent me and my insanely naive young Welsh brain thinking that Big Country’s ‘Wonderland’ 12-inch remix was the height of reinventing rock music with a dance edge.

“When I went back and listened to those things years later, I realised there was real value in those 12-inches. They were banging, and there was an instant impact to them, but there was also a massive added value in simply letting the band breathe. That’s what those remixes did, and that’s what Steven Wilson did with ‘1985’, and I absolutely love it. It’s glorious and it lets every aspect of the song glow, in its own time. Every time I think of ‘1985’, I keep thinking that we’ve got to play the Steven Wilson version rather than our own. It’s that good.” 

Erol Alkan: ‘Europa Geht Durch Mich’ (Erol Alkan’s Mesmerise Zwei Rework) 

“We’d wanted Erol to do a mix for us for ages. ‘Futurology’ gave us the opportunity to ask him, after our mutual friend Kieran Evans (Manics live visual artist and occasional Phantasy Records filmmaker) said he was up for it. ‘Europa Geht Durch Mich’ had the right feel so we gave it to him to see what might come back. As soon as I heard this mix I thought: ‘Wow, this is the ‘Autobahn’ reimagined yet again, now in the spirit of ‘Tron (Legacy)’.’ Listening to it, there’s a constant feeling of trying to catch the horizon with your eyes but it moves too fast and always escapes you, like the video for ‘Star Guitar’ by The Chemical Brothers. A proper nod to Europe.”

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Read Erol Alkan's memories of supporting the Manic Street Preachers at the Roundhouse, 2014

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

Prince’s emergence carried such an impact that culturally, sonically, sexually… nothing was ever the same again. Many of electronic music’s future stars certainly took notice: Frankie Knuckles, Kevin Saunderson, Carl Craig and more were bowled over by his early five-album-run that culminated in his commercial breakthrough, ‘1999’. Kate Hutchinson speaks to many of those who fell under the spell of the man who would be king and assesses how the seeds sown in his early years speak to Prince’s continued influence today…

DJs the world over can sympathise. How many times has the party emptied in front of your eyes and you have to act fast? You need a floor-filler, a certified sing-along moment, a song that brings the dancers back from the bar quicker than you can say tuuuune. You flick through the pile of guaranteed whoppers and find the solution: a Prince single. The smoochy strut of ‘I Wanna Be Your Lover’. The metallic funk of ‘Controversy’. The end-of-the-world anthem ‘1999’. Perfect! The needle drops and the energy shifts immediately. Night saved.

Prince’s early releases have long been go-tos for DJs looking to rescue the dancefloor. His albums altered the molecular structure of popular music, but he left an indelible mark (purple, of course) on the club world too. His first five albums between 1978 and 1982 established him as a prodigy, performer and provocateur – and their innovations laid the groundwork for the varying strands of electronic music that emerged just after: house, techno, electro. “He had a huge impact on the culture,” Chicago legend Marshall Jefferson says simply. 

Backspin to 1977 and a plucky 19-year-old had signed with Warner Bros. Records to release his debut album, a collection of cosmic love songs in nimble step with funk and disco. Prince biographer Matt Thorne called 1978’s ‘For You’ “both a perfectly realised masterpiece and something of a false start”. It was over-budget and overly fussy, with Prince playing each one of the 27 instruments that filled every channel on the mixing desk. But it reinforced him as a creative genius who knew his way around a studio (and tracks like ‘Crazy You’, with its water-splodge beat, evidently signposted his production innovation).

Prince’s self-titled follow-up came just one year after ‘For You’, with its swoon-worthy cover of the topless star with a blown-out bouffant. He looked more vulnerable than the thigh-high-boot-brandishing Rick James, who he’d soon open for on tour in 1980. Lead song ‘I Wanna Be Your Lover’ entered the disco with the flick of a stiletto and helped the album to go gold, though its follow-up singles failed to crack the Billboard Hot 100. Still, Prince trained his sights on the club. The largely instrumental ‘Sexy Dancer’ wasn’t released in the US but a 12-inch version became a UK dancefloor favourite. 

It was described by disco dedicant James Hamilton in his essential weekly Record Mirror column as a “whapping panting breath-sucking strutter” that bettered his big single. Subsequently, it became in-demand with US DJs too. “A lot of his songs in those days were very four-on-the-floor,” house originator Jesse Saunders told the Chicago Reader in 2019. “You could play ‘Soft and Wet’, ‘Sexy Dancer’, all that kind of stuff in your set.” 

Gregory James Broussard, better known as Egyptian Lover, fell for its charms too. He has said that the breathy panting of ‘Sexy Dancer’ guided his early forays into electro-funk and the more explicit themes of his music. “The Kraftwerk side came with the beats and the Prince side came with the lyrics and the subject matter,” he told Red Bull Music Academy. “Mix those two together and you’ve got Egyptian Lover.”

With 1980’s ‘Dirty Mind’, Prince was no longer soft and wet, he was standing to attention. While his first two albums were sonically similar to what was already out there ‘Dirty Mind’ was a moist new start. This was Prince’s panties-and-trench era, where he assembled a killer band (an early iteration of The Revolution) and their super-charged live shows started to gain notoriety. ‘Dirty Mind’ presented perversion as subversion, embraced eroticism and gender fluidity, and even had a song objecting to joining the army (‘Partyup’). Promotional copies were sent to radio stations with a warning advising programmers of the “risqué” lyrical content. 

“He’s singing about incest and oral sex,” says Hot Chip’s Alexis Taylor – which was shocking, “especially when he was being written about as the new Stevie Wonder. It’s so different from what Stevie Wonder would put on a record.” Sonically, it sounded entirely different too – not just to Stevie but to anything else. “I remember being struck by how minimal the production was,” he says about the title track in particular. “Just a simple drum machine part, falsetto singing and that new wave guitar. It sounded a bit like what I thought dance music was, with its pulsating one-note bassline and the beat that starts a song off, which stays in one place for quite a long time before the synth stabs come in. It feels to me like disco, house and techno-y, and was the foundation of any DJing I did for a long time.”

In Chicago, a generation of music fans were listening – many of whom came to Prince via influential radio shows like Herb Kent’s Punk Out on WXFM. Steve ‘Silk’ Hurley (‘Jack Your Body’) bought ‘Dirty Mind’ while he was at high school; a year later, in 1981, Prince released ‘Controversy’ and Frankie Knuckles would spin its title track at The Warehouse. ‘Controversy’ was key in relation to house music for being the first example of Prince using a Linn LM-1 drum machine to creatively programme beats. 

Vince Lawrence is said to have bought a LinnDrum because of Prince and went on to found Trax Records in 1984, which released music by many of the first house producers, including Marshall Jefferson. “If it wasn’t for Vince, I would have retired a postal worker,” says Jefferson.

The ‘godfather of house’ wasn’t so taken with Prince’s music himself: “It didn’t make much of an impression when I first heard it,” Jefferson explains. “He was just another ‘high-voice’ artist.” But clearly Prince saw a synergy between the two. Jefferson recounts how, in late 1987, Prince came to see him play at a New York club called The World. “He was backstage and I shook his hand. He took one look at me and he said: ‘Purple’. I found out later that Prince could see auras.” 

Jefferson does, however, wonder what could have been. That night at The World, “Frankie Knuckles was there, he talked to Prince a lot, and wound up working with him,” he says. “Maybe I should have talked to him more and I could have worked with him too!”

To public knowledge, Knuckles didn’t directly collaborate with Prince in the studio, he officially remixed ‘Partyman’ in 1989. But the house producer’s work with a Chicago musician going by the alias Jamie Principle took direct inspiration from the Minnesotan, in style and name (‘Jamie’ references Prince’s alias Jamie Starr, the other clue is in Prince-iple). Their 1987 single ‘Baby Wants To Ride’, a split release with signature tune ‘Your Love’ on Trax Records, channelled Prince’s falsetto and not-so-subtle sexual innuendo over a machine-like rhythm and driving bassline. “Jamie certainly sounded influenced by Prince,” says Jefferson. “The way he sang his songs, his lyrics, how he played all the instruments.” 

Indeed he was: “Prince showed me that you can stay true to yourself,” says Principle, “and say what you really wanted to say and not be afraid – ‘Baby Wants to Ride’ is a good example of that. But I also did a song called ‘I’m Going to Make You Scream’, which kind of goes back to the Prince punk years. Prince showed me that I could sing about things that were relevant to me and not be put in a genre.”

Perhaps Felix Da Housecat put it best when he said in his 2009 single: ‘We All Wanna Be Prince’. The Chicago producer recommends listening to “anything before ‘Purple Rain’” like ‘Dirty Mind’ and ‘Controversy’ if you want to get into dance music. Even though there are guitars and lyrics, “you can still get inspired,” he told Billboard. “It doesn’t have to be electronic; it can be the energy and vibe that comes out.”

Jefferson says that Prince’s influence on the wider Chicago scene was actually in terms of the permission he gave people to express themselves more freely. “If you look at early house culture, a lot of people dressed like Prince. [Jefferson’s Ten City collaborator] Byron Stingily, when I first met him, was in this group called Dezz 7 (named for Prince’s lead guitarist in The Revolution, Dez Dickerson) and Dezz 7 looked just like something out of Minneapolis. They had the same clothes, the ruffled sleeves, all that stuff.” And that freedom was in terms of sexuality, too. “Because of Prince, a lot of people came out,” Jefferson adds. “Prince made it more acceptable to the Black kids; he made it fashionable.”

Another artist whose aura is 100% purple is soulful house savant Osunlade. He heard ‘For You’’s ‘Soft and Wet’ squelching out of the car stereo, on the way to his grandfather’s funeral, when he was 10 years old. He decided there and then to become a full-time musician and began to master the instruments he found left over from his parents’ house parties in St Louis, Missouri. “I was like, ‘Wow, this man is doing all this music by himself. I want to do that’,” he told DJ Mag. Osunlade started his Yoruba Soul label – fittingly, in the year 1999 – with a Prince-like outlook: “I appreciated his independence and signature sound,” he told online magazine Stamp The Wax. “He also did important cultural things to bring white and Black people together, which in those days was unheard of, at least in my segregated town.”

The album that crossed over and united audiences was, of course, ‘1999’. While ‘Controversy’ was critically acclaimed, Prince’s 1982 album (his fifth) was his commercial breakthrough and his first Top 10 in North America. The run-up to its creation had been fairly character building: a year previous, Prince and the Revolution had been invited by Mick Jagger to support The Rolling Stones for two shows in LA and were pelted with debris – including chicken carcasses – each night. After that, Prince never opened for anyone again and started building his own army of artists, referencing the controlling music manager in the 1980 film ‘The Idolmaker’. He formed boy band The Time, fronted by his schoolfriend Morris Day, and vocal trio Vanity 6, as well as creating his Svengali alias Jamie Starr to produce them, and began to crystallise what was known as “the Minneapolis sound” – a neon-lit nocturnal stew of funk, new wave pop and synthesisers, jacked up on fast tempos.

“Part of the Minneapolis sound was Prince growing in his ability to assimilate everything around him and get rid of the stuff that didn’t work,” said former guitarist Dez Dickerson in the official Prince podcast about the making of ‘1999’. “The LinnDrum and the polyrhythm thing, along with Oberheim and the synth-simulated horns – that was the Minneapolis sound. But what he did was find a way to do that with more of a pop motif. So you could have a track like ‘1999’ which was purely pop. But at the same time, it’s apocalyptic. He found that sweet spot.” (Brilliantly, the same podcast discusses the fizzy ‘explosion’ sound that you hear throughout ‘1999’ – something Dickerson says they used to cover up technical mistakes).

Dickerson said that the album title came from an Orson Welles-narrated documentary about Nostradamus that predicted the apocalypse year as “1999”. Prince was heavily inspired by ‘Blade Runner’ too, hence the metallic purple trenchcoat of this period. The violet sci-fi he created chimed with a generation of Black people growing up in Detroit, like a young Kevin Saunderson, who was one-third of the pioneering techno trio The Belleville Three with Derrick May and Juan Atkins (whose earlier electro project, Cybotron, released ‘Alleys of Your Mind’ in the same year as ‘Controversy’). “Prince was leading you into the future with that record,” Saunderson says. 

He credits radio host The Electrifying Mojo for introducing Prince to Detroit. He’d often play entire albums during his three-hour show. “I started listening to Mojo in high school,” he says. His soon-to-be collaborator Derrick May “lived with me for a semester. It was time to go to bed and he’d be like ‘What do you mean? It’s time for the Electrifying Mojo!’ I had no clue what he was talking about, so Derrick put the radio on, and I fell in love. Mojo played music that you never heard before – regular radio didn’t play it.”

“He was the chief tastemaker,” Carl Craig told Minnesota Public Radio’s The Current, and would play Prince in the mix with “great electronic music, like Kraftwerk, and then the music that was inspired by Kraftwerk, like Afrika Bambaataa, Model 500, Newcleus, that kind of stuff.” 

Beyond the machine music with sex appeal (the same cannot be said for Kraftwerk – sorry), you can hear why the Motor City grasped a song like ‘1999’’s ‘Automatic’. Prince embraced Detroit back, calling his fans there “motor babies”. One of those kids was Kenny Dixon Jr. – aka Moodymann – who is known to have an entire house in Detroit filled with Prince memorabilia, complete with purple curtains. Memorably, he re-edited ‘1999’’s ‘All the Critics Love U in New York’, a song with a 145bpm that’s in line with techno. Moodymann slowed it down to a housier pace and renamed it ‘U Can Dance If U Want 2’. “He was showing the world how much he loves Prince with that track,” says Alexis Taylor.

Craig called Prince’s command of Detroit tastes “absolutely humongous”. “He was even influential in the rap world – if J Dilla was still alive, I’m sure he’d tell you that he had been influenced by him,” he told The Current. “[Prince] was the guy who made it so you didn’t have to dress up in a sequinned suit in order to be in a band.”

Saunderson agrees that ‘1999’ was “very innovative” and demonstrated the potential of technology over instrumentalists. Though it was ultimately the Roland TR-909 and TR-808 that would characterise techno, Saunderson “knew Prince was using a LinnDrum machine. So it led me down that path. When I started playing with a drum machine, I didn’t know anything about music, but I sure was excited to get my hands on one, to see what I could do.” This is as good a place as any to mention that Saunderson, like Jefferson, had another Prince near-miss: “He wanted me to work with Cat [Catherine Glover, a Prince protégé in the late 80s]. His management spoke to my management, and then I met Cat, but it never really progressed. But I know he knew about techno.”

Both Saunderson and Chicago-born DJ/producer Honey Dijon note the importance of a track that came a little later, in 1984, ‘Erotic City’ – the B-side to ‘Purple Rain’’s ‘Let’s Go Crazy’. Saunderson had two copies, so he could mix them in DJ sets and extend the intro – another way in which house and techno evolved. Dijon, in an interview with DJ Cosmo of Classic Album Sundays, said of ‘Erotic City’: “That was a house music record. A lot of people misunderstand what house music is because it’s so shiny and commercial now, but back then it was music without borders.”

Beyond those nascent years, Prince cast a purple shadow far and wide across electronic music, from electroclash to dubstep. Red Bull Music Academy writer Michaelangelo Matos linked Prince to the hardcore continuum in the UK, noting how producers Shut Up and Dance deployed a ‘Let’s Go Crazy’ sample for Ragga Twins’ ‘Hooligan 69’, thus closing the gap between 80s rave and jungle. 

As with many things regarding Mr Nelson, it’s not entirely clear what he thought of four-to-the-floor, let alone drum’n’bass. On his 1987 track ‘Housequake’, Prince seemed to take a mocking stance: “But if you ain’t hip to the rare house quake/Shut up already, damn!”. But house clearly made an impression on him to some degree: the aforementioned Cat Glover interpolated the lyrics of J.M. Silk aka Steve ‘Silk’ Hurley’s ‘Music is the Key’ on Prince’s canned ‘The Black Album’, which was originally intended to follow ‘Sign “O” the Times’ in 1987. Later, he enlisted Hurley to remix 1991’s ‘Gett Off’. 

It took until the mid 90s for Prince to start making what we’d now call dance music, says Taylor. ‘Loose’ from 1994’s best-forgotten album ‘Come’ was an industrial techno stomper that placed Prince firmly at the centre of the rave, guitar in hand, while 1992’s ‘I Wanna Melt With U’ thawed it out to a slower New Jack Swing. The CD-only release ‘Emancipation’ (1996) was perhaps his first to fully go four-to-the-floor: ‘New World’ and ‘The Human Body’ deployed house and techno synth-work that wouldn’t sound out of place now on a Soulwax album. These examples were slight, and of varying success, though who knows how many other attempts are in the vault. 

“When he tried to do more hip hop-style records or house-style things, I felt they sometimes didn’t quite work,” says Taylor. “He was better off when he existed between different genres, or a genre all of his own.”

When ‘1999’ was released, it signalled the latter; an individual star here to stay. ‘Little Red Corvette’ became a hit on (white) mainstream radio and Prince headed off on his biggest-ever tour, covering over 40 cities across the United States and with The Time and Vanity 6 in support. And yes, you could drop any of the album in a DJ set today. “It was groundbreaking – uniquely funky and groovy,” says Saunderson, “and it still stands the test of time.” 

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Read: Prince's Imperial Phase

Read: Prince's Last Hurrah

Read: Prince's Best Edits, Remixes and Dancefloor Deep Dives

‍

This article first appeared in Disco Pogo issue 9

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Like the Fab Four in the 60s and Bowie in the 70s, one artist alone bestrode the 80s both creatively and commercially. It was, of course, Prince, a musical iconoclast who absorbed the very best of what had gone before – from Funkadelic, Sly Stone and Jimi Hendrix through to The Beatles, Joni Mitchell and James Brown – and reinvented it for what was a mesmerising run of albums the like of which has never been bettered. This was Prince’s Imperial Phase and, as Joe Muggs demonstrates, everyone was taken with His Royal Badness…

“Yeah, the Untouchable God Zone.”

That’s DJ Tayo talking about Prince’s creative and commercial run through to the end of the 80s. “I mean,” he says, “Stevie Wonder did it for three albums. Prince did it for, what, 11?”

When you put it like that, it really is quite something. And yet somehow we took it for granted that a wild, wired, miniature, mystical, mischievous, omni-talented subversive sex goblin had taken up residence in our TVs and radios and pranced across the top of the charts for an entire decade. What the mainstream press at the time tended to diminish as kooky or quirky was really a tsunami of glorious artistic ambition unleashed across every medium available. Where other stars generally wait until they’re well established before they start with the concept albums, quasi-autobiographical self-produced movies and never-ending guitar solos, Prince started his commercial [pun obviously intended] purple patch that way and only got more indulgent from there on in – and yet also kept the pop and dancefloor bangers coming without pause.

The work that Prince produced from his commercial explosion with ‘1999’ on through ‘Purple Rain’, ‘Sign “O” the Times’ and all the rest, all the way to ‘Batman’ was wild in itself. Books have been penned and many more will be written about its production and inspirations. But so was the way it landed. His initial run-up from his debut in 1978 had already ensnared outsiders and cool kids, but as he blew up into the mega mainstream, he didn’t lose them.

“We’d liked him for a while,” says DJ and S’Express mastermind Mark Moore. “I went to see him at the Lyceum when ‘Dirty Mind’ came out – me and a lot of people on the gay scene did because we thought he was a new gay artist! Even then he was quite outrageous. But then he kept getting more and more out there, more eclectic, more Prince-y. Once ‘Purple Rain’ came out, that was it, his legend was cemented.”

But just as the performance and flamboyance resonated with a former teenage punk like Moore, so the musicianship could appeal across genre boundaries and snare those less invested in the razzle-dazzle. “In the early 80s it was indie music that moved my world,” says Ali Friend of Red Snapper, “albeit the sort with grooving drums and bass: [Elvis Costello and] The Attractions or even The Smiths. But hearing ‘Kiss’ in 1986, that jangling backing, the whisper – which was basically sex – was such a big part of my awakening to the funk. The fact he could nestle this experimentation and risqué-ness in that to a mainstream audience was incredible.”

Out on the Glasgow suburbs, that same experimentation hit another then indie kid, Sean Dickson, aka Hifi Sean and leader of The Soup Dragons hard: “The way he deconstructed a song like ‘Kiss’ in his head whilst writing it, made it sound like it was from another future dimension,” he exhales, the wonder in his voice still apparent 40 years on.

And the funk was irresistible, too, to those who already knew what it was, and again a conduit into futurism. Handson Family DJ and promoter Cyndi Ellesse was a pre-teen music fan growing up in Brixton when she became aware of Prince. “I was already appreciative of hip hop, dance music, funk, lots of Black and underground sounds,” she says, “so to hear Prince it was normal – but at the same time also felt like the future.” She got fully on board, with the kind of fandom only he could inspire. “Records hung up around the room, posters, getting the New Power Generation newsletter, went to see ‘Lovesexy’, got my aunt to make me polka-dot trousers with the buttons down the sides, with one of my best friends we painted her room the colours of Sign
“O” the Times, a whole black room with just the eyes of Prince in peach, because it was the peach and black era…”

By the time that “peach and black era” kicked in in earnest with ‘Sign “O” the Times’, the totality of the world it offered – with every part of the styling, the construction of shows, the costumery, right down to typefaces – offered up something that anyone with a creative or outsider sensibility could fully invest in. Total adoption of the aesthetic made as much sense for teenage girls in Brixton fully immersed in Black culture as it did for indie and alternative kids. Rob da Bank was just coming into his tastes in Portsmouth, armed with a headful of Cocteau Twins and The Cure and “dressing up in my sister’s dresses at the weekend and putting white lipstick on and pretending I was Robert Smith” when ‘Sign “O” the Times turned his and his friends’ world upside down.

“You didn’t have to be sexually attracted to him,” he says, “just the whole ‘Lovesexy’ androgynous look was extremely appealing and exciting and brave for someone with a conservative brass band kind of village upbringing.”

There’s a beautiful symmetry in the fact that Tayo – who would end up regularly playing all-Prince Purple Rave sets with Da Bank – was finding inspiration in this androgyny from a different angle of outsiderdom. “Prince really helped a slightly confused, working-it-out teenager who was from an estate in south London but went to school out in Sussex,” he says. “There was Public Enemy and dancehall and the machismo of that was great, and that was in tune with my upbringing I guess, but Prince offered something more. He was Black and he was white. He was androgynous in a pair of heels, but as someone famously said, he’ll be wearing the heels, but he’ll still steal your girlfriend. So he had a kind of danger and a weirdness about him.”

That level of complexity in sexuality came over to Cyndi Ellesse as vital too: “because I was a precocious teen,” she says, “it was wonderful to hear a man talk about women in a much more mature-minded way, a thoughtful way, that was important.”

For Hifi Sean’s now musical partner David McAlmont, growing up evangelical Christian in Guyana but coming to terms with being gay, discovering Imperial Phase Prince was an experience bordering on the religious itself. He’d read sensationalist magazine articles “and thought he sounded like Satan!” But then one day, home alone, “it was an unforgettable event. I was sitting on the floor, darning a sock and I had the radio on. I heard this organ sound and a voice going “Dearly beloved…” For the next three minutes I was pinned to the wall, and then at the end of it, the announcer said that was Prince, and that was like, ‘Oh!’ So when I got back to the UK in 87, I got my first benefit cheque and I went straight to Our Price, bought ‘Purple Rain’, ‘Around the World in a Day’, ‘Parade’, and ‘Sign “O” the Times’ – and that was me, that was all I wanted!”

As for a kid in the Communist bloc, just on the cusp of the wall coming down… “To me,” says Modeselektor’s Gernot Bronsert, he looked like a hot woman and a hot man at the same time – so unique and just fucking awesome. As a ten-year-old you’d never seen anything like that before… especially not in the GDR!”

 All of this cross fertilisation – introducing funk fans to Joni Mitchell and new wave, introducing indie kids to Sly Stone and George Clinton, completely short circuiting gender and sexuality – of course fed into the heady brew of dance culture as the 80s drew towards a close. Prince’s influence was already there in the constituent elements, of course. Trevor Fung, the OG evangelist for Balearic culture in the UK, says untold tracks were staples of his and others’ sets in Ibiza through the decade, and proudly beams “I remember taking ‘Sign “O” the Times’ out there and being the only person on the island with that album!”

That, of course, became part of the mix that the other Londoners who followed Fung out there took home with them: Paul Oakenfold, Lisa Loud, Nancy Noise and co hammered Prince tunes like ‘Alphabet Street’ as ecstasy culture hit the UK.

Detroit, too, had a special place in its heart for Prince and the feeling was mutual: from him breaking an interview drought to speak to the foundational radio DJ Electrifying Mojo at length in 1986, to the incredible photos of a young Carl Craig with full frilly cuffs and coiffed hair, to… well, just about everything Moodymann has ever done, the Prince influence is so ubiquitous you could almost miss it. But if you listen to, say, the stark, live electro-funk of Drexciya in the light of Tayo’s observation that tracks like ‘Erotic City’, ‘17 Days’ and especially ‘All the Critics Love U in New York’ are “basically proto-techno” a huge amount falls into place.

So with all of this in the mix, the world of Prince was already interwoven with acid house, rave and all that followed. But in fact, the crossover almost became a lot more serious. Mark Moore remembers the thrill of seeing that Prince had named his epic extended version of ‘Alphabet Street (This is Not Music, This is a Trip)’ and thinking he could only have got it from the intro to ‘Theme From S’Express’, and the even greater thrill when shortly after he got the call asking if he’d like to remix ‘Batman’ tracks – unheard of, as the infamously self-sufficient Prince had only once before let anyone rework his music. Bringing in William Orbit, Moore did it with panache on three tracks, an appropriately ahead of its time breakbeat version of ‘The Future’ especially standing out then and now.

Not only that, though: he found himself often in late-night phone conversations with Prince, who wanted to chat about financial difficulties, about life, “and about how house music is amazing and we’re going to get back on top, it’s going to be amazing, we’ll work together and la, la, la, la... And he was crazy about it. He’s saying: ‘I’m working with Mavis Staples, and I want to do a house album.’ He sent me this track, ‘A Man Called Jesus’, which did eventually come out on the Mavis Staples album, but it was really watered down. The demo he sent me was really kind of Giorgio Moroder, I’ve still got it on cassette. We did these mixes and he was just really, really into it. And then, suddenly, he got bored of it, and that was it, moved on.”

Hearing this, it’s hard not to feel a pang of regret at what could have been – and even, maybe, buy into the myth of the erratic, cantankerous, even mad genius who hit self-destruct on a huge career. But that myth, as Cyndi Ellesse points out, doesn’t add up. “He understood the music industry far too well,” she says, “but unfortunately because he did, he got completely misunderstood. His whole era of painting ‘SLAVE’ on his cheek, calling himself The Artist Formerly Known as Prince, got headlines about him being a bit loony. But actually, in cutting loose, he was showing us so much about so many of the industry issues we all cry about now. The amount he offered just in that is unimaginable.”

Veteran industry agitator The Secret DJ concurs, hailing a prophet of DIY culture. “He single-handedly showed us the entire industry was a sham,” he says. “A parasitic organism entirely. If left to it, the artist can do it. That was his enduring legacy for me: to show us it can be done... and done while dancing about in high heels.”

Of course, that rejection of the industry was also a rejection of the megastar template, so the Imperial Phase ended at the same time Prince’s brief flirtation with house evaporated. Of course he just kept on keeping on, in other, more sprawling ways. But the blindingly bright purple flame of his 80s ubiquity never went out, and though nobody could ever imitate peak Prince, the spirit is everywhere.

David McAlmont suggests D’Angelo and Janelle Monáe as the closest to musical offspring, and Ellesse says the whole of neo-soul owes Prince a debt. “I felt very vindicated when D’Angelo did an interview where he said ‘The Ballad of Dorothy Parker’ was life-changing for him.” Andre 3000 clearly wouldn’t have been Andre 3000 without Prince. Pharrell’s understanding that funk is futurism, topped with high camp hot sauce, likewise owes Prince billions.

But it wasn’t just Black artists that felt the benefit. Beck in ‘Midnight Vultures’ mode is obvious. Jamie Lidell, of course. Hot Chip? Sure. LCD Soundsystem, Daft Punk, the entirety of electroclash? Drenched in it. Out in art-pop space, could there be an FKA Twigs, Yves Tumour, Perfume Genius without that body of work tearing apart the gay/straight, Black/white, alt/pop, rock/electronic dualities that Prince put in during those years? Not in the same form.

The same even applies to Charli XCX, Remi Wolf, Rina Sawayama, Troye Sivan and any number of spiky, post-hyperpop provocateurs. And of course, dance music has never let peak 80s Prince go, because – well, you can’t, can you?

The Secret DJ remembers a Bugged Out event where DJs were invited to each play their five favourite tunes, and very much not enjoying people choosing, for the most, worthy and arty obscurities. “After two hours of this dreadfully stylish one-upmanship,” he says, “I was ready for the Earth to open and swallow me whole... and then Tayo steps up and goes ‘fuck this’ and literally played five Prince singles in a row. Place went from funeral to party in less than 10 seconds. And stayed that way.” And you know that would be as true today, for just about any crowd – because those peak-time , turn-the-world-upside-down Prince songs still reverberate, not just because they’re familiar, not just because of their influence, but because they still power out of the speakers with the same abstract, absurd, irresistible funk – now as much as ever in the Untouchable God Zone.

Read: Prince's Early Years

Read: Prince's Last Hurrah

Read: Prince's Best Edits, Remixes and Dancefloor Deep Dives

‍

This article first appeared in Disco Pogo issue 9

Prince remained a prolific recording artist right up to his death. Indeed, following the release of ‘Batman’,  he went on to record close to 30 albums. Fans can argue over the merits of the music, but the idea that he never released anything to match the high watermark of his 1980s output is a fallacy. Simon Price lists 30 Prince classics from his post-Imperial Phase…

Did Prince ever really, truly, jump the shark?

If he did, it would have been in kitten-heel boots, executing the mid-air splits at an elevation at least equal to his 1.57m stature while emitting a joyously insouciant yelp.

With the arguable exception of David Bowie, nobody’s Imperial Phase was quite as imperial as that of Prince. After hitting his stride at the age of 22 with his third album, 1980’s new wave and electro-inflected perv-funk masterpiece ‘Dirty Mind’, he romped through a breathtaking run of experimental, genre-blending and world-conquering records: ‘Controversy’, ‘1999’, ‘Purple Rain’, ‘Around the World in a Day’, ‘Parade’, ‘Sign “O” the Times’, ‘The Black Album’ and ‘Lovesexy’. But when, exactly, did that phase end?

Most observers, whether unconverted or devoted, would agree that 1989’s ‘Batman’ soundtrack – though enormously successful in commercial terms – was the first wobble in quality, that 1990’s soundtrack to his own movie ‘Graffiti Bridge’ was patchy, and that he pulled it out of the fire again with 1991’s ‘Diamonds and Pearls’.

If we split the difference and start at the beginning of the 90s, it’s possible to assemble a killer playlist by The Late Prince, advancing the argument that his shark may actually have remained unjumped.

Prince’s post-80s discography is a place of chaos and disorder, to namecheck just one later album which made few ripples. It’s a tangled timeline complicated at various stages by his former label’s rival agenda, and his own capricious decisions to dig into his fabled Vault of unreleased material. (I’ll try to limit this list to tracks which don’t appear to have escaped the Vault in any form before 1990 but will doubtless fail.)

Following his career in that era could be hard work. For the first time in his life, he was neither leading nor following the zeitgeist, but disappeared off to his own little world, somewhere to the side, singing about self-made syncretic religions (or, later, the actual Jehovah’s Witness faith).

Almost fatally, he didn’t know what to do about hip hop. A live instrument fundamentalist, he abhorred sampling (except when it suited him) and was blindsided when sample culture came to dominate. And, when he did allow rap into his sphere, it tended to be his own hired guys, rather than the best available.

Perhaps it’s for the best that, aside from the odd tentative foray, he never fully leaned into contemporary trends. It might have been embarrassing and undignified, had he done so. But the end result was that he relinquished the initiative and wound up making music that was neither outdated nor future-facing. It was just... Prince music.

Prolific to a fault, Prince unarguably lost sight of quality control; there was more than one sprawling triple album. But who’s going to tell the greatest musical genius of the modern era to apply a policy of less is more? Warners tried, and it didn’t end well (the singer writing SLAVE on his face in response and changing his name to an unpronounceable symbol). Heaven forbid that Warners might actually have had
a point.

But sift and ye shall find. This admittedly personal and subjective selection of 30 highlights from his post-Imperial years, presented in loose chronological order, amply demonstrates that when he chose to, Prince could still knock out pieces of pure gold at the drop of a rakishly-cocked peach fedora.

‘The Question of U’ (1990)

When Apollonia Kotero, Prince’s love interest in ‘Purple Rain’, saw the script to its Golden Raspberry-gathering sequel ‘Graffiti Bridge’, she told him it was “a piece of shit”, and declined to participate. Cinematically, she dodged a bullet. But the soundtrack, with exquisitely elegant ballads like ‘The Question of U’, had its moments.

‘Joy in Repetition’ (1990)

Originally planned for unreleased triple album ‘The Crystal Ball’, ‘Joy in Repetition’ is another ‘Graffiti Bridge’ moment that’s preferable to its perfectly OK lead single, ‘Thieves in the Temple’. Its slinky, semi-spoken narrative finds Prince in the unfamiliar position of subjugating himself to the spell cast by another singer.

‘Gett Off’ (1991)

The New Power Generation never banged harder than this James Brown-referencing God-tier belter, with Prince the horny pony chasing “23 positions in a one night stand” with a voluptuous, callipygian brick house of a love object whom he cheekily informs “You better be happy that dress is still on/I heard the rip when you sat down...”

‘Cream’ (1991)

Taken, like ‘Gett Off’, from ‘Diamonds & Pearls’, ‘Cream’ confirmed the suspicions of fans of Prince and Marc Bolan that the former was fully aware of the latter. Its main riff subtly channels ‘Get It On’ and Prince nods to Bolan’s “You’re dirty-sweet and you’re my girl” with “You’re filthy cute and baby you know it”.

‘Sexy MF’ (1992)

That A7#9 – nicknamed ‘The Hendrix Chord’ – after that first whipcrack drumbeat builds almost unbearable tension, resolving only long enough for Prince, wielding a gold pistol-mic, to drop the Oedipal Noun, ensuring zero airplay. Which didn’t stop the skittering, JBs-esque ‘Sexy MF’ hitting Top Tens worldwide.

‘My Name is Prince’ (1992)

The Ronseal of Prince singles, its repeated mantra “My name is Prince/And I am funky” was a little on-the-nose. But it was also something of a self-aware piss-take. Funky he may have been, but within 12 months of its release, if there’s one thing his name wasn’t, it was Prince.

‘Peach’ (1993)

From its Kim Basinger-uttered gasp onwards, ‘Peach’ – released to promote ‘The Hits/The B-Sides’ compilation – was Prince in fun mode, a goofy southern boogie chug complete with cartoon skidding-tyres and eyeballs-on-stalks effects, about a hottie who could “turn a gay preacher to a sinner” but, alas, “she’s so cool and I’m so ugly...”

‘Pussy Control’’ (1993)

“This is your captain with no name speaking”, TAFKAP jokes in this banger about a badass who “got bank in her pockets before she got dick in her drawers”. The song sometimes known as P. Control opens ‘The Gold Experience’, the P-word and the N-word making it as radio-hostile as ‘Sexy MF’. But who cares?

‘The Most Beautiful Girl in the World’ (1994)

It rankles that Prince’s only UK number one is this conventionally sentimental Hallmark Cards love song. (Insanely, it was released ten days after Valentine’s Day.) It’s no ‘Adore’ or ‘Do Me Baby’. But if it catches you at the right moment – perhaps a late-night minicab ride – then you can only surrender. It’s not why we love Prince, but on its own terms it’s faultless.

‘Love Sign’ (1994) Nona Gaye & Prince

A duet with Marvin’s daughter (and Slim Gaillard’s granddaught-o-roonie), originally released on the NPG label’s Various Artists compilation ‘1-800-NEW-FUNK’, ‘Love Sign’ was Prince’s nod to G-Funk, complete with a guns-and-cars video directed by Ice Cube. Seek out the remix by Digital Underground’s comedy plastic-nosed Shock G.

‘Orgasm’ (1994)

The largely cunnilingus-themed ‘Come’, Prince’s last for Warners, was a classic case of the contract fulfilment album. Tucked away at the end, after lead single ‘Letitgo’, is a recording of a woman (credited as ‘She Knows’, now known to be Vanity) reaching climax as Prince offers JOI encouragement. Hilarious.

‘Days of Wild’ (1995)

Unreleased in 1995, until it eventually crept out on 1998’s ‘The Crystal Ball’ (only partly related to the aforementioned lost 80s project), ‘Days of Wild’ was Prince’s stab at Onyx-style bumpin’ bro rap, rhyming “back when Dick was fuckin’ Liz” with “jockstrap full of jizz”.

‘Eye Hate U’ (1995)

Hurt people hurt people, they say. When Prince played the sublimely fucked-up revenge ballad ‘Eye Hate U’ to Carmen Electra, his protégee and briefly girlfriend who had been seeing another guy, she cried. Take your pick between the LP version (featuring a “Your Honor” courtroom scene) and the Extended Remix (“Eye know he didn’t make U holler/And if he
did, it wasn’t like the time we did it 2 Mahler...”

‘Don’t Talk 2 Strangers’ (1996)

A sweet, simple song in which a departing – or possibly even dying – parent offers life advice to their child, ‘Don’t Talk 2 Strangers’ sits strangely on the soundtrack to ‘Girl 6’, Spike Lee’s phone sex comedy. Perhaps because it was originally intended for another film, ‘I’ll Do Anything’. It could have been a Nashville standard. And it’s OK, you’ve just got something in your eye.

‘The Truth’ (1998)

The title track and opener of ‘The Truth’, a studio album bundled with 1998’s ‘The Crystal Ball’ box set, was an uncharacteristically stripped-back acoustic blues meditation on the nature of honesty and reality. One man and his guitar. No smoke, no mirrors, just P, his lips and his fingertips.

‘The Greatest Romance Ever Sold’ (1999)

‘Rave Un2 the Joy Fantastic’ – a title recycled from a mooted house album in the late 80s – didn’t give us many memorable moments, but its mid-paced, multi-tracked lead single has a certain Mediterranean mystique.

‘The Work Pt.1’ (2001)

When legendary bassist Larry Graham (ex-Sly And The Family Stone) lured Prince into the Jehovah’s Witness faith, the pair would knock on doors unannounced in Minneapolis. Take a moment to imagine that. ‘The Rainbow Children’, informed by that faith, is forgettable, but the single ‘The Work Pt.1’, yet another James Brown-ish jam, foreshadowed the equally lithe title track of 2004’s ‘Musicology’.

‘U Make My Sun Shine’ (2001) Prince & Angie Stone

Originally slated for ‘High’, yet another unreleased album, ‘U Make My Sun Shine’ surfaced on the tittersomely-titled download-only ‘The Chocolate Invasion’. With veteran Angie Stone, he recreated smoochy 70s soul far more enjoyably than his pointless Stylistics (‘Betcha by Golly, Wow’) cover a few years earlier.

‘A Case of U’ (2002)

The piano-led ‘One Nite Alone’, which featured “ambient singing” from his pet doves Divinity and Majesty, was the first Prince album not to chart (available only to NPG Music Club members). Its highlight, dedicated to the memory of his father John L Nelson, was a cover of a much-loved song from Joni Mitchell’s 1971 album ‘Blue’, slightly abridged, retitled and rearranged: a bit less Laurel Canyon, a bit more church.

‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps’ (2004) With Tom Petty, Jeff Lynne and Dhani Harrison

Cheating? Don’t care. In the 21st century, Prince (re)established himself as the world’s greatest live performer, from Superbowls to tiny club gigs. His paint-stripping solo from the Rock’n’Roll Hall Of Fame’s George Harrison tribute has entered history as the greatest ever played. Watch the supergroup’s stunned faces as he tosses his guitar skywards and makes a French exit. Cool as fuck.

‘Black Sweat’ (2006)

Prince’s finest single of the 21st century was a minimalist beast built from squealing P-funk synths, a brutal beatbox and raw, lust-crazed falsetto. ‘Black Sweat’ was confidently playful in a way that recalled ‘Kiss’ and ‘Sexy MF’. “You’ll. Be. Screaming. Like. A. White. Lady. When. I. Count. To. Three. ONE... TWO...”

‘Guitar’ (2007)

It’s a shame that Prince’s ‘Planet Earth’ album was chiefly distributed free with toxic fash rag The Mail On Sunday, but it was heralded by the highly enjoyable single ‘Guitar’, featuring some muscular clatter from Sheila E, a melody which called back to ‘Girls & Boys’, and a touch of gentle negging. “I love you, baby... but not like I love my guitar.”

‘Dance 4 Me’ (2009)

Effectively a duet with himself (his androgynous alter-ego Camille creeping into the mix), ‘Dance 4 Me’ was the only single from the ‘Lotusflow3r’ album and thrilled Prince geeks by reprising electronic drum sounds that were familiar from 80s classics such as ‘Sign “O” the Times’.

‘Rock’n’Roll Love Affair’ (2012)

After all, if anyone earned the right to reference their past, it was Prince. (His past having created countless other acts’ presents and futures.) ‘Rock’n’Roll Love Affair’ was a lightweight, radio-friendly confection with a keyboard riff straight out of ‘Take Me With U’ and a “That’s when...” vocal inflection straight out of ‘Raspberry Beret’. An easy win.

‘Givin’ ‘Em What They Love’ (2013) Janelle Monáe feat. Prince

When the Afrofuturist auteuse Janelle Monáe rose to prominence, she seemed a dream-perfect inheritor of Prince’s mantle. He saw it, too. “He let me produce him, which was unheard of,” she said of this collaboration – a slow, snaky voodoo groove - adding: “He never let his mystery get in the way of mentorship”.

‘Breakfast Can Wait’ (2013)

“You shut it down last night/I thought the police was gonna come/Was it loud? Yeah, quite...” If the lyrics didn’t prove that Prince was in the mood to have a laugh at himself, the mad Pinky & Perky voices surely did, and if they didn’t, then the online artwork – Dave Chapelle dressed as Prince, serving up pancakes – sealed the deal.

‘FallInLove2Nite (2014) feat. Zooey Deschanel

Prince was such a fan of sitcom ‘New Girl’ that he asked to be in it. They wrote an episode around him, in which he duets with star Zooey Deschanel (no stranger to singing in She & Him) and gets his arse kicked at table tennis. ‘FallInLove2Nite’, a piece of summer-breezy electro-pop, is utterly joyous.

‘FixUrLifeUp’ (2014)

“A girl with a guitar is 12 times better than another crazy band of boys...” Much was made of the fact that ‘PlectrumElectrum’ was recorded with an all-female band, 3rdEyeGirl. As if his history of female collaborators didn’t stretch back to Wendy & Lisa and Sheila E. More startling was the genre: cymbal-crashing hard rock, as epitomised by the single ‘FixUrLifeUp’.

‘Baltimore’ (2015)

The deceptively blissful ‘Baltimore’ was a Black Lives Matter protest song written in response to the police killings of Freddie Gray and Michael Brown, and his most directly political release in years. The song he’d have composed in response to current events in Minneapolis can only be imagined.

‘Revelation’ (2015)

‘HitNRun Phase 2’ was the last album released in Prince’s lifetime. Penultimate track, ‘Revelation’, took its own sweet time as Marcus Anderson threaded a sinuous sax line, with Prince balancing the carnal and the spiritual. After verses about “making you cum”, he delivered a cryptic spoken stanza: “Through English glamour, casting a spell/Through Hebrew, Greek, and Roman Hell/Higher ‘til we overstand/The colour of the Pharaoh’s hand.” His entire oeuvre encapsulated in five-and-a-half minutes.

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Read: Prince's Early Years

Read: Prince's Imperial Phase

Read: Prince's Best Edits, Remixes and Dancefloor Deep Dives

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This article first appeared in Disco Pogo issue 9

Balearic Mike is taken with Prince’s best edits, remixes and dancefloor deep dives…

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Prince is perhaps to blame for my ‘unhealthy’ relationship with records and the main reason I’ve spent a substantial part of my life in darkened rooms, losing myself to the pulsating rhythms of dance music. 

And yet, His Royal Badness had an often uneasy, and at times downright contemptuous relationship with modern forms of dance music – namely hip hop and house – which emerged during the 1980s; the decade he owned. On ‘The Black Album’ alone he goes from adopting the rap section from J.M. Silk’s 1985 house classic ‘Music is the Key’, to dissing rap music on ‘Dead On It’. He struggled to come to terms with these styles as they dominated the 90s but slowly made peace with them as the millennium dawned. 

It’s rare that I DJ and don’t play a Prince track. Here’s why…

‘When Doves Cry’ (Derrick Carter’s live mix)/‘When Doves Cry Miura’ (Compact Disco Edit)

One of the greatest dance records ever made, and yet it has no bassline! This small issue didn’t bother Larry Levan, who famously played it at Paradise Garage, but as dance music got heavier in the house and techno era, DJs and producers increasingly found it hard to programme and found some innovative ways around it. Star of Chicago’s second wave, Derrick Carter blew our collective minds at clubs like Bugged Out and Back To Basics with this live mix, layering ‘When Doves Cry’ over the top of a Roger Sanchez dub mix of UK acid jazz combo Raw Stylus. Some years ago, Luke Una gifted me a superb re-edit by Glasgow DJ and producer Martyn Henderson, aka DJ MASH, which smashes the track into Metro Area’s ‘Miura’ to stunning effect!

‘17 Days’ (East Coast Love Affair/Athens Of The North Version) and Rahaan ‘Down Comes The Rain’ Edit)

Originally released as the flip of ‘When Doves Cry’, and one of his Royal Badness’ best B-sides. But when an early demo version was discovered and released as ‘Piano & A Microphone 1983’, it was just too tempting for some talented producers. Chicago’s Rahaan was first to try his hand with a nice live sounding take on GAMM, before the mysterious Mighty Zaf turned up this blue label 12-inch, rumoured to be the work of the soulful Edinburgh label Athens Of The North’s house band, East Coast Love Affair. It’s more of a classic house take, which suits the source material beautifully – all pounding, churchy pianos and Prince’s soaring voice. 

‘The Future’ (Mark Moore & William Orbit Mix)

The ‘Batman’ soundtrack LP gets an unfairly rough ride imho. Although it was absolutely done because Prince was a) skint, and b) fulfilling a contractual obligation, it nevertheless has some great songs. This European-only 12-inch, released almost a year after the album, takes two of the finest cuts, ‘The Future’ and ‘Electric Chair’, and in getting the UK duo of Mark Moore and William Orbit to remix, really does show us a glimpse of the future, predicting the tougher, electronic sounds that the UK house scene would begin producing and still sounding contemporary.

‘The Bootleg of Dorothy Parker’ (Creative Use)

Stoke On Trent’s finest dance production duo, Kelvin Andrews and Danny Spencer, launched their highly regarded re-edit label Creative Use with this superb reworking of one of Prince’s most beloved deep cuts. Much more than an edit, they added tougher drums and an enhanced bassline, as well as loads of dub effects to create an underground classic. Killer in the released dub form, but a full vocal version also exists and really needs to see the light of day!

‘I Wanna Be Your Lover’ (Dimitri From Paris edit / Mille & Mr. Hirsch – Preset Stomp)

Now this is some imaginative editing alright! Prince’s first substantial hit single from 1979, peaked at number 11 on the Billboard Hot 100, and stalled at 41 in the UK. It’s a gorgeous slice of soulful disco, sung falsetto style, and one of only a handful of early tracks he always kept in his live sets. Dimitri turns in an all-time classic edit by managing to seamlessly stitch together an exhilarating live version – complete with ecstatic crowd cheers – to the original, creating an end of night anthem. On a deeper, darker, more underground tip, Leipzig duo Mille & Mr. Hirsch take the groove of the track and turn it into a head-nodding, sublime and sexy slice of house.

‘Sexy Dancer’ (Long Version)

Another from Prince’s self-titled 1979 album given a near nine-minute remix on this UK-only 12-inch. A gorgeous, lush, organic sounding disco groove of nagging bassline, insistent Chic-inspired guitars and squelchy synths, with a minimal falsetto vocal. This was the only Prince track included in David Mancuso and Cosmo’s Loft 100 chart.

‘Just As Long As We’re Together’ (Soft Rocks Purple Rinse Mix)

There’s a Jim Burgess Disco Mix of this cut from debut LP ‘For You’, but it’s not a patch on this killer version from Brighton-based Balearic collective Soft Rocks. Pioneers of the re-edit in the 00s, this was their first release and turns a lightweight track into a driving dancefloor beast by disposing of most of the song and bringing the groove from the end of the track right up front. 

‘Erotic City’ (Make Love Not War Erotic City Come Alive)

A contender for the greatest B-side ever! Prince watched Parliament/Funkadelic perform ‘(Not Just) Knee Deep’ at LA’s Beverly Theatre and went straight to the studio and recorded this in five-and-a-half hours. It’s pretty much the blueprint for early house records by Jamie Principle et al but recorded in March 1984. Sung as a duet with Sheila E, it has a driving Linn LM-1 beat, and some seriously rude lyrics.

‘All the Critics Love U In New York’/Moodymann: ‘U Can Dance if U Want 2’

The ‘1999’ album is part of the DNA for Chicago’s early house music, and this killer slab of machine-funk is a standout. So much so that Detroit’s Kenny Dixon Jr. turned it into a super-heavy house tune in the mid 90s. U can dance if U want 2!

‘Gett Off’ (Steve ‘Silk’ Hurley ‘Houstyle’ Mix)

After a couple of sub-par releases (‘Batman’ and ‘Graffiti Bridge’), 1991 found Prince back on top form. Not only that, but he’d also enlisted house music pioneer Steve ‘Silk’ Hurley to twiddle some knobs, and his Royal Badness is actually RAPPING! This record conquered the UK club scene, although a bit more funk than house. Had Prince made peace with hip hop and house?

Balearic bonus cut: 

Madhouse: ‘Eight’

Madhouse was Prince’s jazz influenced side project with saxophonist Eric Leeds, but this closing track from the first of their two LPs is not jazz. Inspired by Eno & Byrne’s ‘My Life in the Bush Of Ghosts’ and the Art Of Noise’s ‘Moments in Love’, it’s a dreamlike track, built around a sample of Prince’s voice, live drums, Fairlight and Prophet VS synth. Leeds then plays lovely flute parts over the top. The result is a truly beautiful Café del Mar-style track, with a definite new-age and Scandi-jazz sound. 

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Read: Prince's Early Years

Read: Prince's Imperial Phase

Read: Prince's Last Hurrah

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This article first appeared in Disco Pogo issue 9

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Back in the mid-00s, a wearied George Evelyn, aka Nightmares On Wax, the high priest of trip hop in the 90s, contemplated knocking music on the head. Now, at 56, energised by Ibiza and given an Adrian Sherwood dub makeover, he has sold out the prestigious Royal Albert Hall. Put that in your pipe and smoke it, he instructs Paul Mardles…

Eight years ago, while climbing Mount Kilimanjaro, George Evelyn had an epiphany. He was tired, emotional, drained from the trek that would culminate in the “world’s highest DJ set”, as it was billed by group leader Jonny Lee, founder of Last Night A DJ Saved My Life, a charity established for children in need. He was also flummoxed, three days into the hike, by ‘The Good Book’, a sampledelic album by hip hop producer The Alchemist.

How did he chop up tunes like that, wondered Evelyn, a tireless exponent of stoned beats for the small hours who’s better known as Nightmares On Wax. In search of solitude, he reached for his headphones and, about 10,000 feet above the ground, put his act’s back catalogue on shuffle. Among the first songs he listened to was ‘Nights Interlude’, the opening cut on debut set ‘A Word of Science’, which utilised Quincy Jones’s ‘Summer in the City’. Quickly, it dawned on him: he’d pulled off the same trick, in 1991, years before The Alchemist.

“It kind of blew my mind,” he says. “I was just like, Oh my God! I did it back then. I did that same technique. How did I not know that?’” And how, three days later, was the DJ set, given that climbers are advised to remain for a maximum of 15 minutes at that altitude? “Everybody with us was starting to drop like flies. It was like being at a really bad ketamine party or something. People were like, ‘It will be all right. Come on! Just half an hour.’” The Leeds-born producer puffs out his cheeks and chuckles. “I don’t even remember playing, to be honest with you. It was so cold. But our Sherpas were with us, playing the drums and that.”

Fast forward to today and Evelyn, 56, is on top of the world again. He is in Ibiza, his home for 20 years, a photograph of which adorns the wall behind his head. Soon he will be in Australia and New Zealand, where he will DJ, having taken a year off, principally to start work on his next LP. But the tranquil end of the White Isle is where his heart now lies, not least because it saved him from “hanging up my headphones”. 

He and his wife moved there for their daughter, then a toddler, because Britain was becoming “anti-family” (“Even going out for a meal was an issue unless you went to Wacky Warehouse or McDonald’s”). But by the time they arrived, desperate for some sun and a healthier environment in which to raise a child, Evelyn felt exhausted from promoting an album (2006’s ‘In a Space Outta Sound’, which has been remixed by Adrian Sherwood and retitled ‘In a Space Outta Dub’, marking its 20th anniversary) and was heading towards burnout. Yes, he loved the climate, the landscape, their new house (“It felt like we had come home, not left home”), but professionally, creatively, “there was a lot to process. At first it was great – everyone wants to come over – but for me it was like, Well, how do I do this? It felt like a great idea to build a new studio in the sun, but how do you do that? Do you really want to be in the studio when everyone’s in the pool? I didn’t want to DJ. I didn’t want to do anything. I was trying to find my groove. It just felt like I was done.”

It’s hard to equate such negative thoughts with the Evelyn of 2026: open, gregarious, genial, lively. Maybe it was those very qualities that slowly enabled him to thrive in a new land – a task that took him three years, he thinks. First, as he puts it, “a magical thing happened”: he met Igor Marijuan, the owner of radio station Ibiza Sonica, who offered him a show Evelyn called Wax Da Box. “That got me on the front foot again,” he says, “‘cause obviously you have to find stuff every week.” Then, disappointed with some of the gigs he subsequently landed (“I thought the way that people were treated was cold”), he hosted his own Wax Da Beach parties to air the soul- and funk-fuelled sounds neglected in most clubs. Next came Wax Da Jam, an evening in a restaurant, where a live music element featured on the menu and DJ Shadow was among the guests.

“It was like starting again,” he says, disappearing to let his cat into the house. “But what happened really was Ibiza gave me a blank canvas. I just remembered what I did. A lot of people think, ‘The club scene’s this and that’, and it’s not. It was something completely different – the complete opposite of what was happening elsewhere in Ibiza – that took me back to the basics of playing music and just being myself.”

Revitalised, Evelyn produced a run of albums – ‘Thought So’ (2008), ‘Feelin’ Good’ (2013), ‘Shape the Future’ (2018) – along with a few mix CDs, ‘Back To Mine’ among them. Then, a few years ago, during lockdown, he started to complain of pains in his neck. “My wife looked at it and said: ‘That looks like a lump. You should get it checked.’ So the doctors do some checks and they’re like, ‘We think it could be a lipoma, which is fatty tissue. What do you want to do?’” His eyes widen. He is, fleetingly, back in the hospital. “I’m like, ‘Fucking get it out! I’m in pain.’” When he woke up later, post-op, with a banging headache, the diagnosis had changed. The growth was five inches long. They weren’t sure what it was. “The doctors were like, ‘It’s bigger than we thought’. It was kind of touching the membrane of my brain. They sent it away and told me it would take two weeks for the results so to go home and get some rest.”

Rest proved difficult. One day when his daughter was changing the bandage he asked her to photograph the wound. “And that’s when it hit me,” he says. “I could see the stitches and all. I was like, ‘Shit, that’s big.’” Understandably, as he was working on some music, he sought refuge in his studio. “I was producing some stuff and this thought just came in like an arrow. It was like, ‘Have you made sure the family are all right? Have you sorted it out?’ And I was like, ‘Whoa! I’m not thinking on that tip.’ And this voice was just like, ‘Well, you need to think about it.’ So I played it all out in my head and when I got to the end I was like, That’s not me – I’ve still got shit to do.”

Two weeks later, thankfully, he got the all clear, but the experience left an indelible mark. One: it made him want to talk, to share his hopes and fears, to spurn the fear of dialogue peculiar to men. “I did a few interviews with a couple of people who had been through similar things and it was great to have those conversations,” he says. “Men don’t talk enough to each other. We don’t open up because of our upbringings. It’s time we were free of that.” 

Two: it acted as the springboard for an album, ‘Shout Out! To Freedom’, in 2021. “This was pandemic times,” he says, “when people were having all these conversations about freedom and it made me think, ‘Well, what is freedom?’ This [the cancer scare] was something I wanted to be free of. Another person’s view of freedom could be something else. Everyone’s got some shit they want to be free of, whether you know it or not. You might look like the happiest person on Earth, but you’ll have something you wish you were free of. And that’s what inspired that record. I call them crazy blessings. But it was a reaffirming experience. Be grateful every day, every moment, for everyone in your life, and remind yourself of that, because you don’t know what tomorrow will bring.”

Life seemed so much simpler, free of stress and fear, in Leeds, LS6, when Evelyn was a child. His dad owned two record players, in the lounge and kitchen, “which you weren’t allowed to touch, but I did when he went out”. In 1977, when Evelyn was seven, his sister became an accomplished disco dancer, regularly winning competitions in nightclubs, sometimes returning with a 12-inch or mixtape. “I would always wonder what a nightclub was,” he says. Around the same time, Evelyn had a friend called Dennis Smith, with whom he used to walk home after school. He liked hanging out in his mate’s house, because his mum’s food was “always next level” and reggae was the soundtrack to every meal. Smith’s older brother, Clifford, owned a sound system, whose speakers were stored in a lock-up near the playground of Evelyn’s school. “We used to sit in there after school and hear them talk about sound clashes, but we were too young to understand,” he says. When, later, he started to attend youth club, he would listen to the noise of the windows rattling as the sound system shook the older kids’ building. “I just wished I could be in there,” he says. “It was like I got backstage but could never see the show.”

One artist stands out from those years: Scientist. Not just for the music, which Evelyn adored, but because his record sleeves were a riot of colour – a brilliantly drawn alternative cartoon universe. Designed by illustrator Tony McDermott, Greensleeves Records’ in-house graphic artist, they depicted the Jamaican dub producer battling vampires, shooting space invaders and, perhaps most famously, winning the World Cup, his country trouncing England 6-1 in the final at a time when black footballers in Britain were treated with hostility by some in the game.

“I used to go to the record shop with my friend,” says Evelyn, “and, because as a kid you’re attracted to animation, we’d look at all these sleeves with cartoon characters on and go ‘Bagsy, that’s me. No, no, that’s me.’ He was the first artist I really followed, whose records I collected.”

This was the early 80s when Evelyn was searching for like-minded people, a movement with which he could identify. He was a rude boy. He was a mod. He loved the much-maligned UB40, too, and their “incredible” ‘Signing Off’ album. What he loved most of all, however, was hip hop, then in its infancy, “which changed my life. I just connected with the sound system thing, because there was a DJ and a MC. It opened up my world. I started discovering other people too. You know, ‘Curtis Mayfield? Who’s that? Oh, so Kool and the Gang made cool records too, not just pop ones’. I started connecting people like that with break records. I began to go to flea markets and buy those records, which is how I found ‘Summer in the City’. And it made me realise that I didn’t need much to do anything. I didn’t need much to express myself, whether that was through dancing or rapping or trying to graffiti in my bedroom.”

It was his punk moment. “Exactly,” he smiles. “Exactly.” Which leads him to pause then draw parallels between Malcolm McLaren’s ‘Buffalo Gals’ and the evolution of classical music. “When people talk about that, I always wonder: what happened? What actually happened? It’s like a pebble hit the water and there were ripples and everyone went mental for, like, 200 years. And, to me, that’s what happened with ‘Buffalo Gals’. He [McLaren] had all the elements of hip hop in that video. The hunger for it was insane, because we didn’t have any connection to it before then.”

Energised, Evelyn embarked on a quest for visual representations of hip hop, whether in films rented from a video store or in reports on children’s news programmes. “I would sit in front of the TV with my cassette recorder on pause in case there was a clip of something on ‘John Craven’s Newsround’. I would try to compile all this stuff just to capture something. But it was scraps, man. Scraps. John Peel would play one or two songs on his show. Then ‘Flashdance’ came out and…” He laughs to himself, distracted by a section in that film. “I found out later that when she [Jennifer Beals] does a backspin, it’s not her, it’s [b-boy] Crazy Legs. Crazy Legs with a wig on.”

As his interest in hip hop sparked an obsession with sampling, Evelyn started to make his own mixtapes that he and his friends would soak up after hours. This was the late 80s, the early years of clubbing. In Leeds at least, chillout rooms did not exist. “I call those mixes the ‘experience tapes’,” he says. “There was no plan or structure of what to listen to. We were creating something without knowing it. I had a sampler by then and was just sampling everything and listening to loops. That’s when I got the idea to do an album.”

When it arrived the LP, ‘A Word of Science’, was accredited to Nightmares On Wax, the group Evelyn formed with Kevin Harper and John Halnon (who dropped out before it was completed), and released on Warp. It incorporated many of the samples that he had been tweaking, repurposing, for years, resulting in a supple, effervescent hybrid of tongue-in-cheek hip hop (‘Mega Donutz’) and vivid techno-funk (‘Coming Down’). Two tracks stood out, though, for their audacity: ‘Aftermath’ and ‘Dextrous’ pioneered the bleep sound, a brazen reminder that “proper” instruments could no longer rival the raw power of machines.

“That was definitely reactive,” says Evelyn. “Everything we did in the early days was reactive, and that was a response to [A Guy Called] Gerald’s ‘Voodoo Ray’. We all came from battling and breaking – that b-boy mentality. And because we were brought up with sound system culture as well and knew about dub plates and about not letting people know what tunes you were playing, there was this real competitive mentality – a call and response thing. So when a tune came from Manchester it was like, ‘Yo! We need to do a tune.’ It was beautifully ego-driven.”

Soon there was no “we”: he and Harper split, having grown apart. “I thought, ‘Shit, man. What am I going to do?’” The answer was simple: speak to Steve Beckett, the co-founder of Warp. He advised Evelyn to fine-tune an album he’d envisioned years before when he was at a pal’s house in the early hours, chemically altered, lost in The KLF. “I thought, I’m going to make a hip hop chillout album and call it ‘Smokers Delight’,” he says, casting his mind back to that very moment. An LP of that name arrived in 1995, one year after the samples were all cleared, establishing Evelyn as a darling of trip hop.

“I didn’t like that label,” he says. “It just felt like a trendy term. Now, in hindsight, I can see that it captures a moment.” Plus, as he’s only too happy to acknowledge, he can’t really take issue with a tag that represents his mindset when that album was conceived. “I mean, I got the idea when I was tripping my nuts off. So, yeah, I get it. I get it.”

Thirty years on, ‘Smokers Delight’ is just as popular, its hazy grooves as memorable as the cartoon cover of mind-bending images bathed in red and green, a nod to the Scientist albums of his youth. “I wanted it to be something that allows you to see different things every time you look at it,” he says, applauding the two artists (Lee McMillan, Leigh Kenny) who created that illustration in his flat. A few weeks from now, when Evelyn returns from Australia and New Zealand, the sleeve will be on show at the Royal Albert Hall, where he will celebrate the anniversaries of ‘Smokers Delight’ and ‘In a Space Outta Sound’. The venue holds 5,000. The evening is sold out.

Evelyn shakes his head in disbelief. First, Adrian Sherwood, whom he’s admired for years (“I respect him enormously. He’s a legend who’s never really left his zone”), reinterprets ‘In a Space Outta Sound’, now this. “It’s incredible,” he says. “I mean, who’d have thought it, right? I was 21, I think, when I started writing ‘Smokers Delight’ in my bedroom, so for it to end up in the Royal Albert Hall…”

So why, like ‘Carboot Soul’, its elegant follow-up, does it still strike a chord with so many people?

“I think because everyone’s got their own story,” he says. “That’s how ‘Smokers Delight’ was born. The song titles are named after certain instances or trips or whatever. And then it was just shared. I meet people and they go, ‘Oh my God, that record. I backpacked across South America listening to that.’ Everyone’s got a story. It’s a soundtrack to people’s memories – that’s what it is.”

Surprisingly, the 90s poster boy for weed smokes very little of the stuff these days – or at least by his own bleary-eyed standards – generally preferring to microdose mushrooms. “I always give thanks for the herb, and I go through phases, like on holiday, but it’s not a major part of my life. It’s like… it’s like…” His face lights up. He grins. “You know how pilots have to do so many hours so they can fly? Well,” he says, leaning in, “I’m sure that I’ve done mine.” 

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This article first appeared in Disco Pogo issue 9

Styling & Clothes : Nicholas Daley. Styling Assistant: Cara McCrory

A group of DJs who spin together and share the same dwelling? Felicity Martin digs the new breed...

You might expect a house shared by multiple DJs to be one constant b2b2b2b. But inside the east London home of Tia Cousins, Rosie Ama and Sarahtonin (real name Sarah Isaacs), it’s more leafy houseplants, jigsaw puzzles and yachting reality show ‘Below Deck’, than 24-hour kick drums. “We have clubs for a reason!” laughs Cousins as some rare disco drifts out of a nearby stereo. “We rarely listen to dance music at home. We’re always listening to, like, listening stuff,” adds Ama. They’re more likely to have some folk spinning in the kitchen, although Isaacs recently deep-cleaned the living room to Underworld (“Room One,” she jokes).

Choosing what they put on the speakers isn’t tricky, thankfully. “We’re actually really musically aligned,” says Ama, although yesterday they had their first-ever musical disagreement (over dubstep, which Isaacs never got into). Cousins and Ama have lived in the house since December 2023, and a fourth DJ, NTS Radio’s Sofie K, is the longest resident, while Isaacs is a more recent addition. There are multiple pairs of decks, which they mainly use for recording mixes – Cousins and Ama both have monthly slots on Noods Radio.

Beyond DJing under their own monikers, all of them work in the music industry – Ama and Isaacs at Defected, in the marketing and sync departments respectively, while Cousins is an A&R at Ransom Note. Ama – formerly one half of Kiara Scuro – has frequently appeared at Optimo (Espacio) nights, along with supporting slots for Erol Alkan, Factory Floor and Dave Clarke. Cousins is a regular at festivals like Field Maneuvers, Waterworks and Love International and has appeared on slots alongside Overmono and Bicep. Isaacs, meanwhile, hosts a weekly live show on Do!!You!!!Radio and holds a residency at Low Life, Bill Brewster and Frank Broughton’s party that has run for over 30 years.

If their names aren’t immediately recognisable – although bearing in mind where they’ve played, they should be – they are among a new breed of Disco Pogo-friendly DJs that are helping keep the electronic underground vibrantly alive.  

“They’ve all been behind the scenes learning and being part of what’s reaching a wider audience, so you’re already being influenced by them without knowing it,” More Fountains promoter Rupert Walton enthuses. And he should know, having booked all three of them for his brilliant parties on the south east coast. “If you want to be a great DJ, you have to believe in yourself and your ability to pick the right tune at the right time. They’ve learned their art and have the confidence to follow through with their convictions. The best people in the world are nice people and they’re some of the nicest I’ve met.”

Another to vouch for them is Brewster. He gave Isaacs her first gig after he put a call-out on social media during Covid for a young female DJ to mentor. She was just outside the age bracket but applied anyway in a cheeky bid to get her name in his inbox – she’d written her university dissertation on Brewster and Broughton’s influential book ‘Last Night a DJ Saved My Life’ – and it worked, as Brewster booked her to play at Corsica Studios. “I didn’t really know how to use CDJs. I booked myself in a Pirate [rehearsal studios] a bunch of times and just kind of taught myself in a big panic,” she says. “But it was one of the best nights of my life.” Her Do!!You!!! sets are known for – as her DJ guise would suggest – a sense of mood-lifting, with Isaacs reaching for lesser-known house and disco.

Ama – who also runs Ransom Note sub-label Human Endeavour – recently went solo after almost a decade DJing and producing alongside her friend Nadia Harris. When she first started playing club sets on her own, she’d forget she had to put on the next song, “because we’d always play one for one!” Although Ama had previously enjoyed bouncing off Harris’ energy, she’s now relishing being able to dip into more personal styles and scenes like the 00s electro era – Soulwax and Digitalism – and more guitar-led stuff, alongside the leftfield acid house and low-slung chuggers she’s always loved. “It’s nice to have complete freedom. It’s a new chapter, I guess,” she says.

Cousins learned to DJ at university, after a friend stashed his decks in her room. “I used to smoke a lot of weed and lock myself in my room and ignore everyone’s calls and just taught myself,” she says. Since getting her first radio slots and gigs, she’s become a fixture at the likes of Field Maneuvers, Love International, the Golden Lion and Bugged Out. She even closed Convenanza last year, a suitable endorsement.

Her eclectic tastes and extensive knowledge of jazz, krautrock, EBM and more, have helped her star rise as she masterfully bridges the old and new. She also co-runs Music To Watch Seeds Grow By, an ambient label inspired by the unhurried pace at which plants grow. Somewhat fitting given how proudly she talks about her box of seedlings on the dining table.

Cousins first met Ama while working as her artist liaison at a festival, while Ama and Isaacs met at Defected, although working in different departments meant they didn’t really cross paths properly for some time. “Sarah says we were colleagues for ages, to piss me off,” Ama laughs, “until Field Maneuvers last year, that’s when we became actual friends.” They’d start going on nights out together, and Isaacs would crash at the house so often that it felt odd when she wasn’t there, so she moved in.

The DJing circles they move in often overlap, such as bookings at Bugged Out (they all played the recent Weekender) and Watching Trees, the micro-festival from Optimo and Ransom Note. Two years ago at the festival, Cousins and Ama dropped Perry Como’s ‘Magic Moments’ as a reset for their slot between African Head Charge and James Holden, two acts they had no idea how to bridge. “We were debating it before, like is it gonna throw everyone off?” says Ama. Isaacs, who was in the audience, had a personal attachment to the track. “I won’t go into details, but it meant so much to me that they played it. Rosie was just my colleague at that point – she had no idea. It was an amazing moment.”

Realising they both loved the track – and smooth, yearning vocalists in general – Cousins and Ama drunkenly pitched the idea of a ‘crooner’s set’ to Keith (JD Twitch) McIvor. He loved the idea, and the result was a set that stitched the romantic sounds of Marty Wilde to Dean Martin and Verna Felton’s ‘Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo (The Magic Song)’. People started ballroom dancing, and Ama’s brother slow-danced with everyone in the tent. “It was incredible watching people wander in and then being like, ‘This is amazing!’” Isaacs recalls.

The tragic death of McIvor last year has been tough on them all – each knew him in different ways, and Ama describes going to his memorial in Glasgow, which culminated, suitably, with an afters at the basement club where Optimo began (“it could only really end up at Sub Club!” she says).

Until recently, their unofficial second home was The Gun, the storied Hackney rave pub which shuttered in March 2025 due to financial pressures. It was the place they’d hang out most outside of the house, and the top suggestion in Ama’s taxi app for some time. Sundays were the best there – they’d call it “Sunday Gun day”, meaning their Mondays would often have a slow start, with everyone holed up in their rooms. Cousins recalls how eclectic it was, fondly remembering Vladimir Ivkovic playing a Yugoslavian new wave and post-punk set on a Thursday night years ago. She DJed the closing party, which she can’t quite remember but the others suppose it must have been “muscle memory” as they glow about how good her set was. “It was so busy that we were like, ‘We’re gonna have to crowd surf you down the stairs!’” Ama laughs.

Although the pub’s closure has left a hole in their partying schedule, they’re optimistic about the clubbing landscape in London, pointing to places like OM, a new venue in Dalston that’s open until 6am, the newly renovated Peckham Palais, and the immersive Odeon-turned-club Lost. One party they shout out is Tryouts; the hush-hush event held in a secret King’s Cross location they’ve all DJed at. “The average age is like 50, it feels like you’ve almost gone back in time in terms of the vibe – everyone’s so up for it,” says Ama.

It’s a reminder that however much a venue’s physical space matters, it’s the people and friendships formed there that make a scene. In some cases it can even lead to the start of beautiful flatshare.

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This article first appeared in Disco Pogo issue 9

The list of great electronic soundtracks is as long as it is diverse. Everyone from Tangerine Dream, Vangelis and Air to John Carpenter, Trent Reznor and Cliff Martinez have made significant contributions to the canon. There is, however, one album that stands as the genre’s Lodestar: Wendy Carlos’ soundtrack to ‘A Clockwork Orange’. Daniel Dylan Wray looks back on an innovative piece of work, charts the development of the electronic soundtracks that followed in its wake and speaks to those still marvelling at Carlos’ virtuosity 55 years on. “It’s genius,” says Portishead’s Geoff Barrow…

The very first thing you hear in ‘A Clockwork Orange’ is whirring, ominous synthesisers as they begin to drone over a blood red screen. It sets the tone for the film instantaneously: moody, dark, unnerving. Dystopian. 

When the 1971 film adaptation of Anthony Burgess’ book by Stanley Kubrick came out, its frightfully visceral approach caused shockwaves. Fifty-five years since its release, the film comes loaded with an immortalised history of controversy. Its stylish depictions of ultraviolent acts, as carried out by a group of disaffected youths known as droogs, was blamed for copycat crimes. Cases spanning murder to rape cited the film as an influence and it was banned in the UK in 1973, becoming unavailable for decades. 

As a film, it lived on potently in the memories of those who had managed to see it in its brief two-year run, or if they’d managed to get a dodgy copy, but just as lingering – minus the copycat crimes – was the film’s music, composed by Wendy Carlos (born Walter Carlos). “You couldn’t actually have a more perfect score,” says Geoff Barrow of Portishead and Beak, who also composes music for film with Ben Salisbury. “It’s genius. There’s nothing about it that doesn’t work.” 

Fusing futuristic synthesiser explorations with classical works by the likes of Beethoven and Elgar, Carlos carved out a sonic language and musical world that was as vivid, sharp and intense as the cinematic one that Kubrick laid out. “It’s fucking iconic, isn’t it?” says Ben Frost, an electronic musician and composer who has made scores for projects such as Ridley Scott’s ‘Raised by Wolves’. “More than the sound of it, there’s a severity in the choices and the limited palette of the thing that really makes it stand apart. There’s real power in that brutality.” 

The huge, booming, classical music gives way to warped, eerie, at times ominous, tones that create a sense of sinister tension that feels truly unnerving. It’s an approach that, rather than luring or easing you into the film, or holding your hand through it, creates a jarring and distancing sensation that mirrors the feelings of alienation that are so central to the film. For Frost, such dualities mean that it remains a truly singular piece of work. 

“It set up an idea of how music can relate to an image,” he offers, explaining its significance. “And how music can drive a cinematic narrative without actually assimilating itself into that. It’s quite contrarian and there is a competitive relationship between the image and the score – they’re kind of at odds with one another. That makes it stand apart even now after 55 years, as it’s not about the marriage but the friction.” 

Despite being buried for a long time, its influence on electronic music – both on and off screen – is peerless in its reach. It had a huge impact in Sheffield, with numerous groups such as The Human League, Heaven 17 and Clock DVA falling under the spell of (in the case of the latter two outfits the film provided their name too) the film and its music. Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor, who has since gone on to have a successful scoring career, working on films such as ‘The Social Network’, cites Carlos’ work as being instrumental. “Wendy Carlos was inescapable,” Reznor told Empire in 2025. “She was the Jimi Hendrix of synthesisers in terms of elevating the instrument into being a serious instrument, as opposed to a fraud or a replacement or a toy. I think her work expanded what the concept of an instrument could be.” 

Its influence remains absolutely everywhere. At the time of writing, the hit HBO/BBC show ‘Industry’ is airing its new series, and it uses the same piece of music – ‘Funeral March for Queen Mary’ by Purcell – that Carlos worked into creating one of the most iconic and enduring opening scenes in cinematic history. 

Elizabeth Bernholz, who composes for film and TV, and performs as experimental artist Gazelle Twin, has only just realised how much of it has perhaps seeped into her own subconscious all these decades on. “I made an album a few years ago called ‘Pastoral’,” she explains. “Which incorporates folk, recorder and early Baroque music. I hadn’t really cited that soundtrack as an influence but when I went to listen to it recently, I was just like, oh, God, it obviously went in. Hearing it again today, it could be written now. The classical stuff has a very of its time feel but the electronic stuff, that’s a little bit freer… I just hear it so much now in stuff like Daniel Lopatin’s scores.” 

Oneohtrix Point Never’s Daniel Lopatin – who specialises in immersive, moody, dreamy and dense electronic film scores for movies such as ‘Uncut Gems’ and ‘Marty Supreme’ – told Electronic Sound that he was equally in awe and scared by ‘A Clockwork Orange’, feeling sickened by “the whole experiment of it, the whole mentality of the ruling class and their architecture of society” but then how “the music imbues this sort of sociological prison that’s created by these class relationships”. 

Michael Stein and Kyle Dixon, composers of the nostalgia-coated synth-laden ‘Stranger Things’ soundtrack, had been studying Carlos’ work for years. “I started reading about Wendy, and finding out all these tricks,” Stein told The Guardian. “She taught me to dig deeply into the instrument. She was a magician like that.”

While, ‘A Clockwork Orange’ is by no means the first film to incorporate electronic music – you can go all the way back to 1956 to find the “electronic tonalities” that make up the score to sci-fi film ‘Forbidden Planet’ – it was a film that shifted the dial so significantly, it’s fair to consider it something of a ground zero moment as a new era of electronic film scores soon took hold. 

For Frost, he thinks that Carlos opened up people’s minds to the possibilities of synthesiser music and that the score redefined the purpose of the instrument. “If you wind the clock back to the beginnings of synthesis, it’s in the name what it’s about,” he says. “It’s about synthesising the idea of an organic instrument. Like: we can do this without instruments. There was an element of relishing in the idea of dehumanising or removing the human element, like that Kraftwerk idea of the machines will do the work. It’s a sort of proto-transhumanist idea, but in musical form, I think that that very quickly was followed by a space where people went, OK, but the synths can actually do way more than that.” 

While Carlos was a skilled composer and talented musician, who used multi-track recordings to create her elaborate pieces and classical re-works, technology evolved and synths became simpler and more accessible. A new wave of people experimenting with electronics began to use simplicity as a force. Geoff Barrow points out John Carpenter’s ‘Assault on Precinct 13’ (1976) as being a key milestone moment in such evolutions. 

“When I heard it, I was like, ‘wow’,” he recalls. “Because it’s so stark. The themes are really strong but the simplicity is incredible.” Barrow points to two Portishead tracks – ‘Roads’ from ‘Dummy’ and ‘Machine Gun’ from ‘Third’ – that have taken direct influence from it. 

As the 1970s unfolded, it became an era loaded with electronic film scores. From big budget productions, such as William Friedkin’s ‘Sorcerer’ (scored by Tangerine Dream) to cult horror films such as ‘Suspiria’ and its music by Italian prog rock outfit Goblin. Even more traditional composers began to experiment with tone, with Jerry Goldsmith’s score for ‘Alien’ sounding more like an avant-garde electronic record at points.

Carlos’ follow-up score to ‘A Clockwork Orange’ was 1980’s ‘The Shining’. While still producing brilliant work, it was less impactful due to Kubrick’s decision to not use the bulk of the music that had been delivered. In 1982 Carlos scored ‘Tron’ and proved that, just as she had laid down the foundations for electronic film music in the 1970s, she had produced a score that could be heard echoing throughout the ensuing decade. Such was the legacy left by the cult film that when new instalments in the film’s series came out, heavy hitters Daft Punk and Nine Inch Nails were brought in to tackle the scores.

By the 1980s, synthesisers were becoming more commonplace. What were once cumbersome beasts that would take multiple people to move and cost the earth, were now portable. Synth-pop was booming and a type of music that had once sounded like the future, was now becoming increasingly everyday. However, this access and nascent experimenting with evolving new technologies, resulted in another period filled with visionary and era-defining electronic soundtracks. From Vangelis’ ‘Blade Runner’ to Tangerine Dream’s ‘Thief’, via more John Carpenter magic on films like ‘Escape from New York’. 

One in particular that both Bernholz and Barrow point to as being seismic was Brad Fiedel’s score for ‘The Terminator’. “An astonishing score,” says Barrow, while Bernholz admits she is completely “obsessed” by it. “I constantly cite ‘The Terminator’ in everything I do,” she says. “There has always been some kind of shadow of that in the work I do. It’s so minimal and cold. Obviously, it’s doing what it’s meant to do – replicating that kind of machine, mechanical world that’s cold and dead and heartless – and then all of a sudden you get this amazing emotional theme. It’s just so powerful. I’m always staggered by it. I’ve listened to it thousands of times and there’s always something else in there that you’re like, ‘wow’.” 

The electronic score fell out of favour in the 1990s and instead the decade was defined by needle drops that were more like a mix CD (which could then handily be packaged up and sold as soundtracks during a huge era for CD and cassette sales). ‘Trainspotting’, ‘Pulp Fiction’, ‘Good Will Hunting’, ‘Natural Born Killers’, ‘The Crow’, ‘Rushmore’ and countless others – plus a flurry of hip hop films (‘Boyz n the Hood’, ‘Juice’ etc) all came with accompanying compilation soundtracks. It was a period when many directors opted for a more curatorial style, where showcasing hits of the day or impressive deep cuts, seemed to overshadow more mood based explorations. 

As with everything, of course, things circle back around and by the end of the late 1990s and the early 2000s, a return to these kinds of scores became more notable. From Air’s deft work on ‘The Virgin Suicides’ to Cliff Martinez’s score to ‘Solaris’ via Clint Mansell’s haunting music for ‘Requiem for a Dream’ (not electronic, as such, but a landmark score by an artist that changed the way people approached film music in the new millennium) a new era was creeping in. By the 2010s, electronic and synth scores had undergone not just a full-blown resurgence but were on their way to becoming a dominant sound on screens. 

Barrow also runs Invada records, which releases soundtracks, and has seen up close how much things have changed on that front. “When we released the score to ‘Drive’ it felt like it was one of a kind,” he says of the 2011 Nicolas Winding Refn film. “Now there are electronic soundtracks everywhere, good ones and bad, but ‘Drive’ was a massive influence. It’s like a soundtrack that turned into the score. It felt like after that, there were lots of people that looked at ‘Drive’ and just went: if you’re going to make a cool film you’ve got to have synths and there was this nostalgic period of looking back at the 70s and the 80s.” 

While electronic film and TV scores have become so commonplace now – and are used as prosaically and stereotypically as overly emotive strings are – Frost is seeing a fascinating crossover of styles seeping in by some. “Jerskin Fendrix’s score for ‘Bugonia’ is fucking genius,” he offers. “It’s brazenly acoustic but what’s really fascinating to me about it is that the way it’s written feels electronic. It’s an acoustic performance of an electronic score – which is kind of like an anti ‘A Clockwork Orange’.” 

For Ben Frost, 55 years on from a score that changed the way film music sounded indefinitely, he still thinks that approach can be a template for moving forward. “The future I would like to think, in my most optimistic sense, is favouring the brave,” he says. “It’s not going to do any favours for those who are wanting to sound more like everyone else. Wendy Carlos was a fucking iconoclast. She really didn’t play by anyone’s rules.” 

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This article first appeared in Disco Pogo issue 9

What happens when you mix two of music’s most propulsive proponents of electronic pop? When you fuse the directness of a 29-year-old Norwegian singer-songwriter and the politeness of a 50-something English producer? And what would an album recorded in a “crazy wizard laboratorium” in the East Sussex countryside and a studio nestled in the snowy Scandinavian woods sound like? The answer to all of these questions is TOMORA. A union of Tom Rowlands, one-half Chemical Brother and all whole sonic genius, and Aurora, teenage Chems fan and compelling Nordic pixie, their debut offering ‘Come Closer’ is a delightful take on whimsical techno. “Our voices and musical languages and ideas and openness became merged [in a] sense of complete playfulness,” they tell Craig McLean…

“Who is Tomora?” posted the Reddit user known as apocalypsefowl. 

“WHY is Tomora?” came the riposte.

“No one ever asks HOW is Tomora.”

“Don’t worry about Tomora when Today is still here.”

It was mid-September 2025. The lineup for the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival 2026 had just been released and the busy-fingered philosopher-bantz merchants on the r/Coachella subreddit were scratching their noggins.

On the Californian event’s traditional, desert heat-promising poster, the Sunday lineup for the April twin-weekender had Karol G in big-point prominence at the top of the bill. Then there was Young Thug, Kaskade, Major Lazer, Iggy Pop and Wet Leg. Mid-table, strength-in-depth with Little Simz, Armin van Buuren, The Rapture, Röyksopp and (oof) Black Flag. Coming up the rear, Azzecca (“Chicago DJ/producer and COSIMEA boss”), Le Yora (“more than a DJ-producer project, they’re a three-artist collective building a self-contained creative world across music, design, fashion, and visual art” – Beatport) and last-but-not-last Samia, a singer-songwriter from Los Angeles.

And there, propping up the bottom, someone/thing called Tomora – not, at this point, in caps.

Social media was aflutter about this mystery artist. “Pouring [sic] over the Coachella lineup wondering if someone’s got clues on TOMORA? Looked on Insta and SC but I’m not getting much luck. Anyone?”

“Any clue on TOMORA? Lineup places them on the YUMA [stage] so probs electronic?”

“Calling it now: Tomora is gonna be the breakout name we all pretend we discovered first.” 

For six weeks, confusion for Coachella’s codebreakers. But no one in this online Bletchley Park-of-beats knew anything. Then, in early December, “semisemicoloncolon” entered r/Coachella with a mic drop.

“PREPARE FOR A TRUTH NUKE. WE’VE CRACKED THE CODE!!”

Said user, a “massive Chemical Brothers fan”, had busied themselves on SACEM (the Society of Authors, Composers and Publishers, a French songwriters’ association). Trawling YouTube, too, they had found a 30 October upload of the Chems DJ set at Toulouse’s Poney Club on 22 August 2025. One shaky snippet of fan-posted phone-footage featured a track being played out with the refrain “Ring the alarm!” sung repeatedly by a female vocalist. 

“THANK YOU SOOOOOO MUCH,” posted one grateful viewer. “I’ve been desperately searching for this song ever since I first heard it at the CB DJ set at Parco Gondar in Gallipoli last 9th of August.”

After other users weighed in with equal enthusiasm, a few weeks later an account called TOMORAOFFICIAL responded with a  (either a tight-lipped smile, a heavy-lidded stare or Poirot’s moustache; all valid, TBF). That TOMORA account had one song on it. It was called ‘Alright Ramen’. And that, word puzzle fans, is an anagram of ‘Ring the Alarm’. 

For semisemicoloncolon that – combined with song authorship details they’d found on SACEM – was the “smoking gun”. Meanwhile, Redditor “sandorbeni” had found the smoking machine-gun: on the UK government’s Companies House website, they had located TOMORA LIVE LLP. It had two officers, both registered on 4 November 2025: ROWLANDS, Thomas Owen Mostyn and AKSNES, Aurora. 

Tom. ’Ora. Tomora. TOMORA. Mystery solved?

For apocalypsefowl, credit where credit’s due. “If this is the truth, amazing work.”

Yes, it was true. An artfully teased secret project involving one half of The Chemical Brothers and the Norwegian singer-songwriter Aurora. An album, a tour, a collaboration upending Coachella excitement from the very bottom of the bill. Let the beauteous and thunderous beats overlaid by ethereal and/or Valkyrie vocals commence. 

Aurora: what’s Tom’s most English quality?

“He’s very polite. Very like: ‘Oops, I’m sorry... Yes, I’m sorry... thank you...’”

And Tom: Aurora’s most Norwegian quality? 

“Her directness! That [and politeness] are a great combination in the studio.”

“It was fun to be a secret for a little while,” Aurora is saying. “I did forget that they would recognise my voice, because I thought we could keep the secret forever. And then I realised: I sound like myself, don’t I?”

It’s a gloomy-grey, late January morning in the concrete-sauna-style vibes of The Social bar in central London. The artists formerly known as Coachella 26’s most baffling booking are here, in the flesh, eating bananas and easy-peelers, reflecting on their recent “outing”. This is their first deep dive into the album they’ve called ‘Come Closer’: 12 tracks recorded over two cumulative weeks in a handful of creative bursts that stretched across the first nine months of last year, with sessions taking place in Tom’s studio, Rowlands Audio Research, in rural Sussex, and Aurora’s studio next to her childhood home in the woods one hour south of Bergen. 

It is, too, the first proper joint interview for Tom, 55, and Aurora, 29. They might be well acquainted – as all Chems-heads know, their relationship stretches back to 2019’s Grammy-winning ‘No Geography’, on which Aurora sang three tracks (‘Eve of Destruction’, ‘Bango’, ‘The Universe Sent Me’) for Rowlands and partner Ed Simons (who, Rowlands says, is fully up-to-speed with TOMORA but has yet to voice an opinion on the music). But they’re still getting used to talking about the project they began working on in January 2025.

“Now it’s more, you can say, a bit more open?” continues the small, pale, white-blonde singer and songwriter – her English, of course, nigh perfect, her Aurora aura, with perhaps equal inevitability, perfectly Scandi-pixie.

“We’ve talked about it a bit,” counters the tall, almost-equally-pale Rowlands, scootched up next to her in the booth, his English also excellent. Evasive to Aurora’s effusive, he’s referring to a fleeting Zoom they did “with Japan”, one of the (many) global hotbeds of Chems mania. “Because then we were like: ‘This is the first time we’ve talked about it...’”

To warm us up, is Aurora aware of her new-slash-old creative partner’s connections with the gaff in which we’re sitting. Eyes-widening, she says she is not. Rowlands is encouraged to fill her in.

“It’s a loooong story…” he begins, looking momentarily pained. “Erm, where do we start? Well, when we first started DJing, me and Ed, a guy called Robin Turner came to see us play. He worked for Heavenly. He came to see us in Manchester. And [afterwards] he was like: ‘I’ve seen these two guys. They do this crazy thing mixing together, this wild mix of music.’ And we were in Manchester at the time. And he’s like: ‘You gotta do this in London.’ So we came to do it in London. 

“Then they [and us] started doing an event on a Sunday night in the basement of a pub playing to 100 people or something – The Albany, which is just up the road. A very unassuming sort of pub, but it was quite a good party,” he says, putting on a newsreader’s accent, as if to distance himself from any hint of self-aggrandisement, “called The Sunday Social. And this [gestures to The Social’s upstairs bar area] is basically the product of those moments. 

“But it was quite a fun nighttime in the 90s. Then there was another club in a more heads-down techno-Armageddon place – Turnmills…”

And that, Socialists, is how Tom Rowlands explains a foundational 1990s British club/music revolution to a Scandinavian half his age. 

“That’s wonderful,” says Aurora, smile now as wide as her eyes, “I really like it.”

This is, then, an appropriate place to come closer to ‘Come Closer’, the kaleidoscopic and kinetic first album from TOMORA. It throbs and wobbles and wails with ambience-in-the-nunnery clarion calls (the title track); lose-your-shit klaxons (‘Alright Ramen’, sorry, ‘Ring the Alarm’); Edith Piaf-goes-squelchy-dub champagne chanteusery (‘Have You Seen Me Dance’); pitched-down comedown seduction from a femme/homme fatal(e) (‘A Boy Like You’); Björkian sun’s-up/hands-up rave (‘I Drink the Light’); and Enya-on-ket dronescapes (‘Wavelengths’ – altogether now: “The mother always saves me before she lets me drown…”). 

Across this Aurora multiverse, a feast of ululations and croonings and rave-diva majesty, the omni-talented Norwegian more than living up to the billing given to her in the title of one of her online fan communities: Warriors & Weirdoes. 

It is, most certainly, a record offering a different take on techno: less heads-down-Armageddon, more – in Aurora’s words – “whimsical techno”.

That’s a good descriptor “because me and Tom, we are quite whimsical people, believe it or not. We are very similar, which we learned the more we had fun in the studio. Our voices and musical languages and ideas and openness became merged [in a] sense of complete playfulness and no expectations. Very freeing and very nice.”

That freedom, she elaborates, means “it’s not all techno”. And it’s not all, strictly speaking, Aurora. She does sing every song, with occasional backing from Amalie Holt Kleive (“She has sung in my band for three years. An amazing singer and multi-percussionist and instrumentalist. Fabulous woman and artist”). But the characters inhabiting each are different. “We explored all these different voices and people a woman could be. How many people can this woman be?”

“The strength of each character within the songs blew my mind, really!” adds Rowlands, his rat-a-tat laugher strafing our booth. “It’s very free, isn’t it?” he continues. “Our studio life is [characterised] by never discussing what we want to do… It’s just a response to sounds we’re making in the studio.”

“Things naturally become whimsical, to me, when humans don’t analyse their behaviour,” Aurora goes on. “I think that’s what people mean when they think of someone. ‘Oh, she’s a bit whimsical...’ That’s just people who don’t overthink their natural behaviour or what they do.”

Aurora, you’ve covered Noel Gallagher, singing ‘Half the World Away’ for the 2015 John Lewis Christmas advert. Tom, you’ve collaborated with him, on ‘Setting Sun’ and ‘Let Forever Be’. A Noel story each, please.

Aurora: “When I met him at Glastonbury, I was very distracted by Lewis Capaldi playing. But Noel said: ‘Oh, nice to see you. Thank you. Because of you I could buy a new kitchen.’”

Tom: “That sounds about right… He’s a man who knows his own mind. I love working with Noel. I love Noel. He’s one of the greats. The Oasis reunion – those gigs were mindblowing.”

For Aurora, the desire to pursue BPM-powered “whimsy” arose out of the long-tail rinsing she felt after touring ‘What Happened to the Heart?’, her 16-track fourth album. Released in 2024, it featured some Rowlands production after Aurora invited him to “puke vomit” on the track ‘My Body is Not Mine’. 

“My music is very playful, of course. Because I am very playful. But it’s also, at times, very serious. And often when I come off the stage, I’ve been crying. I’ve maybe seen people crying [in the audience]. It’s very political. My [songs] have a lot of the state of the world on their shoulders and are very vocal about it. And I am. 

“Which gives me a lot of inspiration” Aurora continues. “But also, it is very demanding. Just because you can get a bit locked in the darkness of the world, [or] in hope. It’s just very heavy. I feel it in my heart and my brain when I’ve done a show. And [I had] been on a two-year tour. I just needed a break from the heaviness of my world…” Crucially, on top of that: “I still love dancing and making music and having fun.” 

For Rowlands, his heaviness came, most immediately, from the project in which he’d been immersed for much of 2024: creating the score for ‘Mussolini: Son of the Century’. Sky television’s multi-part, multi-dimensional, Italian-language historical drama about the 20th century fascist leader was directed by filmmaker and long-standing Chemical Brothers friend Joe Wright.

“I was daunted,” he admitted when discussing the project last January. “About halfway through I was like: ‘I don’t know if I can do this…’ It was so much music. Also, the level Joe wants it at. It’s not like a TV show where you can put some filler in. Not that I would do that, but TV shows are incredible for their turnaround: people have a week to compose an episode. It wasn’t that.” Then there was the imagery and narratives he was soundtracking. “It does shock me,” he said of the footage he’d been scoring, “the violence in the show. It’s just horrible.”

So, yes, he nods now, “a series about the rise of Italian fascism – that was quite a heavy project”.

“So you also were in a kind of crying state!” Aurora says to him, cheerfully. “It’s basically what we had both been doing in [our music]: crying about capitalism and the state of the world.”

Taking the longer view, Rowlands was also seeking a respite from the depth – the heft – the responsibility – the Reddit-ploughing standom – of The Chemical Brothers. His day job is a “big sort of monolith thing”. So he was hankering after “just the joy of making music without the weight of expectation, or the weight of what it should be, or what it has to be. When I got in touch with you,” he says, addressing Aurora, “to do this, it wasn’t with an expectation of making an album, or playing live, or any of those things. It was after finishing a tour and being a bit like: I’ve made 10 Chemical Brothers albums. I just need some other thing to think about every day.”

He’d first been struck by Aurora at Glastonbury 2016. For those survivors, that’s the Brexit Glastonbury. One of the muddy AF Glastos. For Rowlands, watching at home, comfy and dry and still high on the dream of a borders-free Europe where we didn’t have to stand in long-arse immigration queues at continental airports, it was the Glastonbury where he hit a BBC iPlayer red-button and caught sight of a Norwegian, freshly turned 20, performing in a mid-afternoon slot between Rat Boy and Half Moon Run in the John Peel Tent (as was).

“I was sitting on my sofa and was like: ‘What is this...?’” he remembers. “Something came out of the TV towards me, and I was like: ‘Wow, that’s an amazing combination of power and vulnerability and fragility. But strength, too. And this voice!’”

Aurora’s memories of her first Glastonbury? That she didn’t tell her family, who were with her, “that it was gonna be muddy. And both my sisters came in these tiny, tiny sandals. Eventually, we just saw these [abandoned] sandals far, far away in the mud. And they just kept going around barefoot, like me.” On top of that, the solo artist was deep into the touring in support of that year’s debut album, ‘All My Demons Greeting Me as a Friend’, a Norwegian chart-topper that made her a teenage breakout star at home, across Europe and beyond. “I remember being very tired and being like: ‘Oh my God, I forgot that I have a thing to do...”

That “thing” had such an impact on Rowlands that, the following year, as he and Simons began work on ‘No Geography’, he emailed. Might Aurora like to come to England to work on The Chemical Brothers’ next album? 

When asked why she was The One, he blusters, flustered.

“I mean, I just love collaboration. I love working with people,” he shrugs, a producer who, of course, has worked with vocalists galore (although never three times on one album, as he would end up doing with Aurora on ‘No Geography’). “It’s always a chance for me to go into a different world. To find how someone thinks. How someone approaches things. They don’t always work but it’s a chance to do something.”

And for her? “The first and the last time in my life where I’ve been starstruck was when I got a mail from you!” Aurora says now, fangirling, still, to Rowlands. Little did he know that aged 15, a girl whose childhood exposure to popular music had solely been Enya, Dylan and Cohen (her parents’ tastes were, shall we say, narrow) had fallen hard for The Chemical Brothers’ soundtrack to Joe Wright’s 2011 thriller ‘Hanna’, starring Saoirse Ronan as the titular, forest-dwelling hitwoman. “It was the first music I discovered on my own,” she says. Not only that: a 15-year-old girl on her own in snowy Nordic woods? Yeah, Aurora could relate.

Rowlands’ 2017 email also arrived with propitious timing. “I needed it,” says Aurora intently. “I’d been touring forever. That’s maybe why I can’t remember Glastonbury 2016 so much, because I think I had over 300 shows that year. It was my first world tour and I remember almost quitting being an artist. I thought: ‘This can’t be for me. If I almost die from my music, then I can’t do it anymore.’ I just said yes to everything. I didn’t know you could say no then.”

On tour in America at the end of 2016, Aurora was hospitalised in Portland with severe stomach pains. She ended up having her appendix removed. But when she resumed touring only eight days later – “the most difficult thing is to cancel a concert,” she said at the time – her stitches burst. It was time, finally, to go back to Bergen.

Convalescing back home with her parents, “I got the mail from Tom just enough time after – I had already rested. And I thought: ‘Well, this I want. This is a clear yes. It’s not obligation. Not something I have to say yes to. Not something where I don’t know how much I can say about my feelings about things.’” 

Even better: as soon as they met ahead of the ‘No Geography’ session, the musical connection was instant.

Aurora: “I remember Tom being so sweet, I couldn’t believe it when he picked me up at the train station. He had music on in his car – Chris Brown was on really loud.”

Rowlands: “Not Chris Brown! James Brown!”

Aurora: “James Brown! A live album. It was really loud. And he was just there, by the car, [going] ‘woohoo’! And I was like, ‘Oh!’ So it began with this very safe space, just dancing and singing along. It began very playfully. We had music energise us in our first meeting. It was so sweet. I felt so, like, safe and not nervous. And it was very easy to have ideas, because he was so easy to be around. It was absolutely wonderful.”

Rowlands: “It’s quite a leap – someone emails you [with an invitation]. Then to just arrive at the airport on your own and being like, ‘I don’t know what I’m doing....’ But it’s a dare to try it. Sometimes it cannot work.”

This one worked. Those three tracks, banged out in two-to-three hours each day, over three days. They established a working pattern that, eight years later, they would replicate in the ‘Come Closer’ sessions. She came armed with words and phrases in her notebooks (“eve of destruction” and the ‘Universe Sent Me’ line, “you should know, I lied when I told you I was nervous”) and Rowlands would respond in the studio. Or vice-versa: she would vocalise words suggested to her, synaesthesia-style, by the synth sounds and chord sequences he conjured.

Stepping into Rowlands Audio Research was like entering a “crazy wizard laboratorium [sic]. You think if you touch the wrong thing, you might go to space. Or change reality. You never know. So I’m trying to not touch too much”.

“We’re trying to change reality daily!” says Rowlands.

“It was amazing to be in there. The first thing I said was: ‘On which synth did you make ‘Escape 700’ from ‘Hanna’?’ And then I got to play it! I never washed my hands again.”

The visit was inspiring in other ways, too. When she returned to her parents in Bergen, May Britt and Jan Øystein Aksnes were amazed at the change in their daughter. “They always say that they love Tom so much. Because they say something happened when I went there to this countryside, beautiful place. That I returned with a new... spark, actually. It was a big thing for me that made me so empowered and so ready for new things. 

“I was,” she says intently, “a different Aurora when I came home. So my parents are like, ‘Oh, we never forget. That’s why we always loved Tom Rowlands.’”

All that? News to Rowlands until he rocked up to the family home last year for the second TOMORA session. As Aurora puts it: “My mum said: ‘We’re so grateful!’ maybe 10 times an hour.”

At the time of our meeting, TOMORA are nine weeks out from their debut live shows, in Manchester and London. Ahead of them, those Coachella performances and, further ahead, a summer of European festivals. Regular Chems’ visuals man Adam Smith is building on his already-established imagery for TOMORA’s artwork, videos and social media “content” with a new stage production. Amalie will be joining them onstage because, says her bandmate, “there’s so many vocals, and we want the performance to be DJing and playing and singing live. So it’s a bit of a new thing for both Tom and I.”

It also seems like they’ve nailed the set-closer: the album’s final track, the hurtling ‘In a Minute’, in which Aurora and Amalie go at it, spitting syllables with a fury to match Rowlands’ locomotive beats. Aurora remembers them thinking in the studio: “We need one more song, especially for the live experience, one song that’s going at you like train machinery. Pixie techno, I call it.”

Pixie techno finale aside, they’re still working out the nuts and bolts of how they’re presenting TOMORA onstage. Will Tom Rowlands, though, retain his traditional spot at the back, safely barricaded behind banks of equipment?

“Hoping to!” he replies cheerfully-fearfully. 

“I’m trying to get him out!” exclaims Aurora. “These are good questions. We have to figure it out [in production rehearsals] in March. But everything that comes on top of the music is just nice. But I feel like we already have the most important things: the songs.” And those songs, she adds, pivoting to Rowlands once more, beaming, have turned out exactly as they intended. Remembering his initial invitation to work together again, she recalls: “You said: ‘Do you want to just be in the studio for fun and write something?’ And I’m like, ‘Yes, of course!’ Because it’s so nice to just make music. Because that’s our behaviour also. It’s not only the job. And it is fun. Tom was dancing in the studio!”

“No one needs to see that!” insists Rowlands.

“I have seen that,” confides Aurora, leaning in across the booth in The Social, the bar the Chems built, with something like a wink. “And it’s glorious.”

Describe each other in three words.

Aurora: “Tom is humble.... Genius... And long.”

Tom: “She cannot be boiled down to three words. She’s a multitude all at once.”

Aurora: “I’m happy with that! TOMORA are a humble, long genius and a multitude.” 

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This article first appeared in Disco Pogo issue 9

How did Speedy J, one of electronic music’s earliest innovators, get over not making an album for nearly 25 years? He went for a walk… 

It’s impossible to overestimate the seismic effect that the series of albums Warp released under the Artificial Intelligence banner between 1992 and 1994 had on the world of electronic music.

Bookended by two compilations, the series brought us the debut albums from Autechre and Richie Hawtin, two acts who would emerge as some of the scene’s biggest names. Beyond that, the series – which also included albums from Aphex Twin (under his Polygon Window alias) Black Dog Productions and B12 – completely redefined the way dance music would be consumed, shifting it away from the ephemeral, here today/gone tomorrow nature of 12-inch culture and claiming the more immersive nature of the album as very much its territory.

Speedy J, the acclaimed Dutch artist and early stalwart of the electronic dance music crossover, was another to spring to fame as part of the Artificial Intelligence camp, his debut album, 1993’s ‘Ginger’, the equal of anything his arguably better-known peers released.

“Back then,” remembers Speedy J, or Jochem Paap to use the Rotterdam producer’s real name, of the days before Artificial Intelligence, “the music came out on 12-inch and the artists were pretty much these anonymous people in a home studio making this music. The music became famous but the people behind it never did. There was this dismissive attitude that ‘this is not music; this is not worth an album’. Then Warp came along and basically raised the profile of the music to be as valid as every other type of music.  Before that it was completely dismissed by every type of mainstream media, even radio.”

Paap says it’s genuinely amazing to see how far the artists from the series have travelled since then, not least Aphex Twin, whose brief overtaking of Taylor Swift in monthly YouTube listening figures is massive news when we speak. Back then, he says, no-one expected to make a career out of what was essentially messing about on equipment.

Warp’s other great move, he believes, was in establishing a form of dance music that was perfect for home listening, the kind of listening people turned to when they returned home from a night of banging techno or outlandish house anthems. 

The album format, and the way people consume it, has been very much on his mind recently, as he prepares to release his first solo longplayer, the 20-track ‘Walkman’, since NovaMute released ‘Loudboxer’ back in 2002. Speaking to us from his studio – a former nuclear bunker in the centre of Rotterdam, where reinforced concrete walls ensure he can make “crazy levels” of noise without disturbing anyone – he explains why it’s taken him nearly 25 years to return to the format.

“I did a lot of albums and at a certain point I didn’t know what to add to it as a solo artist,” he says. “I had some doubts about the format as well, where things were going. The way people were listening to things was changing. You could listen to any recording from anywhere, every recording made at any moment in time. So, people started – including myself – to consume stuff in a different way, and I thought at that time, capturing a whole body of work at one time on one format and presenting it as an album was probably less relevant.”

A change of tack was required. He reverted to producing singles, buying himself a boutique hand lathe on which he could produce limited runs of, effectively, handmade vinyl for a limited number of subscribers under the STOOR banner. He describes it as a “focused way of making things”, a fixed format to work towards.

The process of cutting vinyl by hand is one that fascinates him. “I didn’t know much about it when I started, but if you really get it down, if you really get all the technique and physics behind it well worked out, then basically you can make records that sound as good as or even better than the ones you get from factories. I really like to have the option to make choices all the way along to the end of the process. So normally you have your recording and you send it off to the person who’s going to cut it for you. And sometimes you can be there to attend the cut.  But it’s nice to have decisions right to the end and look after the sound the way you want.”

By his own estimation he’s made thousands, maybe tens of thousands. “But for every one that came out nicely,” he admits, “I’ve probably thrown another away. They make good coasters.”

There have been collaborations aplenty in the interim too. He’s worked with Chris Liebing, Adam Beyer, Literon, George Issakidis and Surgeon, with whom he made the ‘Two Hours or Something’ album as Multiples. STOOR live, meanwhile, is an eight-hour improvised live jam, which made its debut at the Paradiso with four guests in 2021. It soon became an unmissable highlight of the Amsterdam Dance Event. Luke Slater, Donato Dozzy, Regis, Function, Surgeon and Rødhåd have all taken part and the live extravaganza will visit Turin and Barcelona this year, as well as returning to ADE.

What finally led to him returning to the album format was another shift in listening habits. “I can feel it in myself, but I also notice it with other people. I try to find ways to enjoy longer format things again. You’re bombarded with so much stuff from everywhere, you really have to restrict yourself not to get confused and break this endless stream of stuff being fired at you. I see a lot of people, including myself, looking for longform listening or content. I think the album has become more relevant than ever, because it is a chance to get away from the endless fragmented stream of stuff and just focus on one thing.”

While he’s obviously aware of the title’s similarity to a certain piece of 1980s technology made by Sony, that wasn’t his intention. It was more to do with the fact that moments of transit seem to provide those rare opportunities to enjoy music without distraction.

“Everybody goes from A to B sometime, whether you’re walking the dog or out on a run or sitting in a car or the train or whatever. That’s probably the only space people have these days to enjoy something uninterrupted. ‘Walkman’ refers to me. I am the ‘Walkman’. I go for a walk and I listen to things. During the process of making the album, the walks I took, listening to the stuff I had recorded, that’s the time I made my decisions. In the studio I just made the work, but listening to and reviewing what I’d made was all during walks. The whole ritual of going from A to B and listening to it has been part of making the album, so that’s what made me decide to call the album ‘Walkman’.”

It may be sequenced to fit onto two sides of a C90 cassette tape, but any resemblance to the usual electronic album ends there. Of its 20 very different tracks – from the distorted glitchfunk of ‘Chronoroute Fank’ to the mellow head-nodder ‘CR78 Mesh’ – only three are more than five minutes long, with many clocking in closer to three minutes.  

“A lot of the tracks on there don’t really need to be five or ten minutes long,” he reckons.  “Three or four is enough to contribute to the overall thing, and I like the fast pace of the changes. It’s a bit like walking, exploring a city – you turn a corner and suddenly everything is different. I like that energy.”

By returning to the original source everything is different again for Speedy J.

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This article first appeared in Disco Pogo issue 9

The guitar isn’t just for hoary macho rockers. Inspired by the expressive soundscapes at which Vini Reilly excelled, a group of unconnected guitarists are delving into the outer reaches of the instrument’s capabilities. From the cosmic country excursions of ambient Americans to Balearic and “dining room goth” north-west strummers, this is music that beguiles as well as soothes. Jim Butler speaks to some of those involved and hails the never-ending ambient chord… 

“The guitar is one of those weird instruments. It’s so ubiquitous and it’s been so associated with certain genres of music that are very far from what we would consider ambient, whether it’s rock’n’roll, pop, folk, country or blues. As a guitar player, you have to almost push back against some of those prejudices, frankly.”

From his base in Nashville, guitarist William Tyler is attempting to explain his own resistance to the clichéd depiction of the six-string. Across the course of his close-to-30-year career, he has seen his beautifully evocative instrumental guitar music described in various ways: avant folk; ambient Americana and - given his birthplace and the fact that he joined Kurt Wagner’s Lambchop as a teenager, playing with the band for just over a decade - cosmic country.

All serve a purpose. Tyler’s spacey, dreamlike and filmic playing is wonderfully hypnotic, as evidenced across a suite of comforting solo albums and last year’s beguiling collaboration with Kieran ‘Four Tet’ Hebden. That a pioneering electronic artist such as Hebden should endorse someone like Tyler is apt. Close your eyes and allow the floating textures of ‘Country of Illusion’ (from 2013’s ‘Impossible Truth’) or the abstract Lyle Lovett cover ‘If I Had a Boat’, the lead track from his ’41 Longfield Street Late 80s’ album with Hebden, to transport you somewhere far away and you could be listening to the pastoral electronica of Boards of Canada or Aphex Twin.

“I’m really interested in textures,” says Tyler. “Early on, I started pivoting towards wanting to consciously play more electric guitar pieces. The electric guitar can float a much different way than acoustic guitar, especially the way a guy like Vini Reilly played it.”

There are of course innumerable guitarists down the years who have wrestled the instrument from its stereotypical connotations – chiefly the macho, sexualised guitar solo. From the kosmische German innovators of the 70s, like Manuel Göttsching and Michael Rother, to the atmospherics of the ECM guitarists Pat Metheny, John Abercrombie, Ralph Towner, Steve Tibbetts and Bill Frisell, via early Americana exponents such as Daniel Lanois and Ry Cooder, and British post-punkers John McGeoch, Alan Rankine and Robin Guthrie, plenty have offered inventive alternatives. The figurehead for the current breed is, however, Vini Reilly.

For the solo artists Mark Peters and Thought Leadership, this is as much about geography as it is sound. Peters, formerly of post-shoegaze band Engineers, hails from Wigan, while the shadowy figure of Thought Leadership comes from Stockport. Reilly’s playing in The Durutti Column is redolent of both.

“I know he sang a little bit,” says Peters, “but his instrumental compositions have a real lyrical and melodic sense to them where the rhythm and lead blur. It’s really evocative of a northern kind of rainy melancholy. Sometimes you hear things and you just relate to the sound intrinsically. Reilly was a pioneer in that respect.”

Reilly has also become a familiar reference for those attempting to describe the three accidentally Balearic, jazz-infused, goth-oriented, lo-fi albums released by Thought Leadership. Although, as the clandestine man behind the moniker (“The name came about as a kind of nudge and wink to my actual real job as a project manager. It’s one of those, you know, corporate bullshit terms that gets bandied around”) notes, it comes with something of a twist.

“One review of the first album (‘III of Pentacles’) said it sounded like Vini Reilly, but if he’d grown up in California,” he smiles. And while he doesn’t hear that, he thinks he knows why. “[Reilly] uses a lot of harmonic minor and melodic minor scales, which is why his music sounds melancholy. I gravitate towards slightly brighter modes and harmonies, like mixolydian, which is closer to the major scale and is brighter-sounding.”

Another key figure for Peters in his post-Engineers solo work has been the electronic producer Ulrich Schnauss. Although the German sprang to fame as a downtempo IDM artist – see his debut album ‘Far Away Trains Passing By’ – his second album, ‘A Strangely Isolated Place’, betrayed the influence of guitarists Kevin Shields and Robin Guthrie, the dream pop of their respective bands, My Bloody Valentine and Cocteau Twins, a key ingredient. 

Together, Peters and Schnauss released three albums of guitar-led ambient electronica. It was Schnauss’ adventurous approach to music-making – including hanging mics out of the window and recording the traffic outside on their duo’s first album, ‘Underrated Silence’, capturing the ambience of the night – that caused Peters to look again at the humble six-string. “After Engineers I didn’t want to make guitar-led music,” he recalls. “Ulrich said the guitar was a beautiful instrument and all I had to do was recontextualise it.”

Although Peters says his first solo album, 2018’s ‘Innerland’, was “not a genre exercise”, it’s a wonderful example of absorbing guitar-focused cosmic electronica. “I was interested in that dance music aesthetic, where it builds and then you get the payoff,” he says. “It might just rise and become about rhythm. The Orb have always been a big influence; they stand apart because it’s such an inviting space. It doesn’t have that hard edge of a lot of dance music, but it’s got that aesthetic, a quiet sort of euphoria.”

This yin and yang of the authentic and the synthetic makes perfect sense to another imaginative guitar slinger, Jonny Nash. Though he released ‘traditional’ ambient music on his Melody As Truth label, his last two solo efforts (he’s also a member of the ambient trio Gaussian Curve alongside Gigi Masin and Young Marco), ‘Point of Entry (2023) and last year’s ‘Once Was Ours Forever’, have highlighted a new subtle sonic direction, one propelled by the guitar, the instrument on which he can best “express my musical ideas”.

“I spent a lot of years producing electronic stuff,” he says. “Using synths, rack-mounted gear, patch base… that’s what I learned a lot on. Gradually I’ve moved towards mics, amps, pedals… it’s like working as an indie rock band would, but with all this knowledge of electronic production. I can sprinkle a little bit of that on and then it becomes interesting. I really enjoy contextualizing the guitar stuff in that way and I think that’s maybe where I sit in this thing.”

“This thing” indeed. What is this thing? It might be an off-the-cuff remark, but Nash raises an interesting point. This is neither a scene nor a movement. It is, rather, a free-floating, largely amorphous and instrumental sound that rejects rigid categories. On Bandcamp, Nash’s ‘Once Was Ours Forever’ is tagged with the following categories: ambient jazz, dreampop, folktronica, modern classical, shoegaze and Balearic. On the same platform, Thought Leadership is described thus: ethereal wave, improv, jangle, cosmic and, best of all, dining room goth. As William Tyler astutely notes when discussing genres: “There’s so much guitar music that doesn’t really sound like guitar music. I can’t force myself into a genre. Ambient Americana, cosmic country… whatever you want to call it. It’s like, tomato tomato.”

The shapeshifting sound, then, means inclusion is largely in the eye of the beholder. As such, alongside William Tyler, Thought Leadership, Jonny Nash and Mark Peters, the likes of Raymond Richards, Andrew Tuttle, Dean McPhee, Duncan Marquiss, North Americans, Hayden Pedigo and the wonderfully named Nashville Ambient Ensemble can all be enlisted. Tangentially, the blend of soundscape-drenched atmospherics and hushed, almost nonsensical vocals found in shoegaze and dream pop (think Slowdive, Seefeel, Chapterhouse, Lush, Cocteau Twins and co) influenced another wave of electronic producers and bands in the 00s, like Schnauss, M83, Washed Out, Neon Indian, Bibio, Toro Y Moi and more. In turn they have gone on to influence today’s artists whose obsession with sound is everything.

In short, it’s a rich mix and the most evocative artists are those who cast their palette far and wide. “It’s always better when these things are flavouring the soup a little bit rather than taking it too literally,” says Peters.

The American composer, producer and pedal steel guitarist Raymond Richards concurs. Even when he disagrees with critics or listeners regarding comparisons or influences, he’s “happy to be at the table”, he says. His 2020 album, ‘The Lost Art of Wandering’, was a sleeper hit during the pandemic, its immersive and contemplative pedal steel-led rhythms chiming with listeners who wanted to be transported elsewhere. Written at the behest of Andrew ‘Lovefingers’ Hogge and recorded for his ESP Institute imprint, ‘The Lost Art…’ has sent Richards down a path of writing and recording that he admits has become “hard to stop”.

Like that most contentious of musical categories, Balearic, this music is best classified in terms of an approach. What is it that makes the guitar so adaptable?

 “I think it has to do with being able to ‘touch’ the music,” says Richards. “Having your hands on a vibrating string is a feeling of freedom and possibility to me. I’ve spent so many years developing my voice on the guitar, and I feel like it has become distinctive. I use synths and vintage drum machines a lot, but the pedal steel guitar is where I feel most capable. I also find that it naturally makes a very hazy, amorphous sound that works very well for creating ambient textures when paired with a tape echo and some heavy reverb.”

Richards recently discovered that his grandmother was an accomplished steel guitarist. “I’m sure there is something genetic happening there, putting a metal bar on a string and making a note sing in tune is pure witchcraft at some level.”

Voodoo aside, it’s also about technique and tone , says Peters, “and exploring how little you can get away with. Exploring the space between the notes. It’s that Mark Hollis thing isn’t it? ‘Before you play two notes, learn how to play one note’”.

It’s this absence of sound allied to the lack of vocals that fosters this emotive, almost weightless music. Here, Peters highlights John Abercrombie and Hungarian guitarist Gábor Szabó as primary influences. For Thought Leadership, the common denominator is the use of effects: “Guitar plus chorus and delay,” he enthuses. “I’m a sucker for anything with that on. Most artists in this field will use some form of modulation – chorus, flanger and phaser – plus delay, sometimes with reverb.”

The human touch can’t be discredited. For those who struggle with electronic music in its various forms, a familiar sound, in this case the guitar, can be a way in - a gateway to a new world. Less a surreptitious drug than a Trojan horse. 

“It’s a good point,” notes Nash. “I only have to look at my wife as an example. She doesn’t like it when I put on ‘electronic’ music; she says it’s just bleeps and bloops and stuff. But the guitar is a recognisable sound. Some people respond more to the human touch, so, yeah, maybe the guitar is a way for people who wouldn’t ordinarily listen to music without vocals to move into new territories.”

In the last few months, these six-string transmissions have had a full-circle moment. When Vini Reilly was recording the first Durutti Column album in Stockport’s Strawberry Studios in the late 70s, the guitarist Kevin McCormick – barely separated by time and space – was nearby, recording two influential albums that have gone on to have a huge bearing on modern-day ambient guitar sounds (although, as he notes, it wasn’t called ambient then, just “spacey”).

The first was ‘Light Patterns’, a collaboration with David Horridge, whom McCormick met in the early 70s when they worked for the civil service in Manchester. “There was no intention originally to record; we just enjoyed jamming together, discovering that when we played instrumental pieces it felt almost telepathic,” McCormick explains. 

The duo were at odds with almost all the music fermenting in Manchester. Rather than being inspired by New York Dolls or The Stooges, McCormick’s touchpoints were a plethora of ECM guitarists - (“[Eberhard] Weber, [Pat] Metheny, [Jan] Garbarek and [Ralph] Towner”, whose ‘Trios and Solos’ album had exploded his “view of guitar music”.

After he and Horridge went their separate ways, McCormick continued to write and record these minimalist instrumental scriptures. One such set of recordings, the hypnotically faint ‘Sticklebacks’, was finally released by the Santa Cruz label Smiling C in 2023. This resurgence of interest in McCormick led to the release of the equally spellbinding ‘Passing Clouds’ in 2024. Comprising nine fresh recordings of McCormick’s jazz-inflected, barely-there, freeform excursions, it magically captured the landscape of the north west. 

Echoing the thoughts of Raymond Richards, McCormick believes the guitar has a soul and memory. “It becomes your confidant and friend,” he says. “It bends to your mood and easily plays almost any form of music. The intimacy of hearing my fingers on the strings and how I can shape the note just with touch is inspiring to me.”

Earlier this year, a new duo from Stockport (Gordon Milson and Mark Rayner) approached McCormick with a view to working on their debut EP. Arrival’s ‘One’ brings the ambient guitar experiments McCormick began formulating 40 years ago bang up-to-date. Pleasingly, Thought Leadership provides a spaciously meditative mix of the track ‘Common Place’, while the EP is released on Balearic maestro Jason Boardman’s superb Before I Die label. It feels like a coming home moment for McCormick and the arrival (sorry!) of a brand new talent in this thing. 

Of course, this thing is no such thing. And yet it is everything. In these frightful times, the six-string try-outs transport listeners to a place of their choosing. They provide succour and an opportunity to reflect. There’s no manifesto, besides turn off your mind, relax and float downstream. Come in, cosmic country-dream pop-abstract ambient Americana-avant folk-future jazz-accidentally Balearic-dining room goth, your time is now. 

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This article first appeared in Disco Pogo issue 9

For Loraine James the magic of music making is all about the journey rather than the destination. By throwing all her musical loves into the pot – whether that be pop, grime or ambient – the prolific producer unashamedly ensures that the end result is the only possible artistic statement. Her new album, ‘Detached From the Rest of You’ is a stunning case in point. “I do it for my own enjoyment,” she tells an impressed Anton Spice…

“I love making albums because I never know where they’re going to end up,” muses London-based producer Loraine James. “I have an idea, but it never goes that way, which I’m always very down for.” 

It’s just as well. New album ‘Detached From the Rest of You’ is James’ fifth in seven years, and fourth for Kode9’s Hyperdub label. Throw in a handful of EPs, two LPs under ambient moniker Whatever The Weather and a regular NTS show – where she’ll happily play anything from DJ Screw and Autechre to Björk and Deftones – and a picture emerges of an artist who is following her instincts at lightspeed.

And yet, James doesn’t give the impression of being in a rush. Over a ginger and apple juice at Café Oto in east London, she unravels the intentions that have shaped this new album. Electronic experimentalists Aoki Takamasa, Ryoji Ikeda and Oli XL were inspirations, pushing the limits of what others might call IDM, but which James skews with her own off-kilter pop twist. If she is moving quickly, it’s because each release should be as true to the moment as possible. “I don’t think I could spend a year-plus on an album,” she continues, “because I would just be bloody different from when I started.”

As on previous projects, James enlisted an eclectic range of collaborators to bounce off. Some, like Anysia Kym (with whom she released the 2025 EP ‘Clandestine’) and old friend Le3 bLACK, she’s worked with before. Others, such as Tirzah, Sydney Spann, Cibo Matto’s Miho Hatori and Alan Sparhawk of Low, were new and sent her in unexpected directions.

It’s no surprise then that James didn’t know where this album was going to end up. That’s not to say it came easy.

James describes ‘Detached From the Rest of You’ as the most challenging she’s made yet. Self-doubt, writer’s block and creative restlessness all bubble beneath the surface. “For some reason I doubted my ability much more than I ever have,” she says, speaking about the album in an interview context for the first time. Questions simmered about how much guitar to use (“unknown territory”) or whether to foreground her voice (“I love singing, but I’m not a singer”). Others might have shied away from the answers. “Yeah, I could never do that,” she responds, laughing.

Rather than derail the process, James made these questions its subject. Preferring to work from home, she won’t be hurried. If it’s not a vibe, she’ll leave it and do something else, maybe play a bit of online chess and return with a fresh angle, synth line or drum loop. This distracted nature is implicit in the skittish rhythms and warped melodies of ‘A Long Distance Call’ or ‘Forever Still (Steel)’ and the lyrics of ‘The Book of Self Doubt’ or ‘In a Rut’, where Sydney Spann repeats the refrain, “How do I write with no ending in sight? Try as I might, looking out the window”. What does James see out there? “Just the carpark and the bins!”

The more she talks about it, the clearer it becomes that ‘Detached From the Rest of You’ has sent James on a journey back onto herself. “To be honest, I grew up with that kind of view making ‘For You and I’,” she remembers of her 2019 Hyperdub debut. “But then I was on the second floor and I could also see the sky.” Listening to it again for the first time in years put James right back in that space. “I was a teaching assistant, I was 22 and I made a lot of it on the laptop on my sofa with headphones on while my mum was watching TV, still very much a kid.” Albeit a kid with somewhere to aim for. 

‘For You and I’ was a quiet revelation, an album that distilled James’ mix of personal narrative and leftfield production, skirting grime, jungle and ambient tropes to reach for something essential about her experience. DJ Mag and The Quietus crowned it album of the year. But ‘For You and I’ also did something more enduring, establishing James as a producer who, despite describing herself as shy, makes music that is often intensely intimate. Features on Pitchfork and Bandcamp called her “fearless”, as ‘So Scared’ confronted the vulnerability she experienced as a Queer Black woman walking the streets of London, countered by the tenderness of a love song like ‘Sensual’. James chose a photo of the Ponders End Estate in Enfield, where she grew up, as the cover.

Released during the pandemic, 2021’s ‘Reflection’ was clubbier in mood, pulling in flares of drill and R’n’B, but still weird enough to keep most tracks off the dancefloor. The following year came ‘Building Something Beautiful For Me’, inspired by minimalist composer Julius Eastman and released on Phantom Limb, before James returned to Hyperdub for ‘Gentle Confrontation’ in 2023. At once powerfully autobiographical and vividly light, it was significant in James’ broader musical evolution. “It was the first time I was very proud of what I did,” she reveals. “And so I was like, what do I do from here?”

That ‘Detached From the Rest of You’ doesn’t carry explicitly heavy themes has exerted its own weight. Not to dwell on content, James turned instead to form, digging out the music she made when she was at college. “A lot of it is bad, but there would be four or eight bars of this and then it would completely switch,” she explains. “And I thought, why don’t I go back to switching stuff?” 

So nothing ends up where it started. ‘Flatline’ she describes as going in at least three different directions, while ‘Habits and Patterns’, featuring Tirzah, feels like it’s speaking two distinct sonic languages simultaneously. “I would sit manually cutting up drum parts and randomly removing bits, duplicating and pitching stuff, not knowing what it would sound like. And then I’d press play and hope for the best,” she explains. “Why not glitch it up?” 

If this sounds off-hand, it’s not intended that way. There is freedom, curiosity and bravery in the risks James takes, all of which make her music feel stunningly alive. When it comes to collaborations, James’ approach is similar. 

“Sometimes if I have a person in mind, it challenges me to go in a slightly different angle as I would normally go,” she says. “I was intrigued to know, what would a me-and-Alan Sparhawk song sound like?” Throw in Death Cab For Cutie drummer Jason McGerr and you get ‘Peak Again’, a rumbling plea for peace that splinters into a thousand shimmering fragments. Genres need not apply. “To combine worlds and see what happens,” James says. “That’s always exciting and intriguing for me.”

In the press material, James calls this her “IDM popstar album”, which reads like a bit of a provocation to the instrumental heads who like to keep their drum programming pure. When working with vocalists she might send over a Beyoncé a cappella as a guide. (One can only hope Sparhawk was the recipient). “People are afraid of vocals on stuff where the beat is a bit more left or less straight,” she offers. But James is most at home out of her comfort zone.

Despite her reservations, ‘Detached From the Rest of You’ features more of James’ voice than before. “I don’t really care about people’s opinions on whether it sounds good or not. I do it for my own enjoyment,” she says defiantly. “I think it’s an evolution of slowly building confidence in my life.” You can sense her pride, even if this does mean she’s going to have to sing live more than ever. James will soon play an ambient show in the round at the ICA and a club set at Corsica Studios, moving between spaces, bridging worlds and comfortable with the in-betweens.

 Having turned 30 in December, James has been taking stock. “It’s weird to have so much work to listen back to,” she reflects, in part because she can hear in each record the person she was when it was made and, subsequently, how far she has come. “I am more nervous about this one than ever before. I definitely feel lighter after finishing it.” This perhaps is the biggest case for just getting it done. A discography that is an archive of your life and times, as messy and difficult as it may feel in the moment. And so ‘Detached From the Rest of You’ became the only record it ever could have been. 

“I like pop stuff, I like singing, I like rap, and it’s not a straight IDM thing. Why can’t they all coexist?” she asks, although the answer is already clear. “I just make my own mish-mash and pop it up a little bit. As long as I make something that isn’t boring me and I’m pushing myself differently, that’s it for me.” 

Right now, there’s nothing more Loraine James than that. 

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This article first appeared in Disco Pogo issue 9

An eerily hypnotic vocal sample, a 4/4 drum beat and a bassline that could have come straight from the fingers of Chic’s Bernard Edwards created one of dance music’s most memorable and enduring moments in 2000. Not bad for an afternoon spent in Alan Braxe’s parents’ basement.

Origins

By 2000, the French Touch sound was dominating dancefloors around the world. Buoyed by the success of Daft Punk’s ‘Homework’ and Thomas Bangalter’s Roulé label, the heavily filtered sound – which added a touch of nonchalant French cool to the classic building blocks of Chicago house – reigned supreme. Madonna was mining it for inspiration for her upcoming ‘Music’ album and the sound was spawning genuine global hits. And Alan Braxe was growing into one of the scene’s main protagonists. His 1997 track ‘Vertigo’ had caught the attention of Bangalter who released it on Roulé. 

Then in 1998, the pair formed Stardust alongside Benjamin Diamond and released ‘Music Sounds Better With You’. The track was inescapable that summer, went to number two in the UK charts and to this day is still considered to be one of the greatest dance tracks of all time. When Braxe bumped into Fred Falke (an old acquaintance recently back from a stint working in Hong Kong as a session musician) in a record store, fate set the wheels in motion for another collaboration which would lead to the creation of a seminal dancefloor record. 

Falke: “One thing a lot of people probably don’t know is that myself and Alain (Braxe’s real name is Alain Queme) actually met in the army. We were there in the early 90s and played in the marching band together. After that, I went to Hong Kong for a number of years. I was working as a session musician playing the bass. I was doing well out there but in 1997, 156 years of British colonial rule ended and Hong Kong was handed back to the Chinese, which meant I lost my visa. My musical background’s jazz really, and at that time, I wasn’t really interested in the world of electronic music at all. But I came back to France, was in a record store and bumped into Alain. It was such a random coincidence but we had a chat and decided we should hang out and try and make some music together.”

Braxe: “After the army, I was at a bit of a loss of what to do with my life. Music was something I’d always loved since I was a kid and I just decided to give it a go. I had nothing to lose. I kind of set myself a challenge of dedicating a year to it and seeing where I was after that. Luckily, in that time, I produced ‘Vertigo’ and that caught Thomas Bangalter’s attention and ended up coming out on Roulé. Then we made music together as Stardust with Benjamin Diamond which obviously went on to be really successful globally. So when I bumped into Fred in the record store, I’d started to have some success. But I thought myself and Fred working together could be a match made in heaven. I was into the engineering side of music really. The sampling and using drum machines and producing side of music. Fred’s a professionally trained musician so it was like the collision of these two worlds. I had a really basic studio set-up in my parents basement and we started meeting there and working on some sessions together.”

Sample inspiration

Holed up in Braxe’s parents’ basement, with an E-mu SP-1200 sampler, a bass guitar, a drum machine and a desktop computer, the pair had been working on music together for roughly six months before they struck gold. Like many great dance records before them and since, it was the unearthing of a great sample that unlocked the classic Braxe and Falke sound. 

Falke: “We’d been working together for a few months, but I remember the day Alain brought the sample for ‘Intro’ to me really well. The vocal sample on ‘Intro’ is from ‘Crush On You’ by The Jets which is quite a polished, 80s pop/R’n’B record. But it has this snippet on the record that feels quite unusual for an 80s record, with harmonies and modulation. Coming from a jazz background, that’s something I really love and I felt intrigued and energised by the possibility of what we could do with it.” 

Braxe: “I’d bought a bunch of records to go through and find samples and I was working in the basement at 9am. It was something I’d typically do. Go to one of my favourite record shops, buy 20 records and go home and dig through them for samples. I can’t remember what I paid for that record. At the time, it felt too much as it was a 12-inch single but in great condition so the price was closer to that of an LP. But it was definitely worth it in the long run. I came across the sample and sampled it with the SP-1200 straight away. The great thing about that sampler is that it has a very specific sonic signature. It’s quite a lo-fi sampler so there’s quite a big degradation in the sound but that gives the music some kind of magic. I put drums on and then I had the basic structure of the track. I got it on to a floppy disc and went to see Fred straight away.” 

Falke: “I think the bassline took about 30 minutes to put together and record. It was pretty straightforward. I think we even did it in one take. What we recorded that day didn’t get edited at all.” 

Braxe: “I think that’s a really important point about the record. We made and recorded it all in one day so there’s that sense of not really overthinking anything and just being led along by the music. These days I suppose you’d call it a flow state.”

Falke: “I get asked a lot where the inspiration for the bass line came from and there’s a few players. A guy called Ray Brown who’s an upright player and played with people like Ella Fitzgerald. His playing was my bible really when I was learning. Then Anthony Jackson who I was lucky enough to learn from and has a very signature sound. And then of course, Bernard Edwards from Chic, whose influence most people hear in ‘Intro’. But, I think on ‘Intro’, I really found my signature sound. When I graduated from music school, I was playing great but I probably didn’t have my signature sound. It kind of has to find you and I think on ‘Intro’ it found me. The influence from all those great players is in there but I made it into my own thing.” 

Braxe: “How we worked on music back then was a nightmare really, compared to what we have available today. Everything’s on floppy discs and you’re digging around to find the right version. But I think those limitations fuel creativity too. Now, you can save an infinite amount of versions of a track on a computer, but it wasn’t feasible for us to spend ages trying to perfect it back then, so the fact we just finished it all in a day is kind of where the magic lies in the track.”

Falke: “I still try to work as close to that way as possible. I don’t have auto-tune, my computer is pretty basic and I still work mostly with analogue equipment. Producing music is all about decision making and limiting what you work with can streamline the process and make your work sharper. A lot of artists are like ‘wow’ and are taken aback by it, but you either love that process or don’t work with me.”

With the track finished in a day, their attention turned to creating a B-side for ‘Intro’. 

Falke: “We were pleased with what we’d created. But we had no sense if it would work or not or if other people would like it. We just liked what we’d made.” 

Braxe: “Our main focus then switched to creating the B-side. The goal was for us to put out the first release on Vulture so we needed the other side of a 12-inch to do that.” 

Luckily for the duo, it wasn’t long before inspiration struck again and they created ‘Most Wanted’, the synth-laden, blissed-out flipside to ‘Intro’. But, for the moment, it was just a case of a good day’s work done. 

Falke: “We didn’t have huge expectations back then. We weren’t careerists. It was just two friends hanging out and making music and we were really happy with what we’d made. We weren’t chasing hits but were pleased we had the first track to release on Alain’s label.” 

Braxe: “We did the first pressing which was probably 500 copies and we went to Miami with 20. I remember we gave it to Armand Van Helden who loved the track and started playing it. Things went really fast from it being a cool underground track to becoming a crossover hit. It was getting played on the biggest radio stations in France and I’ve got all these great memories of being in the car and it coming on.” 

Falke: “We were getting requests for interviews from magazines in the UK and all over Europe so we knew the track was building momentum. It’s funny because neither of us were DJs at the time but DJs loved it. It’s a really easy track to mix into a set, it’s so basic. It fitted in with a lot of different genres.” 

The track’s afterlife and legacy

Over 25 years on, ‘Intro’ well and truly holds its place in the pantheon of great dancefloor records. You’re as likely today to hear it being dropped by Erol Alkan or Justice as you are to hear it waking you up on the 6 Music breakfast show or being eulogised by Fish56Octogan on Insta. When a whole new generation started mining house music of the late 90s and early 2000s for inspiration a decade ago, it barely left the sets of artists like Julio Bashmore and Disclosure. If you measure success by metrics such as Spotify listens then the track’s currently just under 25 million listens and it even got an airing at one of the globe’s biggest cultural events in 2024. 

Falke: “The track really means something to our generation but also the next generation and the generation after that. It’s amazing to play ‘Intro’ in a club and have young kids coming up to you and saying, ‘Wow, that track changed my life. The bassline is incredible.’ We feel really blessed to have created something which has that reaction 25 years later.”

Braxe: “It got played at the Olympics Opening Ceremony in Paris in 2024. Thomas Jolly who was the artistic director for the ceremony really wanted to celebrate the underground side of French music so it was a really special moment to hear it played on that stage. I still play it in nearly all of my sets!” 

Falke: “We’ve remixed it for the 25th anniversary and it wasn’t a super easy decision to make as now it’s kind of a classic record and almost doesn’t belong to us anymore. But we tried to place ourselves back in that basement again and take a laidback approach to it. We tried to imagine we were just making the track again in 2000 but trying to bring a new vision to it.” 

Braxe: “It felt like enough time had gone by for us to revisit the track. It was a nice trip. A bit like going back to your home town and seeing some old friends.”

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This article first appeared in Disco Pogo issue 9

At an age when most are beginning to put their feet up, it appears that DJ Hell has just got going. Fresh from releasing one of the best (if not indeed the best) albums of his career, the superb house-techno throwback ‘Neoclash’, the enthusiastic Hell is still relishing the sounds of the underground and living his best life. Speaking to Ben Cardew, the man born Helmut Geier talks all things house music, the importance of style and breathing new life into that most controversial of genres: electroclash. “This is very important that people understand that I found that name,” he points out…

At 63 years old, DJ Hell’s life is something to aspire to. A true devotee of dance music, the DJ/producer/label boss, born Helmut Josef Geier in small-town Bavaria, never lost faith in the underground, never coasted on reputation and never gave up on the cutting edge.

This is a man who has DJed regularly since the late 70s; whose first self-produced single, ‘My Definition of House Music’, was an instant classic back in 1992; who founded one of dance music’s most respected labels, International Deejay Gigolo Records, three decades ago; who pioneered electroclash; was the resident DJ at the Limelight in New York alongside Jeff Mills; and has just released perhaps the strongest album of his career.

That’s ‘Neoclash’, a turbo-charged and twisted take on the classic electroclash sound that delves back into dance music history while taking
precisely no prisoners. On the cover, an AI take on Hell’s face stares back at you as if defying you not to enjoy his new record, his slightly pained expression the one of a man who has seen too much but partied on regardless.

In 2026 Hell has dozens of projects on the go, from working as music director for Albert Ostermaier’s new play ‘Munich Machine’, to recording songs for ‘Neoclash 2’, alongside crafting a full-on techno album and touring the DJ world. And he has no intention of slowing down. 

“In a regular life I might be retired maybe soon. But I made a list of new projects for 2026 and it’s like a one-page list,” Hell says, a warm smile on his lips. “I really don’t know why people are losing their power or their love for the music and just repeating their success or their way of music, which is already not cutting-edge anymore,” he adds. “I don’t understand why people my age, not many are interested in real underground music.”

Hell is speaking from Altenmarkt an der Alz, the small Bavarian municipality in which he grew up, a town known mostly for agriculture and forestry. He’s sat on a bench, basking in the winter sun and his conversation is punctuated by the occasional sound of children passing. 

It all looks idyllic – if not necessarily the place you’d expect to find a titan of the underground techno scene. But Hell says he likes to spend week days here, alone, going swimming in summer, as a respite from his busy work schedule.

Hell doesn’t live in Altenmarkt an der Alz. But then again, he doesn’t really live anywhere. “It depends what’s coming up,” he explains. “An interesting point is the album [‘Neoclash’] was produced all around the world. Some tracks in Sao Paulo, some in England, some in Switzerland, Berlin, Munich, Italy…”

Hell is understandably keen to talk about ‘Neoclash’, which is one of his most warmly received records in years. He doesn’t understand why – in fact, he says that he is “totally surprised” by the positive feedback that has come his way.

The quality of the record – 12 tracks of slamming beats, thunderous production, huge hooks and winning references to both electroclash and classic early house songs like ‘House Nation’ and ‘No Way Back’ – is obvious. More than that, though, it sounds particularly genuine, the kind of record that speaks of a life-time in electronic sounds without ever labouring the point or being too pedantic. In short: ’Neoclash’ sounds like the kind of record clubbers and electronic music fans needed Hell to make, without ever quite realising it.

“I was lucky to be old enough to be in the clubs and to DJ this early house music,” Hell says, when asked why he wanted to reference those formative dance classics on ‘Neoclash’. “When the first house records were released, I was buying imports and a lot of UK acid house stuff. I was part of the movement inside the clubs. I was old enough to understand and DJ and get this music on the dancefloor. So this is my DNA. This is where I come from.”

Could the point of ‘Neoclash’ be to educate young clubbers – to whom Hell plays every week – about the roots of house music in Chicago, New York and Detroit, a historical fact that can sometimes be forgotten in the rush towards novelty? Hell says no. “I’m not a teacher or giving out any messages. This is just me, very personal,” he says. “I put in [to the record] everything I learned and saw when I was living in New York.”

Hell has lived in New York twice: in 1993 when he was resident at the Limelight club with Jeff Mills; and a decade later, when he felt the magnetic pull of James Murphy and DFA. “I heard [The Rapture’s DFA classic] ‘House of Jealous Lovers’ and immediately I knew I needed to go there,” as he puts it.

While in the US, Hell met pioneers of house and techno from Carl Craig to Deee-Lite and these encounters had a profound influence. “It was very important for me to meet the creators and these people who started these genres,” he says, “and [understand] what they were thinking and how they were living and eating and whatever.” This knowledge – together with 40 years of spinning house music – is what comes out in ‘Neoclash’, a wise record that isn’t afraid of simple pleasures.

The reception to ‘Neoclash’ is also undoubtedly linked to the nascent electroclash revival, with clubbers and artists alike – Charli xcx being an obvious example – returning to the halcyon days of early 2000s clubbing, when the outfits were loud, the parties arty and the music driven by angular electro beats and deadpan vocal humour. 

Hell describes himself as the “godfather” and “inventor” of electroclash – and with good reason. His International Deejay Gigolo Records label was at the centre of the electroclash storm, releasing iconic records from the likes of Christopher Just (‘I’m a Disco Dancer’), Fischerspooner (‘Emerge’), Miss Kittin & The Hacker (‘Frank Sinatra’) and Hell himself (the 2003 album ‘NY Muscle’). Hell claims, perhaps controversially, to have also named the genre. “I was in New York and I tried to do a festival and it didn’t work out. So other people [presumably DJ and promoter Larry Tee] did the festival using my name,” he says.

Some producers shy away from musical genres. But Hell seems to relish speaking about his role in electroclash, a quarter of a century on. “This is very important that people understand that I found that name,” he says. “I never talked about it because it was not important to me. Now, with the ‘Neoclash’ thing, I think it’s the right time to tell the truth and let the people know who found it.”

Hell didn’t start recording ‘Neoclash’ as a reimagining of electroclash. But as he produced more and more songs for the album it became clear that it represented a historical circle closing. “I call it the ‘Gigolo sound’ and I’m gonna give it a new touch – like 25 years later – I will try to give it a new sound,” he says. “It’s always hard to describe what [my music] is. But I could call it electroclash now or something like that. I think ‘Neoclash’ is a great term – a new term – for this kind of music and people understand it.”

‘Neoclash’ is not, he stresses, a strictly retro record. “I don’t think about whether I’m out of the cutting edge or out of whatever,” he says, “OK, ‘Neoclash’ has a lot of old-school references but I never thought about it being out of time or out of anything. I think it fits perfectly in time with the comeback of electroclash. For many young people, it’s a new sound. And when I also listen to young DJs playing before me, they play a lot of Gigolo stuff, you know? So I think it fits perfectly in time.”

You can understand why the voguish world of electroclash loved Hell – and why Hell loved it right back. Geier is a very stylish dresser – he talks at length about his collection of military clothing, which he sources from all over the world – and has worked extensively with the fashion industry, including a stint as musical coordinator for Berlin designer Michael Michalsky. 

In 2025 he designed the “HELL SUIT” for German fashion label DRYKORN and he mentions a new sneaker he is working on for 2026. Today, he looks fantastic, with his long-flowing, silvery-blonde hair, high-fashion clothing and innate style, somewhere in between dandy, punk and futurist.

Fashion, for Hell, goes hand in hand with music. “It was always very logical to me to dress up because in the new wave days in the 80s, it was like codes, you know?” he explains. “If you see people dressed up like that, you know exactly what music they listen to. You were getting information out of their look or haircut or way of dressing.”

This isn’t so much the case in 2026, when musical tribes are not so pronounced and cultural tastes are arguably more open. But for Hell it is crucial to project the right image when he plays. “It’s very important when I perform: it’s a performance,” he says, putting a telling accent on the last word. “So I need to think about how I look. I can’t be in jeans and a T-shirt.”

Somewhat unexpectedly, he launches into a story about largely forgotten (although excellent) British electroclash group Fat Truckers, whose 2001 single, ‘Superbike’, was re-released by Gigolo in 2003. 

Hell relates a conversation he had with the band’s Ben Rymer from this time. “I was like: ‘You’re coming to Berlin with your clothes; then you perform with the same clothes on stage and the next day you go to the airport with the same clothes,” he says, the suspicion growing in his voice. “I told him: ‘I would think about it. You’re really cool guys, really cool dudes. Everybody has a special way of dressing up but on stage you wear the same clothes you wear in the daytime and you wear the next day, you know?’” 

What Rymer’s reaction was to this suggestion goes unrecorded. But Hell says that the band left his label after he worked with P Diddy on a 2003 remix of ‘Let’s Get Ill’, a move that looks particularly ill-judged today after Diddy was convicted in 2025 on two counts of transportation for prostitution.

It may be that he has been well briefed, but Hell brings up the Diddy connection early on, referring to “other people” he worked with in New York in the early 2000s who are now in jail. Hell actually collaborated with Diddy on several occasions, including on Hell’s 2009 track ‘The DJ’; and he says he was “shocked” when he saw the Netflix documentary, ‘Sean Combs: The Reckoning’ that explored the American producer’s abhorrent behaviour. “The time I met him, I didn’t know what’s going on,” he says. “I think he was not in this totally out-of-this-world, crazy area yet.”

Conversation retreats back to the happier climes of fashion. Hell’s penchant for style inevitably bled into International Deejay Gigolo Records, with the label being renowned for its distinctive logos – first featuring a youthful Arnold Schwarzenegger, then, following a costly law suit, with Sid Vicious – and its immaculate cover art. (Think of the moody black and white drama on the cover of Miss Kittin & The Hacker’s ‘First Album’ or the label’s numerous scientifically elegant Dopplereffekt releases.)

“Cover art should be on the same level, or with the music,” Hell says, passionately. “I think it’s in all Gigolo covers, even at the Skatman album I was involved with [2025’s ‘Selected Bangers’]. Every detail in every single thing, the colour of the vinyl, the sticker, everything, I know exactly what I want and what’s a good cover or a modern kind of graphic.”

Hell says he couldn’t imagine a life without International Deejay Gigolo. “That’s me,” he says of the label he founded in 1996, inspired by the Beastie Boys and Warhol’s Factory, and which continues to operate today. “That’s my Gesamtkunstwerk – that means everything is involved. Gigolo is my life and I released so much influential music and artists like Bobby Konders, like Dopplereffekt, like Vitalic, like Fischerspooner... there’s many, many, many, many, many artists who released their first music on Gigolo.”

Maybe some people don’t like the idea of music and fashion mixing in this way, or baulk at the notion of the DJ as a performer. But there is no denying that Hell has some serious chops in dance music, first DJing at the age of 14 at his local youth centre. At some point in the 80s the youthful Helmut Josef Geier became DJ Hell and the rest was history. 

“Before I was a techno DJ, I was into punk, new wave, and later on hip hop and Black music, electro,” he explains when asked about the name change. “So it was always like ‘Helmut’, you know? But I was experimenting. I was like ‘G-Hell’ or ‘Space DJ Hell’ or ‘Helly.’ And I just cut it down to ‘Hell’. It was just experimenting with what sounded good or what looked good, or what fit me.”

Over the years, Hell has witnessed huge changes in DJ culture and dance music. And if he doesn’t like it all (“club music was originally done for clubs, not for festivals,” he says, pointedly) he can still see the positives.

“Things have changed from vinyl,” he says. “Technically speaking, there are many, many options now and great opportunities to see the DJ work in a different kind of situation. But I always use the new technical innovations in an old-school way, so that it sounds like I do a vinyl mix.”

He fears that this approach may be dying out. “But that’s a reason for me to fight for it and do it every weekend,” he adds, with the combative spirit of someone who doesn’t take this kind of thing lightly. “People are surprised how great it sounds and what energy you can create with that way of thinking.”

Among many pending projects, Hell plans to start work on his autobiography this year and he certainly has the stories for it. When asked for a highlight from his career, he relays a story of playing for one and a half million people – as well as those watching live on German TV or listening on radio – at the Berlin Love Parade in the 90s.

“I remember I was shaking – very much pressure – because I knew it was on TV and on the radio,” he recalls, the emotion still evident in his voice. “But I was prepared. And in those years, people always said: ‘We’re gonna wait until Hell is playing because he puts all his attention in there. And he always plays something special.’ I remember I played the Pope as an intro one year. The next year I had church bells for a three-minute intro. And I have many things to get attention.”

You wonder, perhaps, where the hell he can go from here. How Helmut Geier can ever hope to compete with all the dazzling, illustrious moments from his past as he ploughs ever forward, in a dance music world that is sometimes suspicious of its history. And then you remember: Hell’s just released an amazing new album, his DJ calendar is full, he sounds incredibly happy, and he’s fitted out in his immaculate style, complementing his lived-in looks.

“I will die on top of the horse, riding, and then fall down,” he says, finally. “Until the last moment, I will do something. I will work on something and I will do that my whole life. There’s no stop for a DJ, producer, or artist. This is my life. And I will never stop. I will never retire. There’s no question about it. Never.”

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This article first appeared in Disco Pogo issue 9

Twenty years ago, the mysterious Burial left an indelible mark on music with two ghostly albums – one a masterpiece – that lingered in the shadows, romanticising drizzly zone 3 London late at night. Paul Mardles lauds the elusive raver who was born too late to rave and hears from some of his associates and fans…

As befits an album swathed in mystery, it begins with a track called ‘Untitled 1’. There are hisses, crackles, etched in the same shade of grey, and a disquieting line of dialogue from the 2003 film ‘21 Grams’ (“God even knows when a single hair moves on your head”). Then, as fireworks exploding somewhere in the distance fade, the song peters out, so quiet it’s barely there. This is Burial’s slightest tune on his eponymous debut yet somehow, in the space of 35 seconds – 35 seconds in which next to nothing happens – “dance” music is irrevocably rewired.

No one sounded like Burial in 2006. Twenty years later, that is still the case. Others have tried to replicate his sensibility, but Burial’s ability to conjure up dread, to capture the sensation of walking through a city in the early hours, half asleep, is unparalleled. Frequently he brings to mind spring-heeled 90s garage stripped of the swagger, the cocaine and the bling and reimagined by producer Martin Hannett, whose ominous contributions to Joy Division’s records were anchored in Manchester’s industrial past. 

In common with Hannett, Burial’s methods are informed by dub, chiefly its regard for the space between the notes where the magic happens almost imperceptibly. He employs muffled howls, whispers, rainfall, sighs. Everything is cut up. The drums rarely stop. At times it’s like being on a ghost train at the fair when shrieks and moans leap out at you and catch you unawares, but Burial’s singular, unearthly soundscape goes hand in hand with a love of zone 3 London life.

His territory is the chicken shops and garage forecourts – the Viennese coffee houses of the post-club crowd – where people seek connection and swap rambling anecdotes. The contrast between this humdrum backdrop and the music’s beauty is most apparent on the cinematic ‘Night Bus’, wherein strings and faint, filtered cries are paired with the sound of the skies opening. Similarly, on ‘In McDonalds’ from ‘Untrue’ – Burial’s second LP, and arguably the greatest album of the 21st century – a gentle, sombre synth wash paves the way for an aching vocal snippet, before the song slowly draws to a close with the interjection of a lovestruck man (“You look different”). It’s incredible.

And it’s not just about the extraordinary music. Look at ‘Untrue’’s sleeve: the back is a photograph by Georgina Cook featuring an austere building in south London, while Burial’s striking sketch of a troubled-looking guy, a mug of tea beside him, occupies the front. “I’ve been drawing that same one since I was little,” he once said. The result is that, much like Joy Division’s ‘Unknown Pleasures’, the cryptic artwork hints at the contents therein. It’s all about the details, whether sonic or visual.

But until February 2008, when Burial was unmasked in The Independent, three months after ‘Untrue’ was released to rave reviews (“Like beautiful secrets being whispered to a listener”, enthused Pitchfork; “a brilliant, otherworldly triumph”, concluded The Observer), his identity was a secret. In August of that year, on his MySpace page, the producer confirmed the paper’s declaration, not least because the rumours were distracting from the music. “For a while there’s been some talk about who I am,” began the message, “but it’s not a big deal. I wanted to be unknown because I just want it to be about the tunes. Over the last year the unknown thing became an issue so I’m not into it any more.” Then, displaying an aptitude for the slow reveal: “My name is Will Bevan. I’m from south London.” 

Martin Clark was one of the few people outside of Burial’s confidants who knew as much already. A DJ, producer and journalist, and co-founder of the label Keysound Recordings, he chronicled the dubstep scene in its infancy “when it was just a few of us standing in a room”. In 2005 he was sent a CD-R by Steve Goodman, aka Kode9, dance artist and owner of the label Hyperdub, who was contemplating making the man behind the disc the first signing to his fledgling imprint. Inside the package was a note: what did Clark think?

All these years on, he laughs, as if there could only be one answer to that question. “I loved it,” he says simply. “Probably the single most important influence on Burial’s early sound was El-B, one of the true founders of dubstep. Both Kode9 and I really love El-B, and Burial’s music had that same kind of dark two-step style. Its rhythmic skeletal core was great UK garage.”

In March 2006, 10 months after Burial’s debut single, the skippy, head-spinning ‘South London Boroughs’, Clark became the first journalist to interview the artist for his BlackdownSoundboy blog. “He’s very shy,” recalls Clark, “but also, in a good way, intense and passionate.” Revisiting the piece now, a lengthy Q&A, that much is evident from the off. Burial loves Gary Oldman’s movie ‘Nil By Mouth’ (“The only film I’ve ever seen that gets London properly – just distant lights down the end of your road”); the sounds of rain and fire (“I’ve got recordings of rain and fire crackle that would put most electronica producers to shame they’re so fucking heavy”); pirate radio fans, crate diggers, “margin walkers” (“They’re on the outskirts. They don’t know where it’s from; they just get the music”). Burial hates musicianship, the “enemy” of his tunes (“Fuck Rhodes chords. Fuck that noodle stuff”); “male rage” tracks (“It’s good to have girls liking it”); late-night jazzy trip hop (“If my tunes sounded like the Herbaliser or some shit, I’d shoot myself. I’d throw myself under a train at Clapham Junction”).

What Burial also disliked, as the feature underscores, was the assumption he would promote his work. “I don’t know any other producers,” he told Clark. “I’m not part of the scene and I can’t get up and DJ. I’m proud of this music but I’m not a fully paid-up member of the board.” All of which chimes with Clark’s own memories. “Someone asked me about this the other day,” he says. “I only have one recollection of being in a club with him. I had some emails from him, then we went to a really big DMZ night – and that was it. It’s not really his thing.”

Burial’s “thing” was peculiar to him. He was a raver, a wannabe raver really, who was born too late to party in a field. On both albums, particularly ‘Untrue’, he recreates his own foggy versions of those nights, utilising noises that linger in the ether to flesh out raves he heard about from his brother, who would share his mixtapes with the young Burial. 

“Is that true?” asks Tom Ravenscroft, the former go-to guy for new acts on 6 Music who now presents a weekly Thursday show on Rinse FM. Like Burial, Ravenscroft was too young to attend raves but listened to hardcore and drum’n’bass compilations. “That era – Helter Skelter and Mindwarp and events like that – is still my favourite period of dance music, but I never got to experience it live. Everyone goes ‘What would you do if you had a time machine? Where would you go back to?’ For me, it would be 1992, Milton Keynes. It wouldn’t be checking out the pharaohs.

“Burial somehow managed to take that whole period,” he continues, “my entire education in dance music, and encapsulate it all in one moment. For me, that was the joy of it. He did it in a very cool way while managing to make it all seem very romantic. There’s a nostalgia to it that I fell in love with.”

He remembers buying Burial’s first album from Black Market Records in Soho, where it was displayed next to several dubstep records. Fair enough, thought Ravenscroft. Then he took it home. “I just thought, This isn’t a dubstep record at all,” he says, citing ‘Forgive’ as his favourite track. “It didn’t feel to me as if it belonged there. Me and my mates would stay up all night listening to that album and try to add bits of it to our sets but it was impossible to mix, because the beats weren’t regular. It didn’t sound like anything else we had heard before. It was pure atmosphere.”

Atmosphere is everything in Burial’s world. While his songs are usually little more than sketches, he possesses the forensic eye of an editor, deleting everything deemed extraneous, concentrating solely on establishing a mood. Sometimes, as on ‘UK’ and ‘Forgive’, all that remains is a beatless sweep of sound, an angelic voice trapped inside the studio walls and an allure that is his and his alone. Elsewhere, tracks shift pitch, slow down, assume new spectral forms, the twisted vocal lines expressing a desire for love. “Holding you,” begins ‘Archangel’, from ‘Untrue’, perhaps the quintessential Burial tune, “couldn’t be alone, couldn’t be alone, couldn’t be alone”. Another ‘Untrue’ highlight, the dazzling ‘Etched Headplate’, starts with a woman’s defence of a man (“He’s not setting out to hurt people/He’s got a lot of love in him”) before the tune fragments, growing wobbly on its feet, mutating into starry-eyed psychedelia. “He looked inside me/Love you, love you, oh no”, runs ‘Ghost Hardware’, whose title encapsulates Burial’s entire oeuvre. 

“These fragments of voices hint at actual conversations,” says Clark, who, while regarding both albums as one body of work, identifies ‘Untrue’’s ‘Raver’ as Burial’s greatest track (“It’s not classic Burial, but everything comes in perfectly at the right time”). “Sometimes dance music can be very functional, but he has this sense of humanity. Loads of the samples he uses are about intimacy, and everyone wants those feelings.”

“I love everything he’s done,” says Jason Goz, the mastering engineer who worked on both Burial albums and who owns south London’s Transition Mastering, an integral component of the dubstep scene. “The way he drags atmosphere into his music is very special. I don’t know how he does that. I’ve intentionally never asked him. His stuff is art. That’s what it is – art. There’s a soundscape going on there. He’s trying to tell a story so it’s like a picture. As a mastering engineer, you have to get in and get out without having too much effect on that.”

For dubstep artist Mala, what makes Burial’s music so remarkable is its “grain and texture”, especially on ‘Untrue’. “It really lures you in,” he told Crack Magazine in 2017. “The way that a lot of electronic music is arranged, generally, is kind of basic. But Burial’s music felt really free. Even though it was repetitive, you felt like the same thing never happened twice.”

Not everyone felt so warmly towards Burial. In 2008 ‘Untrue’ was shortlisted for the Mercury Music Prize, triggering The Sun’s predictable attempt to find the producer and take him to task for publicising his music with the album drawing rather than a photograph of his actual face. Not long before then, before he grew mistrustful, before Elbow’s ‘The Seldom Seen Kid’ beat ‘Untrue’ to the Mercury award, he spoke to Dan Hancox – journalist, author and dubstep champion – for an article in The Guardian. “My tunes are really quiet,” he said. “I always feel really defensive of them, like it’s their first day at school and they’re going to get bullied.” Later, during the same interview, he made the link between his tunes and rain explicit, as countless others have done since he first emerged. “My music probably is just for moody people to walk across London in the rain to. That might sound rubbish but most of my experience in life has been exactly that. Everyone knows that feeling. Everyone. And if they don’t, they probably spend too much time in All Bar One. My music’s like a little sanctuary – it’s that 24-hour stand in the park serving tea and coffee; a light in the darkness.”

That was 19 years ago. He’s said nothing since. There has been more music, though, mostly superb, if not quite as mysterious as ‘Burial’ and ‘Untrue’. There has been the occasional sighting too. “I stood next to him once,” says Ravenscroft. “We were on stage a few years ago watching Four Tet. I looked across and thought, Fucking hell, that’s Burial. I was slightly starstruck.”

Small wonder: for Ravenscroft, ‘Untrue’ stands alone. Some may hear its impact in dubstep, film scores and television adverts, in the theme tune of last year’s series of ‘The White Lotus’, but you can’t reproduce the album’s essence, he believes. “It has such a powerful presence and atmosphere that to just use one part of it would be not to hear it at all. To take an influence from ‘Untrue’ and to stick it on your own record would immediately make your own record disappear. So I don’t hear Burial in anything really, ‘cause I can only hear Burial in Burial.”

Clark agrees – and he’s heard hundreds of imitators. “I did a Rinse FM show for 17 years and we got sent so many Burial copies that were just awful. I never thought, Oh, that’s inspired by ‘Untrue’, but it’s really good. That never happened.” He pauses for effect. “Ever.”

What does Burial himself think? We can only speculate. Maybe he’s at home now, somewhere in south London, rewatching ‘Nil By Mouth’ for the umpteenth time while relishing the solitude, the sound of the wind and rain. When, nearly 30 years ago, the late Mark Hollis of the peerless Talk Talk walked away from music to become a full-time father, he reasoned, understandably, that his band’s two fragile masterpieces (‘Spirit Of Eden’, ‘Laughing Stock’) contained everything he’d ever wanted to impart. “Anonymity is a dream situation,” Hollis said, “the one that gives me the most space. All that counts is the records.” Burial, you suspect, knows exactly how he felt. 

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This article first appeared in Disco Pogo issue 9

Vini Reilly’s The Durutti Column were forever slightly out of time. While his native Manchester got on one, Reilly, aided and abetted by drummer Bruce Mitchell, pursued, variously, indie chamber music and modern classical, all while sampling grand opera diva Dame Joan Sutherland. Now, having been lauded by musicians as varied as Brian Eno, Harry Styles and Frank Ocean, sampled by Blood Orange and featuring alongside Taylor Swift in ‘The Bear’, he is edging ever closer to fame. “We go into a studio unrehearsed,” Reilly tells Toby Manning in a rare interview. “You’re discovering by accident…”

Products and purveyors of the cultural and sonic space opened by post-punk, The Durutti Column have never been big sellers, and with mainstay Vini Reilly the very definition of ‘retiring’, they often seemed to disappear into space altogether. Yet Durutti have tracked their times far more than their ephemerality, originality and oddity would suggest. In the last few years alone, the music has lit up ‘The Bear’, been sampled by Blood Orange and inspired none other than Harry Styles’ new album. In 2026, they’re perhaps more relevant than they’ve ever been. As ‘Sketch for Summer’ hits 23 million Spotify plays, Durutti even have a new album due 46 years after ‘Sketch...’ launched their debut.

As the title of that album, 1980’s ‘The Return of… ’ implied, The Durutti Column arrived fully formed, albeit, named after an Anarchist troupe, by abjuring standard musical form. For if Factory’s sandpaper sleeve was highly designed (Tony Wilson RIP), the contents were closer to accident. After a stint in by-numbers punks The Nosebleeds and a post-punk Durutti, the frail Reilly retired to spend more time with depression. Yet in turning inwards, he developed a unique guitar style – clean, echo-laden, intricate – that was paradoxically outward-reaching, and which, far from being academic, was chock-full of emotion.

Having started Factory to release Durutti’s music, Wilson, in his usual dance between flair and folly, lured the delicate Reilly from his bedroom to record with the notorious producer Martin Hannett. “Martin was Martin,” Reilly chuckles today: “he was an experimentalist more than a producer. He was ignoring me completely, taking new equipment out of cardboard boxes while I’m sat there all plugged in. Luckily the engineer hit ‘record’ while I was just messing about on my guitar. Then suddenly Martin produced these sounds like birds twittering and I’d play something, he put down a very simple beat, I overdubbed a second guitar line and that was that.” 

‘That’ being the wondrous ‘Sketch for Summer’. “After a while I got very angry and stormed out. I thought, ‘there’s no way that’s an album’.” Yet Wilson put it out. “I’d never heard the guitar sound that way!” marvels Reilly. “I always thought that was Martin’s album and the fact it was so different created a platform for me.” 

Reilly is being characteristically self-effacing, for as future releases would reveal, the Durutti vision was all his. In those bleak, recessionary Thatcher days, Reilly’s prioritisation of the pastoral over the urban, of warmth over contemporary cold, of beauty over abrasion was a commentary through contrast. The clean guitar-sound and bossa nova feel of ‘Beginning’ and ‘Collette’ would soon suffuse mid-80s Style Council, Everything But The Girl and The Colourfield. 

For Reilly, “empathy is the essence of humanity, if you lose that ability to empathise, it’s the deadening of your own soul.” Note how many of his tracks are named after someone (‘Katherine’, ‘Jacqueline’) or dedicated to them (‘For Belgian Friends’, ‘Detail for Paul’). “From the moment we’re born we’re never ever instigative, only ever reactive,” says Reilly. “It’s like Newton’s law of motion, if you’re not pushing against anything, you lose momentum.” 

As in politics, so in music, and Wilson named 1981’s ‘LC’ after Italian leftists Lotta Continua (“continuous struggle”). Although the struggle was no longer against Hannett, Durutti’s accidental approach was starting to seem methodical – a statement in an increasingly slick, corporate culture. Reilly recorded himself on a TEAC tape machine in his mother’s council house late at night, “just to give Tony something to play on his car stereo”. Wilson was always both yuppie and radical, and he wanted an album. So, Reilly shyly approached linen-suited drumming legend, Bruce Mitchell. 

“Even before I’d finished asking him, he’d already answered, ‘it would be an honour and a pleasure’.” Mitchell completing what Reilly tentatively started would become their partnership’s essence. “As soon as I started playing Bruce was on it,” Reilly explains. “Bruce’s skill is to give some sort of life to what I’ve done.” While bringing Durutti closer to a ‘band’ on tracks like ‘Messidor’, Mitchell eschewed rock dynamics and always tucked in behind Reilly. 

“I’m good at blagging the gig along,” quips Mitchell, a self-proclaimed “chancer with a drum kit”. “It’s not hard – Vini’s so inspiring. There’s the sound of surprise in nearly every chord change.” For Reilly, he “didn’t know whether I was following him or he was following me – there’s this mutual symbiosis”, empathy in action. 

The other new element on ‘LC’ was Reilly’s vocals – expressionless, mixed low, like he’s disappearing as you listen. So ‘The Missing Boy’ could be about Reilly as much as subject Ian Curtis: “Some accident of beauty/Try to capture/As the light begins to fail/Shapes to compose/Shadows of frailty/The dream is better/Dissolves into softness.” This suggests the music’s increasing lushness, the lovely piano embellishments on ‘Missing Boy’ and ‘Sketch for Dawn II’ pointing the way forward. 

As the likes of 4AD caught up, 1983’s ‘Another Setting’ expanded into indie chamber music: witness the shimmering electric piano, guitar and oboe trio ‘Prayer’ and the serene oboe-led ‘Second Family’. Despite the encroaching classicism, there was no ‘score’. “Sitting down and writing something is kind of silly,” says Reilly. “We go into a studio unrehearsed, nothing prepared and it organically just sort of happens. Because the studio is one of the best paintboxes you can have. You’re discovering by accident.”

Wilson wanted something more considered, however, and – pretension never a worry – requested 1984’s long-form “modern classical” ‘Without Mercy’ to “choreograph” Keats’ Romantic poem ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’. Mitchell chuckles: “We would follow wherever Tony would lead, and if that was over the cliff, like lemmings we would go.” 

Yet their attitude was as much pisstake as piety. Reilly requested pointers from producer Wilson and when told knights were approaching, he simply moved up a semitone. In his element, Wilson hired a host of musicians to create a mini orchestra. The Royal Northern College of Music trumpet student Tim Kellett’s audition was at The Haçienda – Wilson’s green Jag parked outside. “It was the start of the most magical chapter in my life,” remembers Kellett, who’d soon join Simply Red. “One of the best things I ever did. None of the music was logical, it was always an odd space, you really had to know it to keep abreast of it. Vin’s a genius: no rules, he just gets the thing in his hand and does it.” Despite Reilly’s disparagement, the first half of ‘Without Mercy’ is near perfect, both out of time (but pioneering the 2000s’ neo-classical boom of Max Richter, Hannah Peel and Hildur Guðnadóttir) and of it, prominently using the new Oberheim DMX drum machine, the sonic essence of the 80s. 

Within weeks the expanded Durutti were playing ‘Mercy’ on ‘The Tube’ with another RNCM student, John Metcalfe on viola. Metcalfe recalls: “I’d get called in at short notice, I’d noodle over the top of the track, and they’d go, ‘great that’s it’. I’d reply, ‘But it’s out of tune, can I go again please?’” 

The gig engagements were growing. “Bruce would turn up at the college,” Metcalfe laughs, “peel off some folding and maybe a lump of dope in lieu.” 1986’s ‘Circuses and Bread’ reduced the lineup’s size and musical scope to short-form chamber music. ‘Street Fight’ is a quartet for Reilly’s piano, Metcalfe’s viola, Kellett’s trumpet and gunfire (either sampled or Mitchell creating gun shots via the drums or synth), while ‘Royal Infirmary’ is a luminous guitar and piano duet. Reilly’s playing was becoming increasingly chordal (e.g. ‘Hilary’), leaving the soloing to others, but pointing forwards, it’s newly aggressive on the synthy ‘Dance II’, as Mitchell and Kellet ricochet off the melody.

For 1987’s ‘The Guitar and Other Machines’, Wilson recruited The Smiths’ engineer Stephen Street, enabling Reilly to let rip with “very distorted, heavy guitar”, underlain by a muscular electronic chassis (tracking the times again, ‘Arpeggiator’ is named after a Yamaha sequencer). 

“I’m a technophobe” says Reilly, “but Tony gave me these keyboards and said: ‘Go away and do something with these.’” If the results risked being more a reaction to technology than Durutti’s characteristic humanity, the video for ‘When the World’ (with Stanton Miranda) matched the electronics to the visceral physicality of dancers DV8 (literalising Wilson’s choreographing fantasy), while on ‘Bordeaux Sequence’ Metcalfe and Reilly meld empathetically. Reilly recalls: “You couldn’t tell the difference between us when he played pizzicato.” 

For most musicians, backing Morrissey (on 1988’s ‘Viva Hate’) would be a career highlight, but Reilly immediately eclipsed it. Regrouping with Street, 1989’s ‘Vini Reilly’ was another response to new technology, the AKAI 900 sampler, but Reilly was keen not to “reduce human emotions to binary code”. The sample snippets enhance rather than structure the tracks, while the AKAI’s grainy sound paradoxically accentuates the human factor. Acoustic opener ‘Love No More’’s wordless blues and opera wails created a futuristic nostalgia, while Metcalfe’s viola, Reilly’s piano and sampled diva (Dame) Joan Sutherland out-haunt each other on ‘Opera 1’. Coming just before sampling rules toughened up following Gilbert O’Sullivan suing Biz Markie for copyright infringement, the musicians would never be so fast and loose with samples again. “We only got away with it because it didn’t sell very well” says Mitchell. 

Nevertheless, the album contains the band’s second-best known track, ‘Otis’, Reilly’s playing at its most blissed-out, peppered with samples from Otis Redding’s ‘Pain in My Heart’) and Tracy Chapman’s ‘Behind the Wall’. “We’d been recording at great cost in London,” remembers Metcalfe, “and Vin was really ill, he’d fired two different studios and with the album virtually finished, he fired Steve Street! So, we recorded ‘Otis’ in a little dodgy
studio in Manchester in about two hours, with (A Certain Ratio’s) Andy Connell playing a two-bar sequence ‘til his hand fell off.” Heart-wrenching but euphoric, this afterthought is the album’s – and arguably Durutti’s – peak, technology amplifying rather than containing humanity, the tangible sound of empathy. 

The impetus for 1990’s dance-inflected ‘Obey the Time’ was “Tony again” laughs Reilly: “‘Dance is happening now so do an album of that stuff’, and that’s as close as I could get.” Hardly a natural clubber – “I’ve never taken ecstasy, I was too anxious” – Reilly drove his Vespa to The Haçienda, chatted with music-loving footballer Pat Nevin and absorbed the club’s sounds. Yet Durutti had never obeyed the time and the results were weakest when they did (‘The Warmest Rain’s Italo piano-house), strongest when being “reactive” to the time, the yearning ‘Home’ and Mitchell-driven ‘Art and Freight’ finding common ground between Durutti’s characteristic manipulation of sound and 808 State’s or Orbital’s texturality over danceability.

Where Durutti had once released albums annually and moved forwards each time, a four-year wait found ‘Sex and Death’ adding ‘Vini Reilly’ sampling to ‘The Guitar…’’s slickness, with both Street and Metcalfe returning. Aside from a Louis Armstrong-sampling tribute to Wilson, ‘Anthony’, the highlight went even further back into Factory’s past, with one-time Durutti sleeve-assembler Peter Hook driving ‘The Next Time’ alongside a sample of Reilly’s favourite flamenco singer Cameron de la Isla, often known as El Cameron. ‘Fidelity’ (1996) returned to dance and is best-known for their fourth-biggest track, the guitar-less ‘Future Perfect’ thanks to its incorporation in season two of ‘The Bear’. It’s aptly titled in looking forward both to electronic millennial pop and in featuring Eley Rudge’s first vocal for the band (Reilly calls her voice, “very English and pure” – like Durutti).

Having created the second album on Factory, it was apt that 1998’s ‘Time was Gigantic… When We Were Kids’ should be the last (on the post-Factory imprint, Factory Too). The first with production mainstay Keir Stewart (“He’s as daft as I am” says Reilly), ‘Time…’ is far more organic, all clean electric and pristine acoustic guitars, Mitchell’s tablas and marimbas (‘I B Yours’) and children’s choirs (the-piano sprinkled ‘For Rachel’). On ‘Sing to Me’ (sampled in Blood Orange’s 2025 ‘The Field’), Rudge’s warmly wistful vocal is contrasted by eldritch choral samples, Reilly’s bossa Spanish guitar rhythm cross-currented by Mitchell’s almost Burundi drums. “That sums us up, two of us playing different things but it really works,” chuckles Reilly. The melding of past and present to produce optimism – and hence the future – is also very Durutti: life-affirmingly so.

This momentum was immediately lost, however, along with Rudge, with Durutti’s 2000s discography on makeshift labels as scattershot as the music. Yet while mostly mired in drab Floydean guitar and pedestrian baggy beats, as Mitchell says, “each album contains something of serious merit”. ‘Spanish Lament’ from 2003’s ‘Someone Else’s Party’ sets Rebekah Del Rio’s ‘Llorando’ against old-school Durutti guitar and ‘Let Me Tell You Something’ on 2006’s ‘Keep Breathing’ draws new life from Lyn Collins’ ‘Think’. The Polly Roberts-sung ‘Whisper to the Wind’ gives spectral depth to 2007’s ‘Idiot Savants’, while the austerely beautiful ‘For Bruce’ from 2009’s ‘Love in the Time of Recession’ is dedicated to Mitchell and sounds it. 

Aptly, 2010’s ‘Paean to Wilson’ returned to form, by returning, effectively, to Factory, complete with cohorts Kellett and Metcalfe. Reilly recalls: “Tony Wilson never put any pressure on me to promote or sell myself or do very long tours. The only thing he ever got from The Durutti Column was a rather standard car stereo.” The pair’s empathy is tangible from the opening sample of Wilson ribbing Reilly: “Is it an art form, or are you just a technician?” (Wilson’s voice futzed like Steve Reich’s ‘It’s Gonna Rain’), spinning out into the gorgeous ‘Chant’ and throughout an album that’s nostalgic without sounding dated. 

Indeed, the flamenco-influenced ‘Quatro’, with Metcalfe, seems to stand outside time altogether. ‘How Unbelievable’, Wilson’s closing rant against New Labour widening the poverty gap, champions the human over the economic – just as Factory had. “Wilson didn’t care if it was selling,” says Keir Stewart, “he just knew it was important to sustain the music. And that Factory attitude – come to us, we’re not gonna come to you – fits in nicely with a contemporary hipster musician or punter. It means that streaming has worked in Vin’s favour.” 

Since ‘Paean’, Durutti have been championed by or influenced musicians as diverse as MGMT, John Frusciante, Brian Eno, The xx, Frank Ocean, Yung Lean and Jonny Nash. Metcalfe, now a ‘modern classical’ composer himself, calls Durutti’s music “fabulously harmonically rich”. He enthuses: “Some of it is painfully beautiful and melancholic, quite nostalgic: it’s pensive, it’s meditative, but it’s also energised, euphoric, kind of celebratory.” 

The music’s expression of the original Spanish Durruti Column’s utopianism – “we carry a new world in our hearts” they declared – is as apposite to our dystopian present as when Reilly first plugged in his guitar in Cargo Studio at the dawn of Thatcherism in 1979. 

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This article first appeared in Disco Pogo issue 9

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As befits his mysterious moniker, DJ Shadow has never been one to take the obvious path. Four decades into a career in which he reset the possibilities of what hip hop could sound like, the artist born Josh Davis has started to look back on the beginning of his musical journey and reflect upon his stellar legacy. Speaking to Angus Batey in an exhaustive interview, Shadow talks about everything: Mo’ Wax, James Lavelle, crate digging, the outer reaches of hip hop and, most confusingly, being compared to The Orb. “If you never contextualise your career for your fans, you’re missing an opportunity to educate a little bit,” he says…

An erudite, generous and careful interviewee, DJ Shadow doesn’t exactly pause to gather his thoughts but does sometimes seem to spend a little time weighing them. When asked whether he still recognises himself in the early work collected in ‘The Mo’ Wax Singles 1993-1997’, a painstakingly crafted collection of his non-LP releases for the storied London-based label, he begins by noting that his twin daughters are now 21, the age he was in 1993. This, he says, affords some perspective.

 “I think I’m basically the same person,” he says. “The only difference is what I can only describe as the arrogance of youth – in that, when you’re young, you sort of just assume everything’s going to work out. And, typically, it did.” 

 Here he allows himself a short chuckle, mainly in gratitude, but perhaps with a touch of ruefulness. 

 “Then you get a little bit older and a little more beaten down and you realise: ‘Wow, that was kind of a magical time’,” he continues. “Because that isn’t the typical way things actually work in life.”

That “magical time” is captured by the box set – which comprises half-speed remastered 12-inch repressings of his first six singles, along with a seventh disc containing the previously unreleased original versions of ‘Camel Bobsled Race’, a megamix of those tracks by DMC world champion DJ Qbert, and an eighth 12-inch featuring the earliest versions of four pieces, just as they were beginning to take shape on his Akai MPC-60 sampler. 

In hip hop, a genre that has always been so obsessed with what’s next that it’s left itself little room to celebrate and honour past glories, this kind of in-depth investigation of catalogue material is rare. So is coming across an artist willing to spend enough time in their own archives, effectively having to re-live their past, to turn in something fans will feel is worth paying for. 

As he has pored through his back pages, Shadow has been forcibly reminded of the good fortune that attended those first exploratory steps, and reliving some of the pivotal relationships that helped him build his career – though you get the sense that those relationships, and those people, are never far from his thoughts anyway. What emerges is not just a clearer picture of the artist as a young man, but a more definitive version, the opening chapters in the biography of a musician who has always refused to allow others to write his story for him.

The package opens with ‘In/Flux’, the single which saw Shadow unveiled as the apparent figurehead of the nascent trip hop subgenre when James Lavelle’s infant indie released it in the UK in 1993 – but the story starts several years earlier. The lazier narratives generally posit Shadow as the guy who showed up out of nowhere to “save” hip hop, his hewn-from-samples instrumentals allowing an entry point for the kind of listener who thought they’d appear cooler if they got into rap but couldn’t handle its unrepentant extremes. This portrayal has always rankled with him. 

“I never wanted to be anybody’s cheat code – [for them] to be able to say: ‘Oh, I can’t stand that rap stuff and the street stuff, but now I can say I like and understand hip hop and participate in it because somebody has offered me a version of it with all of that stripped away’,” Shadow says. “I’m not just some guitarist who was in rock bands for 10 years and then heard Public Enemy and decided to start making beats, the way so many others did. I grew up and went to school with all those kids. They hated rap, hated rap, hated rap – and then suddenly heard NWA or ‘Fear of a Black Planet’ and went, ‘No, no, I never listened to rock, I’m a rap guy now.’ That really bothered me in school and it bothered me later when people started sampling records and then I’d be compared to them. I’d be like: ‘Wait – you’re not listening. My stuff is clearly made by somebody who grew up listening to hip hop.’”

That growing up took place in the city of Davis, just outside Sacramento, north-east of the San Francisco Bay Area, where Shadow started getting serious about hip hop around the age of 10. He remembers being motivated by the music in its totality: not just the cool and cerebral stuff, but the gauche and the gross, too. He recalls a day in 1986, aged 13 or 14, when his father took him to San Jose and spent his allowance in Tower Records on two new 12-inch singles that sat at absolute opposite ends of the then hip hop pantheon: Boogie Down Productions’ seminal ‘South Bronx’, and 2 Live Crew’s notorious ‘Throw the Dick’. 

“They were both incredible to me for completely different reasons,” he says. “The production on the Boogie Down Productions record I thought was really, like, amateurish and broke as fuck, but the rapping was incredible. And then the 2 Live Crew record had some of the dopest scratching I had ever heard and incredible drum programming.” 

Around the same time, he began “hanging around” at KDVS, the local college radio station, and befriended Oras Washington, host of its first hip hop show. The pair tried – and failed – to get into the 1988 Def Jam tour stop in Oakland, but made it to the aftershow party, where Shadow heard Public Enemy’s then-unreleased ‘It Takes a Nation of Millions...’ album being played on a portable cassette machine by Flavor Flav, and got Chuck D’s autograph. 

“Something I’ve realised over the years is that, particularly in hip hop, it’s not considered cool to venerate your influences or talk about how you have so much respect for this other person that you’re quote-unquote ‘competing against’, or whatever,” he says. “I never thought of it that way. I’m always a fan first, and I think that’s served me well through the years.” 

This means he’s always thought and spoken warmly about contemporaries whose work he rates, and in turn that has allowed him to acknowledge their influence and be inspired by their example, and to take encouragement when he maybe needed to be reminded that it was OK to go your own way.

“Whether it was Prince Paul or Premier or Steinski, or Large Professor or Q-Tip, fortunately, there always seemed to be somebody holding a lantern in the darkness and just going, ‘Follow me, I know what I’m doing, I’m over here doing it,’” he says. “Even later, the first time I heard Portishead, the first time I heard drum’n’bass coming out of a car in Piccadilly, you kind of go: ‘Oh, OK, good! This is something new for me to help me along the way.’ You see that they’re doing things differently and it’s inspiring.”

Shadow started making mixtapes at home, and by the dawn of the 1990s he’d joined the roster of mix-show DJs at San Francisco radio station KMEL. Aged 18, he submitted a mixtape-cum-demo to the Unsigned Hype column of the first US-wide hip hop magazine, The Source. Some of the genre’s biggest and most important artists – from Common to Notorious B.I.G., DMX to Eminem – received their first nationwide coverage in Unsigned Hype, but the only time it was ever awarded to a solo artist who wasn’t a rapper was in July 1991, when the column profiled Shadow.

One of the writers at The Source he’d sent the tape to was Dave ‘Funken’ Klein, who, in 1991, was in the process setting up the label Hollywood BASIC, a rap imprint funded by the Disney corporation. Funken-Klein commissioned Shadow to remix a track by Lifers Group – a band comprised of inmates in a New Jersey prison – and released it on a 12-inch with a Shadow solo track (‘Lesson 4’, titled in tribute to the ‘Lessons’ series of cut-and-paste classics made by the duo Double Dee & Steinski) on the B-side. 

Funken-Klein also signed Harare hip hop duo Zimbabwe Legit and got Shadow to remix their ‘Doin’ Damage in My Native Language’ single in 1992. As with the Lifers Group remix and ‘Lesson 4’, ‘Shadow’s Legitimate Mix’ eschewed the kind of funk samples that were by this stage already becoming hackneyed: Shadow, a voracious listener to all kinds of music, was determined to make sure his work sounded different. On a trip to LA, the British DJ James Lavelle picked up a promo copy: months later, he tracked down Shadow and asked if he’d be interested in making a record for his new label, Mo’ Wax, named after his record review column in Straight No Chaser magazine.

“James liked everything about the Zimbabwe Legit track and wanted me to do [something like] that,” Shadow recalls. “He said: ‘I want you to go way out, I like the thread that you’re on, I don’t want you to use familiar stuff.’ I just kind of went, ‘OK, great, I will take that ball and run with it’.” 

Lavelle’s interest in Shadow – and his encouragement of his idiosyncratic approach – came at a time when Shadow needed it most. Funken-Klein, who had suffered from spinal cancer for some years, was seriously ill – he died in September 1995, aged 31 – and other offers of remixes and production work were thin on the ground. Those which did come Shadow’s way would have involved a degree of compromise that was untenable. He was thinking about abandoning music entirely.

“Everybody just kept saying: ‘Your stuff’s too weird, you need to tone it down, you need to sample things other people have sampled’,” he recalls. “So the fact that James called me when he did, and that his message to me was basically, ‘I like what you’re doing, go as far out as you want’... I mean, it’s just incredible that it happened the way it did when it did, because I literally was sitting there going: ‘Well, maybe this is the end of the line. Maybe I should start getting serious about my degree or start thinking about other options.’”

Shadow doubled down on his mix-show method, and the ‘In/Flux’ single was the result. The track still has the power to shock today, its stately pace, episodic structure and extended running time making it pretty much the opposite of an obvious debut single. It also stuffs at least an album’s worth of ideas into one track. Was that deliberate? Was there a sense of, ‘Let’s get it all out there, in case it’s the last chance I get?’ Shadow’s response is concise, and instant.

“I always have felt that way,” he says. “Every record I’ve made I’ve felt that way.” 

Mo’ Wax released the single in the autumn of 1993. Reviews were positive, if perplexing. 

“Everybody mentioned The Orb, this kind of ambient house thing, and of course I didn’t know what they were talking about,” Shadow says. “And some people thought it was acid jazz, and I didn’t know what that was either. So I think for me, then, I was just like, ‘OK, time to do a total left turn’.”

That turn became the second single, ‘Lost and Found (S.F.L.)’. It represents the first example of what has become something of a defining characteristic – Shadow’s determination to make sure that whatever the expected next move is, he goes another way.

“I would sit around at home and be like, ‘People think [my music is] all about these weird samples: alright, fine. I’m going to sample [U2’s] ‘Sunday Bloody Sunday’ and Fleetwood Mac and deliver something to James that he’d never release in a million years’,” Shadow says. “When James called me and gave his reaction to ‘Lost and Found’, which was way more effusive than he’d been with ‘In/Flux’, that’s when I kind of went, ‘This guy, he gets me.’ You know what I mean? ‘And he’s going to let me do whatever the fuck I want to do.’ Because that was a risky move, ‘Lost and Found’. It was a risky proposition – a risky record.”

Risky in what way? 

“It was just the idea of it, I think. The idea of, ‘Wait a minute: you’re committing sacrilege as somebody who’s supposed to be some digging-in-the-crates type of dude’,” he says. “I don’t know sometimes where the inspiration to do the music that I was making came from. It didn’t really have a precedent in my own listening. But I was just trying to do something different within the loose framework of hip hop sampling. I remember thinking that I was compelled to make it, but I certainly wouldn’t have been surprised if it was just completely slated. But at least in the UK, where it was released, it was the opposite.”

Singles three, four and five – ‘What Does Your Soul Look Like’, ‘Midnight in a Perfect World’ and ‘Stem’ – all ended up on Shadow’s celebrated debut album, ‘Endtroducing…..’. After ‘Lost and Found’, making an album had become the plan. But Shadow says he was “gutted” when Lavelle and business partner Steve Finan decided that the first half-hour of music he presented to them – which he thought of as the basis of the album, not a standalone project – should be released as an EP. To him, this effectively meant starting again on the LP.

“It may sound quaint now, 30 years later,” he explains, “but you were looking around at the ‘competition’, and being like, ‘Oh, Tricky’s doing this’ – even though I never in my life heard a Tricky album; but you couldn’t escape the fact that in the press you were constantly put in the same category – or, ‘Massive Attack is doing this, and Portishead is doing that.’ And all of them were putting out albums. I felt like I was missing the boat here a little bit. So I had real concerns about releasing ‘What Does Your Soul Look Like’ because it was like I’m starting from zero again. I just spent four months, maybe even longer, making that, and now I was back to square one. It was a lot to get out from under.”

Concerns about risking burnout may have increased in the summer of 1995, when Lavelle booked Shadow for his UNKLE project as work began on what would eventually become the album ‘Psyence Fiction’. Shadow was spending more time in London, eventually moving to the city for a few months. He agrees with the suggestion that this would have found its way into his music, but argues that, thanks to both Lavelle and to Klein, his musical worldview was already far wider. 

“One of the things I always liked about Funken-Klein was that he thought globally about music and about hip hop,” he says. “That’s why he signed a group from Africa, a group from Japan, a group from Denmark. He and James had a very similar aesthetic. I talk about living in London, but James also brought me to Japan for the first time, to Australia for the first time, to Germany and continental Europe for the first time. He exposed the world to me. At any given month in 96 or 97, one minute I’m in New York, the next I’m in LA, the next Sydney or Tokyo or Paris or London or Aberdeen or wherever. It all contributed to the music I was making.”

‘Endtroducing.....’ was released in the UK in September 1996, preceded by the ‘Midnight In a Perfect World’ single, with ‘Stem’ released a couple of months later. All were effectively part of the same body of work. But the sixth single included in the box set – ‘High Noon’ – was something different; and, in a similar way to ‘Lost and Found’, it was a response to situations Shadow found himself in but had no control over. Mo’ Wax had licensed ‘Endtroducing.....’ and its singles to London/FFRR in the US, but the album wasn’t released there until November. Returning to the Bay Area between the release dates, Shadow seemed to be trapped in a crack between worlds.

“’Endtroducing…..’ had come out, had received its acclaim in the press in the UK and was resonating out there,” he recalls. “But then I went back home and I found myself back in the same shitty apartment in my hometown where nobody knows anything about me or who I am or what I’m doing, and I felt kind of rinsed; I guess. I made ‘High Noon’ as a reaction to everything. It was just me trying to deal with the minor success that I achieved but also the minor notoriety – and at the same time, the real sense that absolutely nothing had changed. There was this feeling of it’s all a mirage and a disillusionment. Working on ‘High Noon’ was an outlet [for] a lot of those feelings.”

The Mo’ Wax era was drawing to a close. UNKLE’s ‘Psyence Fiction’ was released to huge acclaim in 1998, but it marked the end of Shadow and Lavelle’s working relationship. While they clearly had their differences, Shadow only has good things to say about his erstwhile partner.

“People always talk about the conflict between James and I,” he says, “but for me, what I always think about is just all the ways that he contributed to my musical evolution and maturity. Largely it was because of access, and he was much more worldly than I, even though he was younger than me. I was somewhat of a yokel, just a suburban kid, and he introduced the world to me. And I benefited musically, obviously.”

The pair are still in touch, “a bit,” he says. They last met in Manchester in August, when Shadow headlined a bill that included both DJ Krush and the current iteration of UNKLE. “It was good to catch up with everybody,” is how he recalls that day. 

“I think sometimes people get disappointed I don’t add fuel to the fire of the negative narratives that exist about us, but there’s too much good that he did for me,” Shadow says. “I wouldn’t have a career if it wasn’t for James, most likely. He’s certainly one of the most important people in my career – if not the most important. That’s what matters, really. Every relationship has its challenges, but I always wish him well, always want the best for him.” 

Mo’ Wax’s corporate parent, A&M, was dissolved in 1998, its artists’ contracts picked up by Island, which released Shadow’s follow-up to ‘Endtroducing.....’, 2002’s ‘The Private Press’. In 2006, ‘The Outsider’ found Shadow doubling down on his determination to stress his hip hop bona fides, featuring a string of collaborations with the kinds of rappers that would confound any listeners still harbouring the delusion that he was offering a diluted version of the music. 

Since 2016 he’s been recording for Mass Appeal, the label run by Nas, and has continued to determinedly defy all preconceptions. His most recent LP, 2023’s ‘Action Adventure’, inspired in part by a collection of hundreds of tapes of the output of a Baltimore radio station in the 1980s, remains a record he’s “really, really proud of” but which “found a smaller audience than I would have liked” he laments. 

“It’s much more rewarding to be making new music and to be creative, [but it’s] a different animal releasing new music these days,” he says, when asked if there’s another album in progress. “I have no problem at the moment holding out and waiting for something new and compelling to lead the way creatively. I remain excited and the spirit is there - but we’ll see.” 

He’s currently working on a “deluxe edition” of ‘The Mountain Will Fall’, his 2016 debut for Mass Appeal, which has been out of print for some time. This kind of work is just as important, he argues – and the opportunity to do it is one he knows he is fortunate to have earned for himself.

“If you never stop and take stock and you never contextualise your career for your fans, you’re missing an opportunity to educate a little bit,” he says. “I feel it’s important once in a while, because now there’s people younger than my own daughters discovering my music on TikTok or whatever. I’d rather tell that story than have them try to piece it together through AI or some other means where you just go: ‘What? No, that’s not the story that I value, it’s not the story that I want to be known for.’ That’s what I think this type of work is about: let me try to give it my all – in the way that I’ve always tried to give my all, whether it’s a new record or whatever it is – because it’s forever. Whether people listen to it or discover it now, or a year from now, it’s like, ‘Oh, this was his output for Mo’ Wax – forget all that other stuff, this is what matters. Here it is’.” 

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This feature first appeared in Disco Pogo issue 9

Here comes Justin Robertson singing oldies, goldies, “This is acid”; here comes Richard Norris singing “House music all night long”. Ahem. Of course not. The pair might be happy to talk about their early experiences of dance music, but chatting to the duo in 2026 doesn’t see them harking back to the “good old days”. As the twosome take a hike around a Surrey park, they outline how the past has been a dress rehearsal for current pursuits. “Why are we still doing it? The point is, there isn’t a point,” they tell Jim Butler…

Justin Robertson and Richard Norris have spent the best part of the day reminiscing, analysing and laughing at what it is they do. The pair, both foundational figures in the UK’s post-acid house electronic music scene, have been firm friends since the early 90s. 

In 1993, Robertson remixed The Grid’s ‘Crystal Clear’, providing Norris and his Grid bandmate Dave Ball with the distinctive version of their classic track. “It got us on ‘Top of the Pops’,” says Norris of their first of five appearances on the show, “and it really started it all off. A pivotal record for us.” Their relationship – as we shall see – goes back further than that, however.

During the course of their shared 75 years in the creative industries, the pair have trod a remarkably similar path. Both were raised just outside London in the Home Counties: Norris in St Albans; Robertson in Chalfont St Peter, 30 minutes west on the M25. Likewise, both went to university in the north west: Norris in Liverpool, Robertson in Manchester. 

Their approach to ‘dance’ music has been marked by an analogous approach, chiefly multi-genre. Robertson’s various projects – from Lionrock and Revtone to The Deadstock 33s and latterly Five Green Moons – have seen him traverse dub, modish disco, house, techno and more. Norris’s various incarnations – among them The Grid, The Droyds, Beyond The Wizards Sleeve and his recent excursions under the Music For Healing banner – have incorporated ambient, electroclash, chillout, house and new beat, all underpinned by a lifelong psychedelia obsession.

Both are successful DJs, although Norris defers to Robertson’s prowess behind the decks (“I remember watching you when you were playing with The Grid, thinking, fucking hell, he’s good. You told me: ‘There’s this trick, when you bring the bass in on the next one, make it slightly louder’ and it’s like, oh, yeah, that really works”); and both have branched out into writing. Norris published his brilliant memoir ‘Strange Things Are Happening’ in 2024, while Robertson’s new novel, his third, ‘The MineralTail’, tells the tale of the greatest record ever made – by a megalithic stone and two dogs – after the end of the world. An accompanying record - excellent, naturally - brings the book to life. And because there aren’t clearly enough hours in the day, Robertson is also a successful painter.

Norris is currently finishing work on a (possibly) final Grid record, started before Ball’s death in November 2025, while Robertson is playing itinerant gigs under his brilliant Five Green Moons moniker.

After spending a day traipsing round the bucolic Virginia Water at the southern tip of Windsor Great Park on the Balearic borders of Berkshire and Surrey, Norris and Robertson have failed to find much disharmony between them. Suddenly Norris realises where their paths diverge…

“You are definitely more prog than me,” he says, safely back in the front room of Robertson’s ultra-cool modernist home, surrounded by walls of records and books. “I’m more psych and you’re more prog.”

“I’ve made peace with that,” Robertson smiles. “After years of denying it – ‘Thrice you shall deny me!’ – I’ve made peace with it now.”

Let the prog psych wars commence…

Disco Pogo: How did you two meet? 

Justin: “I don’t remember when we met, but what I do remember is… so, in Manchester there was a Detroit techno, Chicago house, New York garage bedrock to most things post-acid house. But I was more interested in Balearic and other sorts of music. Me and Greg Fenton had a club on Sunday nights called Spice and it was named after a track that Richard made – G-Force ‘Spicey’. So the first time I met Richard I knew this was the guy that had made ‘Spicey’. I was in awe that someone had made this record.”

Richard: “It was a strange kind of Belgian new beat record. I had written a big article on new beat for the NME. I convinced them it was going to be the new acid house. I’d got them to pay for me and my girlfriend to go to Ibiza previously and that seemed to work. I went four or five times, interviewed Renaat from R&S and all these bands. New beat is a very unsung thing. I remember Tony Wilson being very disparaging, but I used to love those records. They’re very much like what ALFOS records are now. Slightly doomy, slow, ‘I Feel Love’ slowed down with this industrial edge. There’s something about those records. But yeah, G-Force ‘Spicey’ came out of one of those trips.”

This was prior to The Grid?

Richard: “Yeah, it was 1989. We’d started The Grid but hadn’t released anything. It’s a strange record. Not least because I’m singing on it. Sort of singing. A bit like Yello. It’s quite Balearic… And there it is (Justin locates the record). I’ve not seen a copy of that for so long. I don’t even have a copy.” 

Justin: “At the back of my record box I used to have three lucky records and this was one of them. I think the other two were Italian records. This is from Eastern Bloc. The sticker says: ‘A song so good they named a club after it.’”

Richard: “Yes, [reads the sleeve]: The Grid appear courtesy of Warners, so, before we started releasing records. Certainly before ‘Floatation’. It was me and this guy Patrick De Meyer, T99. His mate did Technotronic. There was the whole scene of rural, strange, industrial new beat-making people in Belgium. There was this amazing club, Boccaccio, four big speaker stacks. A proper sound system, playing this doomy Front 242 music, but everyone was dressed like the ‘Hitman and Her’.”

Justin: “I suppose in the same way, if you went to Detroit or Chicago clubs everyone looked like they were in the ‘Hitman and Her’.” 

Richard: “All those clips of early house clubs, there was a look wasn’t there.”

Justin: “Proper dancing. Not waving their arms like Windy Miller.”

Richard: “Manchester was very good for that wasn’t it. [Seminal dance crew] Foot Patrol. All the dancing and dressing up. Was that slightly pre-acid house?”

Justin: “Yeah, I moved to Manchester in 1986, and if you went to Nude night then it was very dressy. People would put on their best gear. And there was a lot of dancing. A lot of the time you’d be on the periphery of the dancefloor watching these dance troupes come on and do their routines. And they’d be wearing like spats, you know, jazz dancing, but to Adonis records. There was a really nice energy to that pre-acid house house scene.”

How did The Grid come into all of this? 

Richard: “We had something of an art school approach, so things like Cabaret Voltaire and industrial records. We met because of working with Genesis P-Orridge so there was the Throbbing Gristle end of things. Me and Dave mostly bonded over Throbbing Gristle and Suicide. I went to interview Genesis for Strange Things magazine. Six hours of him pontificating in his scary house in Hackney that had a dentist’s chair in one room. I remember there being cutlery on the wall, like a fork with a swastika on it. Hitler’s fork was next to Genesis’ PRS registration, which was framed. He was very proud of his PRS certificate. After doing that interview, this was about August or September 1987, he said: ‘Have you heard about acid house?’ I hadn’t, but said it sounded amazing. Psychedelic dance music, that sounds like a great idea. And he said let’s make a record next weekend. It was that quick. I hadn’t heard any acid house. I’d heard house music, because it had been in the charts, but I hadn’t heard acid house. I’m not sure there was that much out. By the time ‘Jack the Tab’ came out we had heard things like Adonis and Phuture. And things like X-Ray ‘Let’s Go’. Those records were probably 86 or 87.” 

Justin: “‘Acid Trax’ [Phuture] was a big track in Manchester. And the early Transmat things. I remember hearing those things maybe 1986, going into The Haçienda. I always have it in my head that it was going into The Haçienda, it could have been any club in Manchester. Just hearing this open-ended music that didn’t seem to have any beginning or end and then hearing people mixing records, which I hadn’t experienced before. There was this story of my friend Richard Hector Jones, who was working in Eastern Bloc and this kid came in on a Saturday morning. He’d been at the Haçienda the night before, and he goes, ‘Can I have that record they play at The Haçienda?’. Richard said: ‘Which one?’ The kid goes, ‘There’s only one, isn’t there?’ It was an interesting time. You didn’t need to know anything about it. It was probably a drawback if you did.”

Richard: “We were definitely interested in the idea of it as much as the music. But then we got to hear the music and were definitely interested. We made ‘Jack the Tab’ before we’d gone to Shoom. I’m not sure it existed. And then went and took Jack the Tab T-shirts which got us in. I think you were meant to get your Shoom membership and Gen sent the weirdest picture of him with bug eyes and a T-shirt with Hate written on it, which at the time was not in the spirit!” 

When acid house exploded, did you both recognise it was a cultural event?

Justin: “I’m not sure. In those days you were used to things happening, micro trends, micro changes. So the soundtrack didn’t really change, but the energy level switched. Not always in a good way – I quite liked the expressive jazz dancing at Nude. This became much more uniform. What was interesting, was this total dissolving of barriers. That was really new. The energy was completely different. And OK, the liberating feeling of being on ecstasy and that rush where you love everybody was remarkable. You can look back and mock it and go, oh, it was just the drugs, but the drugs were just a catalyst. You could forget about your job and whatever worries you had and for a few hours every weekend – or every night in some places – you could become part of this weird great whole. It was very idealistic for a while, without anyone pinpointing it. No one was saying, this is what is happening. It just happened. The music press took a bit more time to get their heads around it because they couldn’t really get a handle on it, because there was no one to talk to, or even wanted to talk to them. If someone came in and took photographs or videos, you’d presume they were the drug squad.” 

When you both started making music, did you take that energy and idealism into the studio?

Justin: “A couple of times I literally tried to take it into the studio. Just to stay awake. What I took [from those times] when I started making music and still do now… I mean the past seems like a rehearsal for me, for what I’m doing now. The roots of it, it’s taking all the things that you grew up with and the influences that you found around you and the rulebook had been ripped up, if there was one, and you could just chuck all these things together and sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn’t. I was thinking I like the Pebbles psych sound, I’ll stick a drum beat underneath it and see what happens. And obviously the reggae stuff that I grew up with. Using those influences, because you were given a pass to do it. It was a nice freedom. I didn’t know how it worked. I could string a few chords together on the guitar, but I had no formal training and I think that was an advantage. I think if I had gone in knowing what I was doing I don’t think it would have been… I still don’t really know what I’m doing! It’s all trial and error and accidents. And that was the thing about acid house, the whole thing was created by accident – or at least that acid sound was created by accident. It was making something new out of past influences.”

Richard: “We absolutely took the spirit of the times into the studios, including half the people that we’d met in the clubs. Sacha [Souter, the vocalist] on ‘Floatation’, was from Shoom. Polo, who played the bongos, was from Shoom. You can’t really get more Balearic than the bongo player on ‘Floatation’. He was the first person I met at Shoom, coming down the stairs, and within half-an-hour we knew most of the people. Very friendly. When a tall skinhead comes up to you in a club… three months before I would have run out the door. Luckily, this one hugged me. I remember we did a version of ‘O Happy Days’ by Edwin Hawkins and we got half of Shoom to come down to the studio and sing backing vocals. It never made it on to the album. It’s alright. I was singing as well, trying to be some kind of southern Texas preacher. You did have licence to do what you wanted for a bit. It wasn’t so genre-specific and that certainly spilled over into the studio.”

Justin: “What’s interesting about that time is how it’s provided a seed bed for future enterprises. I was wondering about what both of us have taken from that time and I suppose it’s that open-endedness. For the first time in a few years, I feel really relaxed about making music again, because it’s a similar feeling to the first time I went into studios. A freedom to do what you want. We’re talking about why we’re still doing it; what’s the point? The point is, there isn’t a point. And that’s the point.

“I don’t like to put my name on things because I don’t want to be pigeonholed as doing one particular style of music or be associated with any one particular… I mean it’s not even genre now, it’s one particular profession. I was DJing at a literary event recently and I was introduced to this guy in publishing as ‘Justin is a DJ and he’s become an author’. I don’t think of myself as a DJ who’s become an author. I don’t think I’ve suddenly become something else. And also, when acid house started, I just fell into it. I worked in a medical records office, a graveyard and a record shop. DJing wasn’t a profession, it still isn’t. Career’s a death, as I have said before, but you find yourself doing something… ‘Oh, you’re a DJ’. Am I? In what way am I a DJ? So creating personas and projects and discarding them when they don’t do anything fresh… we had this conversation didn’t we, when you’re caught between two moments, you have a doubt as to what you’re doing this for. And it’s definitely not for financial reasons as I’m constantly lurching between financial crises and I’m skint all the time. If you do things for a reason that’s just advertising. It’s not art and it’s not music. It’s just advertising. I think there have definitely been times when I’ve been unsure about what I’m doing, and this might be to do with my overdramatic persona, but there’s never a time when I’m not doing something.”

Richard: “We came into it, a bit like Andrew (Weatherall) used to say, as enthusiastic amateurs. I think that’s why we’re still doing it, that curiosity. We don’t have to do it. And lots of people haven’t done it as long as us, but we still do. Probably even more.”

Justin: “I think I do have to do it. Again, not talking in financial terms, that’s a fucking disaster, but I do feel compelled to do it.”

Richard: “If you were retired, which bits of it would you veer more towards? The painting, the writing or the music?”

Justin: “So that was one of the awkward things about being introduced as the DJ that’s become an author. I feel like all of those things are the same. I don’t think painting and writing and making music and playing it are different. They’re all the same thing.”

Justin, your new book has an accompanying album. Was that always the intention?

Justin: “The book’s about the recording of an album. The greatest album ever recorded after the extinction of humanity by a megalithic stone and two dogs. Guaranteed best seller this summer. Watch out for it, folks! Basically it’s about music. A philosophical discussion and a cosmic comedy about music. What is music? What’s the magic of it? what is it that draws people back to it and what makes it so important in people’s lives? So, I thought I definitely need to record an approximation of this record.”

How do you both work day-to-day?

Richard: “I’ve got a studio down the garden and I go in there every morning and I work every day. Quite early, 8am until 2pm. Postman hours, well, late postman hours. I do that every day entirely on my own. I do like bringing people into the studio, I just did something with Mal (Stephen Mallinder) from Cabaret Voltaire. Bringing people in just changes the energy. You make different records when there’s someone else in the room, definitely. Even if they’re just sitting in the corner reading the paper it does change it. I love working with singers, but very rarely do I get to do it. Done it a lot on the new Grid record that’s being finished at the moment.”

Justin: “I work, almost entirely, on all fronts, in a stream of consciousness. I think that’s when you start second guessing yourself when you start thinking that there must be some structure or some purpose that I’m working towards. I don’t actually think I’m very good at making records to dance to, house records. I struggle to make functional club records... My mind goes off in weird tangents and I think, ‘That’s a pretty jackin’ sound, I know what I’ll do, I’ll stick a sitar on it’. Opening myself up to that stream of consciousness and just seeing where this thing takes me. The Five Green Moons thing I’ve found a real sense of liberation.”

Richard: “Are you a late-night person?"

Justin: “Not at all. In my new place I’ve got neighbours on both sides, even though I am well soundproofed. I tend to go downstairs and work during the day, music-wise. My problem is, I live alone now. When my wife and I were together there was a certain amount of ‘Can you stop doing what you’re doing and sit and have dinner?’ But now, I have no such restrictions, so I often find myself painting while watching TV and listening to records. An overload of stuff. The trouble with that is you’re unable to switch off. I actually don’t think I’m switching off from anything. As we’re getting older, people talk about retiring and I’m like, retire from what?”

Richard: “That’s because it’s all play isn’t it? It’s not work. We’ve been lucky enough to do stuff that we like doing and are really passionate about. You’re right, making a traditional dance track is quite hard, making anything that is functional is hard. With the ambient stuff… you could see it as being quite functional music, but it’s not actually got a function, it’s got a purpose. The purpose is that people listen to it and it helps them relax. People write in about the Music For Healing pieces and they say it’s helped with bereavement, anxiety, kids have been born to the music… and suddenly it’s a different thing. That was a purpose.”

Justin: “Did you have that in mind when you started it?”

Richard: “No. I started making it for myself, because we were living in Portobello Road and there was this gang war going on outside. I had to create a safe space for myself in the studio and I created this calming ‘Analogue Bubblebath’-kind of music and just did it for myself. When lockdown happened I started putting them up on Bandcamp and gave profits to MIND. The response was amazing. Even now, every few days someone will write an email telling me how that music has helped their mental health. It’s incredible. It’s much better than being on ‘Top of the Pops’.”

Justin: “It’s very liberating music isn’t it. I made this quasi-ambient album with Dan Avery, which still hasn’t come out. Formlessness and getting into that stuff where it feels as though it could go on forever…”

Richard: “I’ve got massively into drone lately. The idea that music is just one tone or one note. Every culture’s got it, from eastern European things to Aboriginal, Indian… it seems like a real anchor and actually quite primal. Dan’s gone quite droney, hasn’t he, and other contemporaries like Richard Fearless.”

Justin: “Nothing wrong with a bit of drone. It’s tapping into, as you say, something primal and… it’s that thing when you talk about making music, you almost have this implication that music is somehow created out of the human mind or the human community, when it isn’t that at all. It comes from outside. If we weren’t here, if there were no human beings alive there would still be music. There would still be sound. It’s the cracking of the rocks, the crashing of the waves, the birds singing… or just micro sounds of plants growing. A hippy take, but there’s sound everywhere and what people do is make approximations. I remember speaking to you and you were throwing microphones into ponds or something!”

Richard: “Yeah, I got into these strange underwater microphones. Going to the Thames, sonic fishing, just throwing them in on this massive line. It’s weird because you don’t get any reverb, just these weird sounds. It sounded like electronic prawns scuttling along. Sounds change if you just start listening on headphones and recording outside. One thing is you notice how many bloody aeroplanes there are. To find somewhere and get a really good recording is really hard.”

Justin: “There’s a chapter in the new book called We Are The Asteroid, about an unemployed asteroid rock that’s floating around space and gets an invitation to come to Earth. So it collides with Earth and ends up on the ocean bed and is introduced to the music of Basic Channel. That density and compression… crushed sound. When you spend time in silence to listen to sounds around you, you realise that they’re better than any record you could ever make.” 

Richard: “There’s a lot of God and the Devil in your book and I like the way you describe the Devil as a hack. That he didn’t have the best tunes; he just made really bad approximations of the good tunes. So, I thought, ‘Yeah, the Devil is basically AI’. That’s what I got from that. He’s a chancer.”

Justin: “Yeah, the Devil has a disastrous house party and is thrown out of Heaven and he tries to make music but he’s incapable of doing so. That’s his first original sin.”

Given Dave’s death, is it quite strange coming back to The Grid? 

Richard: “Yeah, we had been making a new Grid album for two years. We were kind of getting on with it, but not really that focused on it. Dave was doing bits with Soft Cell and I was doing other things. We were making it gradually, he was sending me stuff and I was sending him stuff. But since he died… it’s weird, the label and everyone have been, ‘don’t worry, take as long as you need’, but for me the opposite thing happened. I feel there’s a real urgency and need to finish it. The album has changed from being just me and Dave to being very much a celebration of him. Getting loads of guests involved, either people that we both loved like John Grant or people that we’d both worked with like Andy Bell from Erasure. It’s definitely more celebratory, but it’s very weird, having been in a duo for 38 years to suddenly making a record and not being able to say: ‘What do you think?’ That’s hard. The extra musicians are definitely helping. Very much a celebration of Dave, because he was so loved. That was one amazing thing, the outpouring of love for him. There’s still processing the grief but there’s a celebratory aspect around it – this is for him; this is what we did.”

Has music given you everything in your lives? Is it the one thing that you keep coming back to?

Justin: “Yes… Like I say, I find all of them [books, art, film, music] are the same thing really, they’re all connected in some way. It’s like being in a happy penitentiary, you can’t escape from it and I’m happy to stay locked up under those circumstances. You can find it frustrating at times and you can second guess yourself, but you end up going: ‘I’ve got to do this.’ I love it. And I don’t know what the fuck else I’d do. I’m unemployable, for various reasons. It’s given me the sense of community and friends and it’s a great conversation starter.”

Richard: “Certainly for me, it’s music. Music and clubs really. I really feel those spaces were clubs, rather than just nights. There’s something different about that. The thousands of people we’ve met, all over the world, who have been brought together through that. I remember DJing in Taiwan and going into this place and you’re straight into the culture, relatively superficially, but more so than if you’d just gone on your own. And then you’re back at that person’s house, they’ve got decks, you have this shared knowledge of things. Sure, we’re the tourists, but you get straight into their thing and the shared culture that we’ve got. It’s certainly helped me make more friends quicker. So, yeah, the community aspect is great. The music aspect is the fun bit and the play. The older I get the more I’m into the idea of small communities and what difference 50 people can make.”

Justin: “It’s like a reaction to AI slop. Imperfect. Strange. And I’ve noticed with Five Green Moons, people are excited by it because it’s faulty and wrong. It’s rough round the edges.”

What is it about the acid house generation that still feels curious and is still creating great art?

Justin: “You’ve hit the nail on the head with curious. I don’t know anything really. There’s so much to know and see and experience and I’m quite ignorant of most of it and I think it’s that constant curiosity and constant attempts to peel back the layers and the invisible world around us and find out what’s going on. There’s so much. But it’s this constant curiosity. 

“You do get a lot of people in our scene who demand it to be 1992 every weekend, but that has never really interested me. I’ve always seen the past as a rehearsal for now, really. I look back with fondness because I enjoyed myself, but I think the stuff I’m doing now, and the stuff Richard is doing now, is the best, most interesting stuff. Because you’re taking all that experience and only now is it starting to make sense. Or no sense. Or nonsense!”

Richard: “I think it’s being self-employed as well. Even though money isn’t the main reason for it, you do think I’ve got to find a way of doing something and that does have a bearing on your creative input and output.”

Justin: “I’ve got nothing else to do. Apart from walk the dog.” 

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This feature first appeared in Disco Pogo issue 9

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Alexis Taylor is an exemplar of our post-genre world. He’s an unabashed lover of both Gram Parsons and Phil Collins. And his music, in and out of Hot Chip, is marked by a unique fragility and jubilance. A case in point is his new solo record, ‘Paris in the Spring’. Named after a psychology test that measures attention and perception, the record demands the former and urges us to embrace the latter. Gemma Samways quizzes Taylor about European New Wave reggae, equine-related music and the enduring appeal of his band. “The fact that we’re still making music together and enjoying that is something I’m very proud of,” he notes…

Few frontmen have packed as much into their career as Hot Chip’s Alexis Taylor. Alongside the eight LPs he’s made as part of the Putney-formed synth-pop band (incredibly, now in their 26th year), he’s also released three more with improvisational art-pop outfit About Group and leant his distinctive vocals to the likes of HAAi, Holy Fuck, Nicolas Godin and Cerrone. All of this while sustaining a hugely varied solo career of his own, the latest instalment of which has seen the 45-year-old singer-songwriter hit another rich groove.

Begun at Godin’s studio, and engineered by the Air man’s son Pablo, before being finished in London with Oli Bayston (Kelly Lee Owens, Barry Can’t Swim), seventh LP ‘Paris in the Spring’ finds Taylor musing on mortality and self-doubt, over sparkling productions inspired by an eclectic mix of new wave dub, tear-stained country and shimmering disco. 

Named after a psychological perception test, it is deeply personal at points – album closer ‘Black Lodge in the Sky’ pays tribute to his late friend, the Mancunian producer Dan (Black Lodge) Dwaye – and, at others, remarkably universal. It is also far and away his most collaborative solo record so far, featuring contributions from The Avalanches, Godin, Étienne de Crécy, Ewan Pearson, Lola Kirke and Green Gartside of Scritti Politti. 

Just back from Milan, Taylor sat down to discuss the album in more depth and to reflect on his journey to this point.

Hi Alex, how was Milan?

“Good. I was DJing a private event in a listening bar-type place. There’s a massive trend at the moment for these listening bars influenced by Japanese listening bar culture. It’s all about vinyl.” 

The last time we saw you perform was in September 2025 alongside Ibibio Sound Machine at the Together For Palestine concert. You played a CeCe Rogers cover if we remember correctly.

“Yeah, ‘Someday’, which was sampled by Liquid on ‘Sweet Harmony’. We were also incorporating a bit of ‘Follow Me’ by Aly-US, as well as playing our own song, ‘Melody of Love’. So it was a medley of all those.”

How was the evening for you?

“It was really amazing to be a part of it and to see that number of people turn up, all united in talking openly about what’s happening [in Gaza]. And my daughter was there and she joined Hot Chip on stage which was a really nice thing. But then also, I went from that gig to somewhere else and was being questioned by someone, asking why I did it. It’s quite surprising sometimes how you can be so on board with something and then realise that other people are actually baffled by your involvement.”

Seven albums in, what drives you as a solo artist?

“The same thing that drives me to make any music. One thing that I occasionally remember is that I was a solo musician long before I joined forces with Joe (Goddard) in Hot Chip. My solo work is obviously a space to do whatever I want to do, but I would say that there is a particular type of songwriting that I do – however it’s produced – that is my identity as a songwriter.”

Can you expand on that?

“So even if my last record, ‘Silence’, was more acoustic instrumentation and this [new one] is more electronic, it’s still the same songwriting voice there, even if that develops and changes over time. There’s a continual thread through my solo albums in the way in which I write and express myself as a songwriter and I think this record has something in common with one I did, called ‘Beautiful Thing’. It’s a bit more to do with rhythm boxes, drum machines and instrumentation you get in funk records like the clavinet and the Fender Rhodes. But I’m trying to do something slightly different this time around.”

In what sense?

“I wanted to let things develop, so I spent a lot longer making it. And it was a bit of a journey, because I was originally making most of it in Paris in Nicolas Godin’s studio, with his son Pablo Godin engineering and Pierre Rousseau producing. Two thirds of the record was done there, but then I was faced with a bit of a challenge, because Pierre became unavailable midway through the process. So I lost a lot of momentum and got quite depressed. Not, you know, depressed in my life in general, but just concerned about how I could finish this record. I lost confidence.”

How did you regain that confidence?

“I just didn’t stop. I went to do other recording sessions. Like, ‘For a Toy’ was done in Los Angeles at Ariel Rechtshaid’s studio, which was a really great, different place to work in. And The Avalanches had produced ‘I Can Feel Your Love’, initially done with them working remotely and then me finishing the track with a bit of help from Étienne de Crécy and Oli Bayston. And it was Oli who helped me finish the record. So it’s taken a lot of work and time and travel and finding different people to work with to complete it.”

Can you give us an insight into The Avalanches’ creative process?

“I’ve done a couple of tracks with them – this one on the album and one that hasn’t come out yet. I don’t always see that process in action, but I think it’s literally sourcing vinyl – buying records, traveling with a turntable, finding snippets and sampling them. With ‘I Can Feel Your Love’ they sent me an instrumental and words came to me straight away and it felt really good. The thing that was then a bit complicated was that we realised that they had a sample in the track that could never really be easily cleared, so we had to get rid of it altogether.”

The album title, ‘Paris in the Spring’, is a phrase used in an attention and perception test. Why did that resonate as a title?

“Well, I thought about where I made it, and then I spoke to my friend Oliver Payne – who made the cover for my album ‘Piano’ – and he was like, ‘Are you familiar with the “Paris in the the Spring” test?’ And it felt like that fed into the subliminal messages in the music, and into the unconscious influence in the songwriting process.

“Originally, the working title for the record was ‘Cocaine, Wild Horses and Real Love’, taken from three of the songs on the album. I thought it sounded like an outlaw country album from the 70s and I loved it. But then my record label pointed out that no one would play any of it on the radio and none of the streaming services would support it. (Laughs) And as I’ve never taken drugs in my life, it would have been quite funny for me – the squarest, most straight edge person – to sabotage myself in that way.”

Can we talk about the decision to cover The Rolling Stones’ ‘Wild Horses’. You’re a big fan of Gram Parsons’ version, specifically?

“Yeah, The Flying Burrito Brothers’ version of that song is really, really beautiful. When I first met Pierre Rousseau – working on the Nicolas Godin album (‘Concrete and Glass’) – we got chatting about making some music together and what I wanted to do was cover that song but influenced by the Rhythm & Sound records that Mark Ernestus and Moritz von Oswald (Basic Channel) made in the 90s. And also these records by Spectral Display, which are kind of European New Wave reggae music. And instead of him saying, ‘Why would you ask that?’ he said: ‘Yeah, that sounds great.’ So we did that cover, and then we made a cover of the Prefab Sprout song ‘Wild Horses’. We talked about making more horse-themed covers.”

What other horse-related songs were you considering covering? 

“One called ‘Horses’ that Palace Brothers released in the 90s, as well as a Smog song called ‘I Break Horses’. And there’s this song ‘White Horse’ by Laid Back, which is a pretty brilliant dance record. My late friend Dan (Black Lodge) Dwaye – who I’m singing about on ‘Black Lodge in the Sky’ – he made a very good record in the early 2000s on Mo’ Wax, called ‘Horse With No Name’, that uses samples of that Laid Back track and Laurie Anderson’s ‘O Superman’ and various other things. So we could easily think of more [horse] songs but we just didn’t complete the project.”

The song title ‘mp3s Can Make You Cry’ is obviously tongue in cheek but it does beg the question, what was the last MP3 that made you cry?

“There’s one track by Alasdair Roberts called ‘Lord Ronald’, which always makes me cry every time I listen to it. It’s a traditional murder ballad, but his version pairs this very vulnerable and frail vocal with understated Casio keyboard drone and Will Oldham doing backing vocals. It’s incredibly sad and really, really beautiful.”

As someone whose music tastes have always been very eclectic, you must feel very at home in today’s post-genre world.

“I do welcome that development, yeah. I have met other people along the way whose music taste is a little bit less eclectic, or they don’t really understand how you could accept certain forms of music as good. Like, you know, the fact that I like Phil Collins sometimes was incredibly confusing to The Jesus and Mary Chain. 

Some people hear what I do in Hot Chip and they don’t understand why I’m talking about country music or whatever it is I’m talking about. But I’ve listened to a lot of music my whole life – I just don’t wear those influences on my sleeve very obviously. Like, in all my years of listening to Will Oldham, I don’t think I’ve made any records that particularly sound like him. Or, in all my years of listening to Prince, I’ve always felt like I can’t make anything that sounds like Prince, because he’s so unique and so special and I just don’t sound like that.”

It’s been 20 years since your breakout hit ‘Over and Over’ came out. Does your affection for it remain undimmed?

“Luckily, I like it still so it doesn’t become an albatross. I don’t listen to it very much, but I like what we did with that song a lot and I don’t think I could say that about everything that we’ve made. I like the production and the groove of it and all the sounds in it. I feel like it’s a reasonably good indicator of what Hot Chip is all about.”

Did you immediately know you’d written a hit? 

“I don’t think we thought it was necessarily a hit, but we did think it was a good one. We actually started playing it live about a year before it was out in the world, so it occupied a space in our live set like, here’s the big song. We felt the same way about ‘Boy From School’, and both of those are still songs that are meaningful for lots of fans of Hot Chip.”

Do you have any specific highlights of that period?

“I remember we opened for Four Tet in America and we had a really good reaction from the crowds on that tour. I remember getting to know the people at DFA Records around this time as well – Tim Goldsworthy and James Murphy and Jonathan Galkin. Building a friendship with them was quite a big thing for us in that a cool American record label thought we were good. In the UK we got good reviews but everyone only wanted to talk about us being nerds. US audiences were different, saying, ‘This is really good music,’ rather than, ‘Why do you look like that?!’”

In the 26 years since you formed Hot Chip, what has been your proudest achievement?

“I’m proud of the records themselves and that there is an audience for this music, and that seems to remain there. That doesn’t happen for everyone. I’m also proud of the fact those sort of friendships remain within the band. I’m aware that that’s quite an unusual thing, because bands often fall apart over time. Just the fact that we’re still making music together and enjoying that, and working really hard at it, is something I’m very proud of.”  

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This feature first appeared in Disco Pogo issue 9

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Don’t be sad that Saint Etienne are no more, instead smile as you remember the joy they’ve brought us over 35 years. From Balearic pop to indie dance, from folktronica, ambient and Euro dance to back where they began, Sarah Cracknell, Bob Stanley and Pete Wiggs have become one of our most beloved musical mainstays. In an emotional interview, looking back over the last four decades, the trio reflect on a job well done with Jim Butler. “We felt like we were making a bit of a difference, that we were doing something that was important,” says Cracknell…

“Remember, George: no man is a failure who has friends.”

‘It’s a Wonderful Life’

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Saint Etienne had their own ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’ moment earlier this year. When the trio of Sarah Cracknell, Bob Stanley and Pete Wiggs revealed that their 12th studio album, ‘International’, was to be their last they anticipated, in their own unassuming way, there would be some reaction. The creative act has always been accompanied by a feedback loop involving critics, writers and fans. Factor in commercial considerations – records sold, tickets shifted and the like – and a group can generally gauge their popularity.

But critical hosannas, chart positions and moments of being flavour of the month aside, do bands ever get to see what they have really meant to people down the years? Do they get an insight into how their songs have soundtracked people’s lives – the good, the bad, the mundane? Do they understand the emotional succour they provide? Do they get told about the moments when the opening chords of the second single from their third album provide that Proustian hit of being transported back to a time and place? This is what Saint Etienne’s announcement provoked – a tsunami of memories, reflections and celebrations. 

“It was more overwhelming than I thought it would be,” says Pete Wiggs from the kitchen of his house in Hove, where he’s been joined by his two friends and band-mates – the ordering is crucial – to look over the last 35 years. “I suppose we thought some people might be sad, but nothing as extreme as it has been. All the lovely stories are amazing; it’s been tear-jerking some of them. It’s nice to know that we’ve somehow made an impact – a nice impact – on people. Something positive. It means that they got the emotions of the records and that the records have had a life in their life. It’s amazing.”

While the outbursts haven’t exactly afforded them a glimpse into what the world would have been like if they hadn’t existed (per George Bailey in Frank Capra’s cherished film) – one shudders at the drabness – they have been able to observe, in real time, thanks to social media, the very real affection in which so many people hold them. As Stanley notes, it’s something they were wholly unprepared for.

“No, not at all,” he smiles in between mouthfuls of a cinnamon bun that Wiggs has kindly supplied for the occasion. “It is like reading your own obituary. I was thinking about that bloke from Fairport Convention (Dave Swarbrick) who they thought was dead, but wasn’t; he got to read his own obituaries.”

“Was it P.T. Barnum who got a newspaper to show him the obituary they had written just before he died?” asks Wiggs. “Just to check what they said.”

“It’s been really touching,” says Stanley.

Enough to make them reconsider their decision, perhaps?

“No, no,” laughs Cracknell. “It’s the right time. I always wanted to keep the legacy – our legacy – intact and I think it’s a good time to stop. Yeah, good job.”

“We supported World Party?” says a disbelieving Stanley. “I have absolutely no recollection of that whatsoever. What a weird combination. At the Leadmill? No memory.”

Huddled around Wiggs’s kitchen table, which is buckling under the weight of countless envelopes stuffed full of old photos, contact sheets, tour itineraries, ‘access all areas’ passes and other Saint Etienne-related ephemera, Cracknell, Stanley and Wiggs are not so much on a stroll down memory lane as being hurtled, at great speed, down a memory motorway. The prized possessions in this Saint Etienne bric-a-brac are Cracknell’s scrapbooks, lovingly assembled from the moment she joined the band in 1991, following the release of their third single, ‘Nothing Can Stop Us’. They conclude in 1994, not long after a new band called Oasis had supported them (“They were great,” she remembers. “Very friendly, especially Bonehead. He was very sweet”), perhaps because the novelty had worn off and being pop stars of sorts was now what they did and it wasn’t going to end any time soon. 

An incredulous Stanley and Wiggs have never seen the books before – one has a photo of Tom Cruise on the cover – while Cracknell has pushed them to the back of her mind.

“I vaguely remember sticking things in,” she says, sheepishly. “I know it’s me because I recognise the handwriting. I never realised there were so many. It’s mostly pictures of myself of course!”

It’s all in there. The positive reviews (Rolling Stone calling their second album, ‘So Tough’, “visionary pop”); the bizarre references to forgotten bands (“Saint Etienne can be humorous and really emotional at the same time, without verging on Sultans of Ping territory”); photos from an appearance on early 90s late-night TV staple ‘The Word’ (Sarah sporting a feather boa, natch); their idiosyncratic DIY adverts (one featuring the band that performed the original version of ‘Who Do You Think You Are’, Candlewick Green, prompting Cracknell to mockingly point out: “Another one of our adverts that sold us nil more copies”). There are lyrics reprinted in Smash Hits, too, and a strange piece in Peterborough’s Evening Telegraph on how female-fronted bands had become the norm. 

There are also numerous puns on their name, some so oblique and shorn of context it’s hard to tell if they’re funny or not, and tales of aftershow parties attended by other liggers with attitude (Rob Newman, Suede, Primal Scream, Silverfish, Swervedriver, Chapterhouse, Mark Lamarr). And there’s the embellished press release explanations of how they all met: in Croydon’s first floatation tank in Bob and Pete’s case, and in the bathroom of Burger King for Sarah and the boys.

“This is great,” beams Wiggs. “I want one!”

The past they say is another country. When Saint Etienne emerged in 1990, bright-eyed, brimful of ideas and excited by the possibilities a new decade offered, many of the old school didn’t know how to receive them. The decrepit duffers certainly did things differently. Was Saint Etienne’s cover of Neil Young’s ‘Only Love Can Break Your Heart’ indie, dance, indie-dance or pop? Were the duo from Croydon to be taken seriously? Or were they harbingers of those very 90s conditions, kitsch and irony? 

“Some mags, like Q, were a bit sniffy,” Wiggs recalls. “We weren’t serious enough for them. And we were caught between two stools – indie and dance. A lot of them didn’t like dance music at all. Or indie.”

“The press couldn’t label us properly,” says Cracknell. “We were confusing to them so we were arch. They didn’t get it so we must be arch. And kitsch.”

In truth, the band were (and remained) whatever you wanted them to be. ‘Only Love Can Break Your Heart’ wasn’t indie, dance or pop, but all of those things at the same time. No wonder it’s heralded as a Balearic classic today, aided by that Weatherall remix. They weren’t arch, ironic or kitsch either. In a musical environment that was still highly segmented, and which encouraged such tribalism, Saint Etienne confounded many because they didn’t subscribe to one narrow worldview. They were the suburban mods with magpie minds who adapted the musical larceny favoured by hip hop, which saw them chime with the post-1988 London club scene.

In interviews they’d wax lyrical about figures such as David Essex, The Monkees and Billy Fury as much as The Beach Boys, Bomb the Bass and Public Enemy. “I remember doing an interview with Melody Maker, I think it was,” recalls Stanley, himself a sometime music journalist who has written two grand compendiums on pop music, 2013’s ‘Yeah Yeah Yeah’ and its 2022 prequel, ‘Let’s Do It’. “We got hammered. We ended up talking about ‘Dazzle Ships’ by OMD and how it was a big influence on us. The interviewer just didn’t believe us. ‘No, no, no, everyone knows that’s a rotten album,’ he said. He thought we were taking the piss. And we weren’t. Now of course everyone thinks it’s a classic. People just had much more hardened ideas about what was good and bad, I think – certainly in the music press.”

“And then people didn’t believe that we could like Joy Division,” interjects Wiggs, “as if we’d made it up to sound cool.”

But then for Stanley and Wiggs – and thereafter Cracknell – it was never about being cool. Their second single, after all, was another impossibly modish cover of ‘Kiss and Make Up’ by indie popsters The Field Mice, mainstays of the twee Sarah Records scene. For Saint Etienne, it was all about the power of the imagination. Thanks to advances in technology – specifically sampling – the only limit to their sound was their own inventiveness. If they could dream it they, along with producer Ian Catt, the band’s secret weapon, would try to bring their visionary sketches to life.

“He [Catt] was really patient with us,” remembers Wiggs. “We didn’t have the terms to express ourselves, so we’d be saying ‘not like that’ or ‘can you not do the noodly bit?’. And we wanted to whack reverb over everything. “

“We were listening to a lot of dub!” Stanley reminisces.

He continues: “Talking about things being categorised, that [seeing where your imagination could take you] was only happening in hip hop. We thought if you applied that to pop music, or whatever, we wondered what it would sound like. That was it really. I suppose other people were using samplers, like Big Audio Dynamite, but not in the same way. We were just throwing everything at it. ‘Foxbase Alpha’, certainly, it was all the music we liked. We liked My Bloody Valentine, so we’d include feedback on things. If you hear the outtakes of ‘Foxbase Alpha’ that wouldn’t have made such a good album. It didn’t all work.”

Buoyed by the adventurous spirit into which they were born, their sound has always been an amalgam and, most importantly, one governed by no rules. Not least because, as non-musicians (Wiggs has since learned to play keys), they didn’t know what the rules were.

“If it sounded good, it worked,” says Stanley.

“Especially with samplers,” adds Wiggs. “You can take a sample from one record and another from another and technically they shouldn’t go together, but we’d take the chords or whatever…”

Cracknell: “And Ian would make it work.”

“Having learned a bit about harmonies and theories since then, I can see how you’re not supposed to do certain things,” smiles Wiggs.

Cracknell: “No limits.”

At which point the trio collapse into giggles, eventually explaining why any reference to the Belgian-Dutch dance-popsters 2 Unlimited always raises a smile – they were on ‘Top of the Pops’ performing ‘No Limit’ when Saint Etienne first appeared on the show (alongside David Bowie’s Tin Machine and The Grid).

This sonic wanderlust is apparent across all their albums. If ‘Foxbase Alpha’ and ‘So Tough’ are exemplars of their widescreen love of sunshine-flecked, sample-fuelled Balearic symphonies, then 1994’s ‘Tiger Bay’ was a stunning diversion into what would eventually be called folktronica. Elsewhere, they dipped into post-rock electronica (‘Sound of Water’), conceptual kitchen-sink vignettes (‘Tales from Turnpike House’), rousing disco and Euro dance (‘Words and Music’), the dreamlike textures of vaporwave (‘I’ve Been Trying To Tell You’) and even their own impressionistic take on ambient music (last year’s gently affecting ‘The Night’).

“It’s not a concept as such, that’s perhaps too extreme, but a framework,” Wiggs says of their relentless sonic snooping. “The most obvious one was ‘Tiger Bay’ which was folk meets techno. When you say it, it’s quite nice because it helps you come up with ideas.”

“And then ‘Tales from Turnpike House’, we thought we’d write an album where each song was set in a different flat within a tower block,” says Stanley. “That was quite freeing. You could write lyrics that were little scenarios. Being fans of music is like being in a playground. You can do what you want. There’s no point in limiting yourself but, having said that, we always liked our albums having some unifying idea so they’re not just random selections. That’s for the B-side collections! Random genres thrown together.”

Another curiosity of the band’s career is that despite – or, rather, because of – all these digressions there isn’t a recognised masterpiece in the Saint Etienne canon. This is no slight. In fact, reading over reviews and critiques of their 12 albums, it’s clear that each one has been heralded as “the band’s defining masterpiece” in various quarters.

“I think our fanbase has changed depending on the record,” suggests Cracknell.

“And some have stuck it out!” laughs Wiggs.

“We used to be really popular in Sweden until we made ‘Good Humour’ and then they went off us,” smiles Cracknell. “I think we’re all right there now. We’ve redeemed ourselves.”

Of course the real reason for their enduring popularity and sustained quality has been the fact that, at heart, all three are unabashed fans of music, particularly pop. They are fluent in its lingua franca and understand its potency, both visceral and factual. For Saint Etienne pop music is fun, serious, ludicrous and life-affirming. It is one of life’s greatest vessels of joy, celebration and knowledge. It is everything and nothing. As such, their music has always been welcoming, immersive and underpinned by a refreshing optimism. Or in Wiggs’s succinct approximation: “It’s 2 Unlimited and Motown.”

“I think all of us remembered what it was like looking at record covers and trying to get more information out of it,” explains Stanley. “Like sleevenotes.”

“We’d also throw everything at it in case we didn’t get a chance to make another record,” recalls Cracknell.

“Getting gold lamé suits was fun because you might not get the chance to do that again either,” Wiggs grins, recalling that first appearance on ‘Top of the Pops’.

Unsurprisingly, their salad days are mostly looked upon with affection. The early 90s were an exciting time, musically and culturally. Pop time was still progressing in a forward motion and the band sensed they were part of something substantial.

“We felt like we were making a bit of a difference, that we were doing something that was important,” says Cracknell.

“We definitely felt some kinship with other bands, like, you know, Pulp,” offers Wiggs.

They purposefully swerved Britpop. Despite being part of Stuart Maconie’s proto-Britpop feature in Select magazine (titled, playfully, “Who Do You Think You Are Kidding, Mr Cobain?”), when the dust settled and the movement became far more insular and parochial, Saint Etienne ducked out and went to record ‘Good Humour’ in Sweden. “A conscious decision,” says Stanley. “We just found all that flag waving really off-putting. And then the next one we did in Germany (‘Sound of Water’).

Of course, trying new things was always part of their mission statement. “We liked to inject a bit of a new flavour in there,” says Wiggs. “And it was always fun going away and doing a residential-type thing.” 

“Like a little family!” affirms Cracknell.

“You remember those times,” notes Wiggs. “So when people say we’ve soundtracked their lives, we’ve also soundtracked our lives. That’s what the albums do. We don’t listen to our own stuff – unless we have to – and when you do, it’s quite nice, the memories come back and you remember what you were doing then. Vaguely at least. It’s like a photograph.”

Recollections of foreign jaunts bring us back to ‘International’. Despite being routinely referred to as “the quintessential London band” – and there’s certainly some truth in that – Saint Etienne have long embraced all continental flavours. On the track ‘Girl 7’, from ‘Foxbase Alpha’, alongside mentions of the capital’s Primrose Hill, Boston Manor and Gospel Oak, are references to Staten Island, São Paulo and Costa Rica. Named after a French football team, the group have always been unashamedly international.

“Definitely,” says Stanley, if not forcibly, then with a little more vigour than anyone else on a blissful mid-summer’s day in East Sussex. “I mean, the ‘Kiss and Make Up’ cover was a European flag. We did a fan club EP and the artwork was flags with crosses through them. There’s always something to be found in other people’s cultures and countries that’s going to be interesting, so why would you ignore that? I don’t think any of our songs are overly political, but hopefully there’s a fairly common thread bubbling under that people can spot, so, yeah, it’s called ‘International’ for that reason.”

Musically, ‘International’ brings the band back to where they started too. Cracknell points out that there’s a bit of everything from their previous 11 albums packed into its lean 42 minutes. It’s a magical, uplifting listen. A fitting goodbye.

“As bookends they’re nice,” explains Stanley. “We did have that in mind. ‘Brand New Me’ is clearly a nod back to ‘Nothing Can Stop Us’ and ‘Spring’ – that sound from ‘Foxbase Alpha’. I thought like anybody we’d get five years. Like David Bowie said. We got a lot longer than that. We got 35 years! A completely different song!”

The album is also a triumph of collaboration, featuring songs recorded with Nick Heyward, Tom Rowlands (The Chemical Brothers), Jez Williams (Doves), Erol Alkan, Orbital’s Paul Hartnoll and Confidence Man’s Janet Planet. 

“Adam Ant was on the longlist,” says Stanley. “That would have been nice. Don’t know if he would have said yes. Sparks didn’t get back to us. But everyone else did. And everyone else said yes.”

In these uncertain times, such co-operation and inclusivity (hallmarks of Saint Etienne) are an anchor and a boon. It’s a shame that we won’t get to hear more music from their productive minds but we do have 12 studio albums, countless compilations and remix projects with which to remember them by. Their parting – on their terms; no messy musical differences, deaths or record companies pulling the rug – is in keeping with their career.

“We never squabble anyway,” says Cracknell.

“We’ll save that for the final shows. It’ll be full Spinal Tap!” notes Wiggs, alluding to Saint Etienne’s intention to sign off next year with a series of dates, possibly a tour. Their own ‘Last Waltz’ perhaps?

“Yeah, let’s get Neil Diamond out on stage with us,” says Stanley, ever the effusive pop lover.

Back at the kitchen table, the scrapbooks get one last viewing. The reason for Stanley not being able to remember performing alongside World Party becomes clear – he missed that gig. 

Photos of Cracknell in a vibrant Hysteric Glamour suit featuring a ‘Partridge Family’ cartoon (“We got it in Japan. We were let loose in their factory”) prompt further memories of wearing it when she appeared on ‘The Big Breakfast’ with the Zig and Zag puppets. “It was the best day ever. I loved it.”

Wiggs then debates whether they were ignored by presenters Richard Madeley and Judy Finnigan when the band rocked up on ‘This Morning’. He thinks they did. Stanley disagrees.

“No, Richard said something nice,” Stanley recollects. “I remember that ITN newsreader. God, what was his name? What programme would we have been on where he’d have been on? Alastair Stewart, that’s it. He said: ‘What a great band!’ What the hell programme was that? Richard and Judy was funny, because it was up in Liverpool at the Albert Dock and it was Halloween. I think we did ‘He’s on the Phone’ and the whole backdrop was kids dressed up as ghosts…”

Cracknell: “And bats hanging from the set.”

“Quite surreal,” says Stanley. “Probably on YouTube.”

A photo with the late ‘Supermarket Sweep’ presenter Dale Winton heralds another memory. “We did a Christmas gig at the London Palladium,” Cracknell says. “He came onstage with a shopping trolley full of presents, which he threw into the crowd. He kept calling me Susan. ‘Darling Susan, Susan, where’s my dressing room, Susan?’”

Finally, fittingly, Cracknell recalls a “brilliant journey from a festival to the airport with The Prodigy. I sat next to Keith; he was lovely. A little sweetie”.

“We played Roskilde,” recalls Stanley, “and we were in a tent with Björk, Orbital, One Dove and The Prodigy were on last – we were in the middle. I just sat there all day watching them. It was incredible.”

Who has a bad word to say about Saint Etienne? Friends and family, they have it all. It really has been a wonderful life. 

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Read our Saint Etienne Dancefloor Starting XI here

This article first appeared in issue eight of Disco Pogo.

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Nothing can stop Balearic DJ Steve KIW from falling for Saint Etienne’s acid house-flecked pop…

At their best, Saint Etienne are as whimsical as Syd Barrett-era Pink Floyd and as knowing as Blur, nodding and winking, celebrating a green and pleasant land without ever crossing the line into flag-shagging. If The Kinks were the ‘Village Green Preservation Society’, Bob Stanley, Pete Wiggs and Sarah Cracknell are the Campaign for Real Ale twinned with the Acid House Cycling Club – children of a time when teenagers spent evenings in their bedrooms reading Smash Hits before heading to the Ritzy.

And they’ve never strayed too far from clubland. ‘Foxbase Alpha’ gave us the Balearic vibes of ‘Only Love Can Break Your Heart’ and a nod towards house with ‘Stoned to Say the Least’. Remixes from the then up-and-comers Pete Heller and Andrew Weatherall came armed with cheeky samples and “the confidence of ignorance”. Aphex Twin, Masters at Work and Colleen ‘Cosmo’ Murphy were among those who followed, each adding their magic to Saint Etienne’s wonderful catalogue.

Forty years have passed since their first recording, ‘We Survived’, inspired by Paul Hardcastle’s ‘19’ and sampling Ken Livingstone lambasting Margaret Thatcher. The song only made it on to vinyl in 2015 but it represents Saint Etienne’s career perfectly, showing how they’re happy to borrow from the moment and mould in their own image. Now Stanley, Wiggs and Cracknell are going out on their own terms, having done far more than merely survive.

In fact, their past couple of albums have been their strongest for years and picking favourites isn’t easy but, like the Platini-era football side from whom they took their name, this Saint Etienne starting 11 of their best dancefloor moments cannot be ignored.

‘Only Love Can Break Your Heart’ (A Mix of Two Halves, Andrew Weatherall/Masters at Work Dub) 1990/1991

A classic, obviously. But although a debate could be had about whose is the best mix, Andrew Weatherall’s is undoubtedly the most loved (“The DJ eases a spliff from his lyrical lips and smilingly orders cease”). Weatherall took the typical 12-inch song structure - with the vocal coming first - and flipped it on its head with a ‘version’ comprising a lolloping break, a melody-humming harmonica and samples of Jean ‘Binta’ Breeze and then added Moira Lambert’s vocal in what conventionally would be part two. 

Meanwhile, over in the US Warner Bros commissioned Masters at Work. ‘Little’ Louie Vega and Kenny ‘Dope’ Gonzalez turned in a handful of ace mixes, and none were bigger or better than their dub. 

‘Kiss and Make Up’ (Midsummer Madness Mix, Pete Heller) 1990 

‘Kiss…’ is another Saint Etienne track that benefited from Boy’s Own participation. Bocca Juniors’ Pete Heller’s remixes, emphasising every instrument and new phase, and bringing the beats to the front, gave the track a new direction and made it a worthy successor to Terry Farley’s mix of Primal Scream’s Come Together (which Heller had engineered). The rather downbeat indie-esque vocals are handled by Donna Savage – keeping with Bob Stanley’s plan (before Sarah Cracknell joined) to record each song with different singers – but everything around them shines, especially the occasional piano lines. ‍

‘Filthy’/‘Studio Kinda Filthy’ 1991 

Echoing the grittier sound of acts such as Massive Attack and The Sindecut, this was the edgiest of the band’s early releases. It’s so raw that it’s easy to imagine the needle collecting crap as the record spins. Q-Tee’s effortless rap cuts through a lo-fi production that hinges upon a grimy drum loop, a deep, deep bassline, a heavily sampled guitar riff (Afrique’s ‘House of the Rising Funk’) and some vibraphone, allowing Saint Etienne to make the jump from indie-pop pretenders to hip hop. There is barely a hook, let alone a chorus, yet it stands up against anything from Bristol, particularly in its dub form. Q-Tee returned to the fold for the excellent ‘Calico’, a worthy sequel. 

Cola Boy: ‘7 Ways to Love’ (white label mix) 1991 

Should this count? And is it worthy of inclusion? A resounding yes. Stanley and Wiggs gave it away, and Cola Boy remain a one-hit wonder, but this is a perfect time capsule record: an E anthem, euphoric, real hands-in-the-air stuff, horns blaring, everyone reaching for the lasers. And, clearly, Saint Etienne agree: they’ve reclaimed it and added new remixes for a 2025 audience.

‘Speedwell’ (Flying Mix, Dean Thatcher) 1991 

Flying Records’ Dean Thatcher made use of Weatherall and Heller’s templates, resulting in a slice of Balearic brilliance. With their breathless beeps, a vocal stolen from Sandee’s ‘Notice Me’, a rolling break and some proper Italo-style piano – so very 1991 – either of Thatcher’s mixes could be the sister tune to ‘Only Love…’. His Project Mix is tougher, with a heavier breakbeat, but it was the Flying Mix that proved popular. It should have been a classic, but it was overshadowed by its illustrious predecessors. It’s time for the Balearic crew to dig it out again.

‘Nothing Can Stop Us’ (Ken/Lou Dub, Masters at Work) 1992

As the MAW remix of ‘Only Love…’ put Saint Etienne in all the right boxes, it made sense for Warners to turn to them again – and with the ‘Ken/Lou Dub’ they delivered another banger. Cracknell, now a permanent member of the band, kicks things off and as her stammering intro gives way, MAW do their thing, introducing tough beats, organ keys and twinkling keys. Nothing can stop them indeed.

‘Like a Motorway’ (Chekhov Warp Mix, The Dust Brothers) 1994 

The 12-inch is possibly the best remix package of Saint Etienne’s career, comprising the original song, plus remixes from an up-and-coming David Holmes, Autechre and a dub by some other new kids, The Dust Brothers. With its familiar Jungle Brothers sample, big beats, bleeping bass and rolling breaks, their dub remains a high point for all concerned, yet someone, somewhere opted to leave Tom Rowlands’ and Ed Simons vocal on the promo. Ridiculous. Along with ‘Hobart Paving’, ‘Like a Motorway’ marks the apogee of Saint Etienne’s songwriting and the Dust Brothers’ vocal mix is death disco at its best. More refined than the big beats of the south, and more restrained than the anthems that were dominating elsewhere, it is an absolute stormer.

‘4:35am in the Morning’ (Talkin’ Blues Mix, Kid Loco) 1998

Having flirted with commercial remixes in the mid 90s, Saint Etienne returned to the artists who would retain the essence of their sound for their brief spell on Creation. A sample of Minnie Riperton’s ‘Les Fleur’ – or something very close – sets the tone for this beautifully sung trip hop track. With his trademark rolling beats, an offbeat triangle and some subtle trumpets, Kid Loco captures the dawn vibes perfectly. A couple of years later, when Saint Etienne were fleetingly signed to Mantra, fellow trip hopper Aim remixed the epic ‘How We Used to Live’ and his mixes are equally essential.

‘Sylvie’ (Friday Night Boiler Mix, Saint Etienne versus Faze Action) 1998

Faze Action gave Saint Etienne a pair of straight up nu-disco-flavoured smashers, very much in the style of the Lee brothers’ acclaimed ‘In the Trees’. Of the two it’s the Friday Night Boiler Mix that rocks hardest. Almost jazz-funk in places, and very house, it has aged exceptionally well: the synth lines, scratchy guitar riff, rolling rhythms and smooth bassline settle into an incessant groove. Nuphonic had – still has – a distinct sound, which this record encapsulates.

‘Dive’ (Colorama & Shawn Lee Remix) 2017

‘Dive’ is simply a brilliant upbeat pop song completed by one of Saint Etienne’s happiest choruses and set to a house-tempo bossa nova rhythm. It was handed to Greg Wilson and Derek Kaye for remixing, but the pick of the bunch is by the song’s producer, Shawn Lee, and co-writer, Carwyn ‘Colorama’ Ellis. Their commercially minded disco track is a monster that, while not among Saint Etienne’s better-known releases, sits alongside ‘He’s on the Phone’ and ‘Join Our Club’ as a pop-tastic gem. An instrumental mix by Matt Berry hits the spot too.

‘Alone Together’ (Hove Lawns Sunset Remix, Pete Wiggs) 2025

Pete Wiggs can often be spotted walking near Hove beach, which, as locals know, is blessed with incredible sunsets. Maybe it’s not Ibiza, but with the pebbles glistening, the low tides, paddle boarders drifting across the horizon and a mix of yoga mums and joggers pootling along the seafront, it’s easy to believe that a gorgeous south coast evening inspired this mix. This isn’t one for the dancefloors – it’s one for the beach.

Super Sub

‘Pond House’ 2021

The band didn’t release any singles from 2021’s sample-dominated album ‘I’ve Been Trying to Tell You’, so the tracks didn’t reach the audience they deserved. By utilising Samantha Mumba, Honeyz and – ahem! – The Lighthouse Family, and focusing on compositions rather than songs, the set divided opinion among diehard fans but is beloved by those of a Balearic disposition. Despite, or perhaps because of, Pete Wiggs’s creative use of a Natalie Imbruglia sample, ‘Pond House’ is the best song. Indeed it’s right up there with their very best, period. No remixes were necessary; it’s just perfect as it is.

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Read our interview with Saint Etienne here

This article first appeared in issue eight of Disco Pogo.

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Or what happened when Luke Una and Richard ‘Parrot’ Barratt went on a ramble in the Peak District countryside. Looking back over a shared 40-year history, the pair reflect upon the influence of the Steel City’s rich musical lineage on their careers, why Parrot’s Crooked Man releases all sound the same – and dissect the curious phenomenon that is Ibiza Final Boss. Daniel Dylan Wray accompanies the duo on their idyllic stroll and discovers that “some of the early house records are almost closer to the end of the Second World War than they are to now….”

Luke Una and Richard ‘Parrot’ Barratt could not be more different as people. Una is a Manchester DJ who has flourished in the social media age, a self-confessed “peacock” who loves attention and spins in clubs all over the world. Parrot gave up DJing more than 30 years ago, never sets foot in nightclubs, doesn’t have social media and lives a quiet and enigmatic life. “We are the total antithesis of one another,” says Una, when the two meet in the picturesque village of Hathersage in the Peak District. 

However, personality differences aside, there is a deep connection between the two that stretches back 40 years to Sheffield. Parrot – along with Matt Swift and Jon Mattan, plus the DJ, Winston Hazel – had just started a hugely influential night: Jive Turkey. It was one of the first clubs to play imported house records in the UK and it was where Una had his brain rewired. “I was reborn there,” he says. “The most important club in my journey that followed.” 

Jive Turkey ran from 1985 until 1992 but when dance music got harder, faster and druggier, Parrot bailed out and hasn’t DJed since. But he’d already moved into making music. He’s a pioneer of bleep techno – via his collaboration with Cabaret Voltaire’s Richard H Kirk in Sweet Exorcist – and had a “fluke” hit with the pop outfit Funky Worm, even appearing on ‘Top of the Pops’. During the 1990s he started his own label, Earth records, and then joined the leftfield electronic pop outfit, The All Seeing I, with Dean Honer and Jason Buckle, once again landing himself on TV, bothering the charts, and collaborating with Philip Oakey, Jarvis Cocker and Tony Christie. 

By 2012, Parrot was releasing music under the alias Crooked Man, undertaking a longstanding creative relationship with Róisín Murphy. He’s now three albums deep as Crooked Man with his latest – the superb ‘Crooked Stile’ – one of this year’s standout long-players. The first release from the album was a pummelling 11-minute reimagining of ‘Don’t Leave Me This Way’ by Thelma Houston: all filthy bass and metallic crunch, delivered with a raw, unrelenting and driving rhythm that – coupled with Houston’s irresistible vocal – sounds as tough as it does melodic. The other single is simply titled ‘Cunts’ and is a squelchy industrial acid version of Jarvis Cocker’s track ‘Cunts Are Still Running the World.’

To talk about this long and storied history, as well as the pair’s relationship, connection, differences – along with tangents on everything from hooliganism to TikTok techno via farm labouring – two of the most singular figures in electronic music trundle off into the hills and sheep shit-filled fields for a sprawling chat. 

Disco Pogo: How did you guys meet? 

Luke Una: “I got introduced to Parrot and Winnie as an entity, if you like. 1985 is when Jive Turkey started and I was working at the Hallamshire Hotel pub. I bought some speed off one of the guys from Clock DVA and ended up going. It was either the opening night or the next one. Those two became unlikely heroes very early on.” 

Parrot: “What do you mean unlikely? Fuck me.” 

Luke: “What I mean is, no one else in the world would have known about these two at this point. Because in those early days, it [Jive Turkey] was a very small number of people. But it’s where I first heard house music, where I first heard electronic drum machines, where I saw Cabaret Voltaire perform for ‘The Old Grey Whistle Test’. Parrot and Winnie, I always associate with opening me up to this whole new world of music. It was the shock of the new. It was like this is the sound. This is everything I love. These records sounded so revolutionary and incredible. I was really in awe of these two. You probably won’t remember me because I was five stone lighter.” 

Parrot: “Where I remember Luke from is about 10 years later, from going to [Una’s Manchester club night] Electric Chair. For us in Sheffield, at the time, we’d not gone underground, we’d gone positively subterranean. The only nights we went to were little dos in people’s houses, 20 or 30 people. We’d become so alienated from what happened with nightclubs and superclubs and all that. It wasn’t our thing. Raif [Collis, of Kabal in Sheffield and lifelong friend of Una’s] used to run minibuses to Electric Chair and it was like a home from home. It was like Luke had somehow got Sheffield from 1989 and plopped it in Manchester [in 1995].”  

Disco Pogo: Was Sheffield an influence on what you ended up doing with Electric Chair, Luke?

Luke: “100%. Parrot calls me the Pennine mongrel. I left Sheffield for Manchester in 1986-’87 but I love the fact that I came out of that stripped-back, raw funk music sound in Sheffield. I was going back a lot between ’85 and ’90 and there was definitely a different sound going on. It was more underground. There was also a stoicism in Sheffield. When you put your head above the pulpit and try to be something you’re not, you don’t get a tick in the box in Sheffield. You’re seen as a bit of knobhead, but their militancy in sound was something I loved. All the various different micro movements in house music didn’t really affect what these guys were doing because they were much more militant and no compromise. Parrot is like the Mark E Smith of dance music, and he didn’t like the bullshit of all this cheesy music coming through. I loved that about those guys and that element has always been at the heart of what we did at Electric Chair. We were mongrels and I liked all these different elements that we brought to the pot, on top of what we borrowed and dragged over to Manchester.”

Disco Pogo: Did Sheffield feel isolated and in a bubble to you, Parrot? Just head down and do your own thing? 

Parrot: “I’m still doing that, really. What happened with dance music that crystalised in ‘88/’89 into acid house was kind of accidental to us. Me and Winston were just doing what we were doing, and we played a lot of those records because they were some of the best around. Then, obviously, ecstasy came over and everything went bananas. The first couple of years of that were fucking brilliant, like, honest to God, amazing, probably the best times I’ve ever had in nightclubs with music. But because it was so good, it attracted so many people. Younger and younger people and it shunted a lot of the old farts out the way. The dancers left, a lot of the Black people went. It just changed the crowd from something racially mixed to really white, really young, loads of boys with the shirts off, wanting fast music all the time. We played a lot of street soul and we still carried on playing old funk records. What Luke’s saying about the Sheffield sound, I think it actually runs beyond anything to do with a sound. It’s an attitude. And it’s not just like me and Winston that have got that attitude. Richard and Mal [Cabaret Voltaire] had it, Jarvis has it, [Richard] Hawley’s got it. Even though they make completely different music. It’s just something to do with a mentality which is: I’m doing what I’m fucking doing. Everything in Sheffield, as far as I’m concerned, starts in 1973 when Cabaret Voltaire formed.” 

Luke: “Is that when they formed? I didn’t realise it was that early.” 

Parrot: “Yeah. In the early 80s, when they went a bit more dancey I was like, ‘Fucking hell, I’m right into this.’ And then you find out that they started in 1973. When you’re young, something being from 10 years before is like the fucking stone age. The fact that they’d been going that long, predating punk rock, was mental. They were there on the very first night at Jive Turkey. I didn’t know them and they were like, ‘This is good, come and be in our gang. Come to our studio. Come and make some music with us.’ It was fucking brilliant.” 

Luke: “I get all that. There was an attitude from Sheffield. Manchester was a lot cockier, a bit more northern Cockneys. They’re a bit more confident.”

Parrot: “They’re Mancs, yeah. Gobshites.” 

Luke: “And I love both, I really do. But I think there was a golden era in Sheffield where there was a sound which was distinctly coming out of the city. I remember going to The Stone Roses at Spike Island and Frankie Bones or someone like that was DJing, and he shouted out Sheffield. Because if you speak to any American DJ who’s worth their salt, they always reference Sheffield. Like Bristol, it had a sound which was unique.”

Parrot: “I think the thing is that there’s never been a scene in Sheffield. It’s a scene of individuals. It’s village-y and it always has been. Manchester is big enough to have a scene. Greater Manchester is a proper city.” 

Luke: “It was tighter knit in Sheffield. I love to wind people up about the Sheffield house music [being] first thing. Obviously, it’s irrelevant, no one actually really fucking cares. But without a shadow of a doubt, the influence of American underground house music coming into Sheffield there became this weird alchemy. Going back to electronic music with the Cabs, Human League, that had a very punk ethos and it’s kind of remarkable. In many ways, it’s more revolutionary than Factory but it probably doesn’t get the attention. But that attitude can be a curse as well, because I think maybe success is looked at differently in Sheffield. I’ve always been fascinated by you, Parrot, because you’re this farmhand Yorkshireman and there is definitely a Sheffield culture which does not partake in the strutting Manc showing off thing. They don’t like it; it’s seen as a kind of cringe. That’s in the blood.”

Parrot: “You’ve got to enjoy having the piss taken out of you, if you live in Sheffield, and enjoy taking the piss out of other people. What you were saying earlier about tall poppies in Sheffield, I mean, you’re fucking setting yourself up for a bit of rib-tickling there.”

Disco Pogo: Do you hear Sheffield in Parrot’s music today, Luke?

Luke: “Totally. When I listen to your music now, I can hear it fully, the lineage going right back. When I hear a Crooked Man record, I can smell it, feel it and connect it to that whole era.” 

Parrot: “Well, you are what you are, aren’t you? It’s almost like outsider art in a way. You just do what you do. And I’m very limited musically. I have got a joke that basically I’ve been making the same record for nearly 40 years. Because I actually can’t fucking play anything. I can’t sing; I’m fucking incompetent, musically. So they come out and they sound the same. Even if I want to sound different, they sound the fucking same.” 

Luke: “It’s funny, actually, I’ve just been reading Rick Rubin’s book (‘The Creative Act: A Way of Being’). It’s very woo woo but I find it really interesting. He talks about this very same thing, that he was a non-musician, an amateur. But actually, I think sometimes that is a brilliant thing, because you don’t want too many musicians leading on everything. You kind of need someone to be quite militant about it who’s not necessarily a musician.”

Parrot: “I hate musicians. Knobheads.”

Luke: “It’s funny about you, because you are this very esoteric individual who 100% does things your way but you also had a bit of a peacock in you. You did like your clothes and you were a very well-dressed gentleman. Because I have that. I love clothes. And I loved that about you lot. I remember in about 1984 or ‘85 and I was down John Street and I was going to the [Sheffield Utd] match. And most people at football wore donkey jackets, quite trampy. Football casuals were happening, but…”

Parrot: “Don’t use that word, Luke. We say trendies in Sheffield.” 

Luke: “It’s true, it was trendies. So, this one afternoon these lads were walking down and some of them had long hair, with pastels on, one of them had sunglasses with a Walkman on and these mad clothes. I was like, ‘Wow, who the fuck are they?’ They were like aliens. I’d never seen anything like it. And they were these Sheffield United hooligans who were going around Europe, robbing, and they’d all go to Ibiza. This was four years before any of this acid house or Balearic stuff. And [Ibiza veteran] Nancy Noise said that the look in acid house, that whole thing came from those Manchester and Sheffield lads, who were all the wrong ‘uns. The hooligan thing was weird because it was a counter culture. It wasn’t skinheads in Stone Island being right-wing thugs, it was these lads wearing weird fucking clothes. Nancy said this lot were the most influential people of that scene and then they were coming back to Sheffield when Winnie and Parrot were DJing after picking up ecstasy, so they were hugely pivotal. But they don’t get talked about. They were bringing some of the first Es back into the UK.”

Parrot: “They were bohemians. They really were. They went all over fucking Europe, not just Ibiza, and they came back changed. They came back with their minds opened. But they were still businessmen and they were still nasty fuckers. They basically policed it [Jive Turkey] for a bit. Any young lads getting out of line in there, dicking about, they got put in their place immediately. So a lot of the little fucking twats with their shirts off, it kept them shunted to one side. But eventually the pressure was too much. We used to DJ in a broom cupboard and every now and again, I’d stick my head out to see what was going on, and you notice that the Black people were disappearing, and it would be less every week. And then you just look out one day and it’s like, what the fuck happened?”

Disco Pogo: The era we’re talking about was a tough time for Sheffield: economic and industrial decline, unemployment, miners’ strikes, etc. Did any of this register with you both or were you in your own little world? 

Parrot: “I was so far up my own arse in terms of what I wanted to do, which was basically going out all the time and listening to music and finding clothes. My brother-in-law was a miner on strike, and there was a lot of heroin around and the steel works were going down the pan. But it all completely passed me by. Honest to God, even though I am quite left wing. You’re just a fucking little twat doing what you’re doing in your little space. Plus, looking back on it, a lot of that death of industry and post-industrial wasteland opened up a lot of space for little people like us to trot into and put a party on.”

Luke: “I read this Karl Marx quote the other day, that I’m paraphrasing: ‘People make history, but they don’t always know the history they make.’ When I look back at Sheffield, you need the mad kids doing their own thing and removing themselves from life and doing their own little thing in their ecosystem. That, to me, is where the magic happens. Unless people did that in these towns coming out of a recession or Thatcherism, a lot of this wouldn’t have happened. And I don’t think at the time you’re conscious of it. There was never a game plan.”

Parrot: “No plan at all. I never expected to make a living out of being a DJ or making music. I couldn’t imagine that. I had no idea what I wanted to do. I was expelled from school. I did a Youth Opportunities scheme as a gravedigger and then worked as a landscape gardener.” 

Disco Pogo: Why did you quit DJing, Parrot?

Parrot: “I was an accidental DJ anyway. So it didn’t feel like, ‘Oh my God, what am I gonna do?’ It was like, ‘Oh, that’s done.’ There were better DJs, younger DJs. I can’t walk down the road with headphones on while listening to music. If I’ve got music on, and it’s music I like, I’m listening to it. I can’t have it on in the background. If it’s good, I’m listening to it, and that’s all I’m doing. If it’s shit, I’m going up the wall or trying to get out or trying to smash the record. It has such an effect on me. So listening to two fucking records at the same time and trying to blend them together? I couldn’t do it. It was time to move out of the way. We were over. Also, back then, it used to be a bit different in every town. You could literally go to another town to go out and hear completely different records and people would dress differently. I think that’s possibly one of the first things about all the superclub stuff to have really fucking set my teeth on edge. It was the sameness of it all. Same DJs travelling about, people wearing the same clothes, listening to the same records. It felt like a lot of these tiny little ecosystems were dying off.”

Luke: “You kind of disappeared completely around then. But I was probably more evangelical about it – probably because I was also taking a lot of ecstasy. The way I look at it is slightly different. While that did all happen, and that was a negative, there was this tsunami of beigeness that took out the nuance and the dancers. But for me, what I loved about the acid house thing, and ecstasy, was that experience blew my mind and it kicked the doors off, so all the rules had gone. I was coming back to my flat in Hulme with friends, and they were playing records. Whatever it was: Talk Talk, a Brazilian record, a street soul record. Because I was high, I just thought, ‘This is fucking unbelievable.’ So I started listening to all this new music. Sheffield wasn’t Balearic, it was much more a shebeen meets Chicago, so I guess I became more Balearic because I was listening to all these records. There was a real eclecticism that happened because of ecstasy and acid house. What became good about it wasn’t necessarily those acid house records, but, for me, it helped my wings just spread. I listened to music I would never have listened to before.” 

Disco Pogo: Parrot, do you think you may have gone a bit more Balearic, like Luke, if that had taken off a bit more in Sheffield? 

Luke: “If he’d have taken a bit more Es and whizz he would have done.” 

Disco Pogo: So, is it fair to say Crooked Man has zero outside influence? 

Luke: “I can tell that, because his new tune [‘Don’t Leave Me This Way’] I fucking love it, but it’s such a bastard to mix. Nowadays, a lot of DJs will provide you with 16-bar intros and outros. But this track is mental, it’s big, it’s massive, it’s incredible. I don’t know how the fuck you’ve done that. It’s really hard to play something before and after it. You can tell it’s not a DJ-friendly thing. It is just a sound you’ve got. The Crooked Man thing, and he’ll hate this bit now, but I’m going to say it. I think this is linked to the stoic farmhand element. He disappeared from DJing and then he did these amazing records on Earth, which became very cult with people like Optimo getting obsessed by them, as was I. You did loads of projects but then with Crooked Man when I played those records, every fucker was like, ‘What is this?’ I noticed this thing was happening, with your Sean Johnstons and your Weatheralls, all these people going, ‘Who is this fucking Crooked Man?’ No one really put two and two together. There’s a rawness and sonic bigness of those records. There’s a bit of hooliganism to it. I mean, the new one, it’s quite an out of order record, it sort of shouldn’t work. You’re not a people-pleaser. Good art, proper art, real art, will never happen when you’re a people-pleaser. It just doesn’t happen.”

Parrot: “I’ve never heard a Crooked Man track in a club and I wouldn’t like to. He’s saying they sound good but, to me, they wouldn’t. Once the record leaves the studio, I never want to hear it again, ever, because I just feel intense embarrassment about all the bits that I got wrong.” 

DP: Is the studio the place for you? 

Parrot: “In the studio, I sit on the fucking settee. Fat Dave [David Lewin, engineer] is over there at the business end of everything, making things. He’s a proper musician but also a technician. He doesn’t even like me coming into his part of the studio and standing behind him. So he’s quite happy to have me sit on the settee. I’m on there with my eyes closed, imagining it’s 1989, I’m in a club: would I like this record? That’s what I do. I’m totally stuck in the 80s. That was my heyday in terms of clothes, music, that entire decade. Then you get to 1989 and it all coalesced and for a while it was fucking brilliant. I remember Mark Brydon (Moloko, Chakk) coming up to me in the broom cupboard and he was just shaking like, ‘it doesn’t get any better, it doesn’t get any better’.”

Luke: “That’s really interesting. It’s weird that this thing that started with 200 people in places like Sheffield and Nottingham is now a multi-trillion-pound business. It rules the world. We’ve got what we call TikTok techno, and if you think it was bad back then, believe me, some of the sounds coming out now. It’s like fucking fairground techno at 160bpm with these bad pop samples. It’s fucking terrible. You look at it now and you think, ‘Wow, it’s gone.’ But what I’m noticing these last few years is all the weird kids coming through again. These mad, esoteric, oddball kids. I think what’s happening is there is a mini, quiet revolution bubbling where people are seeing fucking [TikTok character] Ibiza Final Boss and pushing back. We’ve reached proper pop will eat itself territory. This is almost ‘Black Mirror’ on acid times 10. We have reached peak EDM meets TikTok meets the worst cultural elements. It’s beyond comprehension. But there’s a reaction to that. You go to places like We Out Here and it’s just full of incredible youngsters who are digging all this new music. So I’m always hopeful that it goes full circle. It’ll restabilise and go underground and probably feel a lot better again.”

Parrot: “I guess when the money goes out of it, it’s back down to doing it for a laugh or to enjoy yourself. Or if you just want to hear the music loud or have a dance or a sing. I mean, that’s something I fucking hate: why don’t people play more records with vocals on them? It does my head in. It’s like the Thelma Houston track, looking through the DJ reports and you’ve got kids going, ‘Where’s the dub? Where’s the instrumental?’ It’s like, are you actually completely missing the point of this track?”

Luke: “I think vocals are returning with a vengeance. The combination of ketamine, post-Covid impatience, young men not understanding what should be a very loving environment and it being very fucking alpha male, very Final Boss. At Houghton festival, I played a lot of vocal records and it fucking rammed out. That is returning.”

Parrot: “There is a danger this is just becoming chuntering old men, isn’t it? We are sitting here in 2025 talking about 1985. If it were 1985, we’d be talking about 1945, which is fucking mental.” 

Luke: “Some of the early house records are almost closer to the end of the Second World War than they are to now. That blows me away.” 

Parrot: “Fuck me.” 

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This article first appeared in issue eight of Disco Pogo.

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From DJ to producer, party host to curator and presenter to remixer, Colleen Murphy sports many hats. Having just released her latest ‘Balearic Breakfast’ compilation,
she tells Chal Ravens about her new musical supergroup, searching for the perfect copy of ‘Pet Sounds’ and the superfan who calls her the Captain. “It’s fun,” she says, “especially when the people on the dancefloor can experience something that is joyous…”

Colleen ‘Cosmo’ Murphy is a woman of exceptionally high standards. Her long career might be summed up as an endless quest for the best – the best records, the best pressings of those records, and the best sound systems to play them on. Her ears are attuned to things that most of ours aren’t. All of this sometimes produces strange results – such as the seven copies of ‘Pet Sounds’ currently housed in her record room, each procured in her search for the perfect pressing. Because even the smallest imperfection “just sounds so awful when it’s amplified”, she says, shuddering at the thought. 

How to explain the many different hats worn by Murphy, an American who has lived in east London for about 25 years. She offers “musical educator and curator” as her job title – which isn’t wrong but doesn’t quite capture the enterprising nature of her CV, which spans more than 35 years of radio, DJing, producing, remixing, party-hosting, writing and – most recently – starting a band with a few friends from Hot Chip and LCD Soundsystem – as you do. 

“I was very embarrassed about it for a long time, if I’m really honest – all the different things I’ve done and how they didn’t fit,” she explains, sitting between two ceiling-height shelves of records in her canalside home. “People still say to me, ‘I didn’t know you knew David!’ I like that, actually, because I do a lot of things.”

David Mancuso comes up a lot. He’s in the room with us now, in fact, looking dapper yet ethereal in a framed portrait on the wall. Many first heard of Murphy via the buzz around Lucky Cloud, a London incarnation of the party first thrown by the American in his New York loft in 1970. Founded with his approval and oversight in 2003, the Sunday gatherings replicated the Loft’s pin-sharp sound and intimate atmosphere, opening up a portal into the pre-history of clubbing. (It’s a party, not a club, as acolytes will tell you.) Since her mentor died in 2016, Murphy’s mission has been to keep that flame burning.

Her attachment to the Loft’s strict idealism, along with a passion for finding great records and playing them to other people, has often put her in the strange position of being both behind the times and ahead of the crowd. When she started playing with Mancuso in the 90s, the Loft was attended by a select few heads – many assumed it had shut down years before. Later, along with a revival of interest in the Loft, came the vinyl revival of the 2010s, the boom in archival reissues and the vogue for listening bars: Murphy was ready and waiting for all of it.

Now 57, she’s more popular and busier than ever, with a new cohort of Loft devotees flocking to the quarterly party, seeking the antidote to commercial clubs, over-hyped DJs and cruddy sound systems. High standards are maintained at home, too. Her husband, Adam Dewhurst – a music manager and the founder and selector of Trojan Sound System – makes a virtuosic cup of coffee as Murphy settles into conversation in her record room. It’s here, surrounded by a mere 10,000 records, that she hosts Balearic Breakfast, a show that started on Worldwide FM during the pandemic and now continues weekly on Mixcloud. She chose the name for its musical vagueness. “Balearic, to me, is just music that takes you out of yourself. It could be a euphoric dance track, it could be spiritual jazz, it could be something that relates to the Balearic canon in terms of what DJs like Alfredo and José Padilla played, how that was reinterpreted in the UK… it’s very open-ended.” 

It’s a testament to her authority as a record digger that Balearic Breakfast has just spawned its fourth compilation, recently released via Heavenly. The double vinyl combines newer songs previously only available digitally with a handful of rarer cuts, including 70s spiritual jazz from British outfit Paz, sun-kissed psychedelia from Paqua, and the trippy 12-inch mix of Gloria-Ann Taylor’s soul epic ‘Love Is a Hurtin’ Thing’ – all Loft-adjacent tracks that are either expensive or hard to find on vinyl.

Not many radio shows can boast a spin-off compilation series, but not many have such a dedicated listenership of serious heads, either – they even sit in for Murphy when she’s travelling, submitting mixes to fill the scheduling gap. “Most of these listeners do not have a career in music and they know their stuff. Some of them have specialties,” she explains. “I’ve really learned so much from them.” One superfan runs a blog that archives all of Murphy’s episodes and media appearances, referring to her simply as “the Captain”. Another flew from New Zealand to Australia to see her DJ, informing her that the show helped him recover after a bad accident. “I’ve cried a few times,” she nods. “I look at it as a family affair.” In person, Murphy seems like an open book: quick to laugh, emotionally switched-on and – how to put this? – surprisingly well-adjusted for someone who owns seven copies of ‘Pet Sounds’. (She also has fantastic hair – again, playing against type.)

For much of her career, she has been the only woman in the room – on college radio, on the floor of NYC record shop Dance Tracks and in nightclub green rooms through the 90s. She reveals that her DJ bookings dried up when she had her daughter, Ariana, in 2004: “My agent dropped me. No one else would take me on.” Later, she asked “a very popular woman DJ” if her agency might consider signing her. “She said: ‘No, we already have a woman.’ And it was a woman who said it!” Even well into the 00s, it was rare to see more than one woman on a line-up: “We were pitted against each other – because if one person got on, you knew you weren’t gonna get the gig.” 

But whether it was unconscious bias or outright misogyny, the worst of the sexism she’s experienced has come from the audiophile world – the “keyboard warriors” who can’t accept that she knows how to deal with hi-fi sound. Murphy sounds more amused than aggrieved. “I don’t mind proving myself, I’m fine with it. I’ve had to do it my whole life.” As a child in smalltown Massachusetts, she was learning electric organ while other girls played acoustic instruments. Her father forced her to take woodworking, and taught her how to drive, scuba dive and sail. “He said: ‘I don’t want you to be a helpless female.’ I know what it sounds like now! But he said it in the right way,” she attests. “He got me my first toolbox, so when I was living by myself I could do all these things.” 

Learning so many practical skills meant that she never felt out of place in “all-male environments, which I’ve been in a lot, and I think David saw that in me. I already had this audio background – he actually didn’t even know that, honestly. But I understood basic setups and how sound works”. 

Over time, Mancuso taught her almost everything he knew about the Loft sound system – specialist knowledge that remained largely theoretical until the day in 2009 when her usual engineer broke his leg. Panicked, she consulted Mancuso, who calmly told her it was time to put what she’d learned into practice. “He used the word zen. He said it’s like walking across rice paper,” she laughs. Afterwards, she realised how much she loved the technical challenge.

Murphy isn’t usually described as a musician, but her discography includes stacks of remixes (Róisín Murphy, Horace Andy, Chaka Khan, The 2 Bears), an album with Captain Beefheart guitarist Gary Lucas on her Bitches Brew label and even silky deep house as Ch’i for Tommy Musto’s Sub-Urban Records. Earlier this year she got back on keys to form a new band with Hot Chip’s Joe Goddard. Electrick Eden includes his bandmates Alexis Taylor and Al Doyle (also a member of LCD Soundsystem since 2007) and Lou Hayter, the DJ-songwriter-producer who first found fame with New Young Pony Club. The band already had a few days of studio time booked in when an email arrived from Robert Smith: would she like to remix a song from The Cure’s 2024 album, ‘Songs of a Lost World’? Murphy was on a writing holiday at the time, attempting to wrangle her life story into a forthcoming “musical memoir”. 

“I honestly couldn’t believe it,” she says, still agog. “I’d been going through some personal and professional troubles with some individuals over the last few years and this request just superseded all of it. Anytime I was feeling down I’d say to myself, Robert Smith asked me to remix The Cure!” Electrick Eden’s first studio session resulted in a twinkling motorik take on ‘And Nothing is Forever’ (released this summer on ‘Mixes of a Lost World’) as well as their first original track: “A long, epic disco odyssey – which is a little bit unfashionable now, because the way music is going everyone wants their TikTok-length remixes.”

Amid the rising panic about our fried attention spans, Murphy’s obsession with distraction-free listening seems almost prophetic. Her hi-fi playback event Classic Album Sundays was an instant hit when it launched in 2010 and now seems like a precursor of the trend for Japanese-style listening bars and audiophile experiences, as heard at Brilliant Corners, the recently opened Space Talk (both in east London) and at artist and audiophile Devon Turnbull’s Listening Room. “They’re not like the ones in Japan, though,” she says, decisively. “I think Classic Album Sundays has been the closest, because it is about listening and not talking.” The prospect of strictly enforced no-phone time is part of the appeal, surely? It’s always a very IRL experience, she confirms. “People would cry, they’d laugh, their blood pressure would go down. It changes you physically.” 

Which brings us right back to the Loft, a dancefloor where even the most familiar records sound different – broader, more vivid, packed with details you’d never noticed before. The party’s Sunday crowd is relaxed but focused, subtly psychedelic, munching on vegetarian food and clapping between the songs – which aren’t mixed with EQ and effects, but simply played one after another. It’s the polar opposite of “clubbing”. When Mancuso first invited Murphy to play at the Loft, she impressed him not only with her selections (starting with Arthur Russell) but her understanding of the physical properties of sound. 

After moving to London in 1999, she began to dig deeper into hi-fi, experimenting with valve amplifiers and preamps at home. “I would listen to things in my record collection and think, ‘Gosh, that 90s house record is pressed too hot.’ I would really start listening to the sonics of the recording.” Classic Album Sundays was a way of letting other people enjoy the finely tuned system she and Dewhurst had built. Years on, they’re working with audio manufacturer dCS to develop a portable DAC (digital-to-analogue converter) to make switching between vinyl and USB sonically seamless, as tested on their Love Dancin’ stage at We Out Here festival this summer. 

“When I play with my high-end cartridges the sound is so warm and rich, and then you go to a CDJ, a digital signal, and it sounds a bit brash – almost too bright and crunchy,” she winces. “Listening back to the Love Dancin’ sets, it’s much smoother – you can’t really tell if I’m playing vinyl or digital.”

Not that everything needs to be hi-fi to be heard. As a teenager listening to punk, “it didn’t matter if the Dead Kennedys had a bit of distortion”, she asserts. But something mysterious happens on the dancefloor when the balance of frequencies is off. “Actually, [producer] Joe Boyd said this: ‘A glass can’t be more than full.’ If you turn up the frequency of something, everything else has to be reduced,” she explains. The Loft’s sound system can make great mixes come to life but will also expose any flaws. “I remember one time David and I were playing – ‘musically hosting’ – back-to-back here in London and I wanted to play ‘Peace Pipe’ by BT Express, the album pressing. I was putting it on and he was like, ‘That’s not a very good pressing.’ Yeah, but it’s a great song, I’m just gonna play it anyways. And I put it on and you just saw the energy in the room go down, and no one knows why. I know it’s not the song, because since then I got a 12-inch and I play it all the time and it brings everyone up! But the pressing on the album is not good.”

Such are the exacting standards of the Loft’s innermost circle. But as his followers have found out, their shared passion for executing Mancuso’s vision has made it harder, not easier, to maintain a harmonious balance. In the nine years since his death, a legal wrangle over control of the Loft has left the New York party in disarray, with Lucky Cloud splitting into two factions. In 2023, Murphy set up again as the London Loft, while her former collaborators – including Tim Lawrence, author of the early disco history ‘Love Saves the Day’ – continue with their own parties, All Our Friends and Beauty and the Beat. It’s been a difficult divorce and Murphy treads with care as she clarifies her position.

Mancuso, she maintains, “wanted me to manage his legacy upon his demise, because I worked with him internationally for decades”. She brings up an old email to corroborate, reading out her mentor’s words: “‘You and I are the only two people I know, in all the years, that can cover as many bases there are for the parties and to try faithfully and spiritually to get it right.’ So that’s a really high bar and I don’t take that role lightly.” In her mind, the Loft is about much more than just the quality of the record pressings. “When I went as a young woman, in my early 20s, I could go alone and not get harassed,” she explains. “I could dance with men and not feel like they were trying to pick me up. I felt protected. And I felt that as a gay man, [Mancuso] was able to mitigate a boys’ club, macho, bro attitude.” 

Her mentor’s wishes are not so easily enforced now that he’s gone, however. As Resident Advisor reported in 2024, the “hostile takeover” of the NYC Loft came about because its founder didn’t leave a will. The resulting schism within Mancuso’s following can seem almost religious – a framing that Murphy rejects (“David was an extraordinary person, he wasn’t a god”), while also maintaining that she is, in effect, the chosen one. “David had very strong opinions on who he felt should, and who he felt shouldn’t, musically represent the Loft,” she states. “So in order to honour David’s directives, the London Loft features the musical hosts that David chose, which is myself along with Guillaume Chottin and Simon Halpin, who support me as musical hosts.”

For now there seems to be enough room in London for multiple Loft-inspired parties – time will tell whose congregation remains the most passionate. After spending the past two years in Camden, the London Loft has just moved to a new spot in the gentrifying wastes of Hackney Wick. As always, Murphy avoids gig listings and online promotion – those interested in coming can simply join the mailing list (loftparty.org). 

The party is better than ever, she thinks, with more diversity in both the team hosting the parties and its attendees. “We have consciously worked to foster a safe space. There’s more of a Queer element, which is great, as David was a gay man,” she reminds us. “And, you know, it’s fun,” she adds, reminding herself. “It is fun working with people who are really passionate about it. It’s fun, especially when the people on the dancefloor can experience something that is joyous, but also sonically beautiful – and as close as you can get to the artist’s original intention in that mixing studio.” 

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This article first appeared in issue eight of Disco Pogo.

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No 90s dance duo better captured the joyous, out-of-control mayhem of a party than Basement Jaxx, whose music – frenetic, carnival-like, free – was mined straight from the source. The nights that Simon Ratcliffe and Felix Buxton held in and around the boozers of Brixton in south London shaped the likes of ‘Jump n’ Shout’, ‘Where’s Your Head At’ and ‘Red Alert’. Miranda Sawyer, a regular at those Rootylicious gatherings, remembers the sticky dancefloors well… 

The end of summer and behind a fence in Crystal Palace Park – a wide, flat, open space, a south London savanna – there’s a party brewing. It’s a multi-generational, multicultural shindig, with several families (no under 18s allowed), all drinking, gossiping, stretching out and revving up on the scrubby grass in the sunshine. The middle-aged women, with crossbody bags and bright trainers, are on the cooler side of mum, but they’re getting lairier by the minute, especially those with their mates. Their husbands are not as loud; the teenagers are lanky and hyped, already at the front. 

After an afternoon in the sun, dotted with appearances from Gilles Peterson, the Rooty sound system and Kitty Amor, just as the sun starts fading, the main event starts. A sound like a horn brings us in. “Commmme onnnn!” shouts one mum nearby, hopping up and barrelling towards the front. The teenagers are already there, phones aloft, bouncing. When the music starts, this lot don’t stop. 

Onstage, the back screen twirls with rocket-fuelled pyramids, with kissing lips, with spaceships and all-seeing eyes, aliens and flowers and outstretched human hands. A floating ramp showcases leotarded dancers, singers dressed as silver space queens, a band with feather epaulettes. And stationed centre stage, in a hole in the ramp, their heads popping up like neon-lit moles, are two men. They’re playing their machines, but, every so often, one comes out to wield his guitar. That’s Simon Ratcliffe. The other, Felix Buxton, sporting a glistening flowing robe and enormo-sunglasses, stalks across the front of the stage with a vibe that falls somewhere between exuberant vicar and Sun Ra. “South London, we love you!” he shouts. 

This is Basement Jaxx in 2025, 10 years after their last live shows, banging through and twisting up their back catalogue with panache and joy. “It’s like a soul revue,” says my friend, and it is: a stage packed with people entertaining you at all times. A lot to see and, of course, a lot to hear. There’s a full-on four-to-the-floor section in the middle of the set, a medley of early hits early on. ‘Bingo Bango’ is merged with a spot of ‘Bamboléo’, ‘Never Say Never’ is a pure soul-house heart-lift, and ‘Where’s Your Head At’, a huge anthem for Generation TikTok, goes off like the fireworks that burst across the sky. The encore gives the old-school fans a nod with 1996’s ‘Samba Magic’, before Basement Jaxx close out with their brand new Latin track ‘Bambina’. And the crowd drifts away, across the dark park to buses and trains and Lime bikes, zipping down hills in the cooling air, joyful, sated. Partied out.

Basement Jaxx were always about the party. The party rather than the club. A couple of hundred people squished into a low-rent venue, mashed and mangled and really dancing, not posing. Bottles of water poured over heads, sweat dripping down the walls, sticky carpets instead of shiny floors. 

Actually, writing that has made me remember the sticky dancefloor at Basement Jaxx’s Rooty nights at the Telegraph: the feeling of the carpet, tacking itself to your trainers. The Telegraph was a pub on Brixton Hill, towards the top, next to a chicken shop; a rackety Victorian joint with wood-panelled bars, big musty windows and a handful of dedicated locals. The landlady was fine with hiring out the back room as long as her regulars could drink undisturbed in the front one. 

And so, at Rooty, in 1999, you paid your £5 to Alma, on the desk at the door, and made your way through to the back bar, which was pretty similar to the front bar, but with some decks to the left and a small area of wooden floor. The dancing started early, with Frank Tope and Tayo Popoola DJing, known these days as the Rooty Soundsystem. The rule was: no house music before midnight. They’d drop a mad Latin track at the end of their set, to ramp things up and let the crowd know that Basement Jaxx were coming on. Then, everything went off. 

And at some point, when you were in the thick of it, when the room was at full pandemonium and the air was almost a living thing, the carpet would feel wrong under your feet and you’d have to manoeuvre yourself off its claggy surface to the centre of the dancefloor (about six feet from the bar), by smushing and squidging, by passing drinks over, by jumping and shouting to ‘Jump n’ Shout’. The build-up, the breakdown, the smash back in. Those Rooty parties were the best. 

In the late 80s, the UK’s first acid house parties were an antidote to nightclub snootiness. They stood against the kind of places with a ‘no trainers no jeans no baseball caps’ door policy; the ones where you were turned away for not being dolly enough. I remember, in 1987, being told by a bouncer at such a club to “come back when you’re a real woman”. I didn’t qualify because I wasn’t wearing heels. 

In house clubs, you could wear what you wanted, and what you wanted to wear was a T-shirt and jeans, or shorts and a bra top, because you were going to get hot. The best nights were about dancing, as opposed to pulling, and by the end of the evening, we all looked pretty similar: wide pupil-ed, wet haired, pulling a hoody over your head as you staggered through the exit, the sweat-steam billowing out of the door into the night air. 

But as house music moved into the 90s, its sound morphing into cheesy anthems, slinky pop, it shifted away from its outsider origins to find itself slap bang in the mainstream. Then the mainstream did what it always does: smoothed off house’s outlaw edge and sold it back in diluted form. Flyers were sexified, with images that were less open-your-mind outer space and more foxy ladies in small frocks. Clubbing’s dressing up factor returned. The multi-floored make-da-money superclub arrived. 

Basement Jaxx were not like this. As Felix told The Face in 1999: “We’re the exact opposite of shiny club bras. We’ve always set out to be unglamorous and noisy.” He meant ‘shiny bra clubs’, but we understood. No leather waistcoats and private tables for the Jaxx. They were about the party part of house music. They brought sirens and whistles and enormous basslines, Latin rhythms and ragga raps, strange noises and pumping beats. They brought the good time.

There were others who were also working the mainstream from within. The Prodigy scared away the normies by turning rave into punk rock. The Chemical Brothers brought over the Britpop kids by mixing acid house and indie. But Basement Jaxx had their own thing, something more upbeat and Latin soul. Though they had their rave past – well, Simon did – by the time they started releasing tracks on XL, in the late 90s, they seemed to be drawing from the same positivity well as ‘It’s Alright, I Feel It’ by Nuyorican Soul or Stardust’s ‘Music Sounds Better With You’. They combined that optimism with a clattery madness, an experimental chaos – very different from, say, Daft Punk’s precisely delivered cool – and that came from their Brixton clubs. They ran a few before Rooty; a few after; and each was an absolutely bananas, utterly unifying, night out. 

You can hear the party in their first proper chart hits. Both 1999’s ‘Red Alert’ and ‘Rendez-Vu’ are a full-on, shake-your-booty, here’s-the-entire-kitchen-as-well-as-the-sink good time that welcomed everyone in but are completely rooted in where they came from. Rooty was a good name for it (it came from a Japanese girl describing the Jaxx vibe as “rootsy” but getting it wrong). Party music, yes, but we all know that a true party is more spiritual and unifying than just a straightforward top night out. All Basement Jaxx clubs were in and of their local community, and that manifested in their music. They made clubs such as Rooty and it was clubs like Rooty that made them.

Like so many Londoners, Felix and Simon were originally from out of town. Felix was from Leicestershire; Simon grew up in Holland, England and Wales. So when they arrived in Brixton, in the early 1990s, they saw their new home with a wide-eyed sense of wow. In interviews, they extolled the delights of Brixton and Camberwell, from the different foods in the market to the front-foot conversations, all thrilling after the buttoned-up dullness of rural England.

Felix’s dad was the vicar of Ibstock and he grew up in a vicarage that was also a small farm. His family life was happy, but, he said, “square”; he was barred from watching ‘Top of the Pops’. “I had to look after old ladies,” he once said. “I had to mow the lawn before the church fete. And there was this terrible Easter procession through the village: I’d be playing the violin while the other kids were racing past on bikes.”

One of the Buxtons’ memorable out-of-area trips was to the BBC’s flagship children’s telly programme, ‘Blue Peter’. The family dog had given birth to 12 puppies, and the show’s producers were keen to feature them. But when the Buxtons arrived at the studio, the puppies’ daddy dog attacked presenter Lesley Judd – specifically, her cardigan – and she fainted. So the dogs were barred for life and the Buxtons went back to Leicestershire. (We could make an extrapolated metaphor about grown-up Felix wanting to welcome everyone, no matter how rabid, into his clubs, but that would be silly.) 

Anyhow, after such small, failed delights, the expansive joy of Brixton blew Felix’s mind. SW9’s mish-mash of different cultures – Caribbean, Portuguese, Italian, soul, reggae, gay, dog-on-a-string – has always been what makes it fizz. Though Brixton’s now known as a dining destination, back then, it had very few restaurants. Instead, there were bars and pubs and clubs and squat parties, any amount of different venues for drinking and dancing, from Mingles to the Fridge Bar to Cooltan. To be honest, you didn’t even have to venture into any of these places: people sold music cassettes in the tube station, tunes banged out of cars on Coldharbour Lane, there was always someone busking, whether singing or throwing some shapes. (All still true today, though it’s CDs rather than tapes now, and those venues are no more.)

Simon dropped out of university after a year, moved to London and lived in a squat. He created a basement studio that he used to make tracks with his friend Dylan Barnes under names such as Tic Tac Toe (‘Ephemerol’ - hardcore rave) and Helicopter (‘On Ya Way’ – slower, more sample-heavy house), and made money from fitting people’s hi-fi equipment. When Simon and Felix first met, in a south London pub, the latter was working as a print designer for a PR firm (key client: Tupperware). They bonded over Masters At Work; Felix hired Simon’s studio for a couple of sessions. 

Soon after, they created a label, Atlantic Jaxx, and spent the next few years releasing EPs, while also building up their DJing chops. They complemented each other. Buxton brought a jazz hippie vibe (Jazz Hippie was his nickname at school: his interests have been very consistent), Ratcliffe was into dub, and was a “pop and rock person who accidentally got into house”. In those formative creative years, they made cool deep house cuts, but, by 1997, they wanted to do something more interesting. “We’re just saying fuck off to all that,” explained Simon to Jockey Slut. “You can get a bit serious and say: ‘This is really cool,’” added Felix. “When actually it’s just boring.”

The B-side of their ‘EP3’, released in 1996, featured ‘Fly Life’ and gave an indication of what their new moves might be: funny noises and Latin rhythms. (“The atmosphere we create is the atmosphere we feel,” said Felix in the same interview. “There are noises that are urban, squeals that mean something.”) But then ‘Urban Haze’, their last release before they were signed, in 1999, to XL, has ‘Set Yo Body Free’ on the B-side: an absolute bass-bin-burning track that isn’t quite house, or techno; that, when they played it out, grew and grew and set your brain on fire.

In promo for the first Basement Jaxx album ‘Remedy’, Felix and Simon called their new music “punk garage”, by which they meant garage house, rather than American scuzz guitar. The punk side is interesting. They were inspired by the attitude of original 1970s British punk, which saw rastas and punk rockers mix (The Clash’s ‘Police and Thieves’; Bob Marley’s ‘Punky Reggae Party’). “That’s the side of punk that appeals to me,” said Felix. “Instead of wanting to destroy the system, let’s look at how we can celebrate the diversity within it, and use force for change in a progressive way.” He and Simon were inclusive and idealistic; they wanted everyone to feel free, to be one nation (or at least, one room) under a groove. And, in contrast to smooth mixes and shiny bras, they wanted to embrace mistakes, to capture mess and experimentation and life.

“A lot of the original Chicago house was done by people who really weren’t that musical,” said Simon to The Wire. “But the wrongness gave it a real excitement. It’s good not to be too safe about being in tune or having correct timing… It’s about energy and oddness. We want you to hear something different each time you listen.”

When they made music, the two of them crammed into a small room on the intersection between Brixton and Camberwell, they innovated and tried new ideas spontaneously, in the moment. Even though what they were doing was sampling and EQing and programming – they would joke that all they did was move their fingers in a knob-twiddling motion – in the old rock parlance, they jammed. 

“We freestyle,” said Felix, and described how he would find samples, play them and pitch-bend them, while Simon would simultaneously put effects on and then shove their new sound into a track, all in a matter of minutes. It gave their tunes a breathless, live feel, a ‘happening now’ exhilaration. ‘Yo Yo’, on ‘Remedy’, has a deliberate skip. “It makes you feel like everything’s slipped,” said Felix. “It’s great.”

They went out of their way not to repeat themselves, even within a track. Think of how many riffs and funny noises there are in ‘Red Alert’. There’s the guitar line, the trim-phone sound, the “don’t worry, don’t panic” hook, before we even get to the real sing-along: “and the music keeps on playing on and on”. And then, after that, there’s the ‘shake shake shake’, the scream, the drop out, the come back.

It sounds like Brixton, or at least their version of Brixton back then: noisy, random, overstimulating, full of joy. A band playing at full pelt, then falling down the stairs, landing in a heap at the bottom and somehow continuing. Those jazz cats dropping through the floors in ‘The Aristocats’. The never-ending party.

I went to many of Basement Jaxx’s Brixton nights. The first was at a bar called Taco Joe’s, under an arch on Atlantic Road that stretched through to Brixton Station Road at the back. There, they set up an open mic as well as music and met some of the artists they would feature on later records. The Taco Joe nights were an interesting, very typical Brixton local mix of “very nice, middle-class, young Soho trendies,” said Felix, “... and bad boys.” 

For a while, they moved to the enormous St Matthew’s church – where ex-prime minister John Major got married, pop/politics fans – which was converted into a couple of venues, around 1992, including a big room in Mass. Basement Jaxx were in the Crypt, the small room in the basement. After that, there were nights at the George IV on Brixton Hill, the ‘Remedy’ launch party at the Fridge, then The Junction in Loughborough Junction, then back up Brixton Hill, to the Telegraph. 

The George IV and Junction parties were fantastic. The George IV was a rattly mini-gig venue: the Junction, a longer, thinner room. In both, the atmosphere was nuts and at the Junction there were several high-profile, but unpaid, guests, such as Daft Punk. But things changed, mostly because of us, the press. Felix lived with a Mixmag journalist for a little while, and there were plenty of journos at the parties, so, inevitably, the Junction nights were written about. The Face, then still hugely influential, put Basement Jaxx on the cover in 1999. 

As soon as the article came out, you could feel the change. The queue for the next Jaxx night stretched down Coldharbour Lane; it was weird to see people we’d never seen before. Another odd thing: early on the same evening, Felix came over to chat to our little group of friends, as he often would. But this time, everyone stopped talking, because he was now important, a celebrity. And that night, when Basement Jaxx came on to the decks, everyone on the dancefloor turned to face them. Before,
we’d faced every which way. We’d been dancing with one another. 

After the Junction, the Basement Jaxx parties moved to the Telegraph. There was a sense that everything was changing. Their career was taking off, and now everyone faced the DJ booth when they played. Still, up until around 2003, and the album ‘Kish Kash’, their tracks were still very based in and born of their parties. The ‘Summer Daze’ EP, which came out in 1995, features ‘Samba Magic’, a Rooty floor filler, as were so many of their tracks, from ‘Jump n’ Shout’ (1999) to ‘Do Your Thing’ (2001). Their second album is called ‘Rooty’; their 11th EP is called ‘Junction’ (and features a great acid track called ‘Acid Luv’). 

‘Rooty’, released in 2001, was still based in Rooty the club. But as Basement Jaxx got bigger, they got busier, touring and playing festivals and working out a live show. Their Glastonbury 2005 headline slot – they were drafted in when Kylie Minogue had to pull out – was a riot of carnival lunacy and by the end of the 2000s, their onstage good time was so tempting that even a 25-year-old Prince Harry wanted in, at 2009’s Wireless. They let him dress as one of the gorillas that jumped about during ‘Where’s Your Head At’. (Harry blew it, because one of the requirements of being a festival gorilla was not to do too much - “you had to get into the part of being a gorilla”, said Felix - and he got carried away and started disco dancing. Felix, who’d forgotten that Harry was in the suit, was so incensed that he rugby tackled the gorilla to the floor, nearly causing a national emergency.) 

Post-‘Rooty’, over the next decade and a half, Basement Jaxx grew up, diversified, tried new things, enjoyed themselves – as did their original audience. They released albums until 2014, and then they went away (though they’re rumoured to be returning with a new LP soon). During that hiatus, over the past decade, others have found their music. It’s the way these days. Artists disappear, and when they reform and decide to play a few gigs, somehow they’re much bigger than they were in the first place. The live acts get larger, the venues more vast, the screen art more whizzy, the stage show more exciting. The fun expands, invites in the newcomers, welcomes all nations, all ages. But it’s still, at heart, a Basement Jaxx party. 

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This article first appeared in issue eight of Disco Pogo.

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Before he was best known for being Thomas Bangalter’s dad, Daniel Vangarde was a dancefloor pioneer and the co-writer of a pair of disco hits in the late 70s and early 80s. But what does he think of his son’s music, wonders Ben Cardew. And why did French radio ban one of his songs?

Daniel Vangarde’s musical career is so outlandish you would struggle to make it up – and that’s before you factor in his famous son, Daft Punk’s Thomas Bangalter. 

Born in Paris in 1947, Vangarde was so blown away by The Beatles that he composed a letter to the band suggesting they let him join the band. It was never sent and he eventually got into music alongside Belgian composer Jean Kluger, dreaming up the Japanese-themed concept album ‘Le Monde Fabuleux Des Yamasuki’ in 1971.

In 1975, Vangarde launched his Zagora label, with his debut album following the same year. The record’s folky lead single contained a steel heart: ‘Un Bombardier avec ses Bombes’ was banned from French radio for criticising the country’s role in the arms trade. 

It was disco that really captured Vangarde’s imagination, though. As Starbow (with Kluger) and Who’s Who, he recorded fabulously melodic underground disco gems, while he also co-wrote such mainstream hits as ‘Cuba’ for Gibson Brothers and ‘D.I.S.C.O.’ for Ottawan.

In the 1990s, Vangarde moved to Brazil, where he founded an NGO, but still had time to advise his son and Daft Punk colleague, Guy-Man, when record labels came calling, resulting in the duo signing a major label deal that afforded them total creative freedom. 

In November 2022, Because Music issued the compilation ‘The Vaults of Zagora Records: Mastermind (1971-1984)’ and earlier this year Be With rereleased Who’s Who’s eponymous album. French producer The Reflex, aka Nicolas Laugier, is also working on remixes from the Zagora catalogue.

Disco Pogo spoke to Vangarde one morning earlier this year, when he was enjoying the morning sun in Brazil.

I have seen you described as ‘the secret father of French disco’. How do you feel about that name?

“I was not the father but I was born at that time, musically. I was very involved in the 70s. I used to do music in Spain. I had quite a lot of success in Spain with songs and when I saw the first time the word ‘disco’, it was familiar to me, because it was the Spanish name for ‘record’. So I went to see what it was and I discovered disco. There were not many producers in Paris, like half a dozen. So it was a little movement. And I said to Thomas, my son, that I was happy to being part of a musical movement in the 70s and he could be happy to be part of another movement. When techno and house arrived, with his friends they were in the middle of the movement.”

Do you remember the first disco record you heard?

“I remember the first disco record that really impressed me. I was in a nightclub in Paris; the moment when I was leaving the nightclub I heard Chic’s ‘Le Freak’ and I was really stunned by the quality of the sound. So I came back to see the DJ, to look at the record, and I saw that it was recorded at the Power Station in New York. Two weeks later, I was mixing in New York, the Power Station, a track for Gibson Brothers. And this was a fantastic studio.”

You said the sound quality of ‘Le Freak’ was amazing. Was that the main thing that appealed to you?

“That’s the thing that struck me immediately. I loved the song. But ever since I started to record, I have always been running after a way to get a good sound. One of the reasons I was lucky to have some international hits at that time is that I always tried to do everything possible to have a good sound: go to the best studio, work with good musicians, spend a lot of time on mixing. For example, the song ‘Cuba’ by Gibson Brothers. I mixed it seven times. And I used the first mix because I thought it was the best, but I was never happy. I thought it could be better.”

Do you think disco is political music?

“Disco was political because it was very popular in gay clubs, Black clubs. And to be Black and gay is really not the best thing to be accepted. Imagine today with the politics of Trump.”

‘Un Bombardier avec ses bombes’ was banned from French radio. Did that make you move more into production? 

“I just decided at that time that I was not made to sing and decided to concentrate on writing and producing. I was never keen on singing. I was on stage once in my life. I don’t remember what happened but when I went out on stage, I knew that I was not made to be a singer and I would not like to sing the same song every night.”

Why do you think French producers took to disco so well? People like yourself, Cerrone, Jacques Morali…?

“French songs are very melodic. And in the French production there was melody, a different melody than American melody.”

When ‘Who’s Who’ was released in 1979, disco was considered unfashionable in a lot of the world. What about in France?

“I heard that it was unfashionable when they were burning the records in the stadium in America [on Disco Demolition Night]. But I never believed that it was and that it would be unfashionable. Because, for me, disco never stopped. When house and techno came, you have the bass drum of disco. At that time, for fun, I did a song called ‘D.I.S.C.O.’ and it was a big hit in Europe. It was a joke to make a record called ‘D.I.S.C.O.’
at the moment when disco was not fashionable.”

How did you feel about Disco Demolition Night? 

“I did not believe it… It was a manifestation from far-right, racist Americans. And if you like [disco] music and if you have been in discotheques, you know that it will not die. It was made to dance to; for people to get together and to dance and to feel the drum and to feel the music. And this was never out [of fashion].”

With ‘D.I.S.C.O.’, did you know you had written a hit? 

“I think so, because at that time I had a thing that, when I was mixing, if I had humidity in my hands, it means that the song would have a good chance to be a hit. This means the emotion that I felt and I had a chance to have a public that feels the same as me… And the contrary too: if I felt nothing, I didn’t think it would be a hit.”

Going back to ‘Who’s Who’, the opening song is called ‘Palace Palace’, named after Le Palace club in Paris…

“It was a very fashionable place and I was just coming back from New York, where I discovered the big roller-skate discotheque. You have a big roller skating place with disco music and everybody doing roller skating with disco music. So I did ‘Palace Palace’. It’s roller skater music.

Did you go to a lot of nightclubs?

“I went to clubs to try out records. Since I was running after a good sound, I always did a mock up. I didn’t press the record; I did first the test record in the mastering room and was going in clubs to compare it to other records, and then doing the correction, if I thought it needed something.”

On ‘Palace Palace’ you sing through a vocoder. What did you like about it?

“The sound – you can play a chord, and each note plays your voice. To sing – and to hear one’s voice in a vocoder – is very exciting. It’s this electronic sound, which was new. When I had the vocoder, in the beginning I used to spend all night testing it out. And before I had released a record with it, there was the single released, ‘O Superman’ [by Laurie Anderson]. I was playing a lot with the vocoder before that record. But when it was out, I didn’t do a record with it because I thought it would look like a copy.” 

Who has a better voice through a vocoder – you or Thomas?

“Thomas is an expert on electronic voice. He dominates the electronic voice. He succeeded in getting the sound he wants to get – and it’s very complicated. I saw him sometimes work with a Moog. But I don’t think he used a lot of vocoder.”

In the notes for ‘Who’s Who’, you say: “It amused me to think that my son, Thomas, was influenced by ‘Dancing Machine’ for ‘Around the World’.” Was that something he said to you?

“No, he didn’t say that, but ‘Dancing Machine’ is one word repeated all through the song: “Dancing machine, dancing machine…” And their song was “Around the world, around the world…” Very repetitive. I said that for fun because maybe he didn’t remember when he did ‘Around the World’.” 

You talked once about the importance of mistakes in music. Do you think that in modern music there is the tendency to make sure everything is perfect? 

“People take mistakes out because with electronic [tools] you can repeat, you can change, you get better and better and better. But you don’t get better and better. You get more and more clean, more and more obvious, and the mistakes in recording that you had when you were recording the musicians together – it is really the soul of the music. If you listen to big records, there are always mistakes. The guitar is too loud at one moment or the rhythm is accelerating. And when you have a steady rhythm, the mind gets bored really easily. Because the mind understands very fast that it will not be surprised and it doesn’t get interested.” 

Have you been to a Daft Punk concert?

“I’ve been to four shows in South America, one show in London and one in Paris. And before they did their big show with the pyramid, they had more intimate shows. I was stunned by the show and the quality of the sound and the inventiveness of the music, how it was live and inventive. I was a fan, really a fan, of their music.”

Do you have a favourite Daft Punk song?

“I was really attracted by ‘One More Time’. Because they used a way to transform the voice that I never heard before. They kept [the song] one year and during that year Cher came out with a song with the same sound. So it looks like they copied Cher, but the truth is that they had this sound one year before Cher. I like ‘Around the World’. I like the slow songs too.” 

Why did you stop making music?

“I started to not do music at a time when they [Daft Punk] started to have a lot of success. They used to do music in his [Thomas’] bedroom, next to my bedroom. And I thought that it was time to have a new generation doing dance music. I could not have copied them because I was not capable of doing this style of music. And I didn’t want to do something that was out of fashion.”

You launched Zagora in 1975. How important was the independence it gave you?

“Totally important. I always wanted to be my own boss. I produced all the records and I never had to ask somebody if I could redo a mix. I always was totally independent. I would have never worked within a record company. And one other thing I’m happy with Daft Punk, I helped them at the beginning to have this freedom. And they had a freedom where they could produce and release exactly how they wanted to do, without having to listen to second opinions.” 

Do you think people will still be listening to your music in another 45 years?

“First question: will we have a functioning world? You never know – it can happen. I produced a famous band in France called La Compagnie Créole in the 80s and a few of their songs are sung in schools. It’s part of French folklore. So maybe it will last. I have grandchildren today, and when they have parties they play ‘D.I.S.C.O.’” 

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This article first appeared in issue eight of Disco Pogo.

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Forget the pills, thrills and bellyaches and remember the Happy Mondays for their music. Balearic Mike does…

When Factory released the Happy Mondays’ debut EP, ‘Forty Five’, in September 1985, there was little to suggest the band would evolve into one of the most original, exciting and revolutionary groups to emerge from the UK’s independent scene. 

Today few would dispute that claim. Their musical achievements are often overlooked in favour of the endless tales of acid house-inspired debauchery, but by a confluence of right time, right place, right taste and access to the right drugs, they achieved what no other bunch of white blokes with instruments had done before and fused the sound of the exciting new house records coming out of Black America with the 1970s rock and pop music they loved. 

Sure, other bands had been influenced by electronic music, and, more specifically, dance records from the US and Europe. Labelmates New Order and A Certain Ratio, for a start. But none had their minds blown by house music and ecstasy at quite the same time, in quite the same way, and then tried to make music inspired by those records with a drum kit and guitars. 

As the band celebrate 40 years of musical mayhem, we hail their 40 greatest moments. Rave on.

1. ‘W.F.L.’ (Oakenfold & Osborne’s ‘Think About The Future Mix’)
Oakey or Vince? I’m not having that argument again, but just so you know, Shaun Ryder prefers the Oakenfold & Osborne mix too. There aren’t many records that better capture the excitement of that third Summer of Love of 1989 than this. The original version was as close as the band could get to creating the music they all loved, but it just needed that extra sprinkle of magic disco dust. A breakbeat from N.W.A., a sample of Jack Nicholson’s Joker from the ‘Batman’ movie and actually a lot of paring back. This was from a time before DJs remixed indie bands on a regular basis. Acid house? Balearic beats? Indie dance? Who cares? It was – and remains – perfection.

 2. ‘Performance’‍

“No comedians!” Controversial, but this is my favourite track from what, in my opinion, is their best album, ‘Bummed’. The Mondays hit it off with producer Martin Hannett. Although he was basically an alcoholic, their constant supply of ecstasy meant he pretty much stopped drinking – or at least long enough to work. In return he managed to get the music Shaun Ryder heard in his head on to record. This is the band at their most assured, funky, loose, original best. Although you can spot the influences – labelmates A.C.R., New Yorkers ESG (also signed by Factory) – no one else has ever sounded like this. The title comes from the 60s counterculture film starring Mick Jagger as a reclusive rock star, which was a band favourite and a huge influence on the album. This is dance music that hadn’t been imagined before, and includes some of Ryder’s most hilarious, and obviously E-inspired, lyrics. Footage of them performing the song live on Anthony Wilson’s arts and culture programme ‘The Other Side of Midnight’ shows a band in their prime – and Bez at his most ‘Bez’!

3. ‘Wrote For Luck’ (Club Mix)
The ultimate fusion of house music, ecstasy/rave/club culture and guitar-based alternative rock music. This distils the sound that the band had been striving for since their discovery of E and house music in 1987. The album version was produced by Martin Hannett, with their second manager, Nathan McGough, remixing this version on the 12-inch. Often their finale live, it’s a thundering, E-fuelled juggernaut of a track. The ‘luck’ of the title refers to E, among other things, while the line “You were wet, but you’re getting drier” is taken from a conversation between David Essex and Adam Faith in the film ‘Stardust’. Directors the Bailey Brothers made two versions of the video (which, oddly, features an edit of the Vince Clarke remix), filmed at the club Legend, one featuring the band performing and dancing in a ‘possibly’ refreshed state, while the other was full of dancing children.

4. ‘Hallelujah’ (Weatherall & Oakenfold Club Mix)
Andrew Weatherall’s first remix wasn’t ‘Loaded’, but this incredible track. The ‘Madchester Rave On’ EP took the Mondays into the charts for the first time, but Martin Hannett’s original versions were pretty weird, building on the psychedelic funk of ‘Bummed’. After the success of the ‘W.F.L.’ remix, the band wanted Oakenfold on board again, and he made the decision to ask Weatherall & Farley, then DJing in the back room of his weekly Spectrum night at Heaven, to join him. The results are astounding, turning the track into a euphoric dancefloor chugger, as well as a pop-dance classic. If you envisage the song in your head, it’s this version that you’re hearing.

5. ‘Tart Tart’
The decision to get Velvet Underground’s John Cale to produce the band’s debut album wasn’t entirely successful. Cale didn’t understand the band, who wanted Bernard Sumner again, but he was over committed, and worried about making them sound like New Order anyway. There are several high points, though, and this is the best. A scratchy, exciting, punk-funk groove, it has real swagger and great riffs, plus Ryder delivering some of his finest lyrics; basically, three short stories. The ‘Tart Tart’ of the title was a friend and speed dealer called Dinah who took young Shaun and Bez under her wing and tragically died of a brain haemorrhage. Another part refers to Hannett, whom the band hadn’t yet met but who fascinated Ryder thanks to Sumner’s stories. The third part reflects the panic around Aids as it swept through the city.

6. ‘Freaky Dancin’’ (Live)
After a slight false start with Haçienda DJ Mike Pickering producing the Mondays’ debut record and giving them a bog-standard indie-guitar sound, Bernard Sumner saved the day. In the audio commentary for the film ‘24 Hour Party People’, Wilson says: “Barney is one of the great producers of the 80s in Manchester.” His genius move was to capture the band playing live, unleashing their unique sound on the public for the first time.

7. ‘Rave On’ (Farley & Oakenfold Club Mix)
The most deranged track from the EP of the same name gets transformed into an indie-dance masterpiece by Boys Own’s Terry Farley and Oakenfold. The decision to copy the bassline from The O’Jays classic ‘For the Love of Money’ is genius. The result is the closest the band had yet come to making a house record, which might not sound like much now but in 1989 was a game changer.

8. ‘Twenty Four Hour Party People’
After their legal dispute over ‘Desmond’ (see 25), the band were quickly dispatched to Suite Sixteen Studios in Rochdale. The resulting anthem has become a theme tune, representing the hedonistic, amphetamine-fuelled lifestyle they then enjoyed, pre-ecstasy. When Michael Winterbottom and Frank Cottrell Boyce made a movie about Factory Records, it was nailed on they would use the name.

9. ‘Loose Fix’ (The Grid Remix)
‘Loose Fit’ should have been another top five hit, making it three in a row for the band, but as the (first) Gulf War broke out, Ryder’s lyric, “Gonna buy an air force base, gonna wipe out your race” earned the single a BBC ban. It still made the top 20 but should have been their biggest hit so far. The Grid managed to improve on Oakenfold’s original version somehow, making for sublime Balearic indie dance, with a guitar part that echoes Pink Floyd’s ‘Shine on You Crazy Diamond’.   

10. ‘Country Song’
The opener from their second album, ‘Bummed’ (produced by Hannett for the first time), displays a new-found confidence and swagger. Which is odd, because it sounds like Dolly Parton’s ‘Jolene’ at the wrong speed, with the additional impediment that the record is pressed off-centre, so it sounds all woozy and disorientating. Totally bonkers and utterly original.

11. ‘Lazyitis (One-Armed Boxer)’
While the original closes ‘Bummed’, the single version was re-recorded as a duet with Scottish yodelling sensation Karl Denver. It’s the band’s attempt at “an off-the-wall pop song” and, while Shaun Ryder didn’t think they got there, I disagree. With tinkling, country music-style pianos and a little help from Lennon and McCartney, David Essex and Sly and the Family Stone, as well as a nursery rhyme, this is a joyful noise, illustrating Shaun’s magpie/post-modern approach to lyric writing.

12. ‘Bob’s Yer Tune’ (Grid Remix)
The remix of ‘Bob’s Yer Uncle’ might be the most Balearic track the band ever released. It features floaty, atmospheric synths, divine flute parts, breathless moaning female vocals a la the best Italo or Spanish house track, a totally filthy lyric and a sexy lead vocal from Mr Ryder too, who does his best Barry White impression. Apparently, this was played at Tony Wilson’s funeral.

13. ‘Kuff Dam’
This driving indie-funk gem opens their debut album. The title is a flip of a porno film called ‘Mad Fuck’ and includes Ryder’s memorable line: “You see that Jesus is a cunt and that I helped you with everything that you do. Or you done.”

14. ‘Do It Better’
Their most blatant E song, with most of the lyric being about being “on one”. The band had just got into the drug while recording ‘Bummed’ and Shaun wrote most of the lyrics referencing the effects of taking E. Indeed, they spent most of the time recording the album chomping the little fellas down. It was originally called ‘E’, and is in the key of E. 

15. ‘Kinky Groovy Afro’ (Oakenfold & Osborne Mix)
According to Shaun Ryder, this song “was a reference to my old man who was a bit of a fucking womble”. Derek Ryder once came second to a 14-year-old Lisa Stansfield in a local talent contest and was the band’s roadie and sound man for a while. This slightly extended version of one of the standouts from ‘Pills ‘N’ Thrills and Bellyaches’ is indeed very groovy and propelled the band to their second top five UK hit.

16. ‘Little Matchstick Owen’s Rap’
The version of ‘Little Matchstick Owen’ on their debut LP is great, but this take, on the B-side of ‘Tart Tart’, sounds like something from the early 80s downtown New York club scene at Danceteria or The Fun House, rather than Manchester in 1986. Mike Pickering suggested London rap trio Three Wise Men for the job, but the studio’s window cleaner Mike Bleach stepped up to the mic instead. Weird, scratchy and psychedelic post-punk-funk.

17. ‘Oasis’
Later re-recorded to appear on ‘Squirrel and G-Man …’, this original version, from that first ‘Forty Five’ EP, was an early example of Ryder’s gift for ‘borrowing’ inspiration from the greats. Features a liberal snatch of Tom Jones’s ‘It’s Not Unusual’, although with a slightly rude twist.

18. ‘Mad Cyril’
Another track from the ‘Bummed’ era and also inspired by ‘Performance’. It includes multiple samples of dialogue from the movie, and the line immortalised in Ryder’s lyrics: “I said I like that, turn it up!”

19. ‘Loose Fit’ (Greg Wilson & Ché Wilson Remix)
There have been some great attempts at remixing the Mondays’ back catalogue from the likes of Justin Robertson and Ewan Pearson over the years, but this stunning version from the father and son DJ and re-edit duo breathes new life into this classic. Released at the tail-end of 2024, the track is twisted into a gurgling, acid house chugger.

20. ‘Fat Lady Wrestlers’
Another highlight from ‘Bummed’. Probably the closest they got to another ‘Wrote For Luck’, with its heavy, repetitive groove. Ryder had just returned from Amsterdam, and the lyrics, some of the earliest to be inspired by E, recount some of those “adventures”. 

21. Stinkin’ Thinkin’ (Boy’s Own Mix)
By 1992, Ryder was so ravaged by the double whammy of heroin addiction and a massive crack binge when he should have been recording (the lacklustre) fourth album ‘Yes Please!’ that he could barely sing. He managed to pull this off, though, the lyrics partly inspired by his visit to the Priory. Farley & Heller turn in some great remixes. The house one is a proper Fire Island-style organ-led thumper, but this is a total gem, which lifts off when Rowetta starts singing.

22. ‘Bring a Friend’
Urgent, visceral, scratchy funk, inspired by Ryder being busted coming back from Amsterdam with a load of weed and some porn mags. The lyrics imagine a dream sequence in ‘Performance’ in which Jagger meets some of the stars from the x-rated mag.

23. ‘God’s Cop’  
You couldn’t make it up, but the chief constable of Greater Manchester Police, James Anderton, openly declared that God talked to him. As such, his bigoted, homophobic, sexist and racist moral crusade was him doing God’s work. Ryder lampoons him beautifully when he switches the lyric “God made it easy, God made it easy on me…” to “God lays his Es on, God lays his Es all on me…”. One of their most rock’n’roll songs, with a guitar riff fit for Keith Richards.

24. ‘Step On’ (Oakenfold & Osborne Stuff it In Mix)
The song that made them pop stars. Not bad for a track that began as a request from their US label Elektra to provide a cover version of something from the label’s back catalogue for an anniversary compilation. Ryder manages to make the track their own with some memorable ad-libs, which are now the only lyrics anyone remembers. “You know you speak so hip, you’re twisting my melons man. Call the cops!”. Hit number five in the charts.

25. ‘Desmond’
Included on the first pressing of their debut LP, until someone, possibly Michael Jackson, more likely his lawyers, who then owned The Beatles’ Northern Songs catalogue, noticed that it bore more than a passing resemblance to The Fab Four’s ‘Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da’. The album was reissued with the hurriedly recorded title track in its place.

26. ‘Moving In With’
In which Shaun sings the words to the nursery rhyme Chicken Little. He told a journalist if he could have fitted all the rhyme’s words to the tune of the song he would have sung them.

27. ‘Hallelujah’ (McColl Mix)
Although the ‘Madchester Rave On’ EP was their breakthrough ‘Top of the Pops’ moment, most wouldn’t have heard the original version, which continued to expand the noisy, psychedelic sound of ‘Bummed’. Steve Lillywhite was asked to remix it for radio, cleaning it up and, with wife Kirsty McColl adding backing vocals, this was how they performed it on that legendary November 1989 TOTP appearance alongside The Stone Roses.

28. ‘Olive Oil’
Inspired by a girl the band knew who had large eyes and feet (like the character in the ‘Popeye’ cartoons), it sounds a bit like The Smiths. Delightful indie jangle.

29. ‘Dennis and Lois’
Named after the legendary New York couple who became something like adoptive aunts and uncles to Manchester bands visiting the city.

30. ‘Clap Your Hands’
The next catchiest track on the ‘Madchester’ EP after ‘Hallelujah’. It didn’t get the remix treatment and so doesn’t get the love it should. 

Yes Please! The Next 10

31. ‘The Egg’

32. ‘Stayin’ Alive’ (12-inch Mix)

33. ‘Tokoloshe Man’

34. ‘Donovan’

35. ‘Holiday’

36. ‘Judge Fudge’

37. ‘Sunshine and Love’

38. ‘Delightful’

39. ‘Hallelujah’ (Ewan Pearson Remix)

40. ‘W.F.L. (The Vince Clark Remix)

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This article first appeared in issue eight of Disco Pogo.

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The Wu-Tang Clan story abounds with myths, kung fu movies, mafioso allusions, countless side projects, esoteric equipment, endless mishaps and much, much more. Not bad for a collective of former warring youths from New York’s forgotten borough. David Kane enters the 36 Chambers and pulls together the varying strands of the Wu-Tang tale into one handy A-Z…

Earlier this year, Wu-Tang Clan wrapped The Final Chamber, a 27-date farewell tour across North America. Time has a funny way of catching up – even with legends who once sounded untouchable. Yet the further time stretches, the greater it preserves, and those first blasts from ‘Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers)’ still sound immortal.

It’s essential to remember the musical context at the time of the Clan’s first single, ‘Protect Ya Neck,’ in December 1992. The golden age of New York hip hop was fading. The Native Tongues movement had become fractured. “Yo, that Native shit is dead,” declared Posdnuos on De La Soul’s ‘Buhloone Mindstate’. The East Coast was losing its juice.

  Released the same month as ‘Protect Ya Neck’, Dr Dre’s ‘The Chronic’ heralded a new era of West Coast supremacy thanks to the infectious G-Funk sound—deep hypnotic basslines, slow-rolling synths and crisp kicks delivered with palm-breeze ease. And that wasn’t all that was happening on the left coast: Cypress Hill, The Pharcyde and a post-NWA Ice Cube all dropped classics within 18 months.

Then, from the forgotten ferry stop of Staten Island, came eight unique voices – RZA, GZA, Ol’ Dirty Bastard, Method Man, Ghostface Killah, Raekwon the Chef, Inspectah Deck and U-God – who fused as one in a blaze of alchemy (Cappadonna and Masta Killa had yet to join the group). Noisier than heavy metal, this collection of rap assassins and street philosophers were yelling through dust and distortion to reclaim the East as the true Mecca of hip hop. 

Whether goodbyes stick in rap is anyone’s guess. What isn’t in doubt is that for more than three decades, Wu-Tang Clan rewired the lexicon of word and sound. Here’s the cipher, A–Z.

All In Together Now The story before the story. First cousins Prince Rakeem (aka RZA), Ason Unique (Ol’ Dirty Bastard) and The Genius (GZA) performed as All In Together Now during the mid-80s. The group put out a few demos but never an official release. By 1991, both GZA and RZA had released debut solo albums that flopped, ‘Words From the Genius’ and ‘Ooh I Love You Rakeem’, and their labels – Cold Chillin’ and Tommy Boy - dropped them both. 

RZA was at a crossroads and was rumoured to have walked back and forth across Staten Island for three months. All In Together Now had stalled, Wu-Tang existed, but only as RZA and Ghostface. Nor could he achieve more as D.M.D. (Dig ‘Em Down – alongside Meth, Raekwon, Deck and U-God). Through those months of pounding the pavements, he found clarity; princes, killahs and geniuses would sit down together at the table and form as one. 

Bobby Digital is RZA’s sci-fi, sex-obsessed, digitally enhanced persona. ‘Bobby Digital in Stereo’ (1998) was a divisive (Pitchfork gave it a 2.9/10), bonkers and occasionally brilliant record as the gorgeous ‘Love Jones’ and swaggering ‘N.Y.C. Everything’ attest. RZA ditched the gritty sound of his Wu-Tang productions in favour of a synth-based direction, telling Vibe: “Hip hop was so sample-heavy at the time and I wanted to make my music have more of an orchestra sound.”

Children As in: “Wu-Tang is for the children. We teach the children.” One of the most bizarre and memorable speeches at an awards show took place at the 40th edition of The Grammys in 1998 when Ol’ Dirty interrupted the award for Best Song won by Shawn Colvin for ‘Sunny Came Home’ with his bizarre, but, let’s face it, accurate “Wu-Tang is for the children” outburst. 

Dip dyeing The two most exquisitely dressed members of the Clan are undoubtedly Raekwon and Ghostface Killah. Ghost can rock a mink coat and silk cravat like no one else in hip hop – bathrobes in broad daylight! Bird-patterned silk blouses buttoned to the chin! Golden eagle wrist gauntlets! And then there’s Raekwon, the don of denim, ice-cold shades, bulletproof leather waistcoats and New Balance 574 on the wheels. Ghost and Rae weren’t the first rappers to rock Clarks Wallabees, but dip-dyeing them into new colours was undoubtedly fresh. Somerset’s finest even made it onto the cover of Ghost’s debut album, ‘Ironman’.  

Ernest Sayon In a tragically familiar tale of police brutality against African American men, Sayon, an unarmed man, was murdered in Staten Island’s Park Hill projects in April 1994. Method Man – who had experienced his own brushes with the law – was good friends with Sayon, and his death prompted Meth to take music seriously. Sayon’s death was retold in Hulu’s ‘Wu-Tang: An American Saga’ (with Sayon going by the alias of Haze), in which the characters of Meth, Inspectah Deck and Raekwon watched helplessly as Haze was strangled to death by police. The tragedy was said to have played a part in uniting the then-warring factions of the Wu.

Floods In 1994, RZA returned to his basement studio – affectionately known as the ‘Shaolin’ – which had flooded because of heavy rain and a sewage backup. The first of three occurrences in the 90s, the floods have taken on an almost biblical mythology in the Wu-Tang canon, yet the damage was very real. Equipment and floppy discs were destroyed, and an estimated 300-500 beats were lost, including original productions from several of the first wave of solo albums: parts of Method Man’s ‘Tical’ and Raekwon’s ‘Only Built 4 Cuban Linx’ were destroyed, while Inspectah Deck’s debut album, ‘Uncontrolled Substance’, was lost in its entirety.

‘The Grunt’ The horn sampled from The J.B.’s’ ‘The Grunt’ made its way through various hip hop classics by Public Enemy, Eric B & Rakim and Ultramagnetic MC’s, before appearing in ‘Protect Ya Neck’, where it sounds less like a horn and more like a glossolalia cry. Whereas brothers Phelps and Bootsy Collins inject the original with an unholy amount of instrumental funk, RZA’s production possesses an ugly, beautiful quality with the speed and density of the Clan’s lyrics contorting the track with a rowdy, tongue-twisting “What did he just say!?” wordplay. ‘Protect Ya Neck’ was the first single released by Wu-Tang Clan. ‘The Grunt’ break, and music in general, would never sound the same again. 

‘Hell’s Wind Staff / Killah Hills 10304’ “Do you know, uh… a Don Rodriguez?” probes RZA’s Bobby Steele alias in the interminable opening skit to ‘Hell’s Wind Staff / Killah Hills 10304’ from GZA’s magnum opus, ‘Liquid Swords’. From ”interest rates a grand to a finger” through to “50 immigrants with fake visas”, GZA provides a hook-free masterclass in world-building and a stark reminder that everyone likes a gangster until they meet one. Beyond the lyrics, RZA’s production is just as inventive, chiefly the sampling of ambient field recordings of Hells Angels roaring by and banging forks on restaurant tables.

The Island nightclub. The east London suburb of Ilford became an unlikely location for one of Wu-Tang’s first UK shows in 1995. Or at least, it was supposed to be. In a sign of things to come, all of the group failed to turn up, leaving a drunk but determined Ol’ Dirty Bastard to perform his and all the other MCs’ rhymes in a chaotic show. Members of the crowd were said to be so incensed that they tried to storm the stage. Dirty reportedly shouted: “It’s hard for a ni**a to represent nine!”

Jim Jarmusch Much has been made of RZA’s collaborations with Quentin Tarantino, but it was Jim Jarmusch who commissioned his first full-length film score with ‘Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai’. RZA’s groovy, grimy soundtrack provides the perfect backdrop to Jarmusch’s Palme d’Or-nominated film. The pair reunited four years later for the absurdist ‘Coffee and Cigarettes’, in which RZA and GZA would appear as themselves in a restaurant scene served by a familiar waiter. “And you’re Bill Murray. Bill ‘Groundhog Day’, Ghostbusting ass Murray”, as GZA observes in the film’s most memorable segment. 

King Hu No Wu-Tang reflection is complete without kung fu, especially the wuxia style King Hu helped revolutionise. After joining Hong Kong’s Shaw Brothers studio in 1958, he rose from set decorator to director, galvanising the genre by fusing Chinese opera, Buddhist philosophy and western editing. His influence rippled directly into Wu-Tang: when mastering ‘Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers)’ at The Hit Factory, RZA arrived with low-fidelity VHS tapes for sampling – no doubt to the engineers’ chagrin – of ‘Executioners from Shaolin’, ‘Five Deadly Venoms,’ ‘Ten Tigers of Kwangtung’ and ‘Shaolin & Wu-Tang’. The first three were Shaw Brothers films, all bearing Hu’s cinematic fingerprints. 

Loud Records Legend has it that label founder Steve Rifkind was sitting in his office sifting through the many promo records he would receive when he stumbled upon ‘Protect Ya Neck’. He put the record on at high volume and a young kid he had never seen before burst into the room and hollered: “THAT’S THAT SHIT!” and promptly departed. Rifkind claims he never saw the kid again. Call it an omen, call it BS, call it what you will, but Rifkind saw it as a sign to go all in on the Wu-Tang Clan. 

Unable to compete with some of the other offers coming in, Rifkind struck an unusual deal with RZA and his associates - the removal of the standard record label clause preventing members of the group from signing solo deals with different labels. Thus, all the majors had an investment in convincing listeners that Wu-Tang were the greatest high in hip hop.

Melvin ‘Cheese’ Wagstaff Method Man struck lightning twice when he landed the role of Melvin ‘Cheese’ Wagstaff – a mean-spirited, fast-talking enforcer for his uncle, Proposition Joe, the kingpin of east Baltimore – in HBO’s ‘The Wire’, an unsparing depiction of life and the machinations of institutional and street corner drug trade in the city. The show proved to be another era-defining ensemble performance that redefined genre and medium. However, Meth, a bona fide rap star by the time he appeared in season two, didn’t receive special treatment, telling GQ: “I auditioned like everybody else. And they gave me Cheese.” 

‘N**ga Please’. The last solo album Ol’ Dirty Bastard released during his lifetime was a testament to his unpredictable brilliance. It marked a significant departure from the largely RZA-produced sound of his debut, with The Neptunes and Irv Gotti giving the album an accessible R’n’B sensibility. Chart primers such as the Kelis-featuring ‘Got Your Money’ jarred with the wild, propulsive energy of tracks such as ‘Rollin’ Wit You’ and ‘I Can’t Wait’. Rolling Stone described the record as “mad-brilliant” and “the ultimate guilty pleasure”. It was, of course, certified gold. ‘N**ga Please’ dissolved underground/mainstream boundaries, propelling hip hop onto its path of global dominance.

‘Once Upon a Time in Shaolin’ Never one for a nibble, RZA enjoys the taste of an entire concept burrito. Six years in the making, ‘Once Upon a Time in Shaolin’, was produced by RZA and Wu-affiliate Cilvaringz, mostly in secret, as the latter explained to Forbes: “We’re putting out a piece of art like nobody else has done in the history of [modern] music.” In a protest against the disposability of music in the streaming era, only one physical copy of the album was produced, housed in a hand-carved nickel-silver box by British-Moroccan artist Yahya. ‘Once Upon…’ was purchased by healthcare pariah Martin Shkreli for $2m in 2015, making it the most expensive work of music ever. It was later seized by the US government after Shkreli’s fraud conviction.   

Purple Tape If you’re new to the Wu-Tang Clan universe and are curious where to begin for mafioso stories and hardcore rhymes, look no further than Raekwon’s ‘Only Built 4 Cuban Linx’. To fans it is known as the ‘Purple Tape’, thanks to the Prince-like veneer of the original cassette, distinguishing it from other ‘product’ on the market. Raekwon originally wanted the cassette to be green, but manufacturing limits left purple as the defining shade of legend.

‘Queen’ Masta Killa was the last member of Wu-Tang to release his solo album, 2004’s ‘No Said Date’. Given MK’s soulful, writerly style, it’s no surprise to learn that GZA mentored him. ‘No Said Date’ proved a much-needed tonic for fans who were searching for the first classic solo album of the early 2000s. ‘Queen’ epitomises all that is good about it – Masta Killa’s voice sounds as smooth as a silk glove ensconced on a velvet carpet over True Master’s production, sampling Curtis Mayfield’s sweet vocals on  ‘The Makings of You’. 

‘Raw: My Journey Into the Wu-Tang’ When it comes to a favourite MC, few fans are likely to nominate U-God: gruff and efficient, his style is an acquired taste, more pugilist than poet. Even U-God’s nickname, ‘The Four-Bar Killer’, speaks to the subtlety of his role. Yet every team needs a versatile player. Behind the scenes, he often played the mediator to the group’s colossal egos and kept working on his rhyme skills. The litigation against RZA for unpaid royalties would come later. In his surprisingly tender memoir ‘Raw…’, U-God makes peace with both his place in the Clan and the tragedies that shaped him – born of rape, raised amid death and drug dealing and his child being used as a human shield. 

Side Projects The Wu-Tang universe is a never-ending cartography of esoteric beliefs, mafia slang and pop culture ephemera – not to mention the side projects. There’s RZA’s Bobby Digital and Gravediggaz, Ghost’s DOOMStarks, the unreleased, much-mythologised collaboration with MF DOOM, who later teamed with Inspectah Deck’s group Czarface. And the deep cuts, such as GZA and DJ Muggs’ chess-themed, better than it sounds ‘Grandmasters’, or Banks & Steelz, where RZA (does this man sleep?) joined Interpol’s Paul Banks for 2016’s ‘Anything But Words’, a mostly charmless rap-rock crossover. Then the affiliates: Killarmy, Wu-Tang Killa Beez and more – by which point, it feels less like an empire than a franchise. 

TASCAM 244 Portastudio was used to bounce final mixes from DAT to high-speed cassette, contributing to the ‘Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers)’ distinctive lo-fi aesthetic. Developed by the Tokyo-based electronics company TEAC, the TASCAM 244 was intended for bedroom demos and budget home studios. While most producers were chasing cleaner, digital setups, the 244’s EQ limitations and tape saturation gave RZA’s early recordings that boxed-in, dust-choked texture. 

‘Uncontrolled Substance’ One of the biggest “what if…?” moments in hip hop history concerns Inspectah Deck’s debut album, ‘Uncontrolled Substance’. Originally slated for release in 1995, the set was delayed by four years due to the floods in RZA’s basement. He told The Breakfast Club: “Every member of Wu gets a chance to be the best. And at one point, he [Inspectah] was the best. His sword was the sharpest. If we had the production and the vibe of what his album would have been, I’m sure he would have had a classic in the ranks of ‘Cuban Linx’ and ‘Liquid Swords’.” 

‘Verbal Intercourse’ Nas became the first non-Wu-Tang member to make a guest appearance on a Wu album, gracing ‘Verbal Intercourse’, yet another stone-cold classic from ‘OB4CL’. Surprisingly, given Nas’ buzzy breakout appearance on ‘Live at the Bar’ by Main Source in 1991 and ‘Halftime’, his first solo release in 1992, Ghost and Rae only discovered Queensbridge’s finest courtesy of five B-girls from overseas, with Ghost telling The Face: “They was French. They had a little van and shit. They put us on Nas’ joint. This must have been ’93.” 

The W logo. Producer Mathematics worked on songs such as Ghostface Killah’s ‘Mighty Healthy’ and was the group’s tour DJ, yet his most significant contribution was the design of the iconic “W” logo. The original logo featured a dreadlocked severed head held aloft, symbolising ‘Protect Ya Neck’. After RZA felt it was too gory, Mathematics removed the gruesome embellishments and refined the logo with a golden bird-like quality that would fit neatly into a circle for 12s, sevens and CDs, creating the most recognisable logo in music since the Rolling Stones’ lips. 

Clarence 13X. The Five-Percent Nation, or Nation of Gods and Earths, is less a religion than a “belief system”. The 5% must enlighten the 85% who are kept ignorant by the 10% who hoard divine truth. Its influence on hip hop, in general, and the Wu-Tang Clan, in particular, is highly significant. This might have something to do with its charismatic, cult-like leader Clarence 13X. A Korean War veteran and martial arts expert with a fondness for jazz cigarettes and horse racing, he was a one-time member of the Nation of Islam. Disenchanted with the NOI’s hierarchy, he radicalised the idea of Black divinity, declaring every Black man a God and teaching through ‘systems’ such as Supreme Mathematics and the Supreme Alphabet. His philosophy resonated with Harlem’s youth. One early convert, Freedum Allah – later known as Popa Wu – was a mentor (and cousin) to RZA, GZA and ODB, ensuring Five-Percenter wisdom flowed directly into the heart of Wu-Tang.

‘I’ll Be There for You/You’re All I Need to Get By’ (ft. Mary J Blige), from Method Man’s debut album, ‘Tical’, was the first Wu single to hit the Billboard Top 10, peaking at number three on the Billboard Chart. The track proved to be the first proof that Wu could appeal to both the streets and the charts. 

Zig-Zag-Zig Allah The final cipher in the Supreme Alphabet translates to Knowledge, Wisdom, and Understanding and represents the final step of consciousness. The ‘Zig-Zag’ refers to the journey one takes to gain knowledge, which is rarely a straight path. The cipher also explains RZA’s name, a backronym for ‘Rakeem Zig-Zag-Zig Allah’. It saw him ‘zig’ toward righteousness and begin building a startling musical universe. 

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This article first appeared in issue eight of Disco Pogo.

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Producer and DJ Teneil Throssell, aka HAAi, has come a long way since working in a hair salon in western Australia and playing with a short-lived shoegaze band. Now, as the former winner of the BBC’s Essential Mix of the Year tells Felicity Martin, she is preoccupied with AI’s encroachment into dance music, the focus of her multi-layered new album, ‘HUMANiSE’. But how are styling hair and spinning tunes connected – and why does her ChatGPT think she’s a gay man?

Perhaps you’ve heard of The Velvet Sundown, the ‘band’ that generated 1m plays on Spotify – and who are completely AI. Or the Japanese girl group AKB48, who released a single created using AI, after it proved more popular with fans than a rival track written by a human. Xania Monet, an AI artist, recently secured a $3m record deal. Whether we like it or not, it looks like artificial intelligence in music is here to stay.

HAAi’s second album, ‘HUMANiSE’, is in part a reaction to AI’s encroachment into creativity, “to the fear of where things are heading, especially within music”, she says. “The most human thing you can do is tell your own story and talk about your experiences and have something people can genuinely relate to. It would be naive of me to think it’s not going to really, really impact [musicians’] jobs. But the thing we can bring is our stories.”

London-based Australian Teneil Throssell, aka HAAi, is in a bar in Hackney. She’s incredibly apologetic about being a few minutes late, having made the classic error of hiring a Lime bike with no pedals. Her ice-blonde hair is tucked behind a brown cap that reads ‘Lil Cowboy’ – merch from the Handsome comedy podcast – and she’s wearing a cream bowling shirt. At this moment in time her schedule is packed: she’s about to fly out to play Pacha in Ibiza, as well as a string of parties in the US and London’s LGBTQIA+ Body Movements, all while planning a Maida Vale session, an expansive remix project that she’s keeping under wraps – and promote ‘HUMANiSE’, which is why she’s here today. She’s had to put Radical New Theory, the label she runs with her partner that champions emerging electronic artists, temporarily on hold. 

“It’s, like, this is what you work your whole life to do,” she says of being pulled in so many directions at once. “But then, amid all the travelling, I’m trying to do my washing and see my cats and have a relationship! It’s like splitting your brain into so many parts. Kind of not so bad for an ADHD person. There are so many cool things happening that are my life’s dream that I kept on trying to find the balance between nailing work stuff and trying to have, like, a holiday. It’s easy to bottle it all up and be like, ‘I just don’t want to let anyone down.’”

HAAi was born in the small mining town of Karratha in western Australia, later moving to the city of Bunbury. She left school early to work as a hairdresser. “The schooling system was not designed for people like me,” she says. “All of my memories of my report cards were like, ‘Teneil is easily distracted.’ And I’m like, ‘No shit!’” she laughs, alluding to the neurodivergence diagnosis that she later received. “It’s something I get quite emotional about, because it’s very easy to grow up feeling like you intellectually don’t fit into a lot of situations. But I was always a really creative kid. I get the same feeling of excitement that I did back then when drawing a picture or making little songs, which is really cool. There’s something to be said about the inner child in you.” 

She loved working in a salon. “One of the common threads [between cutting hair and DJing] is that the number one goal is to make people feel good. With hairdressing, you want someone to walk out there going like, ‘I feel fucking great.’ And you want someone to feel a certain way on the dancefloor. There’s such a link in wanting people to feel happy. People told me some crazy stories – and so did I – but, also, you had the same clients who’ve been seeing you for years and years. They become dear friends that you look forward to seeing – a bit like having a DJ residency.”

HAAi’s own entry point to music was through bands – she was one-third of shoegaze group Dark Bells, eventually sparking her move to the UK. After they disbanded, she made an atypical shift into electronic music. Spotted by Canadian DJ and producer Jacques Greene’s manager while playing records in Dalston’s Ridley Road Market Bar, she was offered a Phonox residency. What followed was two years, or (at least) 564 hours, of a now-fabled Saturday-night residency that won over revellers desperate for more of her unpredictability behind the decks. “I run into people at festivals and there’s this – which I love – sense of pride from people who are like, ‘I used to come to your residency all the time!’ I really love seeing the joy in people’s faces when they’re like, ‘I was a part of this at the beginning.’”

She left the position following creative differences with the club, stemming from her wanting to be more experimental (they’re still on good terms and she’s played at Phonox since then). “There were some pretty heavy chats about the kind of music they wanted played there and what they didn’t,” she says. “As someone who was so invested in every part of that play, I remember feeling like it was short-sighted, because you’re not really offering anything new, or not giving people a reason to want to come back. I remember saying, this comes from me just being so laser-focused on that crowd for so long. And I just went with my gut.”

She’d recorded a bold BBC Essential Mix as a kind of rebellion against what was happening at the time. Serendipitously, it ended up being broadcast on the final night she played there – and it would later be crowned Essential Mix of the Year in 2018. “I’m not very hippy dippy, but I feel like there were a lot of signs that I was making the right decision,” she says. “I feel like I had a lot of people rooting for me during the whole thing, even how much love was in the club on the final night. I personally feel like everything changed for me when I purely went with my gut. That was so separated from any ego or anything that was really to do with me; it was about what I felt was right for the environment. That was when I went from being someone who was selecting and playing records well enough, to leaning more into experimentation. More fearlessness, I think. That was what pushed me into where I am now.”

Never one to meticulously plan her DJ sets, HAAi prefers to feel her way through the moment, weaving together everything from 10-ton techno to searing breakbeats on instinct. The only time she’ll roughly map things out is for marathon sets. “Unless it’s an eight-hour set, I literally throw myself into a 10,000-capacity room with just my scrambled hard drive,” she says, grinning. “I enjoy it – but it’s not for everyone.”

Since being diagnosed with ADHD, she’s come across countless other DJs or people who work in music with similar experiences. “It’s a very attractive job for people whose brains often split into eight!” she laughs, referencing the typical phrase sequencing that DJs use. “I love how much of a conversation it is now, how much more people know about it, and how more people know about how gendered it can be or affected by hormones and all sorts of stuff.” 

She’s leant into her neurodivergence in a positive way – for example, the hyper-focus she gets when working on a particular track. “When I’m on a real roll with music writing, it’s something that can become so obsessive. I’ll be trying to get into the bath or something, and I’ve still got Ableton open. My girlfriend will have to grab the laptop from me!” It’s also helped with the relentlessness of touring. “I have a really hyperactive nature, and it’s really helpful for me when I’m traveling and I feel like until I get home, I feel like I can bounce back. Even in the way that I DJ, I really lean into the chaos of my brain.” 

But it’s not all “rainbows and unicorns”, as HAAi says her mum puts it. In person, HAAi is warm, very funny and easy to chat to, often flashing a conspiratorial grin, but she finds social situations tough. DJing has helped, though. “One of the things I find really appealing about this job is how you’re socialising, but in a way that you’re around a lot of people, and you can have some really nice chats, but you’ve got a job to do. You have something to pull you away if you need to.” She pauses. “It sounds kind of wild to say out loud, but sometimes [when I’m not DJing] I’ll bump into someone and I’ll just be like, ‘How long am I going to be talking for? Am I allowed to go and get a drink now?’ It’s almost like I’ve forgotten how to socialise.”

The tension between the demands of her career and personal life is a theme she explores on album track ‘Can’t Stand to Lose’, a driving, midtempo number with a bittersweet melody, in which she sings: “A thousand clocks upon the horizon/If time’s a question, so is she.” The track, like much of ‘HUMANiSE’, marks a shift towards songwriting territory, most evident on ‘Stitches’, arguably her most traditional verse-chorus track to date, yet still wrapped in characteristically layered production: stuttering drums and saw-toothed synths. On it, HAAi sings about love stretched across distance, missing moments spent drinking wine and listening to music with her fiancée: “If you’re thinking of me/I’ll be thinking of you too”. ‘Rushing’ is another of the album’s most personal moments, revisiting HAAi’s childhood in a single-parent household, while ‘Go’ faces the challenges of growing up Queer in a small town.

Writing more personal music is something that HAAi had to push herself to do. She tapped into the talents of songwriter Låpsley – something she calls a “pivotal” moment for the album. “One of the biggest boner killers of creativity, or creative flow, is like when you stop – this is gonna sound really corny – but when you stop being present in what you’re doing and start to think about how it’s gonna be received,” she says. “When you’re writing songs, it’s like, you just have to get over yourself. And that’s what had to happen to me.” 

One of the themes of ‘HUMANiSE’ is the idea of people and technology coexisting. While HAAi doesn’t use AI to produce, her process involves a variety of plugins, hardware and machines. It was during a studio session with Jon Hopkins, while working on the track ‘Satellite’, that she came across a plugin called Humanize – a type of AutoTune processing designed to make a voice sound even more human. “I was like, ‘That’s so wack that it’s got this function’,” she recalls. “And then I kept thinking about how it’s something that we live with a lot now. There’s so much talk about AI in music, and in our lives, and I was finding it really interesting – like terrifying, interesting.” The discovery ultimately inspired the name of the album, the follow-up to 2022’s ‘Baby, We’re Ascending’, which blended thumping acid with spacious, introspective ambience.

Although she doesn’t use it for music creation, she does find AI helpful for organisational purposes and general questions. “I think my ChatGPT thinks I’m a gay man!” she laughs. “I’ve actually developed a really warm relationship with it. I signed off the other day like, ‘Anyway, better go.’ And then it replied: ‘Slay the house down, Queen!’ What’s interesting about chatbots is they really replicate your own tone... Not that I’m saying ‘Slay the house down!’ But that’s why people like them so much, because they’re relatable.” The technology is something she finds “equal parts fascinating and terrifying. I’m also really happy with what I don’t know about it right now, because that will be when the real fear kicks in,” she adds.

As well as her own vocals, HAAi gives space to other collaborators on the album, most of whom are longtime friends. ‘Shapeshift’ – which sounds like listening to the booming bass from a club from behind closed doors – features KAM-BU, with whom HAAi has worked before. Vocal collective TRANS VOICES appear on three tracks, while Queer poet Kaiden Ford (“a dear friend of mine, they’re a really important voice right now”) provides a beautiful outro to the record on closer ‘HQ’, interspersed with voice notes sent endearingly between them. Hot Chip’s Alexis Taylor – another close pal of HAAi’s – sings on ‘New Euphoria’, while James Massiah is a new sidekick for HAAi (“He’s a friend of KAM-BU’s, so it didn’t feel like a stretch,” she says).

In the past, she says, she shied away from collaborations. Since she first started producing – her first official release was in 2017 as DaDaDa on her own Coconut Beats label – things have, thankfully, progressed, but there was a time when female producers were often subjected to accusations that they’d had help from male beat-makers. “The things that really kept me from working with other people in the past are now the reasons I lean into it more,” she explains. “I took so much pride in doing something solely by myself, so that there was no opportunity for someone to say you hadn’t done that. Whereas now I [relish] the experience of working with other people and learning from what they know, and vice versa, and how much more you can get out of it that way.

“Don’t get me wrong, there’s still a lot of misogyny in our world,” she continues. “But I certainly feel more comfortable knowing what my skills are and aren’t. That was a huge step for me, being like, it’s OK to not be a great piano player. I love working with Jon [Hopkins] for the fact that he’s an extension of the freaking piano when you’re in the room with him – that’s something I’ll never be able to achieve!”

Another of the record’s themes is the importance of unity and community, particularly in our fraught political age. HAAi has been a vocal supporter of Palestine, while also urging the government to pull the plug on the Rosebank oil field project in Shetland, and frequently comments on queer and female issues. She’s attended workshops with the non-profit Slow Factory and Brian Eno about how to navigate your moral compass as an artist. “When you’re someone who’s very visible, the more vocal you are, the more people are going to keep an eye on what you do and don’t say,” she says. “I wish that people would give everyone a bit more grace, because I think everyone feels so helpless and furious and sad and affected by everything that’s going on in the world. We’re inside of this house that’s being set on fire from the outside, and everyone on the inside is telling each other they’re not putting it out right. Maybe if everyone came together and was like, ‘Right, how the fuck do we put this fire out?’ We could make the right decisions together.”

For HAAi, though, connection on the dancefloor is what she’ll always aim for. “There’s this place I played in Manchester recently called The Loft; it’s semi in the round, you’re on the same level as everyone else and you’re just surrounded by people,” she says. “You can really see in their faces if they really love a bit of a song, or if they’re having a moment with their friends. There’s something about the intimacy of that that I really, really love.”

Next year, HAAi will be at the centre of an even more intimate event when she marries her partner. As we finish our frozen margaritas, she chats, excitedly, about her Pinterest board and the venue the couple have lined up. “I’m not sure I’ll DJ it – it’s gonna be packed with DJs, so I imagine the line-up will be pretty stacked,” she laughs. “I always say I’d play the opening of a fucking wardrobe, but I think for this particular night it might be nice just to dance.” 

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This article first appeared in issue eight of Disco Pogo.

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It has been three decades since Belgian brothers Soulwax added electronica to orthodox indie rock, enhancing their reputation overnight and, as 2manydjs, giving dance music a kick up the backside. To mark the release of their first album in eight years, Stephen and David Dewaele talk to Craig McLean in their hometown, Ghent, about their disregard for the music ‘manual’, their father’s connection to the Small Faces and why they were an awful ‘normal’ band…

“Do you know where your teenager is at five o’clock in the morning… drugs, dirty dancing and pounding techno music…”

On a late summer’s Saturday night in smalltown Belgium, it’s not quite dawn, but it is knocking on for 2am, aka 5am for grown-ups. Because while there aren’t many teenagers in evidence at this Daft O’Clock festival hour, their parents are out in continental lager-fuelled force. Drugs? I couldn’t possibly comment. But the dancing, while not so much “dirty”, is certainly on the exuberant side of hygiene. Especially if you’re wearing, as many are, sensible but pricey technical wear. Keeps the rain out, the sweat in.

The beats emanating from the stage, though. They’re definitely pounding and, at times, thrillingly techno. The propulsive live sound of Soulwax will bring that – especially the bit in their set when the Balearic bliss of new track ‘Gimme a Reason’ leads into 2001’s ‘Theme from Discothèque’ (made under the alias Samantha Fu), with its scaremongering, sampled image of dissolute teens getting their pre-dawn rocks off, and then on into 2004 monster ‘E Talking’.

Three drummers will bring that, too. Soulwax’s trio of tub-thumpers – one of them, Igor Cavalera, a founding member of Brazilian metal heavyweights Sepultura – are going at it hammer and tongs from their perches inside scaffolding towers arrayed in a row upstage.

Downstage, meanwhile, are four banks of vertical, mirrored, big-knobbed synths. One of them is worked by a musician who’s suited and booted like a Kraftwerkian bank-teller. In front of him, crooning into an old-school radio microphone, is a dapper man with hurt in his voice but pep in his step.

This is Soulwax, the band led from the front by brothers Stephen and David Dewaele. In the transatlantic, UK-US-EU, rock-rave triangle, the duo sit alongside old pal James Murphy (with whom they host travelling, heavyweight (30,000kg) sound system Despacio) and even older pal Erol Alkan (for whom they helped turn London club night Trash into a year zero tear-up).

Here at Lokerse Feesten in Lokeren, the middle-aged raverati are out in force for Soulwax’s headline slot. They’re splayed and arrayed across the festival site’s municipal park tarmac, making good, shape-throwing use of a space somewhat thinned out after the midnight end of Pet Shop Boys’ set and the onset of babysitter rush-hour. Still, Soulwax, being local boys made good, mean the crowd appreciate the familiar bangers as much as they do the brand new tracks from the brothers Dewaele’s new album, ‘All Systems Are Lying’.

Well, to these eyes and ears anyway. But as they see it from their spots behind microphone (Stephen) and big-knobbed synth (David), the crowd includes a fair amount of folded arms, metaphorical or otherwise. This, too, is apparently because Soulwax are local boys made good (they’re from, and still based in, Ghent, 18 miles down the road).

“That show wasn’t the best one for us,” David says in our second interview, a few weeks later. “You’re playing in front of a home crowd, but it’s not an [easy] home crowd.”

“I know people think of Belgian audiences differently,” adds Stephen, referring, presumably, to Anglo-Saxon notions that the Belgians and Dutch are, well, more polite and less judgemental than us Brits. “But they’re kind of critical. They’re like, ‘Oh, let’s see what you got here.’ So I don’t think we enjoyed it that much. We like being the underdog way more!”

The result: even though the Dewaeles de-emigrated around the pandemic, returning after 12 years living in east London, the biggest Belgian artists in the world don’t particularly look forward to hometown gigs.

That said, the new tunes did go down like 5am teenager-friendly Jägerbombs. “The majority of those songs hadn’t come out,” says David as we talk at the mid-calendar point between Lokerse Feesten, the final show on a summer run of dates, and the release of their fifth studio album. “So the fact that they work in that setting without people knowing them [is great]. It’s not like the reaction is a lot less than for the ones that people know for 20 years. That’s reassuring.”

The afternoon before Lokerse Feesten, Stephen, 55, David, 50, and I meet at Soulwax HQ in Ghent. The architect-designed space, completed in 2014, lurks up a cobbled side-street perpendicular to a canal. Also home to their label, DEEWEE, it’s a wonderland of music-making, record-collecting, gear-amassing and artist-developing, hidden-not-hidden behind a tiled, matt-black exterior. On the outside it looks like the wall of a chic AF shower cubicle. On the inside, a disco Tardis.

Pride of place in the middle of the office from which they run their business and their craft is a space-age hi-fi, racked in a ceiling-high cabinet bisecting the floorspace. Throbbing from the speakers as I arrive is the Small Faces’ ‘Ogdens’ Nut Gone Flake’. When I commend the choice of the 1968 psych-pop-conceptual classic, Stephen’s face lights up. As they often do, Soulwax have a story about that.

The brothers’ dad’s status as Belgium’s pre-eminent music TV host and disc jockey of the 60s and early 70s (imagine a cross between pirate-era John Peel and Serge Gainsbourg) meant that the Dewaele household was full of music. And, occasionally, musicians.

“My dad worked for the TV, a bit like the BBC,” begins Stephen. “I wasn’t born at this point, but they had a house a little bit outside of Ghent. And he had a TV programme, and for some reason they chose to film the Small Faces in their living room. They recorded it – but they lost the tapes,” he adds, still disconsolate despite living with this knowledge of the one-that-got-away for five decades.

Encircling the stereo are stacks and stacks (and stacks) of vinyl, running in floor-to-ceiling rows along the walls of the main office. They’re the evidence of a deep-seated, Abba to ZZ Top eclecticism. The reference points for their remixes. The weapons of mass distraction for the dancefloor botherers who went out as 2manydjs and came back still battling the complicated legacy of the bootleg/mashup micro-genre they invented-didn’t-invent at the turn of the millennium.

We move downstairs to the studio, a crowded cave of synths and amps and wires. David, comme d’habitude, is dressed in business casual: shirt, slacks, no tie, jacket drying on a hook after an afternoon downpour. Stephen is in rock star casual: crisp white T-shirt, directional denim, strong trainers game. On the interview rider: a bowl of plump cherries and mugs of hot water poured over artisan Japanese leaves. Soulwax are tea spotters, too.

‘All Systems Are Lying’ is the Dewaeles’ first studio album in eight years. Its predecessor, ‘From Deewee’, was recorded in one take. Further back still, the “pre-2000” Soulwax, as Stephen puts it, were an indie band purposefully bucking what they saw was their young Belgian peers’ obligation to make R&S-friendly techno. But the seeds of change were sown early, when Chris Goss (Kyuss, Queens of the Stone Age), the producer of their 1996 debut album ‘Leave the Story Untold’, said to them in the studio one day: ‘Whoa, you guys need to incorporate some of that electronic thing. Because that’s easy for you guys. That seems to be in your DNA.’

In short, the brothers like a framework to their records. Was there, then, any concept, or focus, or rules for the making of ‘ASAL’? David nods before embarking on a typically thoughtful, eloquent description.

“The two things that we’d set out, they’re interlinked. One is that we wanted to it to be more vocal. Less of this ‘travelling studio that does a crazy audio experiment’. Which is maybe more what ‘From Deewee’ lent itself towards. So, more vocals. Then – this is going to sound like it’s the same thing, but it isn’t really – we wanted the songs to be better.”

That meant pushing things hard, not working them to death. Rigour, not rigor mortis.

“For everything that’s on the album, there’s maybe five or six things that we’ve thrown away,” David continues. “For this album, we wanted it to be a very intuitive and instinctive process.” That, he notes, is at odds with their remixes (for Tame Impala, Marie Davidson, Fontaines D.C. and many more), where the tracks unavoidably must work, if not to a script then at least from one. “Therefore the rule is a non-rule: we had to feel whatever came out of us.”

That meant, ultimately, that the album they recorded here in studio DEEWEE was built from modular synths, live drums, tape machines, processed vocals – and no guitars. “That was never a rule that we set out,” clarifies Stephen. “It was something mentioned to us when we finished it. But songs like ‘Hot Like Sahara’ or ‘Idiots in Love’ could easily have been made with guitars,” he adds of certifiably rockin’ album tracks that definitely sound like riffs (but are actually synth-alikes). “And would have been maybe easily done by Soulwax pre-2000. But I guess, in a way, they have the same sentiment, or the same DNA.”

That idea of ensuring room to roam, of following the vibe, is encapsulated in ‘Run Free’’s lyrics: “I want to run free with the music,” sings Stephen in melancholy huskiness, “the beautiful mistake, try not to lose it… I wanna run free when I choose it, play the wrong chord, say something stupid”. That feels like a guiding ethos: the brothers are free to mess things up. There is no wrong chord, no wrong answer. There’s no such thing as a nightmare on Soulwax.

Stephen: “It’s a really, really good point. It’s a stream of consciousness on one hand. I’m definitely struggling with how formulaic a lot of stuff – a lot of music, a lot of life – has become. And I think as Soulwax, or as 2manydjs, or when we do Despacio, we try to colour outside of the lines. Try and see what that new territory there is. Because there is no manual.”

These funky freres have been ignoring the manual since the earliest days. That “pre-2000” incarnation was indeed an indie band who propped up the bill on NME tours and played with other up-and-coming guitar slingers. But as David once said: “We were really bad at being a normal band.” So, to cite just two of the other bands that they played with early on: what could Muse and Coldplay do that Soulwax couldn’t?

Stephen: “Make money!”

David: “Which could be seen as our detriment, because we couldn’t really do that. It’s just too boring for us to be just that. We’ve tried to use it as a positive thing, as a superpower, if you will. But I’m sure Muse and Coldplay are frustrated, having days where they’re like, ‘Oh, this is hard...’”

Stephen: “No, they’re having a great life!”

David: “Maybe. But what I’m saying is: it’s never black or white. We’re constantly doing different things. So that keeps it interesting. But that’s also to our detriment. Because it means sometimes it’s hard to keep up with all the things that we’re doing. And I’m sure from an audience point of view, it can be confusing, like: ‘What? Why are they doing this?’”

Stephen: “Maybe we’re also a little bit more dysfunctional. I remember Muse really well, because we toured a lot with them. They were so driven. So ambitious. That was never something we felt was rock’n’roll. Or had the punk ethos. Or whatever it was that we were gravitating to. And I’m not saying it’s a bad thing – because Muse were a force. But I honestly think our feeding ground was Van Halen, and the stuff that my mum and dad listened to, but also then quickly we go to The Virgin Prunes, or ‘O Superman’ by Laurie Anderson… So our sense of success, or what we were hoping to achieve, is a very different thing than trying to be Queen.”

Like the man said, you can’t say that’s not ambitious. But the Dewaeles’ ambition was less linear, more unrealistic, wholly… wonky. They were trying to find a way to mash the Small Faces and Jimi Hendrix and Daft Punk and Aphex Twin. As Stephen says: “We were consuming the whole time. We were trying to figure out, how does that become a place in culture? That’s still today what we feed on.”

“People sometimes say about Bono and Damon Albarn: ‘Oh, they’re so driven.’ [Like] it’s in their DNA,” he continues. “We’re very clear about this: we don’t have that. We have a different drive. Which is: ‘Ooh, how can we make that sound?’ Or: ‘Wouldn’t it be great to do that?’ Or whatever other stupid idea we had. I guess that’s the difference.”

“Steph and Dave don’t live a stagnant creative life,” says songwriter, composer and former Klaxons man James Righton. He signed with DEEWEE for his 2020 solo album ‘The Performer’ and 2022’s ‘Jim, I’m Still Here’, with the brothers co-producing and Righton spending a lot of time in Ghent. “They have an ability to say yes to things, but never make that decision based on financial or commercial reasons. They didn’t make my records to make money. They did it because they liked what I do and wanted to explore that. Even live,” he adds of Soulwax’s constant retooling of how they play concerts, “they could do a much more conservative version of that. But it’s not about money. It’s about executing their vision without compromise. They’re like big brothers to me, and they set a really good example.”

Soulwax met their other brother-from-another-mother after their 1999 show at Dingwalls in Camden, north London. Somewhat bored with the life of a touring indie-rock band, and with a burgeoning DJ side hustle as The Flying Dewaele Brothers (their pre-2manydjs handle), they jumped at Erol Alkan’s invitation to play his Monday club night Trash.

“We took our record bag, and looked at Erol’s record bag – and he had 80 per cent of the same records that we had,” remembers Stephen. “It was [Daft Punk’s] ‘Rollin’ and Scratchin’’, but it was also Wall of Sound stuff, ‘Silver Machine’ by Hawkwind. And then David and me play ‘Ace of Spades’, and Lemmy’s in front of us doing this” – Stephen flashes devil horns – “and doing this” – Stephen gives me this middle finger. “And we go: this is our world. This guy Erol and us, we absorb pop culture the same way.” Are friends eclectic? One million per cent.

It was a relationship that gave Soulwax escape velocity from indie rock and fully into electronic music culture. And it’s a relationship that continues to this day. As Stephen says, “it’s quite extraordinary that, still today with the three of us, it’s all about music. ‘Have you heard this? Have you seen that?’ Erol actually sent us a text yesterday, he was playing Pike’s...”

They found more brotherhood in New York, with “what James was doing with DFA”, remembers Stephen, “then Arthur [Baker] doing his nights Return to New York. It all just came together. And it was very exciting.”

That sense of joyful anarchy takes us directly into 2manydjs and the Dewaeles’ groundbreaking bootleg album ‘As Heard on Radio Soulwax Pt 2’ (2002). The idea that you can smash things together that on paper should not be together – it’s the old Björk maths: two plus two equals five. An ineffable extra emerges.

Still, that magic arose from the most prosaic circumstances: given a one-hour radio show on national Belgian radio, the brothers had to come up, weekly, with a mixtape of records. “So just to cram in as many records that we liked,” says David, “we thought, ‘Oh, let’s just take the a cappella from this track...’ That gradually became: ‘Actually, we can make something new out of this.’”

“And juxtapose weirder things,” adds Stephen, “like Salt-N-Pepa with The Stooges, because we felt they had the same energy.”

Alkan, again, was a kindred spirit as mashups invaded the airwaves and the culture. Stephen remembers the three of them browsing in Rough Trade’s Ladbroke Grove shop “when all these A&R guys came in. They were like, ‘Oh my God, I heard this thing on XFM, it’s Kraftwerk meets The Beatles.’ And it was something that we’d made that week, and the three of us were just standing there like, ‘Hee hee hee…’ The guy behind the counter’s like, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about, man.’”

That sense of making music on the fly – of bootlegging your own record collection – and just getting it out there was right up their cobbled side street. Stephen: “The world that we [had] lived in was: you make a record, you tour it for a year, release three singles, make a video.... It was all so slow. And it was dependent on getting airplay on Radio 1 and blah, blah, blah. This whole machine – that still is there! But what we were doing was just: we make the track… somebody tapes it… it comes out. It’s a bit punk because it was like: ‘Ah, cool – we can beat the system.’”

Quickly, though, things got mashed up. Kylie Minogue’s ‘people’ asked the brothers, via Alkan, about doing something clever with ‘Can’t Get You Out of My Head’ for the singer’s appearance at the 2002 Brit Awards. All three quickly realised that the best fit was ‘Blue Monday’. But before they could action it, in the brothers’ telling, Kylie’s “people” said they’d had the same idea and cracked on and did their own version. ‘Can’t Get Blue Monday Out of My Head’ then appeared as a Kylie B-side four months later.

The following year, Soulwax appeared on a French TV show honouring David Bowie. You can watch the clip on YouTube, the brothers sitting there, dumbstruck, as Bowie waxes lyrical, intellectualising the dumb-not-dumb 2manydjs bootleg concept.

“It was my least favourite moment in my life!” says Stephen. “This is the difference between me and Dave – this Dave here – because for him it was like a walk in the park. But I just freak out a little bit! Because Bowie’s my hero. He’s the reason why a lot of this is happening for us. And he goes like, ‘You guys can do whatever you want with my music.’ And I go: ‘No, it’s perfect, we can’t!’ What? Just shut up, Steph! Just shut up!”

In the end, eventually, Soulwax took him at his word: in 2015, shortly before Bowie’s death, they released Radio Soulwax’s ‘Dave’, a 60-minute audio/visual mashup megamix of Bowie tracks.

As Stephen characterises it now: “There’s this dance that we keep doing with Bowie. We’re allowed to use ‘Heroes’ and ‘Sound and Vision’ and make these new versions. But it’s like Dave – this Dave – says: the Kylie moment is a moment in the timeline where it also defines a little bit what we end up doing.”

Because you define in opposition to that?

“Yeah, maybe. The fact [was]: we’ve always been DJs. We’ve always been a band. We’ve always been remixing other people. But if the culture goes ‘great’, then what do I fight against? Who am I going to piss off? What lines am I going to redraw? So it’s always great to have those other entities to go looking for other stuff.”

That willingness to disrupt, that embracing of the wayward, naturally chimed with James Murphy’s vision of what his band could be and do. The Dewaeles have DJed and played with LCD Soundsystem multiple times – they estimate they’ve seen the American outfit more than 100 times – and were, naturally, part of the line-up during LCD’s final-not-final show at Madison Square Garden in 2011. They were, too, Murphy’s DJs of choice at the aftershow “wake” at the Tribeca Grand hotel.

Now they have Despacio with Murphy. What function or fulfilment does their pop-up global sound system bring them?

“There’s a lot of boxes it ticks,” begins David. “Again, it has to be seen in its context. Because when we started with it in 2011, we were feeling that there had been what seemed already like a peak of DJs becoming this thing. People are just on a stage with pyro, and the DJs come in to play on a not-so-great sound system, and there’s seven DJs in a night. Everyone gets to play 45 minutes. People don’t dance anymore. They just stand there looking at a DJ and with their phones and hands in the air.

“All these clichés that now you’ve heard a million people talk about. But this was what we were [thinking then]. So instead of us being the guys in the business class lounge complaining about it, why don’t we do something about it?”

The Dewaeles were fans of McIntosh, using the company’s hi-spec amps and speakers at home in and their studio. Then Murphy suggested they get together to build a sound system as good as their respective studio set-ups. Soulwax’s management duly approached McIntosh.

“They were crazy enough to say yes,” says David of the New York state-based company. “They’d only been involved in Woodstock and the Grateful Dead Wall of Sound [PA]. But they lent us this crazy amount of amplifiers. Then we sat down at dinner and defined what Despacio should be. And it was all these things that have now become also pretty much the norm: back-to-back, super-long sets, vinyl only.

It is, the younger Dewaele acknowledges cheerfully, “like we’re ticking all these hipster boxes. But it wasn’t that. It was just us saying: ‘All these things are important. The DJ should be hidden, people should be dancing, people should be in the dark for the first four hours.’ All this stuff that seemed obvious to us. And the world has kind of caught up with it.”

Stephen draws parallels with what they did with 2manydjs: they had to create a bespoke ecosystem to play the records they wanted to play. “We had to build a place where we can play Steve Reich, 20 minutes long, and make people feel emotional about it. It was a necessity for us to do things like that.” And now, “when we remix Tame Impala, we make it completely for Despacio: It’s a 10-minute Despacio version. It’s all about facilitating all your ideas.”

Like they said: What? Why are they doing this? Where “this” is a wilfully non-linear, brand-blurring identity. Where Soulwax is only the jumping-off point for a world of differently named musical adventures.

Because, pure and simple, they love it, still. And it takes them round the world, still. But it is, always, a lot. Certainly the fiftysomethings I meet on both occasions are indefatigable and buoyant, even as a “phoney war” summer touring schedule prefigures a full-bore album release and international touring campaign of many months’ duration. But being middle-aged, time-served musos and DJs, with families to boot, how have they looked after each other – and their mental health – through all this period? How have they made sure that they didn’t go insane?

“Have we?” wonders Stephen with a smile.

“It’s a good question,” ponders David. “There’s one thing that’s typical Belgian: to never believe. Maybe it’s the same thing with the Bowie thing – if someone’s sitting there telling you you’re the future of music, you don’t believe it. The typical Belgian thing is to maintain...”

“...that feeling of an underdog,” repeats Stephen. “It’s something that I recognise a lot with people from the north in the UK. Because there’s always London being the place to call things. I feel like you keep your feet on the ground there. That’s a typical Belgian thing.”

And in very simple terms, being brothers and being there for each other – that goes a long way?

David: “Yeah, yeah, of course. We have quite a lot of friends who did travel alone. They did...”

Stephen: “…go insane.”

David: “Yeah, quite quickly you start to spiral into negative territory. And luckily, you have this person with you – who might also be the most annoying person, like most siblings can be. I’m not saying he is...”

Stephen: “And he’s always going to be your brother. He’s never not going to be your brother.”

Forever buoyed by brotherly love, Stephen and David Dewaele have duly booked more shows, well into 2026. That said…

“Just before we started talking today,” says Stephen during our second interview, “we were discussing how we want to skip the whole show part and do something else. We have all these other ideas. Another way of bringing the records [to audiences].”

Really? Soulwax… #4? #5?

“Yeah, we’ll see,” says David with a what-can-you-do? shrug. “We’re idiots.”

“See the difference between Coldplay and Muse and us?” says Stephen. “It’s this!” 

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This article first appeared in issue eight of Disco Pogo.

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With a flurry of activity related to their various guises this year, you could say The KLF were back. But did they ever truly go away? After a string of hit singles and one massive album in the early 90s, they left the music business following an unforgettable performance at the 1992 Brits, but prank after statement after stunt kept them in the public eye. Joe Muggs analyses their many happenings and ponders whether it was all just one big pyramid scheme. “It’s a cult,” explains one long-time KLF confidant. “Definitely a cult...”

The KLF don’t really exist. At least not in the sense that any other Disco Pogo cover stars do. There’s no big greatest hits package, their tunes aren’t endlessly replayed anthems in clubs, and the only live shows you’ll find on YouTube are a two-minute set where all the music is provided by grindcore/thrash band Extreme Noise Terror, and one 23-minute-long version single track (performed as ‘2K’, five years after The KLF had split up) featuring a brass band and striking dockers’ choir, with Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty made up to look elderly, pelting around the stage in motorised wheelchairs, giant horns attached to their foreheads with hazard tape, pouring disinfectant down a dead swan’s neck. 

They’ve disappeared and reappeared, taken on different guises, announced tours to happen in 300 years’ time and done stunts so weird that it’s hard to accept they really happened. In researching this feature, some of the things that most leapt out are things they didn’t do: they didn’t produce Pulp’s ‘Common People’ (although Jarvis Cocker asked them to) and they didn’t make a single with Barry White (although they gave it serious consideration). Yet the thing they’re most often accused of having not done – burning a million pounds in cash as The K Foundation in 1994 – they actually did.

It’s easy to think that Drummond and Cauty’s activity has been one long theatrical performance, an art stunt, or just a gigantic in-joke – as DJ and keen mischief maker Artwork puts it, they’re “proper piss takers at the highest level – not many people have trolled the work like those dudes”. Or it can all be seen as a great mystical conjuration, a breadcrumb trail of symbolism and magic for the faithful to follow into ever weirder manipulations of reality. Certainly plenty of die-hard fans are fully subscribed to that version. “Oh yeah, mate,” says long-term KLF collaborator Tony Thorpe, aka Moody Boyz. “It’s a cult. Definitely a cult.” 

And yet, and yet… Aside from all that, Cauty and Drummond did make some profoundly great music, for the dancefloor, for the charts and for horizontal wreck-heads – music that echoes through the decades and still inspires. The first Pure Trance version of ‘What Time Is Love’ was a staggeringly influential underground staple. And the ‘Chill Out’ and ‘The White Room’ albums were things of melancholy bliss – part of their involvement in a wider chillout movement, which included playing cosmic sounds with Alex Paterson and Youth in the backroom of Paul Oakenfold’s Land Of Oz club and led to Cauty’s early involvement in The Orb. When it came to their global chart dominating ‘Stadium House’ reworks of their tracks, they hit a vein of crazed inventiveness that was instantly accessible – enough to help them sell more singles than anyone else in the world in 1991 – but also sounded like nothing else before or since and came with the still now head-melting dubwise remixes by Tony Thorpe to boot. 

The fact The KLF ceased to exist as such in 1992, ending all sales of their physical records, meant they effectively removed themselves from radio play too, pre-emptively erasing themselves from any retro 90s playlists. Yet those records do echo through fans’ and ravers’ memories, endlessly bootlegged in new versions. ‘What Time Is Love’ has been remixed by no less than Ricardo Villalobos (back in the peak ‘mnml’ moment of 2005) and Paul Woolford’s Special Request guise (released online on 23-11-23 and on vinyl last year). 

And just this year, KiF’s ‘Still Out’ film and LP reimagining of ‘Chill Out’ has been a word-of-mouth success. “It’s reminded us how important The KLF were,” says KiF’s Will Cookson. “We’ve had messages from all over the world about people’s love for ‘Chill Out’ since it came out.” And since The KLF resurrected in 2017 – marking 23 years from their cash-burning – their People’s Pyramid project has likewise been gathering steady waves of interest, drawing the Sports Banger organisation into its orbit and generating new KLF-adjacent music this year in the form of the deeply eerie (uh-uh) 23-minute ‘Music for Funerals and Bricklaying Ceremonies’ by TowerBlock1 and the Peoples Pyramid Foghorn Orkestra.

Got all that? Good.

If there’s an origin story for all this madness, it comes in the mid-1970s when Drummond, down from Scotland to study art in Liverpool, became a carpenter and scene painter for the notably progressive Everyman Theatre. It was here that actor and anarchist provocateur Ken Campbell put on his 24-hour production of ‘The Illuminatus! Trilogy’ by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson – and Drummond was drawn into the worlds of both Campbell and the serious-not-serious pseudo-religion Discordianism, which surrounds all things ‘Illuminatus!’ Pyramids, golden apples, secret societies, lost continents, the number 23 and the idea that the fabric of reality could be an artistic medium all entered the mix. 

All that would remain in the background for a while, but his first musical venture was certainly unorthodox: the sprawling Big In Japan, fronted by Jayne Casey with a lampshade on her head, its shifting line-up featuring a remarkable array of future talent including Holly Johnson, Ian Broudie and drummer Budgie (The Slits, Siouxsie and the Banshees, etc).

Budgie remembers Drummond back then being a stern taskmaster and intense performer: “I still have that vivid memory of Bill standing in front of me, with that huge semi-acoustic Gibson thing, always with the same face on, the grimace of anger, ‘NOOOO! URGGGH!’ that kind of thing. You know, ‘No!! It’s not good enough!’” Another Big In Japan member was David Balfe, who likewise remembers Drummond being imposing. “I was the youngest in the band,” he says, “still just a teenager. He was this big, rugged guy who wasn’t... I mean, not that he was antisocial, but he just seemed to be marching to the beat of his own drum even then. But we ended up getting on really well.” So well, in fact, that when Big In Japan failed to get a deal and fell apart, Drummond and Balfe went into business. “I was wandering around asking the others what they were going to do, Bill said: ‘I think I might start a record label.’ I said: ‘Oh, that’s a good idea. Can I do it with you?’ And for reasons that I’ve often asked him about since then, he said: ‘Yeah, all right.’”

Balfe flags this up as symbolic of the snap decisions that would define Drummond’s life thereafter. They formed Zoo Records, and with what Balfe calls “the impetuosity of youth” quickly made quite the splash by first signing and then managing Merseyside scenesters The Teardrop Explodes and Echo and the Bunnymen. Both Drummond and Balfe went on to further success in the London industry, Balfe eventually signing for management the group Brilliant – which, alongside former Killing Joke bassist Youth, featured in its line-up a young Jimmy Cauty, who was living in a large squat in Stockwell, immersed in a scene that was swirling everything from post-punk and psychedelia to jazz-funk. 

“There was an amazing apprenticeship available to us creatives back then,” says Cressida Bowyer – then Cauty’s partner, soon to be a key part of The KLF, and now a biologist and associate professor in arts and austainability. “A lot of people became quite successful later on because we all signed on the dole and we all squatted, we were all in bands together or separately, and it was easy to learn your craft – you could spend your whole time either trying to be a rock star or waitressing in a whole food cafe or whatever.”

Balfe got Brilliant signed to Warners and installed Drummond as their A&R – but in fact it wasn’t until after they’d spent a fortune on Brilliant’s Stock, Aitken & Waterman-produced album and been dropped by the label in 1986 that Drummond and Cauty hit it off. “I think maybe Bill had had enough of being the industry guy,” says Bowyer, and in short order he made his one and only solo album, ‘The Man’, a very intense and peculiar affair rooted in folk and trad country – and then turned his attention to more modernist, conceptual ideas. He told Balfe he wanted to do sound collage. 

“So,” says Balfe, “I said: ‘Oh, you should speak to Jimmy. I’d given Jimmy this old Apple II computer of mine, he’d bought some card that you stuck into it and it did this incredibly early crude sampling. So they tried this and it wasn’t very good, it sounded really rough, but that was state of the art at that point.”

Their first album as The Justified Ancients of Mu Mu (JAMs), ‘1987 (What the Fuck Is Going On?)’, really was rough: collisions of crass (and thoroughly illegal) samples with crude pseudo-rapped shouting – Drummond’s fierce Scots bellow, in particular, still has some of the scary presence Budgie had noted in Big In Japan. “I think they were trying to be the Beastie Boys,” says Iain Baker, later of Jesus Jones. “You could see it with them calling themselves King Boy D and Rockman Rock. They probably wanted to be popular. But I was working in a record shop then, and I can tell you they were only selling to chin-stroking, John-Peel-listening, art-rock-type guys.” 

Things were moving very fast indeed, though. They might not have sold loads but their dramatic statements – and getting sued by Abba for one sample, in particular, and having to destroy every copy of ‘1987’ got them plenty of press attention. Drummond moved into the Stockwell squat that would soon become known as Trancentral, and as he and Cauty became thick as thieves the weird symbolism started flowing, starting with the JAMs name, which came straight out of ‘Illuminatus!’. Mystical anarchists such as Ken Campbell were still very much in the mix: his daughter, Daisy Eris Campbell, now the chief “bricklayer” for the People’s Pyramid, remembers Drummond and Cauty “coming round for tea all the time when I was a kid, discussing whatever mad Discordian ideas they were having… I had no chance really!” 

Also, crucially, acid house hit London.

Through 1988 and 1989, the JAMs and their new offshoot ,The KLF – all released entirely independently on the KLF Communications label based in the Trancentral squat – had a split personality. On one hand, Balfe says, “they’d got really fascinated with Stock, Aitken & Waterman, who were now getting really big with Kylie and Jason and all that. Bill, especially, loved this idea of factory-made pop and was writing a lot of songs where he was trying to be in that vein.” 

This is shot through the JAMs’ second album, ‘Who Killed the JAMs?’, the three mutant punky dance pop singles by Disco 2000 – a duo of Bowyer and Brilliant vocalist June Montana – and explicit in the 1989 KLF single ‘Kylie Said to Jason’ (even if that does sound more like the Pet Shop Boys). But on the other hand – and also audible through those same records – is the fact that Cauty, in particular, along with Bowyer, Balfe and their circle of friends, was soaking up the acid experience non-stop. 

“We were in [Paul Oakenfold’s] Spectrum early doors,” says Bowyer, “totally amazed to be experiencing it and really wanting to replicate this culture… actually no, not replicate it but help forge it.” Cauty would stay up all night in Trancentral letting sequencer settings modulate. One of these sessions became the unforgettable ‘What Time Is Love’ riff – which, in Drummond’s words at the time, became “our three-note warhorse of a signature tune.” Edited to a crisp seven minutes, the ‘Pure Trance’ version was passed to DJs in the summer of ‘88 and began to spread entirely organically – almost the opposite of the highly conceptualised pop they’d been hoping would be their core. 

“For a few weeks Oakey would play it as the last tune at Spectrum,” says Bowyer. “Everyone had been having the most amazing time, then they’d put the lasers on, everyone would know it was the last track, and to see them buzzing on that… we knew!” The track also exploded across Europe, bootlegged and reworked by big names in Belgium and Italy, and inadvertently setting the pace for trance, Euro-techno and rave as such. 

Their pop leanings did bear fruit the same year, though, in the form of the ridiculous ‘Doctorin’ the Tardis’, a bona fide novelty record mashing up ‘Doctor Who’, (unfortunately) Gary Glitter and ‘Illuminatus!’ imagery. It was “probably the most nauseating record in the world”, as Drummond put it on their KLF Communications information sheet but also made them a ton of money and allowed them to ramp up ambitions. Even as they continued to experiment with pop in 1989, the Pure Trance singles and the backroom chillout experiments at Oakenfold’s Land of Oz alongside Youth and Alex Paterson saw them becoming part of an expanding electronic underground. A gloriously weird remix 12-inch for the initial release of ‘3am Eternal’ featured makeovers by The Orb (then Paterson and Cauty) and Moody Boys – marking Tony Thorpe becoming a part of the KLF machine. 

Thorpe was already a veteran of the post-punk scene with his band 400 Blows and an early adopter of house. He first come in contact with the duo as The JAMs: “They were sampling really stupid music,” he says, “and I thought, ‘Who are these clowns?’ – but I was fascinated. I asked if I could remix one of their tracks for a compilation I was doing, they said yeah, but then told me it was shit. I think Jim might have even thrown it in the bin in front of me.” This combative beginning was the beginning of a surprisingly fruitful relationship; the ever-blunt Thorpe became “the person who could tell them ‘no, this is shit’” in the studio but also an ear to the ground of the evolving rave scene. 

“Tony used to turn up on a Friday evening at the squat,” Bowyer remembers, “with a bag of new records he had picked up in Soho, and we used to just spend the weekend listening to these tunes and going out, that was our stimulation and inspiration.” 

As that suggests, the party energy wasn’t just out in the clubs by this point but was part of The KLF infrastructure. Manda Glanfield was already in their extended clubbing and raving circles and had had notable early UK house hits with The Beatmasters, when she moved in next door to Trancentral. 

“They were friends of friends, and they were so cool that when the flat came up we nabbed it,” she laughs. “We lived next door for a few years of total madness. We had a little sort of nice two-bed flat in a Victorian semi, but they had this gigantic wreck – it was like this five-storey squat and they just ripped out every internal wall, the place was full of acrow props holding up the ceilings. Their parties were a bit terrifying. I remember going in the front door and just standing there and watching this... the floor above... just bouncing.”

It’s this energy, as much as any high concept, that fed into The KLF that the wider world knows. From 1990 through 1992, the vast Stadium House reworkings of the Pure Trance songs put deranged rave mania and KLF conceptualism into the mega mainstream the world over. 

“Bill was less interested in the acid house thing,” says Balfe, “but his genius was taking Jimmy’s backing tracks, adding samples, finding the right people to make them pop.” 

Trancentral became a hit factory, albeit not in the Stock Aitken & Waterman fashion they’d imagined. Thorpe, as well as being a grumpy sounding board, regularly added beats and brought in vocalists from the London hip hop and reggae scene. 

“There was nothing like it, nothing like it,” laughs Maxine Harvey, who became the “KLF aha-aha-aha” voice of ‘3am Eternal’, as she remembers the differences from her previous role in Maxi Priest’s touring band. “Though my mum phoned me up panicking when she saw ‘Top of the Pops’, like, ‘What are all those hoods!?’, thinking they were some Ku Klux Klan thing…” 

Glanfield was brought in to add some of the pop-dance magic she’d given to remixes of The Shamen, Erasure and suchlike. “Though actually they literally just brought me into the studio and asked me to programme some ‘trademark drum fills’,” she smiles. Bowyer became de facto creative director for ever more elaborate videos and performances and held the chaos in check (“Her and Jimmy were the mum and dad of Trancentral,” chuckles Thorpe), and Sally Fellowes came in from their distributor to become KLF Communications label manager. 

With Fellowes’ smart deals, the Stadium House remixes kept getting bigger and more lucrative – albeit with the money going back into ever more ludicrous staging and stunts such as hiring Tammy Wynette and building Viking ships – and ‘Chill Out’ and ‘The White Room’ achieved major cult status. “I wanted it to keep on going,” says Thorpe. “The music was great; we were having hits… I even persuaded Bill it would be a good idea to get Barry White to sing a Stadium House version of ‘Build a Fire’ from ‘The White Room’… but basically they burned out.” 

Less than four years after The KLF began, the project ended in 1992, followed by a symbolic sacrifice a couple of years later as their K Foundation guise burned the million pounds that they calculated were the remaining profits from their hits. Cauty, Drummond and various members of the team they’d assembled would continue to make music through the 90s, though, via K Foundation, K2 and Kalevala projects, but it became increasingly confrontational, fragmented and opposed to industry involvement. 

“When we came to record ‘Common People’ in 1994,” says Jarvis Cocker, “we really wanted them, because they did ‘Stadium House’ and we thought this could be ‘Stadium Indie’. I got as far as tracking Bill down, but they weren’t having it. Maybe for the best, who knows?” 

The aftermath was still creative, but wild. Witness the chaotic outsider art and chaotic noise performances that took place at the east London bar The Foundry, owned by Drummond and run by pugnacious ex-forces tour manager, security man and long-time associate Alan ‘Gimpo’ Goodrick – fond of letting off munitions in the basement as entertainment for drug buddies. Or Cauty’s “sonic cannons” built on to armoured cars, which, says Thorpe, involved “me playing horrible drum’n’bass in a hazmat suit and trying to punch journalists”. Or, indeed, the K2 performance of ‘What Time Is Love’ recast as ‘Fuck the Millennium’ at the Barbican in 1997 when the then 19-year-old Daisy Eris Campbell was asked to direct the choir of striking Liverpool dockers. 

“It was trial by fire,” she says. “And it shouldn’t have worked, but of course when Bill and Jimmy set something in motion, somehow it does.”

Eventually, though, the duo separated into their own artistic lanes going into the 21st century. Cauty made overtly politicised installations in collaboration with the L-13 Light Industrial Workshop, notably focusing on riot imagery, while Drummond produced books, hosted artworks in a tower in Northern Ireland and cooked up other more conceptual work such as ‘The 17’ (a template for spontaneous choirs, designed as an escape from recorded music). But finally in 2017 – 23 years on from burning the million pounds – they reconstituted The JAMs. This wasn’t to make music, though (although some KLF material did trickle on to streaming sites in 2021): rather to publish a convoluted sci-fi story, ‘2023: A Trilogy’ (announced at 23 minutes past midnight on 23 August, of course), and throw a three-day carnival in Liverpool, Welcome to the Dark Ages, at which the People’s Pyramid was announced. In contrast to pyramids dedicated to kings and emperors, this was to be a tomb of the people: built over centuries, each brick containing 23 grams of the ashes of one person, starting with Cauty’s brother, Simon, who had died the previous year.

There was a new seriousness to this, a sense that they weren’t getting any younger, which has also led to them archiving their entire work together with all music master tapes going to the British Library and all film material to the BFI. “We’re in the process of dying,” says Cally Callomon, who manages Drummond and Cauty, and has long been the designer and realiser of Drummond’s conceptual books and pamphlets. “But instead of waiting for someone to be dead and then having lots of children saying: ‘We don’t know what to do with this stuff!’, they are living that process of dying by ensuring that everything is taken care of.” 

And that includes steadily handing over the People’s Pyramid to… the people. As Daisy Eris Campbell, who lays bricks containing the ‘MuMufied’ ashes in the Toxteth Day of the Dead each year says: “It’s new territory for them to be doing such a community project where you really do need the community onside because that’s not their way: their instinct is to kind of keep pulling the rug!”

And in that handing over to the community – their community – they tacitly acknowledged their links to the rave and to their own musical legacy. That first 2017 event featured Jarvis Cocker singing ‘Justified and Ancient’, and was glorious chaos. “I had to wait in a room,” he says, “in this sort of church, community centre place, and I could see people queuing up to help tow their ice cream van through Liverpool. Then I sang my song, and there was an amazing event afterwards, with bands and Greg Wilson DJing, all these people gathered in strange face paint, a really good atmosphere. It seemed to fall together: I’m not sure how much forethought there was behind any of it, but it really happened. It worked.” 

Most recently, in a symbolic roping in of younger generations, Sports Banger was recruited to throw a “workwear fashion show” and rave after the 2024 Day of the Dead. Jonny Banger wasn’t that familiar with The KLF’s work when he created artwork around a riot theme. Incorporated into that was a photo of a bizarre seven-foot-tall character at the 1990 Poll Tax riots, which he didn’t know was in fact Drummond’s old charge Julian Cope in papier-mâché costume as his Sqwubbsy alter ego. The artwork attracted Cauty’s attention; he playfully pointed out the similarity to his own work and eventually sent Banger one of his signature smiley riot shields in the post. Banger instantly grasped the sense that he existed in the same deep streams of raving and subversion as them, and since then has got drawn more into their world. “I now know where I’m going to be in November every year from now on in!” he says. 

The KLF never really existed in the sense that any other musical act does. But in the four years they officially were a thing, even if it was one big conceptual joke or mad mystical conjuration, they made more impact than most people do in entire careers. And that impact, and its legacy, as we still try to puzzle it out decades later, still reverberates through lives and through culture. 

For a band that never existed, their presence looms large indeed.  

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This article first appeared in issue eight of Disco Pogo.

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They say you can learn a lot about a person by the company they keep. If that’s the case then Lowell Fillmore ‘Sly’ Dunbar, the legendary drummer and one half of the equally celebrated Jamaican rhythm section and production duo Sly and Robbie, was deserving of all the plaudits that came his way.

Over the course of his nigh-on 60-year career, Dunbar, who has died aged 73, provided the propulsive backbeat for such illustrious artists as Bob Dylan, Grace Jones, the Rolling Stones, Sinead O’Connor, Yoko Ono, Peter Tosh, Jimmy Cliff, Gwen Guthrie, Herbie Hancock and many, many more.

He got his start as a teenager in his native Jamaica playing in various outfits, alongside bassist Robbie Shakespeare, that backed some of reggae’s breakout stars of the 70s, including Bunny Lee, Peter Tosh and Lee Perry, for whom he played on Junior Murvin’s ‘Police and Thieves’ and Bob Marley’s ‘Punky Reggae Party’.

Sly and Robbie’s radical rhythm section found a home among rock’n’roll’s more forward-thinking practitioners. They toured with the Stones in 1978 (Dunbar eventually contributing to their 1983 return to form ‘Undercover’ album) and were influential upon new wave acts like Talking Heads and Ian Dury.

This musical dexterity was apparent when Island’s founder Chris Blackwell came to assemble a house band for his Compass Point Studios in Nassau, the Bahamas. With Sly and Robbie as the band’s (which came to be referred to as the Compass Point All Stars) heartbeat and flanked by their compatriots Mikey Chung and Sticky Thompson, British guitarist Barry Reynolds and a young French synth wizard by the name of Wally Badarou, the ensemble embarked on a remarkable run of success.

Grace Jones’ creative rebirth across her ‘Warm Leatherette’, ‘Nightclubbing’ and ‘Living My Life’ albums was arguably the All Stars’ high point, but the likes of Black Uhuru, Joe Cocker, Mick Jagger, Serge Gainsbourg and Tom Tom Club all benefitted from their rhythmical alchemy.

Speaking to Badarou in 2024 about his time at Compass Point, he told me: “Whenever we were rocking with Sly & Robbie, he [Blackwell] had that body language and we knew that we were cooking something. It was so uplifting. There were no words.” Indeed Blackwell told him: “‘Wally, I believe I have the best band in the world with you guys.’ He was genuine. He was serious.”

Sly and Robbie’s dancefloor friendly sounds continued to find new audiences as the years passed by. Their classic ‘Boops (Here To Go)’ was a favourite of The Chemical Brothers (then The Dust Brothers) at the raucous Heavenly Sunday Social. Dunbar would also play drums on The Fugees’ ‘The Score’, produce No Doubt, back Sinead O’Connor and, incredibly, feature within a Madonna remix for her deep cut track ‘Supernatural’.

That everyone from David Rodigan to Questlove and Terry Farley have paid tribute to Sly demonstrates the esteem in which he was held. His beat will always go on.

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Richard Russell has been a very busy man this year. Not only has his XL Recordings label released its usual array of diversely stunning records – see: Four Tet, Nourished By Time, Fontaines D.C., Makaya McCraven, Blawan, Jim Legxacy for starters – but Russell’s super collective Everything Is Recorded have been responsible for two albums (this spring’s ‘Temporary’ and the ‘Solstice Equinox’ collection this summer) and then an EP, ‘No Ends No Beginning’ to end the year.

‘Temporary’, a beautifully haunting suite of songs composed with a who’s who of leftfield electronic music, and even the odd bona fide pop star and folk rock matriarch, has easily been our most-listened-to album of 2025, providing succour and joy in equal measure.

As such, naming it our Album of the Year was an easy decision. This is what Russell had to say after he was told of the accolade...

Congratulations on being Disco Pogo’s Album of the Year! Do accolades like this and reviews mean anything to you?  

“Yes, I’m honoured. You never know what anyone is going to think of anything you do. The process of making this album was amazing. While you’re making an album it is your life. After that, everything is out of your control.”  ‍

How do you feel about the album now you have had time to reflect on it and it has got out into the world?  

“I have been so touched by the responses. I've heard from people who have used the album to help them in difficult times, and that is the ultimate achievement. The record is intended to have a healing quality to it, without sounding too woo woo!”

You've played a few shows this year. How different was it playing the songs from the album live?  

“I loved it. I’ve had some incredible experiences this year, being out in the world with an insanely talented and lovely bunch of people. And I have been using a new rig where I can be very expressive and make a lot of noise! We didn’t just play this record, we did some older songs, and a Gil Scott-Heron cover. And also some improvisational stuff, different every time. More coming in 2026. 

What albums have you enjoyed and inspired you this year?  

“Jim Legxacy’s album (‘Black British Music’) is very special and important, with a great sense of humour and humanity. Nourished By Time’s album (‘The Passionate Ones’) shows what an astonishing songwriter he is. Chronixx (‘Exile’). Jay Electronica (who released two mixtapes and three mini albums this year). Lily Allen’s album (‘West End Girl’) kind of shocked and amazed me. Great year!"

What can we look forward to from EIR in 2026? 

“A new single with two new collaborators imminently and a bunch of shows when the weather warms up. See you out there.” 

Read our review of 'Temporary' in our albums of the year round-up

Buy the album

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First the good news. The last 12 months have seen some brilliant, life-changing, evocative albums released. Despite the naysayers, if you look hard enough – or just know where to look – there’s always fantastic music to be discovered.

Now the bad news. The sheer volume of music released – and it would appear to only increase year on year – is not always a good thing. We all love music, but just how does one unearth the sounds that will soundtrack our lives? In a post-consensus digital world of difference, we no longer agree on much. Which, in our eyes, makes annual round-ups such as these, vital.

When we asked our various contributors – with all their differing views and tastes – for their albums of 2025, we knew we’d receive a mind-bending variety of styles. And that’s great because it means we get to shine a light on a number of releases that perhaps didn’t get the recognition they so richly deserved. What follows then is a list of the top 30 albums from 2025 covering everything from electronic pop, techno, house and folktronica to jazz-fuelled R’n’B, industrial post-rock and ambient Americana. And that’s just the start.

These are the albums to which we have returned again and again. Some like Thought Leadership and KiF are fresh artists at the start of their musical journeys. Others, like Justin Robertson, Soulwax, Adrian Sherwood and Matthew Herbert, are returning veterans. Saint Etienne are bowing out – joyously so. HAAi, Marie Davidson, Emma-Jean Thackray and Little Simz are outsmarting the men. Auntie Flo and Daniel Avery just get better and better. And Rosalía, well she keeps on being Rosalía, a stunning talent for these most trying of days.

As for our favourite album, we’ve gone for a collaborative effort that features talents from across the globe, directed by a non-musician who seems to know exactly what the world needs right now.

We hope you find at least one new record to fall in love with. Get stuck in…

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30. Emma-Jean Thackray: ‘Weirdo’

In which the multi-talented Thackray turned grief into an outpouring of creativity. Jazz is just the jumping off point for a devastatingly beautiful album full of grace.

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29. Ela Minus: ‘Día’

Minus’ second album treads a stunning line between experimental electronica and big room techno soundscapes. A talent to cherish.

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‍28. Land Of Echo: 'Almost Music’

Sunshine-soaked R’n’B, deep house, funk and disco wonderfully collide on Rob Mac’s brilliant new project on Dom Servini’s always on-point Wah Wah 45s label.

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27. Kieran Hebden & William Tyler: ‘41 Longfield Street Late 80s’

A perfect pairing of Kieran Hebden’s electronic nous and William Tyler’s cosmic Americana. An imaginative soundtrack to the road trip in your mind.

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26. Adrian Sherwood: ‘The Collapse of Everything’

Outside the world might be going down the shitter, but in Adrian Sherwood’s studio all is well. His ninth album is a wonderful lesson in atmospheric, stripped back dub.  

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25. DJ Koze: ‘Music Can Hear Us’

Collaborators include Damon Albarn, Sofia Kourtesis, the Notwist and Sophia Kennedy, among others, but DJ Koze’s sonic alchemy is the real star. From deep, vibrant dancefloor excursions to delicate electronic lullabies and back again, we can hear the music.

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24. James Holden & Waclaw Zimpel: ‘The Universe Will Take Care of You’

Six tracks of electronic experimentalism that captivated and thrilled in equal measure. Holden’s unerring knack for extracting melody from the roughest of sources was the perfect complement to Zimpel’s sonic complexity.

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23. Matthew Herbert & Momoko Gill: ‘Clay’

The prolific Matthew Herbert returned to the dancefloor on ‘Clay’ – a spellbinding collection of refined deep house and electronic. In the attractive vocals of Momoko Gill, he found the perfect foil for his soulful productions.

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‍22. Kokoroko: ‘Tuff Times Never Last’‍

Kokoroko’s second album collected the street sounds embedded in modern Britain – rare groove, disco, Afrobeat, jazz, lovers rock, soul, funk, house and more – and transported listeners to a place far away from the hateful rhetoric espoused by some.

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21. Jonny Nash: ‘Once Was Ours Forever'

Slowly, surely, but most securely, Vini Reilly has emerged as one of the foremost influences of our age. Jonny Nash’s latest set was another sprawling venture indebted to The Durutti Column linchpin.

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20. Thought Leadership: ‘IV of Cups’

Post-shoegaze? Cosmic ambience? An instrumental folk rock fusion? Whatever you call the work of this clandestine Stockport guitar gun, it’s always mesmeric. A super limited run on cassette should be followed by a vinyl release next year.

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19. Torn Sail: ‘Steady Weather’

Balearic lovers went crazy for the third album by the Huw Costin-helmed Torn Sail. With echoes of The Blue Nile, John Martyn and Talk Talk this was sublime head music for transcendental trips.

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18. Little Simz: ‘Lotus’

Little Simz’s grandest work yet was perfectly constructed for the arenas that she now inhabits, but she demonstrated she’d lost none of her nuance in some astonishing broadsides against former friends.

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17. Sandwell District: ‘End Beginnings’

Inspired by Mark Lanegan of all people, the shadowy techno collective return with a collection of cinematic techno and mind-bending dancefloor dynamism.

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16. Panda Bear: ‘Sinister Grift’

The one-man Beach Boys releases his ‘Pet Sounds’. A melodic sonic tonic for these embittered times.

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‍15. Baxter Dury: ‘Allbarone’

The singular Dury headed straight to the heart of the dancefloor on his ninth album. His wonderful lyrical bon mots were littered liberally over a non-stop, propulsive groove. Magical stuff.

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14. Decius: ‘Decius Vol II: Splendour & Obedience’‍

The UK’s premier exponents of dysfunctional disco returned with another album of sleazy dancefloor thrills and spills. The hypnotic ‘Queen of 14^th Street’ was an unofficial national anthem this summer.

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13. Marie Davidson: ‘City of Clowns’

Davidson held nothing back on her comeback club album. The themes might be serious – dystopian capitalism being squarely in her sights – but the invitation to cut loose on the dancefloor was too good to resist.

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12. Andy Bell: ‘Pinball Wanderer’

Released before the small matter of this year’s elephantine Oasis comeback, Bell’s fifth album under his own name was a delight, mixing psychedelic dub and Balearic folktronica. For fans of The Durutti Column and Bibio…

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‍11.  HAAi: ‘Humanise’

Teneil Throssell’s second album of emotive electronic maximalism is a sheer delight. Bursting with ideas – and with some choice guest vocalists – this is dance music designed for the club but with proper crossover festival appeal.

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10. Soulwax: ‘All Systems Are Lying’

As New Order, Daft Punk and, erm, Skrillex would remind you, Soulwax aren’t the first band to start life as a rock act before an epiphany sparked a change of heart, alerting them to club music’s possibilities.

But the Belgian brothers’ debt to rock, proper primal rock, is still evident in everything they do, even when, as on ‘All Systems Are Lying’, their first studio album since 2017’s ‘From Deewee’, they abandoned guitars altogether and reproduced the band set-up with processed sounds. It worked. 

The 50-somethings’ fifth set is lithe, bubbly and robust, whether summoning a 6am beach party (‘Gimme a Reason’), celebrating Derrick May’s ageless ‘Strings of Life’ (‘Polaris’) or adding bite to the skinny-tie pop peculiar to the late 1970s (‘Idiots in Love’). Every track, every beat, every acidic squeal, was clearly considered for weeks at a time, betraying the LP’s long gestation period.

Never once, however, does it seem clinical or suggest that David and Stephen Dewaele, who have 20-odd years of remixes to their name, nearly all of which have been rightly celebrated, were spent and obliged to rehash their greatest hits.

And if the title indicated Soulwax are on a mission – a tireless quest for answers in a post-truth world, without which they will never find peace of mind – the music posits that life is pretty simple; that happiness is attained on a dancefloor, with your eyes closed, the chime of a fake guitar ringing in your ears. 

Paul Mardles

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9. Five Green Moons: ‘Moon 2’

DJ, producer, musician, author, artist, natty dresser… it’s probably quicker to list the things Justin Robertson doesn’t successfully do than highlight all the artistic endeavours in which he excels. His latest project, Five Green Moons, which debuted at the end of 2024 with the release of ‘Moon 1’, brings together many of his musical passions – dub, pastoral folk, kosmische-tinged electronica, punk funk, techno – and some of his literary ones too (most notably a predilection towards the occult), in one captivating, stylish package.

‘Moon 2’ is another immersive trip into Robertson’s vibrant netherworld. The musical touchpoints remain broadly the same and while that angular sense of late-70s/early-80s dystopian disco evoked by outfits like PiL, The Pop Group and Adrian Sherwood’s On-U collective can often appear monochromatic, in the hands of Robertson there’s a colourful lightness of touch.

In fact, the dub that underpins all 11 tracks has a welcoming psychedelic edge. The mellifluous melodies of gentle opener ‘Calling OS’ are suitably hypnotic, while the new wave groove of ‘Ridges of Bark’ is sneaky and spiritual rather than sadistic.

Snippets of prose and spoken word recitals provide an element of foreboding – these are deep experimental basement vibrations after all – not least on the ‘The First Tower of Babel’ (keep the wonky chocolate out of reach for this one) and ‘Come on Kallisti’. Elsewhere, Brix Smith brings a transcendental vocal flavour to the Sabres Of Paradise-like ‘Lost in the Static’ (a pertinent cautionary tale urging against “borders or regions”) and the diaphanous digital dub of ‘Boudicca’.

But this is entirely Robertson’s show and it’s a commanding and otherworldly performance; a voyage into the heart of rhythmical repetition, where the disco is discordant and the pogo most rebelliously post-punk. Stunning stuff.

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8. Mark Pritchard & Thom Yorke: ‘Tall Tales’

Radiohead’s return to the live arena raised acres of headlines in 2025, amid calls for a boycott over the band’s stance on Israel and doubts about whether Thom Yorke and co. would ever release new music.

There was no fresh music this year, but Yorke continued his busy schedule of solo work and intriguing collaborations with the release of ‘Tall Tales’, a bewitching hook up with one-time Global Communication man Mark Pritchard that stands among the best of both artists’ work.

To hear Pritchard tell it, the genesis of the album was convoluted to the point of distraction, with files being passed back and forth between the duo for five years, punctuated by the occasional Zoom call. But ‘Tall Tales’ doesn’t sound difficult: tracks like the brooding ‘Back in the Game’ and the future rock of ‘This Conversation is Missing Your Voice’ are vivacious and natural, a perfectly simpatico meeting of musical minds whose casual elegance suggests that this is what Yorke and Pritchard might have been edging towards over their six collected decades in music. 

Pritchard’s catalogue is proudly genre agnostic, flowing from ambient to techno, jungle to footwork, grime to deep house and back again. On ‘Tall Tales’ he takes this to nonchalant extremes, cooking up a musical mix that nods to Krautrock, ambience, folk, IDM, electro and more, without ever feeling forced.

And Yorke, for all his grumpy edges, remains a vocalist and songwriter of the highest order, his performance on the gorgeously yearning ‘The White Cliffs’ reminding us why we fell in love with his voice in the first place, a simple pleasure in a year where so much seemed tangled and unsure.

Ben Cardew

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7. Daniel Avery: ‘Tremor’

Much like his musical north star Andrew Weatherall, Daniel Avery exists in a musical world completely of his own making. This singular, unapologetic path has seen Avery assuredly move from the acidic dancefloor-slaying tracks that featured on his stellar debut album ‘Drone Logic’, through the stripped back experimental ambient and techno soundscapes of ‘Song for Alpha’ and ‘Love + Light’ and land on the energetic electronic maximalism of his last album, 2022’s ‘Ultra Truth’.

His latest statement of intent, the timely ‘Tremor’, sees the curious Avery take another musical detour, this time to the band-dominated, shoegaze, post-rock and industrial sounds that comprised his teenage years. Pleasingly, rather than slavishly create a My Bloody Valentine-meets-Mogwai-and-Nine Inch Nails pastiche, Avery has injected ‘Tremor’ with an electronic pulse: there are hints of Chicago and Detroit innovators like Larry Heard and Drexciya on the expansive ‘New Life’ and ‘Until The Moon Starts Shaking’, while on the foreboding ‘Haze’ and ‘A Silent Shadow’ a very British dread emerges, both welcoming updates on Massive Attack’s crepuscular ‘Mezzanine’.

His choice of female vocal collaborators is equally telling. The Kills’ Alison Mosshart brings a slippery presence to ‘Greasy off the Racing Line’ (this is a record that places great stock in song titles) while NewDad’s Julie Dawson applies a dream pop lustre to the ambitious UNKLE-like ‘The Ghost of Her Smile’. The introspective melancholia of ‘Rapture in Blue’, featuring Cecile Believe, gives ‘Tremor’ its emotional pivot – a cinematic tour-de-force that encapsulates the various strands of the record in one alluring song.

Similar to Primal Scream, Death In Vegas and Depeche Mode before him, Avery has crafted a record that breathes new life into the vexed rock-meets-dance hybrid and takes such an alliance into surprisingly fresh waters. Given time, the results of this particular ‘Tremor’ will prove fruitful.

Jim Butler

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6. Rosalía: ‘Lux’

It’s unusual to get a pop megastar who can shapeshift like Rosalía. She followed up the flamenco pop of her 2018 debut ‘El Mal Querer’ with 2022’s reggaeton-heavy ‘Motomami’, but ‘Lux’ is the biggest plot twist of her career so far. 

‘Berghain’ wasn’t the pummelling techno offering we assumed it might be from its title, but instead a work of Royal Festival Hall-worthy classical grandeur, with Vivaldi-like strings. The album was recorded with the London Symphony Orchestra, with songs in ⅝, surging piano keys and even samples of sheet music being turned for the Classic FM heads out there. There’s barely a 4/4 beat to be found on ‘Lux’.

But that’s not to say ‘Lux’ is all Mozart cosplay: the rolling timpanis on ‘Reliquia’ rattle like jungle drums – Venetian Snares actually did the drum programming, while Daft Punk’s Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo is also credited – while the deep bass hits of ‘Divinize’ evoke footwork rhythms. ‘Porcelana’ is anchored by a woodwind bassline that recalls the dembow flavour of ‘Motomami’’s ‘Saoko’.

Rosalía has always flirted with this fusion of classical and pop (‘G3 N15’, ‘Cap. 5 - Lamento’), underground and mainstream, but never has that interplay been fleshed out so fully as on ‘Lux’. The best albums spark conversation, and ‘Lux’ has ignited debate over where those genre boundaries truly lie.

Above all, ‘Lux’ stands as a masterwork in its own terms, proving just how much of an outlier Rosalía really is. It’s stranger, grander and more distinctive than anything of hers before, and we can only hope that this evolution continues.

Felicity Martin

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5. Auntie Flo: ‘Birds of Paradise’

A vertical expression of a horizontal desire? A tool for social change and identity formation? A vehicle for a sense of unadulterated freedom? All of these, or something else entirely? George Bernard Shaw, sociologists and Madonna had their ideas, but just what does it mean to dance?

Thanks to a number of timely books in recent years and constant cultural appraisals, dancing is no longer regarded as a frivolous ephemeral pursuit. Moreover, the dancefloor is rightly acknowledged as not only a physical space where lived experiences – finding your tribe for instance – are enjoyed, but also a metaphysical place, a state of mind almost, which can be tapped into anywhere, from your kitchen to the subterranean strobes that exist inside your head. Dancing, in this sense, becomes an empowering form of escapism. Then again, as Andrew Weatherall would often remark, usually after a lengthy and entertaining exposition about the transcendental nature of nightclubs, it’s all just a big disco isn’t it?

Today, no producer better encapsulates the dichotomous nature of the dancefloor – the excursions into the sacred and the profane – than Brian d’Souza. Better known as Auntie Flo, the prodigiously talented Scottish (by way of Kenya and India, specifically Goa) producer is at home talking about the scientific and hedonistic impulses of music and the dancefloor as he is digital sound therapy, sound installations and using the biological sound of nature as a basis for his own productions.

Such a juxtaposition is brilliantly explored on his new album, ‘Birds of Paradise’. Following last year’s fantastic ‘In My Dreams (I’m a Bird and I’m Free)’, featuring the 15-minute epic (and Disco Pogo’s Track of 2024) ‘Green City’, ‘Birds of Paradise’ combines all of Auntie Flo’s musical passions – the many flavours of house, techno, highlife and Afrobeat – and underpins it with field recordings and ventures into the Japanese art of kankyõ ongaku, or environmental music.

While ‘In My Dreams…’ was a collaborative affair, ‘Birds…’, however, is strictly Auntie Flo pushing his own imagination onto the dancefloor. All eight tracks – the album clocks in at a perfectly sprightly 47 minutes – ebb and flow like a rousing DJ set. From the rhythmical sunshine groove of opener ‘Paradise 23’ to the snake-hipped percussive closer ‘Cobra’, D’Souza keeps things moving at a welcoming lick.

The abundance of textures are aided by the recordings he made in his maternal homeland of Goa, not least on the restrained ‘Anacyclosis’. The effect is wonderfully enveloping, hinting at (but never suffocating with) notions of migration, cultural diaspora and the assimilation of Western, African and Asian approaches to music and rhythm.

For those looking for dancefloor thrills only, the hypnotic teaser ‘Ceibo’ and the unrelenting groove of ‘Joy Mantra’ will appease pleasure seekers. The former’s loose-limbed magisterial build and climactic release evoke the trance dance of Moby’s ‘Go’, while the latter throbs like Joey Beltram’s ‘Energy Flash’ – all that is required with these tracks are a basement, a strobe and a smoke machine. A pleasing curveball appears in the form of the disorientating ‘Earth NRG’: another propulsive weapon that expands and contracts at will – imagine Kevin Shields let loose on a bank of synths – and brings to mind Harvey Keitel’s classic drunk scene in ‘Mean Streets’.

Having released a pair of stunning albums in the last two years, it’ll be interesting to see where Auntie Flo goes next on his global dancefloor adventure. Just a big disco? Yes, the childlike abandon of losing yourself on the dancefloor should never be lost, but in the hands of Auntie Flo, dance music, dancing and the spaces where we indulge in such activities become so much more…

Jim Butler

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4. KiF: ‘Still Out’

It was a bold move to rebuild one of the most beloved records of all time from the ground up. Doubly so to try and do it with the work of The KLF, one of the most inimitable entities in our cultural universe. Lots of people have attempted takes on Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty’s 1990 ambient masterpiece ‘Chill Out’ before: there are all sorts of unofficial remakes, remixes, tributes and such to be found online, all which pale in comparison to the original. Even The KLF’s own official revision of the album which is on streaming services as ‘Come Down Dawn’ is a shadow of its former self.

For Will Cookson and Tom Haverly, though, there was something profound in how they approached it, and perhaps partly a sense that they were tapping into the deep forces which drove The KLF initially. In our KLF cover story this year, one of Bill Drummond’s closest lifelong friends reported periodically asking him why he pursues one or other of his inexplicable schemes, to be met each time by an exasperated: “BECAUSE I’VE GOT TO!” The way Cookson and Haverly went about making a 35^th anniversary tribute to ‘Chill Out’, born as a joint project with filmmaker Rufus Exton, feels like something they had little choice but to do.

Cookson and Haverly have been friends since childhood, raved and listened to ‘Chill Out’ together as teenagers, and ‘Still Out’ is palpably an expression of that. This is a record about lives lived in the presence of ‘Chill Out’, about the memory of where that record fits into ecstatic and psychedelic experiences and coming of age: and how that memory is reinforced by relentless repetition. Their understanding of ‘Chill Out’ is the kind that only people of a certain age and demographic, who have had it as the ever-present soundtrack to otherworldly adventures and real-world troubles and joys, can have.

But for all the uncannily precise understandings of the original’s structures and sonic spaces, and for all they’ve interjected sly references to and samples of high rave culture, this is not nostalgia. If you’re lucky enough to see a screening of the accompanying film version you’ll see absolute love for the landscapes, wildlife, roads and climate of England and Wales as they exist now in the 2020s: it’s the same friends vibing together, experiencing the world together, as 35 years ago. And the music – with all its extraordinary fitting in of Cymande, Jake Thackray, ‘Under Milk Wood’ and other hyper-specific reference points that replace the wide-skied Americanisms that Drummond and Cauty associated with the road movie aesthetic – is about loving those sounds in the here and now too.

The mood this creates – of friendship, of hedonism as genuine enjoyment of the world and not just escape, of memories as part of us and not just distant ghosts, of sound and art being for total immersion and not just fragmentary feed for the content mills – has never been needed more. The duo never expected this record to be A Thing: they planned 150 vinyl copies and a few film showings. As it turned out, however, it’s not only one of the best and most beloved records of 2025, but it’s also going to be an enduring cultural artefact.

It seems that even in an age of information glut, digital snow blindness and overwhelming dread, two friends building a monument to their favourite record and their shared experiences purely because THEY’VE GOT TO can be a glorious thing.

Joe Muggs

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3. Saint Etienne: ‘International’

Saying goodbye is never easy. Particularly musically when any notion of farewell can hang heavy over the artistic expression. Intentional valedictory releases can of course be nothing more than contractual obligations (Blondie’s ‘The Hunter’ and The Clash’s ‘Cut the Crap’ spring to mind), the creative muse long since an afterthought.

In 2016, the irrepressible David Bowie and Leonard Cohen turned dying into an artistic statement. Yet, while ‘Black Star’ and ‘You Want it Darker’ are up there with each icon’s best work, the sombre finality of both albums didn’t exactly lend itself to any form of joyous celebration, rather respectful remembrance.

A carnival of sound, however, is precisely what Saint Etienne have aimed for – and effortlessly achieved – on their magnificent swansong, ‘International’. Maybe the lovable trio of Sarah Cracknell, Pete Wiggs and Bob Stanley, utilised all their maudlin emotions on the abstract ambience of 2024’s superlative, albeit decidedly non-party-friendly, ‘The Night’. Either way, ‘International’ is jam-packed with smash hits, all charged with disco-flecked pop frivolity and an endearing stylish and literate sensibility. It’s a fitting send-off for a band that have soundtracked our lives – through the wide-eyed thrills of the teenage years and one’s carefree twenties, through to an eventual, possibly reluctant, maturing and into middle age (or a teenage winter as they might have it) – for the best part of four decades.

Fundamentally, ‘International’ is another demonstration of how Saint Etienne fluently harness the power of the imagination and a love of pop and transform those dreams into the art of the possible. The majestic opener ‘Glad’, is a case in point. A collaboration with Chemical Brother Tom Rowlands, it soars with a 60s Spector-like effervescence and combined with a twinkling post-acid house fever it encapsulates the twin qualities of pop – joy and loss. It could be the ultimate hymn to a generation – X – facing a looming mortality head on as Cracknell follows up the observation, “And don’t it make you sad when you’re alone” with the perfect rejoinder: “But don’t it make you glad when the sun shines in your eyes?/Don’t it make you glad to be alive?”

‘International’ is also unapologetically self-referential – or incredibly meta in today’s speak. ‘Brand New Me’, a ceremonial passing of the literate pop baton to Confidence Man, doffs its cap towards the timeless ‘Nothing Can Stop Us’; the continental elan of ‘Sweet Melodies’ (co-written and co-produced with Erol Alkan) hints at the techno folk of ‘Tiger Bay’; ‘The Go-Betweens’ an iridescent duet with Nick Heyward, evokes the kitchen sink drama of ‘Tales From Turnpike House’ and the sparkling Euro pop of ‘He’s Gone’ is a cheeky reprise of 1998’s ‘Good Humor’.

In fact, the only point where things get sad is fittingly on the closing ‘The Last Time’. A supreme slice of symphonic melancholia, it casts an emotional eye over the past as the shimmering synths delicately pull at the heartstrings “for the very last time”. It’s a bittersweet finale, but utterly in keeping with their 35-year existence: clever, inspired, self-effacing. And with that, they’re gone. A job well done indeed.

So long, farewell, auf wiedersehen, adieu.

Jim Butler

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2. Blood Orange: ‘Essex Honey’

We agree about very little these days but on this we are united: collectivism is dead. Argue all you like over who or what’s to blame (Brexit? The internet? Thatcher’s legacy?); the point is, stripped of a shared sense of purpose, we lead increasingly solitary lives with nothing to connect us bar a handful of box sets.

Which makes Dev Hynes, AKA Blood Orange – whose albums unify a range of collaborators, from Lorde to Ben Watt via A$AP Rocky and novelist Zadie Smith – something of an outlier. It was ever thus. He was an outlier in the early 00s when, as one third of Test Icicles, he tried to give hardcore punk a postmillennial sheen. He was an outlier in 2008 when he reappeared, solo, as Lightspeed Champion, a geeky proponent of baroque country-pop. He was an outlier when, under the same name, he graced a 2009 tribute to Moondog, the singular jazz musician who lived on New York’s streets.

Hynes is a New York resident now, too, having moved from Ilford in Essex not long before his debut album as Blood Orange, ‘Coastal Grooves’, in 2011. He returned to his hometown a few years ago to care for his ailing mother, whose death and its effect on Hynes forms the thematic thread of the magnificent ‘Essex Honey’, the greatest of his five LPs, all of which are gems. 

Lyrically, inevitably, it’s infused with loss and despair. “A knitted heart they gave to me/I wash my hands and stare into the drain”, runs ‘The Last of England’, perhaps the only song of the last 30 years to locate the sweet spot linking Prefab Sprout to weightless, sun-kissed drum’n’bass. If the cello on that track evokes Arthur Russell so too does Hynes’s skill at drifting between genres, between the clamour and excitement of the city and the tranquillity of the countryside. In the video to ‘The Field’, ‘Essex Honey’’s wonderfully arranged, symphonic zenith, Hynes lies atop the bonnet of a car, hands behind his head, staring at the sky, as he and his friends drive along a rural road. “Healthy as we pray for a journey home”, he sings, and the music falls away, leaving just the strings and cello, allowing him to savour the beauty of the moment. 

This is an album rich in beautiful moments: the flute that follows Zadie Smith’s uncredited contribution to the sumptuous ‘Vivid Light’; the mood-shifting injection of jazz that fuels the final minute of ‘Thinking Clean’; the stuttering riff from disco classic ‘Don’t Make Me Wait’, by Larry Levan’s Peech Boys, on the spacious ‘Westerberg’. That, incidentally, is Paul Westerberg, the frontman of unruly 80s rockers the Replacements, whom Hynes would have no doubt attempted to recruit were the 65-year-old still releasing music.

‘Essex Honey’ is that kind of LP – gloriously unpredictable, unusually nuanced, steeped in nostalgia but never antiquated. Who knows when Hynes will start work on his next set, but anyone who thinks their voice would complement his vision should find his house on Google Maps and camp outside his door. The queue for the guest list will soon be a mile long.

Paul Mardles

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1. Everything Is Recorded: ‘Temporary’

Whichever way you cut it, 2025 has not been a red letter year for humanity. Crushingly, frustratingly, helplessly, maddeningly, we now live in an age of bombastic belligerence. Those individuals – men, mostly – who stride the world stage like latter-day, and oftentimes, self-appointed, Colossi, you know, your Trumps, Musks, Farages and Netanyahus, only deal in overblown gestures and performative grandstanding, as if somehow subtlety or nuance were a sign of weakness or, worse still, femininity.

In their orbit, the headline is first, last and everything, to hell with such trifling concerns as substance or detail. Somewhere on a different astral plane a French philosopher is muttering bon mots about spectacles, decay and unrealism…

It doesn’t have to be like this of course. There are always green shoots of hope if you look hard enough and it’s here where the creative act can, mercifully, provide a bulwark, whether intentionally or not, against such domineering, attention-seeking and divisive rhetoric. And when it comes to shining a light on the minutiae of life – where the real stuff happens of course – no other act have understood and celebrated the fact that the details matter as much as Richard Russell’s peripatetic Everything Is Recorded super collective.

After two previous albums, 2018’s ‘Everything is Recorded by Richard Russell’ and 2020’s low-key ‘Friday Forever’, this year’s ‘Temporary’ was everything those besieged by the times, yet refusing to be defeated, would want it to be. A sonic comfort blanket, in its dusty, understated grooves, the barely-there found sounds and the melding of winsome folktronica and woozy, weightless beats is an elegiac defiance.

An aside: little in Russell’s back story prepares for the sparseness of his Everything Is Recorded project (and ‘Temporary’ wasn’t the only release from that venture this year: there was also the improvised, meditative 40-track ‘Solstice Equinox’ collection and the ‘No Ends No Beginning’ EP). There’s nary a hint of his rave past (remember Kicks Like A Mule’s ‘The Bouncer’?), nor his production work with Gil Scott-Heron, Damon Albarn or Bobby Womack.

The title is apposite. Not only does the gossamer music hint at fragility and impermanence, but the album’s central conceit is a quiet reflection upon mortality. Life, death, remembrance and affection all come together, not least in the spoken word interludes and samples that adorn the opening ‘October’ and the penultimate track ‘The Meadows’, in an acknowledgement that our time here is finite and that those fleeting moments of everyday experiences – joy and despair especially – are the real weight of life. It’s all in the details.

Musically, those details are similarly transitory. The first track proper, ‘My and Me’ sees Sampha and Laura Groves trading haunting ruminations upon loneliness and self-deception (“Ain't it a lonely feeling/Talking 'bout them and me/Instead of family”) against a gauze-like musical backdrop featuring Alabaster DePlume. The hallucinatory alt.Americana of ‘Porcupine Tattoo’ brings together the unlikely pairing of Bill Callahan and Noah Cyrus, whilst the lysergic, Pagan trip hop lullaby ‘Never Felt Better’ is Sampha harmoniously dovetailing with a dreamlike Florence Welch.

And on this beautiful, uncompromising vision goes. Folk rock matriarch Maddy Prior garnishes the chimerical melodies of ‘Ether’ with an emotional heft that is drawn from every one of her nigh-on 80 years on this planet. ‘Firelight’ and ‘No More Rehearsals’ directly address the loss at the centre of ‘Temporary’; the former a sepulchral lament, the latter a heartbreaking yet ultimately rousing, gospel-infused, expression of grief (“I can’t wait until we see each other again” sings one of the album’s key figures Jack Penate).

Indeed, the musicians that Russell wisely surrounded himself with to bring this wonderful piece of work to life is instructive. As well as those mentioned, Jah Wobble, Kamasi Washington, Samantha Morton, Roses Gabor, Berwyn, Yazz Ahmed and Nourished By Time all appear, alongside a parting recording of Scott-Heron on the closing ‘Goodbye (Hell of a Ride)’. Drawn from every musical, cultural and geographical corner imaginable, Everything Is Recorded seek to exalt the power and beauty in collaboration; the joy in coming together; that, at heart, there are more things that unite than divide us.

In the hands of lesser musical directors this grand yet understated project could have mutated into overblown pomposity. But Russell, always a music fan and consummate A&R – this after all, is the man who made stars out of Adele, The xx, Dizzee Rascal, The Prodigy, The White Stripes etc – instinctively understands what each song requires. In exercising restraint, stripping back the music to its bare bones and oftentimes dealing with an absence of sound, ‘Temporary’ is heightened, enriched, empowered – a soulful symphony for our troubled times.

Jim Butler

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The nights Hot, Nude and Temperance Club might be synonymous with The Haçienda, but equally important was the club’s monthly gay night, Flesh. A riotous collision of Queer Northern energy and pure hedonism, it was the perfect antidote to clubland’s encroaching lad culture. There from the beginning, Paul Flynn was one of the night’s disciples. He looks back on a time when his home city went from Madchester to Gaychester…

For the decade preceding October 1991 and the opening of The Haçienda’s peerless monthly gay bacchanal, Flesh, Manchester built part of its robust, say-what-you-see identity on casual homophobia. This strand of the city’s character had obvious figureheads. Portly stand-up comedian, Bernard Manning engendered a ‘backs to the wall’ atmosphere at his Embassy Club, parlaying gay male sexuality as nothing more evolved than a predatory desire to bum anything that moves. James Anderton, the city’s puritan Chief of Police, famously responded to the AIDS pandemic by saying gay men were ‘swimming in a cesspit of their own making’ on ‘Granada Reports’. The central joke of Mike Baldwin’s affair with Deirdre Barlow on ‘Coronation Street’ was that husband, Ken, was a bit too gay for her because he read books. 

Where there is thought, there is counterthought. The local response to all this had been coalescing, forming a perfect storm ready to eventually congregate on the Haçienda dancefloor, the spot where the sad city found its happiness. “The first Flesh was the proudest moment of my club career,” says the night’s co-promoter, long-term Haçienda employee, Paul Cons. “Seeing the best club in the world fully and explicitly going Queer was historic.” 

The Haçienda was one of a small number of venues across the city that Mancunian LGBT+ folk already felt invested in, like The Royal Exchange theatre, the King Street Vidal Sassoon salon, clothes shop Geese, vegetarian café The Eighth Day and The Cornerhouse cinema. “It was massively important for Queer Mancunians to stake their claim on this juicy territory,” says DJ Paulette, the Flesh figurehead who DJed downstairs at the Gay Traitor. 

LGBT+ people worked The Haçienda. We manned the cloakroom and the canteen. Cons was our representative wizard behind the curtains of its Oz. The pre-acid house ‘straight’ crowd was sophisticated (local translation: pretentious) enough to know gay and lesbian people and all looked a little bit bisexual anyway. “Lots of us had already been going there a lot, and loved it,” says another of Flesh’s resident DJs, Kath McDermott. “Quite a few of us had been thinking, can you imagine this full of Queer people?” When it happened, says Cons: “It felt like we weren’t at the margins anymore. We’d taken the temple.”  

The Flesh storm had other, more oblique portents. New Order’s debt of gratitude to the gay clubs of New York was stitched into their story early. ‘Blue Monday’ had been crafted with the same programming machinery Bobby Orlando used to fashion hi-NRG hits for Divine and The Flirts. Like Robert DeNiro, Tony Wilson’s dad was gay. “I always remember Tony’s gay dad turning up at the opening of the [artist] David Mach exhibition in 1986,” says Cons. “There were giant columns on The Haçienda dancefloor, made out of thousands of unused sleeves of the [New Order] 12-inch ‘Confusion’ single. He started dancing on his own a bit pissed until he was gently removed by security. There was always an undercurrent.” 

“That confidence Tony had in his own campery,” says McDermott. “Calling everyone ‘darling’. Wearing nail polish. He sent Paul Cons to New York for the summer on sabbatical to see what was going on in the gay clubs there. Imagine that now?”

An aborted early attempt in Haçienda history to mount its first LGBT+ night, Gay Mondays (1983), climaxed with Divine, growling along to a succession of flawless Bobby O cuts to a quarter-full main room of men in overcoats and women with Cocteau Twins hair. The night lasted less than six months. By the time it got a second shot with Flesh, which lasted six years, The Haçienda had accrued its own legends, good and bad. The period when gangland Manchester peaked, briefly dubbed ‘Gunchester’ had shut down its doors for a season. Solutions needed to be found to open again. Cons suggested turning the entire venue gay, an idea which was rejected. 

You could see where he was coming from. There’d been a recent growth spurt in confidence of Manchester’s LGBT+ underground. In 1989, the ‘No Clause 28’ March against Margaret Thatcher’s proposed bill to ban the ‘promotion’ of homosexuality in the classroom formed the largest street protest in Britain. The following summer, ecstasy began filtering into the gay clubs of Manchester. Smoke machines were installed and the carpet ripped up at The Number One club, a compact box tucked footsteps from Anderton’s Bootle Street Police Station HQ. Saturday night resident DJ, Tim Lennox adjusted his sets to the tempo and stimulants of the times, as whistles blew, Vick’s VapoRub merged with the ever-present aroma of poppers and tobacco, sweat dripped gracefully from the ceiling. A new archetype, the gay raver was born. 

“The Number One was amazingly important,” recalls Cons. “Tim sewed seeds and built a scene that was ready to explode when transported to The Haçienda.” Lennox’s Saturday nights at The Number One were our big gay secret. “It was the temple,” says McDermott. “That influenced us to set up Loose, so young Queer Liverpool was galvanized. Dave [Kendrick, beloved Flesh main floor resident alongside Lennox] was doing Jungle in Leeds, so that crowd was ready to go. Manchester was obviously set up.”  

In a final flourish of local Queer hospitality history, former Boddingtons Brewery marketing man, Peter Dalton opened Manto on Canal Street, the first glass-fronted gay bar in the country. The staff were pretty, the music new, the finishes sleek and European. You could buy Gitanes cigarettes over the bar. A newspaper stand housed Le Monde and Die Welt. “Manto was massive,” says McDermott, “It really kicked a door down with the big plate glass windows. ‘It’s on, we’re here. Fuck off, we’re beautiful, screw you.’”

If we had our own Dry Bar, why couldn’t we get our hands on The Haçienda? “That’s quite a Manc attitude, isn’t it?” says McDermott. “Manchester’s gay clubs had been so segregated before. The music was appalling. We wanted to push all that segregation and Stock, Aitken and Waterman into the canal. We knew there was change coming because we were that change.”        

Buoyed by the success of co-promoting Attitude at The Academy (over 800 tickets sold) and her takeover of The Haçienda for The Lesbian Summer of Love (notoriously the biggest bar take in the club’s history), Paul Cons began Flesh as another co-production with Lucy Scher. “Lucy was a neighbour in Hulme,” says McDermott. “When she told me she was going in with Paul at The Haçienda, I was completely evangelical. Paul with all that bedrock knowledge he’d learned from New York clubs, Lucy completely keyed into a grass roots community of dykes in Hulme? Now we’ve got something interesting.” She remembers flyering for Lucy ahead of the first Flesh. “We did it for free because we believed that strongly that this had to happen. Standing on the corner of Aytoun Street persuading people to come along wasn’t a job, it was a passion.”

“I wouldn’t have been there if it wasn’t for Lucy,” says Paulette. 

“Her modus operandi,” says McDermott, “was: ‘Where’s the women?’” 

“She put us upfront on the flyers and posters,” says Paulette. “She was gentle, funny, direct and sharp. She made me believe I could do anything I wanted to.”  

In almost all respects, the night The Haçienda turned gay was just evolution at work, the club transmuting into a portal through which the Queer city found its true Dionysian head of steam. On October 31 1991, Flesh’s first night nerves lasted approximately half an hour, before The Haçienda began swelling with mid-week ravers from across the North on the last Wednesday of each month. There were more than any of us crammed into the 200-capacity Number One club had ever really imagined possible. 

I was still a teenager when Flesh began. Despite being well schooled in nights at The Haçienda and Number One, it was almost as if picturing the two conjoining was a Queer leap of faith too far. Yet combining the raw energy from The Number One with the Brutalist sophistication of The Haçienda felt instantly epochal, capturing a vanguard junction of Northern gay culture at its most blissfully and romantically untested. A friend turned to me that first night, while looking over the balcony onto the main dancefloor and said: “It’s a bit like watching everyone interesting and gay in the city lose their drug virginity at once, isn’t it?” 

Flesh took something already in the ether and crystallized it into pure nightlife magic. As early as Flesh #2, a wasted Masonic bond had begun to trace friendships formed there. Taking over The Haçienda was our shared triumph. The secret was out. Homophobia was not indigenously Mancunian after all, despite the ideas James Anderton had banked his professional reputation on. “Playing the Gay Traitor was like playing the wildest house party that was flooded 90% of the time,” says McDermott. “It was wild and great and free.”

 “Flesh pushed Queerness into a club where Queerness was unexpected,” says Paulette. “From the day it started, it turned the clubbing week on its head. Mid-week became the weekend. The town centre became aspirationally gay. House and disco ruled.”

Stories began gathering around Flesh. “The tickets used to say: MANAGEMENT RESERVE THE RIGHT TO REFUSE ADMISSION TO KNOWN HETEROSEXUALS,” says Cons. “Prior to Flesh you would have been hard pressed to find straight people frequenting any Queer establishment,” says Paulette. “Life in the 90s was riddled with isms and phobias.” Yet monthly, straight nightclubbers hoping to gain entrance to Flesh would ritualistically get off with their gay and lesbian mates at the check-in to prove to Jemima and Renika on the door that, if not quite 100% aligned to New Queer Manchester, they might at least be persuadable after nibbling the corner of a disco biscuit. “Straight people pretending to be gay in order to get in?” says Cons. “Incredible.” 

Paula Yates hosted the debut Flesh beauty pageant. Flesh FC inaugurated The Haçienda’s first gay football-themed party. Take That played an early Flesh, to a mostly indifferent crowd, turning into regular punters instead. They recorded Dan Hartman’s ‘Relight My Fire’ after witnessing Tim Lennox raise the roof with it as his trusted end-of-the-night Flesh crescendo. 

For Haçienda regulars used to hearing Mike Pickering and Graeme Park polishing off a Saturday night with Loleatta Holloway’s ‘Love Sensation’, the singer’s gospel explosion during the bridge of ‘Relight My Fire’ – ‘You’ve got to be strong enough to walk on through the night/there’s a new day on the other side’ – announced itself with a spine-tingling new charge. 

Hartman died six months into the night starting, of complications due to his AIDS diagnosis. Owing to the medical emergencies of the times, not all who went to Flesh survived its six-year run. When the night began, we were still five years away from combination therapies curtailing the assumed death sentence of an HIV infection. The impulse to dance is rarely more urgent than when dancing for your life.

In 1992, Paul Cons revived the idea of a more regular gay Haçienda takeover to his bosses at the club. “I tried to stage a coup in ‘92 and turf Mike Pickering out of his Friday night slot. But the pushback was swift and firm. So, I don’t think it would have ever happened. In hindsight, I should have gone further and asked for Saturdays as well. It would have been a major success and the club might still be open.” 

At the Flesh second birthday party, when Michael and Gerlinde Costiff’s Leicester Square party, Kinky Gerlinky visited from London, Cons described Flesh to me as: “The most glamorous night Manchester has ever seen.” He still stands by the statement. “Oh yes, of course. How could Leigh Bowery giving birth on stage not be glamorous?” For Paulette, the Kinky Gerlinky Flesh felt like its crowning moment. “Flesh excelled itself each month, but the Second Birthday is probably where it all came together on a national scale, with Patrick Lilley, Princess Julia, Jeffrey Hinton and Luke Howard in attendance and all the glamour that came along with them.” 

Somebody started a rumour that night about Princess Julia mixing two records from the spaceship DJ booth above the main dancefloor with the heel of her stiletto. “This is the party that the press came to,” says Paulette, “everyone from The Face, Mixmag, Attitude and DJ. Photographers and TV stations were there.” Fleetingly, ‘Gunchester’ begot ‘Gaychester’. Granada shot and aired a one-hour Flesh TV documentary.  

“Flesh informed a generation,” says McDermott. “Playing the main room was completely visceral. I’d say to the guys who did the lights: ‘When the piano breakdown happens in this one, make it go absolute sunburst orange.’ They’d hold it for the entire breakdown. These were theatrical lights, better than anywhere else. Being at the helm of that, looking down at what was going on was completely overwhelming. Stressful as fuck, but incomparable, really.” 

After the third birthday, Lucy Scher left as co-promoter. A sea-change felt afoot. “It lost some of the diversity that having a lesbian co-running it brought,” says Cons. By now big room gay parties had spread across country, including Vague at The Warehouse in Leeds and Love Boutique at The Arches in Glasgow. Flesh had proven hungry audiences existed. A feeding frenzy began. It had done its job, shifting Manchester’s central sense of itself. It continued, with intermittent flashes of genius, until early 1997. 

There were repercussions. Manchester City Council appointed an evangelical, unofficial ‘Minister For Fun’ in gay local councillor, Pat Kearney to sell the city’s new LGBT+ groundswell to the world. To his eternal credit, it worked. Peter Dalton bought the old Factory Records building on the corner of Princess Street from a bankrupt Tony Wilson and for a couple of glorious, ecstasy-addled years we got our full-time gay Haçienda in Paradise Factory, with Flesh’s longest standing main room residents, Tim Lennox and Dave Kendrick as Saturday night heroes. 

Canal Street exploded, to the point where Channel Four commissioned burgeoning television genius, Russell T. Davies’ ‘Queer As Folk’, a drama centring on its patrons, a bit like Tony Warren’s ‘Coronation Street’ with its pants off. Handbag house brands like Hed Kandi took a sliver of the tough, cheeky, New York house energy of Flesh and, briefly, successfully sold it back to straight Britain, one fluffy bra top at a time, corporatizing and ultimately killing the unique flavour of DIY Northern wit, glamour and heads-down Queer boogie that made Flesh so golden in the first place. 

This being Manchester, everyone decided they hated Canal Street by the time it became popular. Another old Flesh regular and Manto DJ, Luke Cowdrey and a band of his Queer chums, including Kath McDermott started Homoelectric, a boutique anti-mainstream Queer club in the old Clone’s leather den, Rockies, a venue James Anderton had raided in the late-80s. After cannily tracing the shift of interesting Manchester nightlife out to Hidden in Salford, Homoelectric gained a new momentum more redolent of Berlin nightlife than Mancunian, now hosting a 10,000-capacity affiliate annual gay rave, Homobloc, at Mayfield Depot. 

Paulette is officially a superstar DJ and writing a first memoir about her scintillating journey through the night. Kath McDermott is a producer at Radio 6 Music and intermittent nightclub DJ, when the correct mood and night takes her fancy. “For Manchester to become one of the key Queer cities in the world,” she says, “was unthinkable when we first walked into a basement club positioned next to James Anderton’s police station. From that to today is just seismic. Flesh was a big part of that story.” As if to emblemise the passage of Manchester from a place of hostility to one of acceptance, Anderton’s daughter eventually came out as lesbian. 

Tim Lennox left DJing for good to become a funeral director, inspiring more than one Queer Mancunian to coin a nightlife epithet on his behalf: From the rave to the grave. He stepped out of retirement for a Flesh 20th anniversary night at The Factory, the old Paradise Factory which Peter Hook was by now renting back from Peter Dalton. 

Paul Cons made the shift from The Haçienda to managing the elite London confectionery company, Konditor and Cook, with his husband. “Ecstasy, sugar, it’s all drugs,” he once told me. Lucy Scher died at 53, in the summer of 2018. She’d returned to her first love of filmmaking, helping initiate an accessible screenwriting resource. Dave Kendrick? Reader, I married him. 

In early summer this year, Dave, Kath and Paulette were booked by Cons to play the Flesh room at The Haçienda reunion at Tobacco Dock, London. Flesh is starting, at last, to be written into club legend, on its own terms, celebrated for the absolute ball it once was. Nobody has a critical word to say about the night The Haçienda turned gay. Which, if you know Mancunians, well…

“I am massively proud of my involvement,” says Paulette. “It was ground-breaking in every way. My presence as a Black, female, Queer woman commanding the decks and hosting the second room for four years is poignant and powerful. Every month I saw my beautiful mixed crowd grow into a faithful family, some of whom are lifelong friends. I managed to become successful enough to join the world of white, heterosexual, cis male DJs, meeting them on their own territory. That’s pure poetry.”

They are all still friends. “I know, it’s so funny,” says Kath McDermott. “We went through so much together. Once you’ve been there with a swimming pool bursting on the side of the dancefloor at The Haçienda, everything’s quite normal to us.” 

She’s proud of Flesh, too. “You can see bits and pieces of it in every cutting-edge Queer club that exists now,” she says. 

It’s just a different edge that’s being cut now. 

“Yeah, and you have to get through that first battlefront to get where we are now. We did that.” 

Read John Burgess' interview with Haçienda DJs Dave Haslam and Jon Dasilva.

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This article first appeared in issue two of Disco Pogo.

Despite closing 25 years ago, The Haçienda still holds an almighty - almost reverential - pull over those who swayed upon the club's fabled dancefloor. In the year of it's 40th anniversary, John Burgess speaks to DJ stalwarts, Dave Haslam and Jon Dasilva, about the club's halycon days, and it's ever-evolving legacy, before unsheathing his Haçienda bollard for them to sign...

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In the early hours of Sunday 29 June 1997, The Haçienda nightclub closed its doors for the final time. Not long after this sudden end my fellow Jockey Slut co-founder, Paul Benney, and I met Anthony Wilson to discuss that year’s In The City music conference. 

At the end of the meeting he asked us if we’d like to exit through the venue as they were going to change hands with the buyer soon and there were set pieces from club nights that he knew we’d be interested in. I spotted one of the club’s distinctive bollards that signposted the dancefloor, held it aloft and asked if I could keep it. Wilson hesitated – eBay didn’t exist then so he wouldn’t be thinking I was going to make a quick buck – but said yes.

It’s not the only piece of Haçienda memorabilia I own, though it is my most prized. In 2000 (see Archive section), at a charity auction, I acquired a 4 sq ft piece of the dancefloor which cost £200, a couple of random planks and two bricks (the building had been demolished and turned into flats and apartments named Haçienda Apartments). The following year I declined an offer from the DJ Sasha who, feeling refreshed after a gig in Ibiza, offered me a grand for the dancefloor. I may have devalued it by scraping off the club crud as it smelt pretty bad, mainly of tobacco, and varnishing it for use as a coffee table. It’s currently in storage awaiting its next incarnation. I’d like to believe I have the 4 sq ft that Madonna danced upon when she played the club in 1983, but the dancefloor had been replaced at some point, so the wood in the auction – and in fact the exterior bricks – had not been part of the fixtures and fittings from 1982.

The Haçienda, Factory Records, acid house, Madchester… all that’s now history of course. But it’s a history that is continually being rewritten, edited – remixed you might say. 

Earlier this summer, however, on 17 August, another part of Manchester’s rich musical history was in danger of being permanently erased. One of the city’s cultural landmarks had been painted over with an advert. A wall on Port Street that had started as a canvas for street artists, before settling on a painting of Ian Curtis, had been replaced with an advert for a new album by rapper Aitch. The image of the Joy Division frontman was based on a famous photograph taken by Phillipe Carly a week before he committed suicide. The mural, by artist Akse P19, had been unveiled on World Mental Health Day 2020 in support of Manchester Mind.

Ironically, the advert was for a musician who respects and mines Manchester’s musical heritage. The track ‘1989’ on his album even samples the Stone Roses. “This is the first time I’ve heard of this,” Aitch quickly tweeted. “Me and my team are getting this fixed pronto.” Joy Division’s Peter Hook replied with a: “Thank you”.

A fortnight before this debacle I had coaxed erstwhile Haçienda DJs Dave Haslam and Jon Dasilva to the mural to have their photograph taken. In the year of its 40th anniversary we had been discussing The Haçienda’s legacy. Haslam opined: “The club is bigger than ever.” 

When I say coaxed, we had just left our spot outside Eastern Bloc, another Manchester institution that shares The Haçienda’s late-80s, early-90s imperial phase and which is now a cafe bar that still sells vinyl. Both DJs had just signed my bollard, taken a trip through the past and now I wanted them to stand in front of a mural of Ian Curtis. It could have been a nostalgia trip too far for one afternoon but it was nearby, it was over 30 degrees that day and you never know if you’ll get the chance again…

Dave Haslam, who ran Thursday’s weekly residency Temperance in the club’s heyday, certainly didn’t know when The Haçienda was going to close. It had been saddled with debt and licensing problems, mainly related to gangs, for an eternity but it had existed for so long and seemed beleaguered for a generation that no one expected it to fold when it did. It was, in fact, doing OK at the time so Haslam was surprised. 

“I’d been doing every Saturday in the Fifth Man for about eight months and I loved it. The night was called Freak and Paul Cons had come back to run it and it was going really well.” But after that fateful night at the end of June it was all over. “During that Saturday night It had all kicked off in front of a minibus full of councillors on a fact-finding mission. It wasn’t like in the film where Steve Coogan (playing Wilson) announced: ‘It’s all over, loot the offices.’” 

Jon Dasilva who helmed Wednesday’s Hot nights in 1988 and Saturday’s Wide says of the closing with a laugh: “I was nowhere near the place; it was nothing to do with me.” 

Anthony Wilson subsequently went on Northwest Tonight to confirm the closure. Dave remembers the moment well. “When it was clear it was not going to reopen I remember the interviewer said there was talk of turning it into a museum. Tony said: ‘No way should it be a museum, it’s had its moment, it’s had its time, it’s made a difference.’”

But it wasn’t over. The Haçienda must be re-built (to twist a Situationist phrase its name was derived from), though not on a corner of Whitworth Street West. There was a legacy to keep alive. Haslam: “I feel like I can understand Tony’s point – it had its moment; let’s all try and move on.  But it’s not quite how it’s turned out. The club is more well-known now than it was when it was open.”

Since the club’s closure the club’s mythology has been furthered in film with 2002’s ‘24 Hour Party People’, Peter Hook’s book ‘How Not to Run a Club’ and documented in
‘Do You Own the Dancefloor?’. Hook – who owns the name and trademark – has steered the club’s brand via the much-copied Haçienda Classical events, and staging huge nights at Manchester’s Warehouse Project and London’s Tobacco Dock.

The legacy of the club seems mainly mined from 1988-1992, would you agree that those were its peak years? 

Jon: “Those were the halcyon days of The Haçienda, absolutely, I’d actually say to 91 because I left then (laughs). 

That’s when it was actually given the status of the best club in the world, 88 to 91.”

Dave: “For the first few years it was open (from 1982) it felt more like a musical, cultural project. There’s something lovely about those early days when the programming was based on a few people’s whims. There was an innocence about it which I liked. It was great to be around in 86 and 87 because nothing was defined. It wasn’t like The Haçienda is ‘this kind of a club’. It was random, daft and creative. Obviously once 88, 89 started kicking in then it became more defined.”

Jon: “I absolutely agree, there was also a loss of diversity. It became less diverse in terms of gender to an extent and sexual orientation – it became whiteified. In 1987 Friday was Black kids from Moss Side doing jazz funk dancing to T-Coy’s ‘Cariño’.” 

In 2000, the first legacy event took place, an auction to raise funds for charity, the lots were the detritus from the club: the bricks, dancefloor, sinks from the bathrooms, even the DJ booth. Did you both attend this? 

Jon: “I failed to get to it because I was too hungover in Stoke. (Mike) Pickering and (Graeme) Park rang me: ‘Where the fuck are you?’. I ended up going for dinner with New Order and Rob (Gretton) afterwards.”

Did you miss out on buying anything?

Jon: “I did but I don’t think I was in a position to buy anything at the time. I was freshly divorced and going through a whole load of financial nightmares.”

What would you have liked to have to bought?

Jon: “I can’t believe I didn’t steal one of the bollards when I could have, because there was a pile of them. It was just like my loyalty to Rob, I thought: ‘Best not’, you know?” 

Dave: “I bought four bricks, three of which I gave away as Christmas presents. I wrapped them up and put them under somebody’s tree.” 

Jon: “Oh, I had a brick, I was given a brick. I gave that away. The bricks were only a couple of years old after a refurb anyway.” 

Dave: “When you think of all the memorabilia we could’ve laid our hands on over the years. I mean, when I talk about innocence, the idea at the end of the 80s that anyone would go in to video or photograph the club or keep the flyers…

Jon: “I had posters for New Year’s Eve one particular year, I used them for wrapping paper for Christmas presents. Now they sell for £300 each.”

Dave: “What I liked about the auction and the film ‘Do You Own the Dancefloor?’ [the 2015 film documenting the auction] is that idea that everybody takes a piece of their favourite club to wherever they feel and really cherishes it. That’s how it should be, it becomes part of their life. It’s a representation that The Haçienda never belonged to any one person, it belonged to those thousands of people. Nobody really owns The Haçienda now and everybody has their own idea of what it is.”  

I love that at the auction Peter Hook was increasing the bids by taking phantom bids. Bobby Langley bought the DJ booth which was going to go for £500 and Peter took a bid from the back of the room to get it going. I think the DJ booth is still missing in action? 

Jon: “He’s got it flat packed. I think someone else paid for it in the end not Bobby. He was living in my apartment at the time.”  

Five years after the club’s closure the film ‘24 Hour Party People’ was released. Both of you appeared in the film didn’t you? 

Jon: “I did by accident. Me and Dave were supposed to play together (in a club scene) and then Graeme and Mike muscled in. But then when Steve Coogan makes that announcement that the club is closing I’m right next to him. So, I’m in it for a microsecond but I’m there because Mike was at the bar and he said: ‘Can you go and DJ for me using my records?’ So I went up there and – bang! – they all walked in and started filming.”  

Dave: “I think Mike was the one who missed out the most because there was somebody playing Mike. There was an actor who was cast as Mike. And he was very un-Mike. He was mis-cast. Mike was really not that impressed.” 

Jon: “I think there was a scene where he met with Rob. They were all going to a Manchester City match and they were running down the street and both dived over a hedge and that’s where they met.”  

Dave: “But the Pickering character got taken out.”

How did it feel entering the film set of the Haçienda?

Dave: “Well, I was lucky enough to get involved a little bit in the run up to it. I had quite a lot of meetings with [the director] Michael Winterbottom and the team about the music for the whole film. Martin Moscrop [A Certain Ratio] and I had a little bit of say in that, just to get it as authentic as we could but they were stuck with the budget so they weren’t able to get the tracks they wanted. Which is why there is one ACR track in there. So, I kind of knew how it was going to look and so I put them in touch with the original lighting guy so that we could have some of the original lighting. Mike confessed to feeling the wobbliest when he walked in.” 

Jon: “I burst into tears. I walked into the set and, it wasn’t quite right but it was just… clearly I obviously knew this view, so, so well from years of playing there or being a punter or whatever and it was just… I just burst into tears. It was our night of closure.”

Dave: “It felt like the last night that we never had. I helped get all the extras in and I had to send them all a letter saying don’t dress like a cliché and just be aware that it will stop and start while they film. But Michael and his people loved it so much that they just let it roll.”

Jon: “There was unfortunately rather a lot of beanie hats which we never really saw in The Haçienda. The fishermen around here went hatless for months afterwards.”  

Dave: “At least it was a fairly young audience, not just all our mates.” 

What do you think of the film?

Dave: “The film felt right, though it wasn’t historically accurate.”

Jon: “I spoke to Tony about it because I didn’t really enjoy it. He said: ‘Well you’re too close to me, Jon, to enjoy it’. I get the humour, but I thought it was quite rough on Tony. I’ve only seen it a couple of times since then.” 

Dave: If you Google image Haçienda nightclub, a lot of the first 50 images are actually stills from the film.”  

Did you both read the Peter Hook book ‘How Not to Run a Club’ in 2009? 

Jon: “I refused to. I told Peter at the time. I said I’ve had enough and I’d lived it, so no I haven’t read it.”

Dave: “I went into Waterstones and looked myself up in the Index. And there was a paragraph about me and my history with The Haçienda. I resigned once and got sacked once and reinstated three times. A paragraph about me resigning was so far from the truth, I just thought well if that’s a mark of what the rest of the book is like then I’ll leave it. I remember somebody sending me a link to the book when it was commercially successful and it was riding high in the fiction charts. That is about right.”  

Was it really that badly run? 

Jon: “There was a bit of a debacle with the 40th birthday in the car park this year and the vitriol that was spewed. That was an issue with the Council and I don’t really think it falls at The Haçienda’s door. But this idea that it was continuing this notion that the club was chaotic. We put on great nights and did fantastic birthday parties with funfairs and all this kind of stuff nobody had ever seen this before. So, I don’t understand where this comes from. I think in terms of the management, there was a lot of jobs that really could have been done by one person. A lot of money was wasted – there were rumours that they didn’t make any money even when it was absolutely rammed.” 

Dave: “It was always ready at 9 o’clock to open. Everything was there and I never had an issue with the sound, no one ever booked guest DJs without telling me and I got paid every week.”  

The Haçienda Classical series has been both successful and pioneering. Since the first one with the Manchester Camerata, Cream, Ministry of Sound and Back to Basics have all done versions. 

Jon: “I’ve never actually watched Haçienda Classical. But apparently they do a fantastic job. You can understand it’s a big cash cow for them, I understand that and good luck to them.”

How was the 40th anniversary party in the car park under The Haçienda apartments on the site of the original venue? When it eventually got going?

Jon: “It was in two parts (an afternoon event and a night-time one). The second part I just thought was fantastic and it was emotional. I really enjoyed it.” 

Dave: “I don’t get invited. I mean the other underlying issue is the whole Peter Hook, Bernard Sumner New Order thing. In the years since Hooky has run the Haçienda brand I’ve done lots of stuff with New Order and unfortunately I think in that relationship you are forced – certainly by Hooky – to choose. And I feel very comfortable with my choice. I always look at the line-ups, of course I do, there’s a part of me that would love to go and I’d love to play. But like I say it’s just things have conspired and events have happened and I’m not going to. I can be jaded and cynical but I can also acknowledge that it’s amazing to be a participant of something that 40 years later people find intriguing or if you’re lucky, inspiring.”

Jon: “Absolutely, I’ve come across kids in their late-teens, early-20s at gigs and they’re asking me questions about the Wet party (a night in 1988 held in a swimming baths) and because that’s one of the few things you can actually watch on YouTube, they’re just absolutely obsessed. You get met at the stage by really nervous teenagers wanting to ask you all about Factory Records.” 

If you had to describe why The Haçienda was special to a young person what would you pick out as a defining thing?

Jon: “DJ culture really arrived during that period and The Haçienda was quite central to that. There was an excitement in the air. It was exhilarating – the collision of certain chemicals, certain music and a certain dancefloor. It was scary to walk around there, it wasn’t scary because of the violence, it was scary because you just didn’t know what was going on. People just losing their minds to the music.”

Dave: “I don’t think there’s a way of describing it, you know, again because it went through so many different phases but certainly in that golden period it was absolute euphoria. I mean I remember feeling the audience’s positivity and reaction to the music almost physically as a DJ. Previously you could tell they were appreciating what we were playing, but in that era it was almost a physical thing, you were in the DJ booth feeling this positivity and it was tangible and the sweat would rise.” 

Hacienda That?

In a meta moment I took the bollard with me to a 2017 screening of ‘Do You Own the Dancefloor?’ in King’s Cross. The Haçienda’s architect Ben Kelly and DJ Graham Park were appearing after the film and I wanted them to sign my artefact. The film documents why people bought what they did at the auction and what they did with it. 

One of The Haçienda poster and flyer designers, Trevor Johnson, has four bollards signposting the lettuce in his allotment. Peter Hook turned some of the dancefloor planks into bass guitars. My favourite part of this endearing documentary are the friends who purchased these hulking metal emergency exit doors. No one really mentions these when they think wistfully back to Ben Kelly’s ground breaking design, they didn’t even feature his black and yellow stripes. But to these friends – under-age at the club’s peak – they meant the world as each weekend they would bang on the doors at a certain point in the night and there was a chap on the other side who would let them in for a fiver. From there they would enter this epoch-making wonderland of tunes, sweat and beers (cans of Breaker lager, not sure anyone has drunk this since - or before for that matter). 

I approached Kelly before the film in the bar and unsheathed my bollard from a black bin bag and handed him a Sharpie pen. His friend stopped him for a moment and cautioned: ‘How do you know it’s real?’ So I told him my story about Anthony Wilson guiding me and Paul through the club one last time, which he seemed to believe. He signed one of the white parts. Graham Park signed it without question after the screening and I now have Haslam and Dasilva’s inked on following this interview. Mike Pickering, the DJ I danced to the most back in 89-91 when I used to go nearly every week is next on my list. 

After he had signed it, Ben Kelly asked if he could buy the bollard from me. As with Sasha 20 years previously I declined. The club still seems to have a hold over everyone, even the man who laid out its first plans 40 years ago… 

Read the history of The Haçienda's ground-breaking gay night, Flesh.

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This article first appeared in issue two of Disco Pogo.

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Ron Trent’s first LP in 11 years, ‘What Do the Stars Say to You’, is shaping up to be one of the albums of the year. Just don’t, whatever you do, call it house he tells Ben Cardew…

Ron Trent would like to make one thing clear: ‘What Do the Stars Say to You’, his new album as WARM, is not house music, OK?

“Is it house? Oh, absolutely not,” he says with a large smile, down the Zoom line from Chicago where he is back in the old family home. Which is fine, of course. He’s Ron Trent, a producer and DJ of exquisite talent, who has been making electrifying dance music since the tender age of 14 when he produced the early house/techno classic ‘Altered States’. 

At the same time, though, wait a moment: he’s Ron Trent, the same Ron Trent who kept the deep house flag flying through the 1990s and beyond, with his none-more-musically profound label Prescription (with Chez Damier). This is the Ron Trent who produced scuba deep house classics like ‘Morning Factory’ and ‘The Choice’ (both with Damier) and who spun at NYC’s sacred house hangout Body & Soul. Surely he’s not giving up on his roots, right at the moment when the mainstream media is proclaiming 2022 to be the summer of house?

Well, no. Not really. Obviously it is way beyond our pay grade to tell Ron Trent what is and isn’t house. But ‘What Do the Stars Say to You’ feels a lot like house, albeit a kind of house made for lounging in a disco hammock, occasionally twitching a limb, as a cool summer breeze comes in off the sea. Songs like ‘Melt Into You (feat. Alex Malheiros)’ and the gorgeously indolent ‘WARM’ sound like house of a certain age, house music for deep diggers and musical thinkers, rather than tech housers and impatient festival dancers. 

This is a house music album that is home to a septuagenarian jazz violinist trained at the Conservatoire de Paris (Jean-Luc Ponty) and an Italian composer in his 60s (Gigi Masin), alongside New York disco legend François Kevorkian and musically promiscuous festival headliners Khruangbin; a house music album that embraces synths and a gentle four-four pulse, as well as the dual (and perhaps contradictory) influences of kraut and yacht rock. 

Sure, there are elements of jazz (witness Ponty’s sparkling solo on ‘Sphere’), Afrobeat (Khruangbin’s funk glide on ‘Flos Potentia (Sugar, Cotton, Tabacco)’), New Age (the admirably horizontal ‘Admira’) and even Detroit techno (the synth sweeps on ‘Cycle Of Many’) to the album. But then house music has always been a very adaptable beast, capable of making pretty with everything from gospel to soca, and ‘What Do the Stars…’ feels like a continuation of this warm-hearted, open-minded spirit.

Putting all this together took time. ‘What Do the Stars Say to You’ is Trent’s first album in 11 years, a lifetime in electronic music terms, and he has been quietly working away on the record, honing his musical skills. Rather than getting in his way, necessarily, Covid gave Trent a convenient excuse to improve his guitar skills, one of several instruments he plays on the album, alongside drums, percussion, keys, synths, piano and electronics. WARM is a band, Trent says, albeit one that very much starts with him.

This organic approach was a deliberate reaction to the way that a lot of modern electronic music is made, using laptops and plug ins. 

“It’s really like taking a look back at the craftsmanship of the 80s and the 70s, where there was a combination of live music and electronic and not so much one or the other,” Trent explains. “You have albums that are mainly just electronic or mainly live. I like the combination of the two together, when they’re working together, you know, because it makes another whole layer of beauty.”

Trent’s key influences on ‘What Do the Stars…’ reflect this eclectic musical spirit. They include Brazilian jazz fusionists Azymuth (whose Ivan Conti and Alex Malheiros feature on the album); ‘Gigolos Get Lonely Too’, a 1982 song by The Time that was produced and composed by Prince, putting treated drum machine alongside live drums; Tangerine Dream; and – perhaps most intriguingly – Kraftwerk’s pre-Kraftwerk band Organisation, who released one album of spiralling, psychedelic krautrock before Ralf Hütter and Florian Schneider decamped to make musical history.

Organisation, it’s suggested to Trent, isn’t a name you hear every day. He seems amused. “It’s travelling music, it’s very visual,” he explains of the band’s deep-kraut appeal. “It’s highly textured, also abstract, for sure. I like those kinds of things: it allows the mind to have its own travelling session, if you will. And that’s very much what this album is about: it’s about being transported into different spaces and places. And also it’s kind of an ode to structures: architectural structures, sonic structures, visual components, design, things of that nature, cityscapes.” 

The album’s striking cover art, by Italian architect and illustrator Federica Scalise, which depicts a modern, lightly surreal cityscape glimpsed through the window of a minimalist apartment, speaks to these structural concerns.

Ron Trent, it turns out, loves to talk about music. His current favourites include Thundercat, Robert Glasper, Khruangbin and English rapper/producer/songwriter Labrinth, who he discovered via his daughter’s love for HBO teen drama ‘Euphoria’, which Labrinth scored. These are far from your typical house favourites. But, in many ways, Trent continues to see the world through a DJ’s eyes. When he’s asked what he likes about Organisation, he starts to enthuse about ‘Tone Float’, the 20-minute-plus opening track that dominates the band’s debut (and, indeed, only) album. 

“It’s a long, long track and it’s very atmospheric and you could play that record at the right time,” Trent explains, “say at The Loft [David Mancuso’s legendary New York party]. Or if I’m playing a long set somewhere in Japan, or if I’m playing by myself for a long period of time, I could play something like that.”

In the same way, he believes that the music on ‘What Do the Stars…’ could, in the right circumstances, move an open-minded dance floor. “At the right time and the right place, you could play tunes from this album in those zones,” he says. “François [Kevorkian] and I did a party together and we kind of demonstrated that attitude – that attitude, that altitude – will allow you to deliver the music in a certain way. It would all make sense in a dance formula.” (Kevorkian, as well as mastering ‘What Do the Stars…’, has also provided a mixed version of the album for digital release.)

And what is the secret to this dance formula? How can you make ‘What Do the Stars…’ work on a dancefloor? It comes down to context, Trent explains. 

“My style of playing, the school I come from, it’s about telling the story,” he says. “So it’s really about what you surround it with, the textures that you surround the songs with.” 

He digs back into krautrock to find an example of what he means. “Kraftwerk has had a big influence on electronic music, along with Tangerine Dream, along with George Kranz, those are krautrock groups and krautrock people. And Manuel Göttsching, Ash Ra Tempel, those tunes like [Göttsching’s] ‘E2-E4’ and ‘Shuttlecock’ (another Göttsching classic, notably favoured by Joe Claussell), you can easily play them on the dancefloor, at certain moments. Along with tunes like Herb Alpert’s ‘Rotation’. It’s all in that same world. It’s just a matter of being able to have the insight to understand the dialect, if you will, to deliver it.”

So when Trent says ‘What Do the Stars Say to You’ isn’t house music, he isn’t rejecting house, exactly. Rather, it feels like a reaction against what much modern house music has become. “How can I say this?” Trent ponders. “House music, as people are using it today, it has absolutely nothing to do with where it comes from or what it’s about. Because really, it’s an amalgamation of a lot of types of styles. 

“What house music is, especially before it became formulaic, where it’s four on the floor and it does this and it does that blah, blah, blah, house music comes from The Loft; it comes from The Gallery; it comes from Paradise Garage. It comes from rock, it comes from gospel, jazz… So when someone says: ‘House music’, they’re really talking about a consciousness or a style, versus it being something that is a formula. This is a more krautrock, Balearic, yacht rock, rock, New Age, experimental album. But knowing what I know: people like David Mancuso and Frankie [Knuckles] and Larry [Levan] were very experimental and they had open minds for music. So it’s more of a music lover’s album.”

Don’t get it twisted. Trent likes Beyoncé and recognises her recent excursions into house music. (“She’s an artist,” he says. “And I can appreciate what she’s doing now, obviously, with the house music thing because of the statement that she’s making in terms of being a reclamation project. So I appreciate it.”)

Chicago’s current club scene, however, is less to his tastes. “It’s definitely a shadow of itself,” Trent says of the city that gave birth to house music, the city where he was born back in 1973, and made his first steps as a DJ and producer. “I came up in the beginnings of it [Chicago house] and pioneered a lot of it, on my end and my generation. Now it’s definitely more about drinking. And less about the sound system, less about the skill set… You know, what? Fuck it. It is heavily commercialised and there’s no underground. That’s the best way to describe it.”

To anyone who has grown up idealising the raw future funk of Chicago house – and that is everyone from Basement Jaxx to Daft Punk – this is a troubling thing to hear. So why has the city’s club scene has gone downhill? 

He thinks for a while. “When something loses its connection to its roots, it dilutes the potency of what it is,” he eventually answers. “That’s kind of like what has happened in Chicago.” He contrasts this with New York, another city close to his heart. “I was there pre-9-11,” he says. “And the energy, man, it just reminded me of what it was like [in Chicago], you know, that freshness.”

New York, he explains, has been able to maintain a balance between commercialism and the underground in a way that Chicago has failed to do. “A lot of the underground here was kind of wiped away, in a sense, because of corporations, because of laws, because of just various things,” Trent explains, a note of weary sadness in his voice. “So it made it harder for people to create underground situations, where you could have a house for the cutting edge. And it is the edginess that made this happen in the first place. You know, it was somebody thinking outside the box, a DIY philosophy.”

Speaking to Trent today, it is obvious he has been on a musical journey since he burst onto the scene with ‘Altered States’ while still in high school. He’s older now – we’re all older now – and ‘What Do the Stars Say to You’ is an album both from and for people of age and experience. It’s relaxed, untroubled and musically accomplished; it’s profound, polite and slightly hippy in its New Age concerns; it is house that will gently give you a heartfelt hug rather than an electrifying jolt of excitement. And yet the same slightly naughty, non-conformist spirit that made ‘Altered States’ such a musical slap in the face in the early-90s is still undeniably present in Trent’s work.

Before our time is up, an exploration of ‘Altered States’. There’s one bar, around two minutes 43 seconds into the song, when the drums radically break from their steady rhythm; it’s a moment that used to mess up listeners in those long after-club nights, with the irregular drum rhythm making it sound like the mix was being trainwrecked. So, was this deliberate? Did he do it just to mess DJs and dancers up?

He laughs heartily. “No,” Trent says, amused by the idea. “If you listen to the track, it has a shuffle to it. That’s something that hadn’t really been done or played with, in a lot of tracks at that time. And so I was playing with shuffle, more than anything else, and with timing, more than ‘I’m gonna fuck you up on it’. When we’re creating tracks, we like quirky things. And that was quite quirky. You know what I mean? Something that was like: ‘Wow, did that just do that? Like what? Oh, shit!’ you know?”

It was, he concludes, an “edgy” move. “And so that was the purpose. It’s like: ‘This is some wild shit: it just did a thing we’re not used to.’” Again, Trent laughs deeply, as well he might. Ron Trent’s career has been one of musical adventure and exquisite control. It has also, beyond doubt, been one of wild shit and things we’re not used to. Long may that continue. 

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This article first appeared in issue two of Disco Pogo.

The central track on Laurent Garnier’s third album, ‘Unreasonable Behaviour’ (released in 2000) was the epic ‘The Man With the Red Face’ - and it went on to transform the fêted French producer’s sonic palette.  

Montreux Calling

In 1998, Laurent Garnier took a phone call that not only changed the course of his career, it planted a creative seed that eventually gave birth to one of his most memorable, certainly one of his most distinctive and unquestionably one of his best-loved tracks, ‘The Man With the Red Face’.

“Christian [Paulet, his manager] rang me and told me that I’d been asked to play live at Montreux Jazz Festival. I thought: ‘Fuck! What do I do? Playing live at the Montreux Jazz Festival in the place where Miles Davis played. Who the fuck am I to go and play there after monsters like that?’ It was strange. But then again we were in a time when techno was getting out of the clubs. It was getting out on the streets and in festivals like Montreux, and other pop rock festivals or whatever were starting to have a techno room. Finally the link was established. There was a good sense for us to go and play there.”

In the 90s, the relationship between jazz and techno wasn’t as defined – or respected – as it is today. However, the founder of Montreux, Claude Nobs, was an open-minded music fan eager to push the boundaries.

“Back then it was very difficult to find someone in the jazz world who was open to electronic music. It’s better now – 30 years after. There were only guys like Bugge Wesseltoft who were open to us. Thankfully, the guy who ran Montreux Jazz [Nobs] was a very passionate man. He had hip hop. He had bands like Deep Purple playing, psychedelic bands, punk bands… he was very open. He wanted to move forwards. Always. So it was daring to ask us. As a matter of respect, I wanted to make a track that would have a more jazzy connotation and improvisation.”

The timing was serendipitous because Garnier was beginning to fall under the alluring and innovative spell of jazz.

“We were signing people to [his label] F Communications like [Frederic] Galliano and I was starting to explore jazz music. I didn’t when I was younger. Every time in my career I liked moving on to different things. When something becomes really fashionable I tend to go against it. I usually search somewhere else – I still do now I guess. And, yeah, jazz was talking to me and I kind of understood back then the root of jazz within techno music. I got it. Improvisation. Instrumental music. Pushing the machines. Searching. I understood the connection.”

When Garnier was approached about playing Montreux he was touring in Ireland with his band.

“One day we were rehearsing in the afternoon, because I had a drummer and a violinist. We used to have long rehearsals. I was usually pretty bored because my machine was on/off. Is it working ok? But we’d spend an hour on the drummer and half-an-hour with the violins, so I was just playing about with my headphones on and I started to get some stuff together. I had the Reese bass line; I did a bit of the drums and I just did that during rehearsals. 

“The inspiration came from a track by The Deep, called ‘Dom Dom Jump’. It was reminiscent of Masters at Work with a trumpet player, and I thought: ‘Wow, this is quite nice to bring the wind element to house music.’ It worked really well. So I have to give him credit for putting a tick in my head. I got back home and I tried to search for a saxophonist.

“My drummer Daniel Bechet was the son of Sidney Bechet, a huge jazz man in France. Daniel had a lot of connections in the jazz world and he told me that he knew this guy called Finn, a saxophonist. So I met Finn. I told him I was working on a track for Montreux and I’d like to put a saxophone on it.

“I had a loop, this gimmick with the drums, which Finn helped me to put together, and then he improvised with his saxophone. We went to Montreux and right in the middle of the show we did this track which was completely improvised. It worked really well. We felt straight away that we had something. Something strong. Something that was funky.

“Unfortunately, Finn was a bit of a showman – to say the least (laughing). He was onstage and then the next minute he’d be jumping around and then he jumped off the stage, playing in front of the girls. I’m onstage thinking: ‘What the fuck are you doing, man? Get back on the stage.’ At the end of the live show I said to him: ‘No offence, but I don’t think we’ll carry on… You’re used to hanging off buildings and playing your saxophone. You’re used to doing big shows and this is not what we do.’ So it was great to do Montreux. We had a good time, but no we didn’t carry on.”

Another prestigious 1998 gig – this time at Paris’ world-famous music hall, Olympia – led to Garnier working with another temporary saxophonist.

“Again we do this Montreux track – it still has no name – and it works well. People seem to like it. I tell the saxophonist, who could only do this Olympia gig, that I need a guy. I liked the idea of having a saxophonist in the show and want to go further with it. He tells me about a guy he knows called Philippe Nadaud who he says is great and available. So I meet the famous Philippe Nadaud. And straight away it works. We go and play live and we play the Montreux track a few times. One day we decided we needed to go and record it. The recording was a bit of a different kettle of fish.”

Recording – And Hitting Upon The Song’s Title

Garnier, his sound engineer, Laurent Collat, and Nadaud met at Garnier’s Paris studio. The track’s brooding bass line was already there - as was its ominous, almost malevolent undercurrent. What was missing, obviously, was the saxophone part.

“I said to Philippe: ‘I know in jazz, you guys have ways of playing music. So if you play bebop you play bebop. If you play free, you play free and you don’t mix the two together.’ But I told him he could do whatever the fuck he liked. ‘You can do one phrase bebop and you can do another phrase super freestyle. Just go with the flow.’ So we put a pair of headphones on Philippe and I said to him I’m just gonna send you the loop and I’m gonna record you. 

“When he started to play I turned to Laurent [Collat] and said: ‘Check this out.’ I could talk to Philippe while he was playing. So I said: ‘This is shit.’ And then I went: ‘It’s getting even worse.’ We made him play for 20 minutes, cursing him. We were saying: ‘This is bad. We need more. This is crap. Blah, blah, blah.’ After 20 or 25 minutes, I stop. And Phillipe stops. He’s bright red, looking at me, going: ‘What the fuck?’ I said: ‘It’s ok. We’ve got everything we need. Now you can go home.’ He just said: ‘You motherfucker.’ He was bright red. And I said to him: ‘I’ve got the title of the song too: ‘The Man With the Red Face’.’

“I did the edit two or three days after. I remember it was a Thursday or Friday and I was supposed to play in Montpellier that night. There’s two instruments on the track – there’s the saxophone and then there’s an electronic sax called a Ewi. Philippe played both. I do this edit with the phrases going into each other and answering each other, you know, fucking around with Philippe’s way of playing. And I finish a mix which I think is nice. I put it on tape. And then I go to Montpellier. It was a chaotic night, but I wanted to try this track out. But playing a tape in a DJ set was not very easy – it’s not like now with a USB stick. I find a place in my mix where I just stop the track, put on an a capella and then, bang, I play ‘The Man With the Red Face’ and after five minutes the whole room is going absolutely fucking ballistic. I look at everybody thinking: ‘What is going on?’ I played the track again at the end as a last track. Same reaction.

Thinking he has something strong; Garnier sends his edit to Nadaud to get his thoughts.

“He said: ‘Laurent, what the fuck did you do? You can’t play like that as a saxophonist. If I had to replay it you can’t play like that.’ But I just wanted to know if he liked it? Whether he thought it was good or not? He told me he liked it. So there it was. I told him that I wasn’t asking him to ever replay it like that. Live is different. But I told him that if he was happy with it. And he wasn’t ashamed by what I did with it – with the cutting and editing – then I thought it was great.

“The track is extremely simple. There’s a Juno 106 Reese bass, percussion – nothing special in there – and then the funky, Herbie Hancock-ish gimmick is a Yamaha DX100, which was a very small keyboard that I bought because a lot of the Detroit guys used it at the beginning and I really like the texture. It’s kind of a toy keyboard, but it’s one of the root keyboards of Detroit music. The rest is not much more – apart from the saxophone.

“When I recorded it in my studio with Philippe – how many months after [first messing about in the rehearsals in Ireland] – the track never evolved. 90% of that track was made on that stage in Ireland. The surprising thing about it is that at the end of day the track was made in 10 minutes. Not 10 minutes… 20 minutes. Really. I used some of the percussion from my other tracks because I didn’t have a drum machine or anything. I pinched the hi hat from that; I pinched that from that, put it all together, did this bassline… I liked the groove. And that’s it.”

Release And Aftermath

Throughout 1999, Garnier continued playing ‘The Man With the Red Face’ in his DJ sets – not least at his famed Thursday night residency at The Rex Club in Paris. The track was a cornerstone of his third album, ‘Unreasonable Behaviour’, released early in 2000 and named Album of the Issue in Jockey Slut. Released as a single in April, the track reached the lofty heights of 65 in the British charts, although when released as a two-part 12-inch later that year, alongside another album track, ‘Greed’, it actually gave Garnier his first – and, to date, only – Top 40 British hit, landing at number 36.

“Besides what the track is about, ‘The Man With the Red Face’ is a very pivotal point in my career, where I kind of switched and wanted to explore more with musicians and go a bit further. That track is the key moment where we moved to a more freestyle jazz-way of improvising. I could somehow find a way to not be a proper musician, as I would have loved to be, but be more like a director, a conductor.

“I did that for a few years and then moved on and I haven’t really made any jazzy tracks for some time. It doesn’t mean I won’t again. I’m just experimenting. I try things on and if we do something strong I’ll never repeat it – I mean a lot of people would probably like me to make another ‘The Man With the Red Face’ but I can’t. There’s no point. I don’t see the point. The same reason that I don’t want to do another ‘Crispy Bacon’. I want to do something else. I want to surprise myself.”

One thing that did surprise Garnier recently was the urge to play it in one of his DJ sets. 

“I don’t play it very often. But I played it last week. I finished my set… I was on the mountains, playing outside, not under my normal name, I was playing a strictly house set: house and African music, no techno, and one man kept asking if I was going to play ‘The Man With the Red Face’? This happens all the time and normally I don’t like playing my stuff too much, but this time I thought: ‘Yeah, it makes sense. We’re outside. We’re happy, let’s do it.’

“As I played it I was thinking about how good it sounds after all these years. There are some tracks of mine that I hear and I think I should re-record it. I don’t like the mix, or I don’t like this or I don’t like that. On this track, even though I can’t confess it’s my favourite track of mine – I like it – but there are tracks of mine that I like more which have done nothing, but that’s ok, it doesn’t matter. But when I played it last week I thought: ‘Wow, I’m not embarrassed by it because I think the track sounds good even after all these years.’ The mix is a bit weird but it works. It’s cool. 

“It got old in a nice way. It didn’t get dusty. It’s like nice wine. It stayed with its flavour and everything is still there. It didn’t get dusty. Some old tracks can get dusty, so I’m happy with that.”

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This article first appeared in issue two of Disco Pogo.

The release of Warp’s ground-breaking ‘Artificial Intelligence’ compilation in 1992 was a watershed moment for electronic music. Not only did it help turn on a new generation of listeners to electronica, it went some way to legitimising the sounds to a reactionary, indie-obsessed music press. Sherman should know, he was pushing dance music while ‘at the controls’ at the NME. He looks back at this pivotal release, and examines its significance today…

It’s not going to be long before an artist can make an album, film, CDI and CDO in his or her own bedroom for a few thousand pounds, advertise the ‘product’ to hundreds of thousands of people directly via the computer networks and sell directly to them. This will completely cut out the need for the usual trek around the major entertainment companies looking for finance and could lead to things getting really interesting.

Extract from the original 1992 press release for ‘Artificial Intelligence’

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Speeding out of the late-80s and into the 90s, new technology was enabling musical fences to be frequently smashed down. Electronic music had been on the rise since acid house (and the acid) had kicked in and now it was splintering off in new directions as it bleeped and sub-bass-ed its way out of bedrooms across the country. With a few basic machines you could make music in a brand new way, create brand new sounds and beats that inspired brand new ideas, the results of which flooded into the record shops weekly. 

This science of samplers, sequencers and computers, linked together with drum machines, synths and whatever else you could find, allowed producers the ability to produce their own final product without having to go through the usual artistically restrictive filters. Welcome to the future.

I was manning the controls of NME’s dance section at a time when dance music was first sweeping across the country. The paper was still a powerful force in British music and had become pretty much a full-on indie-paper covering Morrissey’s every breath, so it was really hard to get electronic and dance music taken seriously despite electronic pioneers New Order being regulars on the cover, Madchester and the genre-splitting ‘Screamadelica’. 

Dance music was making its way across Europe as the underground bubbled overground, but if it wasn’t on Creation it was usually seen as throwaway club music lacking authenticity by a lot of journos at the inky weeklies. I wasn’t a trained journalist, I was the editorial assistant who was just really into the music and who kept moaning to editor Danny Kelly that the paper wasn’t covering the real action. I fell into it all by accident really because I knew about the records and what was going on in a world that most of the paper was oblivious to. 

It seems crazy now thinking back to how it was, but ‘dance’ music was rather sneered at by segments of the industry early on – there would often be comments about only having to press a few buttons to make the music. At the paper, one staff writer, an ardent Nick Lowe fan, thought it hilarious to dance around me going ‘bleep, bleep, bleep, bleep’, and at one point I was ‘temporarily suspended’ from constantly playing tunes on the office hi-fi. Prior to forming The Dust (later Chemical) Brothers, Tom Rowlands’ Ariel visited techno towers to play me their single ‘Rollercoaster’. They were adamant they couldn’t leave me their only copy but eventually had to because of my ‘blocked status’ on the stereo. Tom, I still have your record.

So it became a bit of a crusade as I genuinely thought it was scandalous that so much great music was being ignored. ‘Artificial Intelligence’ would be among the records that helped change minds and mark a new era.

Occasionally the odd sign would appear that hinted towards new offshoots for techno. ‘Altair IV.1’ by States of Mind on Plus 8, along with two 12s by the unknown Infamix – later to morph into B12 – being early markers in 1990. The release of The Orb’s first post-clubbing chillout album, ‘Adventures Beyond the Ultraworld’, in April 1991, helped slow everything down and space everything out, designed, as it was, to be consumed in one piece. Later that year Network put out the brilliant ‘Mood Set’ EP by Xon; an atmospheric trio of tracks that shuffled and skittered with a deep mechanical funk that was more for the mind than the body, so I described it as ‘armchair techno’ in my review. 

The Black Dog and Irdial Discs had been working in a different dimension for a couple of years and there wasn’t really a genre that could hold them. True to form, Cabaret Voltaire were posted on the frontline, their ‘Body and Soul’ album and EP releases ‘Colours’ and ‘Easy Life’ being among those remote viewing the future. In the autumn of 1991, Aphex Twin released his first single ‘Analogue Bubblebath’. It was played by both Colin Dale and Colin Faver on London’s Kiss FM, both of whom had a huge listenership regularly tuning in to hear the latest imports from labels like Djax-Up-Beats, Eevo Lute, Planet E, Underground Resistance, Transmat, Metroplex, all spun alongside new British labels like GPR, Radioactive Lamb, Rephlex and the cityscape cinematics of B12, who hailed from Barking in Essex, but shrink-wrapped their releases to appear Detroitian.

Out of all this a new kind of hybrid techno was emerging, one that wasn’t really for clubs and which wasn’t just ambient but balanced somewhere in-between. It was more textured and organic, sometimes slower in pace, sometimes more abstract and it explored new structures. It was miles away from the clattering breakbeats and hoover noises of rave and revolted against the quick turnaround and disposability of the white label fashion. Independent of each other, all these people had tuned into the same wavelength and were all now speaking a new electrical language. 

“There was no ‘scene’ as such,” says Steve Rutter, who, alongside Mike Golding, was making futuristic techno influenced by the first Detroit wave of producers and releasing it on their own B12 label run from a fax machine behind Rutter’s sofa. “It didn’t exist. As we went on we hooked up with Steve Stasis and Kirk Degiorgio and that was it for our little group that liked this music. Four of us!”

Autechre’s Sean Booth and Rob Brown also felt out on their own as, “Warp didn’t really get our music initially.” They’d been sending tapes to the label for two years only to receive standard record company rejection letters in return. It took a combination of LFO’s Mark Bell hearing an Autechre demo tape playing in the Warp office and telling them they should put it out, and Booth ringing label co-owner Steve Beckett and asking: “Why the fuck aren’t you listening to our tapes?” for the label to pay attention. Like most electronic labels at the time, Warp were driven by 12-inch singles directed mainly at clubs with perhaps the odd track that didn’t quite fit the dancefloor making its way onto a B-side. The concept of the ‘dance’ album hadn’t fully taken off yet.

Essential to the ‘Artificial Intelligence’ story was the opening of Fat Cat record shop in London’s Covent Garden in 1991. If you lived in the capital and were into techno and electronica, inevitably you would discover this one-stop shop for all your drum-machine related needs. The racks of the small basement space in Monmouth Street would be filled with fresh releases coming in from the States, Germany, Netherlands, Belgium and across the UK. 

It could only squeeze ten or so people in at best and on Fridays and Saturdays it could get so rammed you’d have to overflow into the even tinier office where you might get into a chat with Tony Thorpe and Neuropolitique’s Matt Cogger. Those who couldn’t get into the actual shop would line the stairs yelling down for the records they wanted as they were played. Björk would regularly visit, Kevin Saunderson would be in, Andrew Weatherall, Alistair Cooke from Back 2 Basics, Infonet’s Chris Abbott, Colin Dale, Richard D. James... It played a key role in the development of UK techno and electronica, acting as a hub and a meeting point for many of those active in this slowly building movement. 

“Without knowing it we created a space for that community to connect with each other and realise they weren’t isolated,” co-founder Alex Knight recalls. “We felt that we were on our own initially, we had no idea that there was all this other stuff happening until we opened in Monmouth Street. Ed from The Black Dog came down within the first couple of months of us opening and said that his distributor was going to melt down all of his unsold records and could we sell some? We said: ‘Yeah, we can probably sell the whole lot!’ That was one of our earliest connections to that scene.”

Along with The Black Dog, the B12 boys and Akin from Irdial, Grant Wilson-Claridge of Rephlex would turn up with a box of records on the label he had started with Aphex Twin, and which they had tagged ‘Braindance’ as a reference to the music’s psychedelic qualities.

“You’d have people dropping cassettes in for us to pass onto labels like Rephlex,” says Knight, “and then Grant would come down with a new release by the kid who gave you a cassette a few days earlier. So it felt really organic. Everything felt brand new and every week you’d get surprised by something that blew your mind.”

In January 1992 there was a breakthrough when I managed to convince the paper to do a techno issue. The closest NME had come to a dance cover was nearly two years previously when it flirted with the idea of showcasing Andrew Weatherall at the time of his James remix of ‘Come Home’, but the outraged Power-Pop Police soon blocked this rebellious notion.

However, following LFO’s success the previous year, including a pause-button moment when they had appeared on ‘Top of the Pops’ with their debut single constructed from Morse code bleeps, electro rhythms and warehouse rattling sub-bass, it was decided they would grace the front page. But when the photos appeared and Mark Bell and Gez Varley were posing with burning guitars, it felt a bit gimmicky, like the paper was portraying some sort of confrontation between dance and indie when the reality was nothing like that at all. But hey, it was a leap forward. LFO were on the cover. Techno was on the cover of the NME. This was major, and it became a massive talking point.

Dave Balfe, once of the mighty Teardrop Explodes and now owner of Food records (Blur/Jesus Jones), rang editor Danny Kelly and demanded that he sack me! Red from laughing, Danny waved me into his office to listen in while Balfe, who was apoplectic on the other end of the phone, ranted something about me being a really bad influence at a musical institution and that the NME was no place for dance music. ‘Off with his head!’. Just another day at the office.

There were definitely a few at the paper who appreciated dance music and some would go to clubs, but generally the ‘world’s biggest selling music weekly’ couldn’t handle the ‘Faceless Techno Bollocks’ of it all. It didn’t understand it and was therefore a bit nervous of it. For me though, it was this element of anonymity that was the music’s great leveller. It didn’t have to play by the rules of the rock industry. Thousands of working class kids were going raving in clubs, warehouses and fields every single weekend. There was a fast output of records that came and went and often included little or no information about who made the music. And what the artists looked like wasn’t that important because the people making it didn’t want to be pop stars or on TV.

Throughout early ’92 more labels began to appear like beacons on the horizon: Evolution, set up by Tom Middleton and Mark Pritchard of Global Communication, Applied Rhythmic Technology (ART), Rephlex, Infonet and Radioactive Lamb. Alongside artists like Neuropolitique, Kirk Degiorgio and In Sync, there was a wealth of music created that was becoming more complex, expressive, filmic and diverse. It only needed a jolt to bring everything into focus. Steve Rutter remembers the moment it did.

“One day a fax came through which said something like: ‘We’re having a meeting for electronic music people.’ There were some names of who were invited – A Guy Called Gerald, Cabaret Voltaire. The Black Dog were invited. I think Kirk was there.”

That meeting of futurists in a Shepherd’s Bush pub in early 1992, was a pivotal moment in the development of ‘Artificial Intelligence’ and the kinetic effect it would have on electronic music as a whole. The time was right, Steve Beckett and Rob Mitchell recognised it and planned to make Warp synonymous with electronica.

Rutter continues: “They’d reached out to everyone, but we didn’t know who was behind it or what it was. I can’t remember if it even said Warp on the fax. But they did it. They had an idea that this electronic thing was going to be big. They were really clued up, especially Rob, he saw something which none of us really did. He was clued up in the art of the possible.”

Sean Booth also recalls sensing pressure in the air. “There was common ground there because we all knew this was already a thing. So they felt comfortable doing ‘Artificial Intelligence’ because they knew they were plugging into something that was really real. Dance music was out of context, people were listening to it at home, but that wasn’t weird, we’d grown up listening to dance music on Walkmans and boom boxes. We were too young to go to clubs so the whole listening to electronic music in isolation was dead familiar to us already, even before the rave scene.”

The release of ‘Artificial Intelligence’ in July 1992 was a future shock; the spark that ignited, and united, this new movement of electronic artists. Warp had been on the bleep and bass trail for the previous two years, but this album collected the music into a new futurist manifesto. As a concept, it demonstrated to a wider audience that the machines were just tools people were using to follow their feelings, that they could be used to create as much emotion in this music as in any other.

For the uninitiated, it acted as a portal into this new digital world of pictorial instrumentals, introducing Autechre, The Black Dog (I.A.O.), Aphex Twin (The Dice Man), B12 (Musicology), Richie Hawtin (UP!), Speedy J and Alex Paterson to a much broader audience. And even though the music was mostly made by British artists, it turned a lot of people onto the sort of spacious, Detroit-led sounds that a lot of deeper techno was built on. But to counter the often deadpan sci-fi side of the music, the tongue-in-cheek sleeve featured a cyborg reclining in an armchair, spliff on, letting go to the sounds of Kraftwerk, Pink Floyd and the first Warp compilation ‘Pioneers of the Hypnotic Groove’. 

The original sleeve was conceived with The Designers Republic, a name now twinned with Warp. Its co-founder Ian Anderson, a self-taught graphic designer, remembers how the sleeve needed to convey the sense that it was listening music.

“Because electronic music was intrinsic to everything we were doing,” he explains, “everything about the image is saying when you get home, this is what you chill out to. That there’s enough in this music to listen to. There was a lot of talk at the time about heritage and where it was all coming from. At that point there weren’t many reference points so people looked back to things like Pink Floyd and Kraftwerk, kind of a stoner thing and for student bedsits. I liked the idea at the time although it wasn’t something we really loved, but in hindsight I really like it and I think it’s really iconic now.”

The album marked a shift in perspective in the music press as the connections with Kraftwerk and Floyd enhanced the realisation that this was a home listening experience. Once they recognised that students were getting heavily into electronic music, they had to pay more attention. Basically, ‘Artificial Intelligence’ justified some of my rantings in the NME office.

“We didn’t have much idea that other people were making this music until the album came out.” explains Booth. “We were listening to a lot of Black music like hip hop, Juan Atkins and people like Smith & Mighty, Unique 3 and Arthur Baker. We were heavily into electro and just saw our music as a linear continuation of it, so when we heard it we thought it was mostly inspired by electro and was just a further development.”

Steve Rutter remembers being unsure about the album at first. It didn’t connect immediately.

“When me and Mike first heard it I don’t think we necessarily thought all of it belonged together. Our music at the time was just us trying to copy Transmat and Detroit techno, whereas the other guys on the album were doing something a bit different. I wasn’t sure that it all fitted together. I thought it was a thing of beauty, but I didn’t really understand what was going on because I thought for a long time that our music wasn’t really anything, it was just what we did because we liked it.”

Down at Fat Cat, the album became a best seller. “We sold the album for years and continued to sell it because it became one of those classic albums that everybody wanted,” says Alex Knight. “A lot of the people on that record were in the shop all the time and were friends of ours so it always got pushed. We felt proud because it felt like our little community on that record. I feel privileged to have been part of that.”

The attention ‘Artificial Intelligence’ brought to electronica and the confidence it now gave other artists and labels to plan full albums, was furthered at the end of the year by the release of Aphex Twin’s seminal ‘Selected Ambient Works 85-92’ on R&S. It sounded utterly different to anything else. This was partly enabled by Richard D. James’ penchant for stripping back bits of equipment to improve them, soldering in new components and removing others in the vein of experimentalists like Throbbing Gristle and King Tubby to create unique sounds from customised machines. The rock press gradually embraced James for his entertaining and lurid tales more than his skills as an electrician; that he lived in a bank with a recording studio in the vault, that he owned and drove a tank, pulled songs from lucid dreams, once played a show using sandpaper and a blender, that he was paid four grand to remix alt-rockers The Lemonheads but didn’t bother listening to the original and instead returned one of his own old tracks which was then not released. Some were possibly true and some maybe not. Possibly maybe. We should hope the mystery of the Aphex Twin remains eternally unsolved.

Throughout 1993 electronic music exploded and seemed to shapeshift weekly. New artists, labels and clubs sprung up and as more electronic acts began to play live, nights like London’s Megadog, Manchester’s Herbal Tea Party and Birmingham’s Oscillate put on events where DJ sets melded into live performances and back again and where the visual side was often equally important. Clubbers flocked to see all these new artists like Aphex Twin, The Black Dog, Autechre, Psychick Warriors Ov Gaia, B12, Higher Intelligence Agency, Orbital, Sun Electric, Biosphere, Ultramarine and countless others who were all now out on the road.

The founder of Herbal Tea Party, Rob Fletcher, recalls the initial difficulty in tracking down all these new artists and DJs. “I would basically look on the back of sleeves or get phone numbers off labels to ring artists or agents. I’d go to clubs to meet people then hang around the booth at the end of the night to talk to DJs. I didn’t really see electronica as a separate genre. I just saw a massive amount of leftfield dance music whether it was ambient, Detroit or progressive. Techno was a broader word back then before it started going into very defined, separate genres.”

The crowds would often comprise the spectrum of night people. “It was a total mish-mash” Fletcher says. “You’d get ravers, people from the festival scene, scallies, students, clubbers who also went to The Haçienda. It was a total mix and I wanted the vibe to be like that, loads of different music and people coming together.”

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Sean Booth also remembers a time when dance music was a uniting force. “In the early-90s it was a global thing and all about being together. The whole techno scene was a global phenomenon from Detroit to Europe to Japan. Everyone was friends. No one remembers any of that now.”

The album itself also went onto birth a series of releases under the Artificial Intelligence umbrella – these included Polygon Window’s ‘Surfing on Sine Waves’ (another Aphex alter ego); Richie Hawtin’s ‘Dimension Intrusion’ (released under his F.U.S.E. pseudonym) and Speedy J’s ‘Ginger’. The final release came in 1994, with the ‘Artificial Intelligence II’ compilation bookending the series perfectly.

Techno and electronica was beginning to spread and would ultimately become an integral part of some of the major festivals. When The Orb headlined the NME Stage on a special Saturday night at Glastonbury in 1993, so many people wanted to be part of the experience that the gates had to be shut and the field locked down. When new press darlings Suede had headlined the same stage on the Friday, it looked like a fan club turnout. Orbital carried on the task the following year to push techno home at Glastonbury and in 1995 the festival pitched up a dedicated dance tent. Now it’s a whole Dance Village.

And so, 30 years on and the past’s future is now the present. ‘Artificial Intelligence’ has more than stood the test of time but, equally, so has much of that early techno and electronica which captured the energy, dynamics and freshness of the period. All the other artists, labels, shops, clubs and DJs are of equal importance to the story of ‘Artificial Intelligence’ because that early scene is where the album was born. The effect it caused on subsequent next-step artists such as Photek, Björk, Squarepusher, Andrea Parker, Boards of Canada, Two Lone Swordsmen, Riz Maslen and thousands of others, was quickly noticeable.   

It wired itself into dubstep, indie, drum’n’bass, hip hop and beyond. Today you can trace it deep into Bovaflux, on some of Paul Woolford’s Special Request albums and there’s continuance in some of the sounds Billie Eilish uses. Electronica doesn’t stand still and the music continues to evolve and shift and influence and be influenced. This is evident today with Autechre, Black Dog, Aphex Twin, Richie Hawtin, Steve Rutter and Alex Paterson all still pushing at the musical frontiers that new technology perpetually enables.

But technology also dates. The original artwork was created with now redundant graphics tools, so when Warp went to retrieve the artwork in preparation for re-scanning ahead of the album’s re-release, they found all physical copies of the LP and CD were missing. It appears they were borrowed or ‘liberated’ somewhere down the line by either an intern or a leaving staff member who was missing this particular required listening. At least they had good taste. Messages went out along back-channels for anyone with a decent copy they could loan. My copy was too battered, but I managed to locate one from an old friend, one Alan Gray, once a founding member of Glasgow’s infamous Rubadub record shop (still a lighthouse for electronica in Scotland), but now head of the Scottish chapter of ALFOS. Stand up Sir Alan, you have helped resolve Warp’s sticky artwork predicament, as it’s known in the trade.

Now, for 30 years I’ve often wondered about the cyborg in the armchair and whether it related directly back to my description of the Xon record. I might be about to discover the answer. Surely someone must have re-used the phrase at the planning stage? Ian Anderson laughs, he isn’t sure if ‘armchair techno’ was a specific detail to the brief, but he does tell me that the designer who worked on most of the artwork was a Grateful Dead stoner. Ouch. Thirty years, own myth shattered! 

It would have been great to speak with Steve Beckett again but having moved on from Warp long ago he politely declined an interview. Although I was forwarded a message from him saying: “Just send them what Midjourney AI came up with (in 45 seconds) asking it to imagine ‘Artificial Intelligence 3’ LP :).” With it was enclosed an image produced by an artificial intelligence app.

I rather like the fact that Steve replied with such uncluttered minimalism. That, my friends, is ‘Faceless Techno Bollocks’ for you. 

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This article first appeared in issue two of Disco Pogo.

Honey ‘Fucking’ Dijon is a survivor. As a Black Trans female artist, she’s fought hard for acceptance. And to this day she continues to fight for the Black and Queer roots of house music to be celebrated. Her new album, ‘Black Girl Magic’ encapsulates all of this. But most importantly, it’s about love. Because, as she tells Tracy Kawalik: “The one thing you can’t kill is love”… 

“I consider myself a professional athlete because there’s no way that I could do my job to the best of my ability if I wasn’t taking care of ‘the machine.’ I call it ‘the machine.’ It’s me, my physical being, and I have to make sure it is buffed, shined and in working order to do what I do. I like to show up and give 100%. I don’t just stand there and put records on like I do at home. I come from a school of DJing which is very physical and emotional. I like to connect with the dancefloor. When I end a set, it’s like I’ve had sex 50 times in two hours!”

From day one, Honey Dijon has been operating at maximal levels. As a DJ, she’s reached stratospheric fame while producing records and remixes for upper echelon stars like Beyoncé. She’s played a staggering list of pulse-racing sets, festival slots, and headline gigs from Glastonbury, Coachella, and DC10 to Berghain, Smartbar in Chicago and KOKO, and her influence grows with every show. All while keeping her focus locked on her mission to spread love as a multi-hyphenated creative, Transgender spokesperson and bring the dancefloor back to its radical roots. 

When we speak, she’s gearing up for a move to London this autumn and working with the estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat for her fashion line with COMME des GARÇONS: Honey Fucking Dijon. She’s proudly beaming about an upcoming four-day party she’s throwing during Paris Fashion Week at Badaboum called ‘Baum!’ followed by another in Amsterdam called Back 2 Black. She’s also curating a monthly residency at Berlin’s Panorama Bar called Jack Your Body featuring heritage artists and up and coming legends. 

“I’ve always been one of these people who thought: ‘It’s better to have your name above the door than on the flyer.’ What I’ve always tried to do across my career is be a role model for female-identifying POC to own the narrative instead of letting someone else decide their worth. So, with my parties, I bring up-and-coming talent, more women, more POC and Queer people so that we can do that. Back 2 Black is about celebrating the roots of house music and being inclusive of everyone. I don’t think that when you’re celebrating one thing, you’re excluding the other. With house music, it didn’t matter what colour or gender or what sexuality you were. It was about the music. But I also want to make sure that people of colour are recognised as being the forebearers of this culture that so many of us around the world enjoy.” 

Honey Redmond, aka Honey Dijon, was born in Chicago, raised on a diet of the Isley Brothers, Patrice Rushen, Phyliss Hyman, Shalamar, Donna Summer, George Benson, Marvin Gaye and a wealth of Black music thanks to her parents’ record collection. “Like every middle-class African American family, music was non-stop,” she says. “There was music when we went to the grocery store, music when we cleaned the house, family parties, picnics, BBQs; everything was music.”

She became the in-demand selector at her parents’ basement parties, unaware of what the future would hold. “They’d let me play records for an hour before my bedtime. I loved the vibration of sharing music with other people. It was instant gratification and an energy transfer that was so immediate.” 

At the same time, her love affair with music was growing; she was also pouring over magazines and discovering fashion at her uncle’s tailor shop. 

“Music and fashion have been integral to my development as a human being since I was a kid. I was just born to do what I do, and I say that with humility. I don’t say that with arrogance. It was just my path. A passion turned into a hobby, a hobby turned into a craft, and that craft turned into a career.”

At 13, Dijon got her hands on a fake ID without her parents knowing and started carving out a name for herself on the underground club scene. She cut her teeth and came to age during the birth of house music on the south side of Chicago as the genre was rising to a fever pitch. “When I started going to clubs, it was literally Black and Latin Queer culture and very underground,” she recalls, lighting up. “It was the beginning of a subculture. It was a cultural movement. That first memory of stepping inside was like a spiritual awakening. My world expanded. It was the feeling of excitement, fear, ecstasy, joy and freedom. It was pulse-racing, thrilling. My love of fashion came from seeing how kids used to dress to go clubbing. Clothing was used as a language to tell people what music you listened to, what club you went to, and what record store you shopped at. You found your tribe through the clothes and the club scene, and I’d found mine.”

She became a club dancer, amassed a diverse collection of records and musical influences from new wave, acid house, Detroit techno and beyond; and formed a long-lasting friendship with Derrick Carter, who became a mentor. 

“I didn’t DJ in Chicago! Are you kidding?! My best friend was Derrick Carter! I grew up in the second wave of house music with some of the best there were ever to do it. I was around the DJ Sneaks, Green Velvets and Mark Farinas. I would try and play, and Derrick would say: ‘Get off my turntable. You sound horrible.’ When you have one of the best DJs in the world telling you that you sound like shit, you think: ‘Well, ok, I guess I can’t do this.’

Dijon made the jump to New York in the 90s, during the heyday of tastemakers Ron Hardy and Frankie Knuckles, who diversified the genre. Not long after, she was introduced to Danny Tenaglia and independent dance label Maxi Records and found the courage to bless the decks. 

Dijon remembers the difference between the two cities: “I wasn’t hearing music like it was presented in Chicago. It was borderless in Chicago. In my experience clubbing, you’d hear new wave with early acid and jack tracks, booty house, and disco loops. When I moved to New York, suddenly it was like you went to this club to hear ‘tribal house’, you went to this club to hear ‘deep house’, you went to this club to hear ‘vocal house’. I thought, well, that’s not how I like to hear music over the course of my night, so I just started DJing out of necessity.”

At the beginning, she turned to Chi-town house legends for guidance. “I used to have apartment parties in Chicago, and you couldn’t come to the party unless you brought something,” she laughs. “Derrick, Mark Farina and other heavy-hitters on the house scene would always bring mixtapes. I kept all those mixtapes, and when I started DJing in New York, I studied them with forensic attention.”

Dijon was making a name for herself, gaining traction in the New York scene, and transitioning simultaneously. While she was stepping into her power and the most authentic version of herself, her unique look and inability to be defined presented a series of obstacles. 

“At that time, there was no visibility for Trans people, and the only places I could DJ were in gay clubs. But I wasn’t playing pop remixes. I was a house DJ. That’s where I come from. So, I wasn’t playing commercial enough music for the gay clubs, and straight promoters wouldn’t book me because they thought I was too commercial. It was really hard. From my upbringing, I always played genres across the board. Now that’s celebrated. But back then, it didn’t work like that. They wanted you to stay in your lane. If you’re a techno DJ, then you played techno all night. If you were a house DJ, then you played house all night. I never was that. “

She continued to hone her skills, clocked underground clout and eventually diversified her skills by teaching herself how to produce from her bedroom with a cracked version of Ableton. 

On her come-up, she reflects: “I had to create my own space. And this is no disrespect to any other artist, everyone has their lane, but I was never this pretty thing that you could market or some blokey person that you could fit into anyone’s agenda. I remember a meeting with my manager before I met my current one, where they told me: ‘We don’t know what to do with you. You’re better off doing your own thing!’ Looking back, all the things that made people tell me no are the things that make me who I am. I’m so happy that I never really took in other people’s limitations and instead just continued to persevere and do things my particular way. I felt like I’d already heard no a bunch of times, so I had nothing to lose. I can’t be put in a box. I’ve never been able to. There are no labels for me.” 

Dijon kicked down plenty of doors so the new generation wouldn’t have to. By 2017, she released her debut album, ‘The Best of Both Worlds’ and had become a vocal advocate for Trans rights and awareness, speaking from her experience as a Black Trans woman DJ in dance music on television and at the MoMA PS1 museum in New York. 

“Sometimes people don’t realise that no is the best lesson you can have. Because no one knew what to do with me, I had to make it happen for myself. I don’t rest on my laurels. I don’t think I’ve made it. I think I can still grow as an artist. The more I DJ, the more I make music. I think I get better at it. I still have a lot to learn. It’s not like it’s a destination, and I’ve arrived. This is a continuous journey.”

Her forthcoming second album, the cosmic masterpiece, ‘Black Girl Magic’, is a 15-track lesson in energy, attitude, healing, protest, community and most of all, a love letter from one dancer to another. 

Having been a professional club dancer myself at the same age as Honey, the freedom of expression, sharp accents begging for hair whips, hip twists and wrist flicks or lava-like basslines, jazz and vocal breakdowns and sassy spoken word across the album strike a chord. 

“I still approach my DJing from the point of view of the dancefloor. I instinctively know where to go with the music. I know where to take it up and take it down. I know how thrilling that tension and release feels because, thankfully, I spent so many years clubbing. Dancefloors can unify people in a way that governments and religions can’t, and I stand by that shit 100%.”

On ‘Black Girl Magic’, she showcases her magnetism with collaborators of the highest order enlisting artists such as Channel Tres, Eve, Pabllo Vittar, Josh Caffé, Mike Dunn, and Dope Earth Alien. Shining a spotlight on a new generation of Queer people and people of colour to “keep this culture in the conversation” was one of the driving forces of ‘Black Girl Magic’, alongside paying homage to her sonic lineage and how she first experienced the music of her hometown. 

“We started writing the album in early 2019,” she explains. “But after 2020, the pandemic, then we had Black Lives movement, then Trump. The concept, the artists I worked with, and the meaning of the record took on a more personal angle. This album was created during a time when love was needed more than ever. So, this ‘Black Girl Magic’ is about love, self-acceptance and sexual freedom. They are still trying to take away everything in the world that makes it beautiful. But the one thing you can’t kill is love.”

As a producer in 2022, Honey Dijon has aligned herself with some of the strongest female artists of our time, including Lady Gaga, Neneh Cherry, Madonna and Beyoncé. She produced and co-wrote two records for Beyoncé’s chart-topping ‘Renaissance’ and remixed lead single ‘Break My Soul’, all acting as a sonic masterclass in the history of dance music culture and an unapologetic celebration of Blackness. 

“I got to put so much of myself into it. It’s a really deep record. I mean, she knocked it out of the park. Working with Beyoncé… she’s from another planet.“

Possessing otherworldly gifts herself, when asked what her proudest achievement is, she answers candidly: “Survival. I think the fact that I’m still here as a Trans woman of colour, that I didn’t get murdered or had to sell drugs or do survival sex work. That I can still get up every day and make a living from my craft. Not many people can make a living off their passions and what they love, and I’m lucky that I get to do that. So, I think my biggest achievement is just still being here.”

It’s a hard truth to hear and even worse to conceive that the reality of being a Trans woman of colour in 2022 still comes with a handful of demons and a plethora of toxicity. “The most personal song for me off the album is ‘It’s Quiet Now’. Every time I play it, I get super emotional. Luke Solomon wrote the lyrics of that song for me because of the pain I’ve endured trying to date as a Trans woman of colour. And the amount of shame and fear, toxicity and secrecy that you deal with. It’s about all the toxic relationships I was in and finding the tools to navigate out of that. It’s about knowing when to leave the table when love is no longer being served.”

One swipe through Dijon’s Instagram, and you’ll see her empowering trademark hashtag ‘Be the Thing That You Wish to See,’ advocating self-acceptance and the importance of not giving a fuck what others think. So how would she define that to the next generation of creatives following in her footsteps? 

“Stop looking outside of yourself for validation because everything that you need is on the inside. You don’t need anyone else’s approval for your existence. We’re always told to look outside ourselves for validation, be that beauty, money, power, status, fame, or love. At the end of the day, you can have all the money to run away from things, but you’re still going to find yourself. People fall out of love, people change their fucking minds, and who are you if that happens. At the end of the day, you have to like yourself more than anyone else can like you.”

As the interview comes to an end, Honey excitedly talks about taking pottery classes when she gets to London, going to vegan cooking school, and learning silkscreen. She reels off the records she currently has on rotation which range from Eurythmics to Steely Dan and Fleetwood Mac to Kendrick Lamar. 

“When you do anything as a cultural person, you have to live life,” she concludes. “You can’t do it from an ivory tower. You have to walk the walk. I love being out in the world, experiencing different cultures, listening to different music, watching how people walk, talk, and move. I’m so honoured to work with artists that I love. You asked me earlier what I thought my biggest success was, and I said survival. Well, I always remember telling myself I just want to wake up every day and create. It’s the process that thrills me. The main thing I’m looking forward to in the future is the next album I’ve already started working on. As for the message I want to send, ‘Black Girl Magic’ holds a lot of inspiring, uplifting messages from powerful icons, but mine is that I’m a proponent of joy. When you hear my music, dance, fuck, party, drink, jump on your Peloton like I do, whatever. If I can make someone have a little bit of joy from my music, then I’ve done my job.” 

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This article first appeared in issue two of Disco Pogo.

According to Nia Archives, one of a new breed of electronic producers tapping into the past to write the future, 2022 was the ‘summer of jungle’. But what’s the real origin story behind one of the 90s most incendiary musical and cultural scenes? Julia Toppin says it’s time for a rewind…

Without jungle, there would be no garage, no drum’n’bass, no dubstep, no grime and no drill. Forget Britpop… when jungle emerged in the early-90s, it was the most exciting music in the world. MC Navigator, a veteran of the jungle and drum’n’bass scenes and the presenter of the first national jungle radio show in the UK is not resorting to hyperbole when he states: “Jungle music became the most popular style of underground music that you could imagine. It gave the UK its identity.”

Many in the scene consider the terms drum’n’bass and jungle synonymous. Others aim to unite the two by using the term jungle drum’n’bass. Though a more universal term, for reasons we will explore later, drum’n’bass is not the same as jungle nor is jungle a sub-genre of drum’n’bass. 

“Jungle is the mothership,” says DJ and author of the first jungle newspaper column, Tina Irie. Sonically, the easiest difference to spot is the synthesized uniformity of the drums and a much, much lighter bassline. Think Roni Size, Goldie and LTJ Bukem for drum’n’bass as opposed to Ray Keith, Doc Scott and Lemon D for jungle.

Of course, this rousing music didn’t just appear out of nowhere fully formed. It’s time for a rewind. The story of jungle begins with the sonic dominance of the reggae sound system culture; born in the small island with a mammoth footprint: Jamaica. It journeys through the Black and gay Xanadus of Chicago house and Detroit techno. It traverses the provocative raps of New York and LA hip hop. It takes in the mathematical beauty of New York breakbeat and incorporates the ecstatic abandon of acid house and happy hardcore. The bullying beats of Belgian hardcore give way to the dubbed down bass of jungle techno. 

Depending on which myth you believe jungle was named after an area in Tivoli Gardens in the Jamaican capital Kingston, or the concrete jungles of its bleak urban birthplace, London. One fact that is not up for debate is the way that for a few years, jungle felt like it was everywhere in the UK. 

“You would walk down the street and hear it coming out of houses, shops, the cars, people listening on boom blasters,” recalls MC Navigator. “It was mad, so overwhelming… it was thee ting!”

For Chris Inperspective DJ, label owner, former manager of Hospital Records offshoot, Med School and founder of the Black Junglist Alliance: “Jungle drum‘n’bass is one of the greatest British exports.” 

Again, such an expression is justified. The music is now a billion-dollar worldwide business. Time-lapsed, warp-speed, stretched-out… jungle was imaginative and intoxicating; Black and British, white and working class, with a healthy representation from South Asian youth. Chest-rupturing basslines, melancholic soulful vocals, posturing lyricism and complex drum patterns. Former Metalheadz resident and 1Xtra host DJ Flight, who grew up listening to various artists from Dennis Brown to Madonna, found the “hodgepodge melting pot of genres” attractive. “It was such a mishmash,” she recalls enthusiastically. “Jungle was interesting and different.” 

Those differences brought people together from walks of life who would not normally give each other the time of day. There was already a small but significant Black presence in the rave scene, however the blend of breakbeat, hardcore, reggae, ragga, R’n’B, rare groove, jazz, funk, house, techno, horror films and gangster films (both Italian and African American) really balanced the scene out.

People formed lifelong friendships across cultural divides. “Black, white, old, young,” DJ Hype told Uncle Dugs in a recent interview. “We broke down every barrier.” No wonder the government wanted it shut down. You can imagine their absolute dismay. The anarchy of rave AND Black people! There would be a revolution soon if everyone continued to get along. 

DJ and V Recordings co-founder, Jumping Jack Frost recalls jungle as a force to be reckoned with. “It was a cultural revolution because you had people from all different backgrounds that had never met each other.” 

Reid Speed, an instrumental DJ in the jungle scene in America agrees: “It was very mixed and fluid. It was very free, very loving, and very accepting.” The outlook was bleak for those without privilege. They lost themselves in the euphoric haze of ecstasy, weed, alcohol, and repetitive beats. People who used to fight each other on a Saturday night, or never socialise with other cultural groups at all, crossed the dancing divide and became best friends for life. Sharing water, sharing the dancefloor, then sharing their stories.

Black musical elements of jungle struck a deep chord with the grandchildren of the Windrush generation and their friends like DJ Hype who built his own sound system while still in school. They had spent their childhood listening to Coxsone, Jah Shaka, Saxon and Wassifa sound systems in local community halls and ‘blues’ parties or ‘shebeens’ held in their neighbours’ homes. Carpet rolled back, all the furniture moved into one room to accommodate the giant speakers now located in the others, food and a community bar set up in the kitchen on a table across the doorway that blocked entry. Vocalist, composer and voice professor, Cleveland Watkiss who was a resident MC at the legendary Metalheadz club night at The Blue Note in Hoxton immediately felt the parallels. Recalling his regular attendance at LTJ Bukem’s club night Speed he says: “There was this speaker right on the bar and it was like thumping the most clear sonic sound. It just reminded me of the sound system.”

Jungle’s emergence against a bleak political backdrop of post-Thatcherite neoliberalism is significant. The dark heart of its sounds represented the disillusionment that young British Black people felt in a home that often depicted them as strange, violent visitors. On the other side of the tracks the largely working class white youth harboured no love for Thatcher’s Britain either as it had abandoned them without looking back. Unions were broken and state services like education and healthcare were pared to the bone. 

“We were soldiers,” states Jumping Jack Frost about a time when unemployment and inflation were riding historical highs. 

The jungle scene would be nothing without its ravers. They turned up in their hundreds or thousands to worship weekly at the altar of this fresh new music. Whether in Gucci or Versace, white tees or combat camouflage gear, leggings, lace and hot pants, the ravers were the heart of the jungle scene. They would skank and sway half time on the beat or jerk their bodies rhythmically to the pace of 160 beats per minute. They would tell the DJ if their tunes were good by demanding a rewind, banging on walls, cheering, two finger gun saluting, and cut up the dancefloor until the early hours. 

DJ Paulette, a renowned house DJ and former press officer for Talkin’ Loud when they had legends like 4hero and Roni Size on their roster, believes women brought a particular energy to jungle’s dancefloor. 

“Women ruled it all, because they just did,” she states emphatically. “There were lots of sets of female dancers that just tore up the dancefloor in all their finery.”

The popularity of jungle created a thriving self-sustaining underground ecosystem that was the making of a new life for not only the DJs, MCs and producers, but many others in the scene. 

“It started as a small seed economy then people got jobs through this,” explains Frost who has never worked outside of music. In a country that did not present the underprivileged with many options, they took the entrepreneurial ethos of Thatcherism and created their own network of promoters, agents, record labels, record shops, (pirate) radio stations, vinyl (dubplate) manufacturers, designers, dancers, and printers. 

Many of the early pioneer DJs of the jungle sound came from the acid house rave scene. Fabio and Grooverider, Kenny Ken, Mickey Finn, Randall and Jumping Jack Frost were all spinning acid house tracks before producers like Paul Ibiza and Lenny De Ice, tired of the influence of Europe over the UK dance scene, started to infuse reggae basslines with hardcore’s looped breakbeats to create a new sound. Metalheadz founder, DJ and producer Goldie recalls infinite “progression” of the sound where producers were “always trying to find something new and pushing things forward.” 

This new music and the creativity that newly affordable technology like samplers could bring fired the imagination of DJ/producers like Frost: “The thing that was different is that the music was pushing the boundaries. That was what was exciting.”

MCs are a critical part of the jungle scene inherited from sound system culture. They ride the rhythm and keep the crowd bubbling. It’s an artform. 

“There’s nothing like it,” says MC Chikaboo, the first female MC in the jungle scene, “you’re the conduit, the connection, the link between the crowd vibration and the DJ’s intention.” 

The best MCs chat on the mic just the right amount. They know the tunes, the drops, and have perfect timing. Ravers would recite the iconic rhymes of lyricists like Moose, GQ, Chikaboo, Navigator, Det, Shabba, the Ragga Twins, and Cleveland Watkiss, whose jazz-infused melodic ad-libs at Metalheadz were in a league of their own. He comments: “My mic was plugged in for about three or four years every Sunday.” 

Pirate radio was the social media of its time. You could hear all the tunes that you heard in the rave and get all the information that you needed to work out where to get your tickets from. Getting a shout out from the MC or DJ was very special indeed. You could big up your crew and rep your manor. Stations like Sunrise, Fantasy, Pulse, Weekend Rush, and Kiss FM would broadcast illegally through homemade transistors that were placed on top of high rise council housing. 

DJ Andy Clockwork remembers broadcasting Eruption FM, which launched in 1989, out of an empty tower block condemned for asbestos. “We had the whole top floor of that tower block for most of 1993,” he recalls. 

DJs and MCs would sneak in and out of these spaces like spies to avoid detection by the police and government agents from the DTI (now Ofcom). If caught broadcasting on an unlicenced frequency, station owners, DJs and MCs would get arrested, or perhaps suffer a fate even worse... having all their equipment and records confiscated and then destroyed. 

In November 1991, Kool FM launched as a pirate radio station that played jungle, initially hardcore jungle. The station quickly became the sound of the streets. You could tune into Kool FM and hear DJ Mampi Swift and MC Navigator or DJ Brockie and MC Det. DJ and Rupture host Mantra recalls getting bit by the jungle bug while listening to Kool FM as a kid.

“In 1994 my brother always had Kool FM on super Sundays, Det and Brockie. I used to go nuts.” 

Kool FM also put on events. Kool FM’s 3rd Birthday Bash at The Astoria in London is one of MC Navigator’s favourite raves of all time. “The energy at that party was electric,” he remembers.

Held at the peak of jungle’s popularity in 1994, the rave brought Charing Cross Road to a halt as hundreds of people queued outside desperate to get in. Sadly, the Astoria is no longer with us, much like a number of venues where extremely popular jungle events were held. 

For MC Chikaboo the best venues were: “Clubs with low ceilings and lots of bass like The Blue Note or Bar Rhumba.” She asserts that “dark and sweaty” rooms that felt a bit “dirty” were the best place to listen to jungle.

Outside of the venues, record stores like Blackmarket Records in Soho’s D’Arblay Street and De Underground Records in East London’s Newham borough, became the new Meccas of music worship. They were community hubs for the scene. Jumping Jack Frost fondly describes Blackmarket Records, which launched in 1988, as a “youth club” as many would hang out for hours at a time. 

“I remember one day there was me, Goldie, Grooverider… we were there all day,” he smiles. “Listening to records, checking out promos. Going for lunch and coming back.” 

Founded in 1991, De Underground Records, which was recently celebrated with a blue heritage plaque, had a studio in the basement where they would cook up beats. MC Navigator remembers the time well. 

“When I first went in there, Randall was selling records. He’d be in there mixing music. I’d love to see him play. Just seamlessly mixing everything.” In addition to Randall, other producers like Goldie and Hype would go to De Underground and have sessions in their studio. 

In jungle you could hear a track in a rave, and try to find it, only to discover that it was a dubplate. Like the MC, the dubplate culture of jungle was inherited from the sound system.

Dubplates were highly limited pressings of tracks cut on acetate disc used to gauge their popularity on the dancefloor before committing to a pressing of thousands. According to Jumping Jack Frost, they could only be played about “30 or 40 times” before their sound degraded. Producers would take a DAT tape to a pressing and mastering studio like the legendary Music House in Tottenham Hale to cut a dubplate.   

These would only be given to a select few DJs, notably, Grooverider, whom Flight recalls as always having the “brand spanking new cutting edge stuff.” Producers would religiously attend Metalheadz every week alongside ravers “just to hear other people’s dubplates.”

A thriving dubplate culture in jungle was one of the factors that kept everything sounding new and exciting. Different DJs had different dubplates and at Rage or Metalheadz you would hear loads of tunes that had been made that week and pressed that very night. Goldie describes the continual process: “You’d get an idea from a rave, go to a studio to try and create something on Monday. Mix it on Tuesday. Get it together on Thursday. Cut it on a dubplate on Friday and take it to give to a DJ to play.”

Some describe the period from 1992 to 1996 as jungle’s golden years. Especially after the genre’s 1994 crossover to the mainstream and national chart success. Tracks like ‘Incredible’ by M-Beat with General Levy and ‘Original Nuttah’ by Shy FX and UK Apache even landed a place in the UK Top 40 chart. ‘Incredible’ spent over three months in the national charts and peaked at number eight. 

The success of jungle brought attention from the police, the press, and the major labels. The police accused the jungle scene, especially the pirate radio stations, of being involved with organised crime and fronting events where drug dealers could thrive. It would be ludicrous to say that there was no drugs or violence in the clubs, but violence, gangsters, drugs and alcohol have always had a close relationship with night clubs. Jungle was no different to any other UK dance genre.

Whilst the media was busy trying to pigeonhole jungle, the genre continued to branch out simultaneously into several different areas. The atmospheric beauty of Goldie; the slightly laid-back sound coming from Bristol artists Roni Size and DJ Krust. The jazz-infused tones of LTJ Bukem; the liquefied basslines of Fabio; the ominous dark sounds of Motive Unknown; the R’n’B-tinged fury of DJ Ron. All these things were evolving, producing beautiful music. Flight comments: “Jungle changed from many different angles. Some of the changes were by design and some were kind of forced on the music.” 

A decision was made to rebrand, and a new version of an old name - drum’n’bass - began to circulate. It was under this new name that Roni Size and Reprazent won the Mercury Prize for their debut album ‘New Forms’ – a record that went on to become the best-selling drum’n’bass album of all time. 

Jungle enraptured some music and popular culture writers, like the late Mark Fisher, but was largely ignored by most music journalists until just after the mid-90s. Fuelled by the mainstream success of Goldie’s ‘Timeless’, which was backed by a major label campaign, and the constant carousel of celebrities at Goldie’s Metalheadz Sunday Sessions, jungle became very cool indeed. For Flight the audience changed at Metalheadz after magazines like Dazed & Confused and i-D decided that drum’n’bass was “trendy” and started to cover the music. “Once they took hold of it you just saw a whole different type of person going out.” 

The story of jungle does not end there. After being shadow banned out of the mainstream for the more palatable drum’n’bass, jungle merely went back underground to the smaller venues that it had called home in the early days. Though drum’n’bass evolved in exciting and wonderful ways with artists like Adam F, Pendulum and Noisia, it seemed to lose all the multicultural conviviality of the early jungle scene. For Reid Speed the new dark sound that was being pushed in the US: “shrivelled up the scene”. 

Flight describes the sound losing its “soul” and becoming “very cold and dark”. The composition of its ravers became homogenised. Women and Black people abandoned the sound in droves. DJ Hype describes how the composition of ravers went from “multicultural girls” where “everyone is raving” to “white guys with their tops off.”

Securely back underground, jungle just kept on going. It also went international, sending DJs and MCs all around the world. Then its popularity started to build up with old favourites like Roast and Jungle Mania still going strong alongside new club nights like Rupture, which was launched in 2006 by DJs/producers Mantra and Double O. Stretch from foundational label AKO Beatz reminisces how the new jungle night inspired him. 

“2013, I went to Rupture, totally blown away by the music,” he says. “Left there knowing in my heart that if this is what’s going on, I can safely come back and make [the] music I want to make again.”

In recent times jungle has caught the ear of a new generation of producers and DJs. Goldie states: “We’ve already got the next generation of young people like Nia Archives and Tim Reaper making music so it’s just going to keep going.” 

Flight agrees: “People have tried to write the music off so many times over the years. It’s just become its own entity. It’s become its own and our own thing.” 

DJ/producers like SHERELLE, Tim Reaper, Coco Bryce, Sully, and Nia Archives – who memorably declared the past hot few months as “the summer of jungle” – are keeping one foot in the past whilst simultaneously pushing things forward. Mantra believes this is because jungle’s golden years were perhaps not long enough. 

“I think when you have a lot of new producers revisiting that sound,” he argues, “maybe there was a little bit more to discover.” 

So jungle is back, though it would tell you that it never went anywhere. The bass is still dropping low, the breakbeats are flying high.  

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This article first appeared in issue two of Disco Pogo.

Confidence Man are back! Back! BACK! And they’re bigger, bolder and better than ever. Jim Butler hears how the Aussie dance pop superstars went about creating their anti-lockdown lockdown opus, ‘TILT’. “It was like getting drunk and writing at 5am on a Tuesday, and then sleeping until Thursday,” the band explain…

Lockdown did funny things to a lot of people. Gardening, wild swimming, refining the perfect artisanal sourdough bread… the gift of time gave many the unexpected opportunity to develop new skills and hobbies. Not so eight-legged Aussie groove machine Confidence Man. Rather than adopt mindfulness, jogging or some other mood-boosting makeover, the charismatic quartet doubled down on their Technicoloured party-first-ask-questions-later lifestyle and turned everything up to 11.

Having moved in together in the north Melbourne suburb of Thornbury at the start of the pandemic when they realised their adopted city (they originally hail from Brisbane) was heading for an extremely long lockdown, they just kept the party going at home.

“We’re the best of friends,” explains ebullient frontwoman Janet Planet – not her real name, not that it matters. “And we pretty much exclusively hang out with each other anyway. So we created a club in our house called The Fuck Bunker (the band are big fans of ‘Peep Show’, The Fuck Bunker being a scuzzy venue where Jez’s group play).”

“There was nowhere else to party,” confirms Sugar Bones (most definitely not his birth name), Janet’s co-front-person and an equally magnetic force-of-nature. “There’s only so many times you can get drunk in the kitchen. We realised all we needed was a smoke machine, two shitty lasers, some decks, a couple housemates and you can make a club anywhere.”

The Fuck Bunker quickly became the band’s – alongside Janet Planet and Sugar Bones, the group is rounded off by a pair of shadowy musical masterminds Clarence McGuffie and Reggie Goodchild – refuge. Their safe space. If indeed they needed one. Alongside the incessant partying (“Our neighbours hated us,” laughs Planet), the group eventually began to write a follow-up to their acclaimed 2018 debut, ‘Confident Music for Confident People’. And in true hedonistic musical fashion – think the Stones recording 'Exile on Main Street' in French mansion Nellcôte, albeit more Melbourne youth club than French villa – time became an amorphous and immaterial concept.

“It was like getting drunk and writing at 5am on a Tuesday, and then sleeping until Thursday,” explains Planet. “And then waking up and doing it all again. Weird, crazy hours. A pretty gross lifestyle.”

“There was nothing else to do,” offers Bones by way of supposedly rational explanation.

Thankfully, for us at least, if not the band’s livers, the result of this endless partying has been worth it. At a time when the world could do with an unapologetic shot of sonic dopamine, Confidence Man have delivered. And then some. Their new album, ‘TILT’, is a no-holds-barred, glitter bomb-fuelled rush to the dancefloor. Taking onboard everything from the euphoric sound of early 90s rave and 80s imperial pop to 00s UK garage and modern-day R’n’B, it is less a love letter to dance music, and more a flirtatious and instant TikTok message. 

For the listener it sounds like all great parties – fun, maddening, flamboyant, crazy, playful, soulful… For Confidence Man it was an escape.

“It reflects the freedom we found in the Fuck Bunker,” says Bones in a rare moment of levity. “But more so the freedom and escapism you can find through making music. It took us out of reality, gave us purpose and kept us sane. This sounds cheesy, and she’ll hate this, but music is medicine, you know?”

Planet: (Audibly gagging) “Eurgh.” (laughs)

The pair do agree on one thing, though. ‘TILT’ is not a lockdown album. Rather than reflect upon the grim reality the world found itself in two years ago, as Bones notes, the band dug deep to find an alternative, magical reality.

“It’s the opposite of a lockdown album,” affirms Planet. “Out of desperation we created something else that saved us. In a really dark time it’ll probably save some other people too.”

“We’re super proud that we managed to create this escapism,” admits Bones. “I suppose in reality it was a lockdown album. But, you know, in non-reality it was way beyond that.” 

The global pandemic also shaped ‘TILT’ in other unforeseen ways. Before the world came to a shuddering halt in spring 2020, the Fab Four had been grappling with the direction their second album should take. In the vaults of The Fuck Bunker reside a disco version and a pop iteration inspired by working with songwriter and producer Greg (The New Radicals) Alexander. The band worked with him for a couple of weeks in Brighton, alongside U2 producer Andy Barlow, and although these tracks didn’t make it onto ‘TILT’, Planet points to a third Confidence Man über pop album, or even side project.

“There’s a handful of bangers that we’re going to finish,” she says with relish.

“It was definitely inspirational seeing his mind work,” adds Bones of the time spent with the man behind the late-90s archetypal pop tune, ‘You Get What You Give’. “The way he approaches songs is very open and free. I think that’s how we worked in the beginning. So after four or five years of being in the band it was good to get that refreshing energy again. The guy’s a fucking genius.”

Back in Melbourne after years of touring both pre- and post-‘Confident Music for Confident People’ (“We were a bit burned out,” admits Bones; “Our thighs were sore,” adds Planet), the group – like the rest of the world – were afforded the luxury of time. They opted to go bigger. To ditch the kitsch elements and dial up the anthemic.

“The characters are still there,” says Planet. “But they’re being sluttier and badder over bigger and better beats.”

She’s right. The band’s first album of playful electronic punky pop and indie dance was spectacular if a bit more literal. ‘TILT’ is a different beast altogether. It begins with a pair of turbo-charged early-90s Italo house bangers, ‘Woman’ and ‘Feels Like a Different Thing’ – the latter with a gospel-infused coda. Both are anthems of female empowerment and a clarion call to the dancefloor. These are followed by the block party Sub Sub-flavoured hip house boogie of ‘What I Like’ and the brand-new-you’re-retro Neneh Cherry vibes of ‘Toy Boy’. Elsewhere, there are traces of Bow Wow Wow and Haysi Fantayzee on the Pop Art collage of ‘Angry Girl’ (recorded when Planet and Goodchild took a [romantic?] break to an Airbnb out in the Australian country during an easing of lockdown and Planet just screamed uncontrollably into a microphone), and even some broken French sophistication on closer ‘Relieve the Pressure’.

“It’s definitely a bit like a collage,” admits Planet. “It's the same thing with the clothes and the stuff that we do on stage as well. A bit of it is like theatre and then we mix it up with the dance stuff.”

“We all have these wide-ranging interests,” concurs Bones. “So that all kind of boils down into this…”

Planet: “Icky mess.”

The album’s centrepiece, however, is undoubtedly the escapist Fuck Bunker anthem ‘Holiday’. Coming on like 2 Unlimited mixed by Felix Da Housecat, Planet coos: ‘I get away every day, my holiday, I'm gettin' paid/I live it up on the go, I’m gettin’ high, I'm never low’. Bones repeatedly adds: ‘We all need something to live for, baby.’

In a perfectly-aligned cosmos, it would have shot to the toppermost of the poppermost global hit parades. The world’s loss is of course our gain. Conceived in a four-hour session and inspired by a coming together of Underworld and MIA, it’s the perfect embodiment of Confidence Man’s so-anti-cool-they’re-actually-really-cool aesthetic.

“I want to be taken seriously,” says Planet, “but, like, not too seriously. I kind of think we're a joke, but then also, like, not a joke. I am serious, but I’m also not.”

“We're just going to do our thing and we're going to do it with as much energy as we can, which will be a lot of energy,” states Bones. “So whatever people want to interpret that as, it's up to them. But yeah, we'll probably fuck-‘em-up.” 

Confidence Man weren’t meant to be a band. Planet, Bones, McGuffie and Goodchild came together not-so-much from the ashes of other outfits, but as a means of release from them.
A desire to have fun. In a typically flamboyant twist (of pleasing embellishment?), Bones believes this was destiny. He describes how Janet was playing keys in a band at the same time Confidence Man was starting out and it didn’t sit right.

“When we made ‘Boyfriend’ and ‘Bubblegum’, it was like, she needs to be front stage, centre, being a fucking superstar,” he explains.

Planet chuckles at the memory: “I feel I've been building up my whole life to be able to do what I do on stage. I feel like it would be such a shame for people not to see that.”

And like their Australian forebears, The Avalanches, their contrarian streak of chucking everything into the blender not only set them apart from the tired rock bands that clog up their home music scene but helped distinguish them in the eyes – and ears – of kindred spirits, and their eventual label, Heavenly Recordings.

“Naivete is bliss in music,” says Bones. “We’re out here on this island, kind of detached from the world…

Planet: “… filled with rock bands.”

Sugar: “It gave us the freedom to take our own path and to take our time.”

Planet: “I do think once we came to the UK and started working with Heavenly, they probably educated us a little bit too much. We know too much now. We can’t fuck up as much. Fuck ups are good sometimes.”

According to Planet, the band didn’t understand all this talk of remixes Heavenly were suggesting at the outset. This charming lack of wisdom was soon rectified when Andrew Weatherall transformed ‘Bubblegum’ into an infectious and joyous dose of widescreen ALFOS-friendly chug.

“When I first heard it, I was shocked,” recollects Planet. “I was like: ‘What is this wonky song?’”

It’s now one of her favourite remixes – she describes it as “sick”. Talk of Weatherall soon turns to the times they met Lord Sabre. Bones remembers a time in Dublin when he was strung out, post-gig. 

“I had the most beautiful chat with him,” he affectionately notes. “And then he gave me this perfectly rolled joint and sorted me out. I loved that guy.”

“I did way worse than that,” Janet laughs. “He was DJing, and I jumped up and tried to steal his joint. I started dancing with him and he was asking who I was. I kept saying: ‘I’m in Confidence Man, give me your joint.’ So of course, mine is way more embarrassing.” 

Riches of embarrassment; tales of excess; dancefloor-slaying songs… all born in the Fuck Bunker during lockdown. This is Confidence Man’s TILT at world domination. Don’t say you’re not tempted. 

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This article first appeared in issue one of Disco Pogo.

Balearic: Is it a sound? A style? A genre? Jim Butler goes searching for answers and forgets to ask for Chris Rea…

In March 2020, Colleen ‘Cosmo’ Murphy, like the majority of people around the world who weren’t frontline workers, began working from home. For music fans of a certain persuasion, however, she was about to perform a key task. Broadcasting from her home studio, she not only kept the musical conversation going – “Something I felt was important for people isolating,” she reflects two years later, “including myself” – she was placing the latest marker in one of dance music’s most enduring, and contentious, narratives. The story we call Balearic.

That summer, she temporarily filled in for Gilles Peterson on one of his Worldwide FM morning shows. Having already begun asking for audience requests on her other shows on the station, she replicated this vital dialogue and cultural exchange in that slot. The show was such a hit that Peterson asked Murphy to keep the spot, and in September that year, she changed the name to Balearic Breakfast.

This June, she releases her first ‘Balearic Breakfast’ compilation, featuring tracks from the likes of Cantoma, Midlife, Lady Blackbird, a suitably soulful remix of P’taah by the much-missed Phil Asher, and Friendly Fires’ motorik-flavoured collaboration with Andrew Weatherall and Timothy J. Fairplay’s The Asphodells. Her liner notes state: “Musically Balearic Breakfast is a bit of a hodge-podge of chillout, spiritual jazz, deep soul, percussive house, quirky disco, indie-dance and what may ‘traditionally’ be called Balearic (whatever that may be).” 

She explains further her feelings about what constitutes Balearic music: “It’s very nebulous in what it is in terms of musical structure. It is more about the feeling it conveys. It’s about musical exploration. Or it should be.”

Jason Boardman, co-founder, alongside Richard ‘Moonboots’ Bithell, of the Mancunian Balearic mainstay Aficionado, concurs. “That’s the idea isn’t it,” he states bluntly when its put to him that at its best Balearic represents a certain musical freedom.

“There’s a preconception that Balearic music is 100bpm, has a chuggy 4/4 beat and after 16 bars the bassline comes in and after 32 bars the Spanish guitar comes in,” he explains. “I really hate that because that’s not what it is. At Aficionado we start off with super-horizontal music and end up at a crazy disco or acid space. And that’s over the course of six-to-eight hours.”

Kenneth Bager, Danish producer, DJ and label boss of the simpatico Music For Dreams, believes that as a musical term it means “expect the unexpected”, explaining it is all about “musical choices”. Dr Rob, the man behind the adventurous music blog Ban Ban Ton Ton, says “really, musically, it’s just a kind of eclecticism.” While Timm Sure, one-half of sonic explorers Coyote and the label Is It Balearic? points to it being a state of mind based upon not following any rules.

“I kind of apply it to everything,” he says. “Anything can be Balearic. Like drinking Estrella out of a toothbrush glass watching the silent jet skis dash across the shimmering sea at lunchtime in Hostal La Torre. Ask me tomorrow and I’ll say something different no doubt.”

DJs Kelvin Andrews and Sean Johnston, meanwhile, both point to Terry Farley’s oft-cited description of Balearic being whatever Alfredo had in his record box and played in Amnesia between 1985 and 1989. 

José Padilla, another one of Balearic’s totemic founding fathers, following his legendary DJ sets at Café del Mar – and the compilations that followed – was emphatic when the question was posed to him, stating: “Balearic is not a kind of music, it’s a way of life. It’s the freedom to play whatever you want, so long as you play it proficiently. People listen to a track with a guitar on it and say: ‘This is Balearic’ when it’s not. Balearic is just the spirit of Ibiza. DJs used to play here seven or eight hours a night and have the freedom to play anything they wanted, from rock to house.”

But that was then. And while tales of Brits having life-changing holidays on the White Isle in the 80s and dancing to Chris Rea will always raise a wry grin, or knowing smirk, as Dr Rob has it: “The term Balearic Beat only really existed in the UK where it was created solely for marketing purposes.” Namely, FFRR’s 1988 ‘Balearic Beats Vol 1’ compilation.

“The days of Alfredo, Leo Mas, José…” says Boardman. “That was a blueprint. We Anglicised the blueprint. So much so that the B word is a difficult term these days. It’s been bastardised. Things masquerade as Balearic.”

Johnston, with his tongue ever-so slightly wedged in his cheek (the inherent ludicrousness of all Balearic discussions never being more than a shuffle away), looks at it in a different light, noting: “Balearic Beat is for life. It’s not just for a summer in the late 80s.”

Has Balearic music had a resurgence in recent years then, or has that spirit of adventure, of shapeshifting musical freedom, always been there? Johnston and Dr Rob both point to people like Boardman and Moonboots, Balearic Mike, Coyote and Phil ‘Cantoma’ Mison as being pivotal in keeping the sounds alive during the 90s.

“They stuck to their musical guns and their particular musical obsession,” says Dr Rob. “The rest of us jumped from bandwagon to bandwagon.”

Another key chapter in the Balearic story was the advent of Bill Brewster and Frank Broughton’s influential DJhistory forum in late 1999. Dr Rob says it reignited the passions of many music lovers as they shared information on “forgotten Alfredo favourites found in local charity shops and IDed tunes on José’s treasured tapes”. It also, crucially, introduced the term Balearic – in a context other than geography – to the rest of the DJing world, he says.

The late-00s gave us the cosmic years. Inspired by the exciting selections of Italian DJ Daniele Baldelli (“He completely fits into the Balearic narrative,” says Andrews. “One of the most inventive DJs of all time) – and popularised on DJhistory – producers such as Prins Thomas (recently described by Piccadilly Records as a Balearic Poster Boy), Hans-Peter Lindstrøm and Todd Terje delivered a sunshine-soaked take on space disco. This was complemented by the likes of Al Usher’s sublime, free-floating ‘Lullaby For Robert’ and Windsurf’s ‘Windsurf EP’ (both released on Thomas’ Internasjonal). Sorcerer and Hatchback (each one half of Windsurf), Rekid, Mark E and Mugwump mined a similarly beatific cosmic house feeling. 

Indeed, the latter’s monumental ‘Boutade’ soon found a home in the incredibly diverse sound being played at a new club in north London’s Stoke Newington: Andrew Weatherall and Sean Johnston’s A Love From Outer Space. A refuge for all manner of leftfield dance music that never knowingly exceeded 122bpm, Johnston believes that ALFOS is on the periphery of Balearic, but admits there is some crossover.

“I certainly felt we were more aligned to Baldelli and the cosmic thing,” he says. “But Andrew said to me on a couple of occasions that when we first started A Love From Outer Space it was the closest thing in terms of musical freedom to Shoom. A friend once described what me and Andrew did as dark Balearic and it’s probably a better description than drug chug or whatever it was people called it. I guess we are the dark side of the shiny Balearic spoon.”

Musical freedom is central to any explanation that captures the spirit, attitude and essence of Balearic music. The Secret DJ coined the term Balearic Silverbacks to describe a certain cabal of beardy, British, middle-aged ravers who despite claiming to be imbued with the Balearic spirit have “taken something that fundamentally means ‘no rules’ and given it a very tight set of rules and have the nerve to tell the Balearics what’s what”. He notes that Balearic isn’t a genre. “It’s a way of choosing.”

As such, daring acts have been committed in its name. Johnston points to one year at the Electric Elephant festival in Croatia when Kelvin Andrews played at the open-air club Barberellas.

“The sun was coming up and he played ‘Grease’ (Frankie Valli),” he enthuses. “Most people would probably hear that and think it sounds cheesy as hell. But at that moment in time, with the sun coming up in the most beautiful courtyard, in this one-level club, with this massive sound system, it was the most Balearic thing you’d ever heard in your life.”

“That was not a planned record,” laughs Andrews. “It was 6am and I was told I could play one more. But a short one. And it just literally appeared on my list. Bang. Just played it. And it went off. People were saying that they would have never thought to play it. I was like: ‘Neither did I!’ It’s the open-air thing in the morning. Anything goes. When Harvey played The Bee Gees’ ‘How Deep Is Your Love’ the following year everyone lost it. It’s having the freedom and the tools to go somewhere when you need to. In terms of DJing anyway. I look at it from the DJing and dancefloor point of view.”

So what about the musicians and producers? Despite it being heralded as arguably the most open-ended and nebulous style of music – in the hands of innovative DJs at least – no one willingly wants to be pigeonholed as Balearic. 

“Someone like Phil Mison and the music he makes as Cantoma is deeply rooted in the sound of The White Isle,” says Dr Rob. “But I’m sure he’d loath to be called Balearic.”

As Boardman alluded to earlier, there is a danger the music termed Balearic can fall into a Café del Mar-type formula. Murphy notes: “The formulaic stuff I find really boring. Ok, this is made for chilling by the pool. It has the same keyboards sounds, it’s in the region of 102-122bpm, there’s no real musical hook… it’s purely functional music. There’s quite a bit of that and that to me is not Balearic because they’re adhering to a formula.”

Mo Morris, one-half of A Mountain Of One, who were tagged everything from Goth Balearic and Prog Balearic to Nu Balearic (alongside Swedish duo Studio whose 2006 album ‘West Coast’ is another important part of this ever-expanding puzzle) when they emerged in the mid-to-late 00s, balks at the description.

“People seemed to suggest it was us putting a Balearic flag in the ground,” he states firmly. “Our first two albums weren’t meant to be Balearic. Yeah, it had that sound. But for me they were alternative rock or alternative dance.”

A Mountain Of One recently released their third album, the majestic ‘Stars Planets Dust Me’, after a gap of over 10 years. A deep, life-affirming record – think Talk Talk at their most intense – it definitely touches upon that open-ended narrative that Balearic music best represents. But not intentionally so. So, maybe the best Balearic music is accidental? 

“100%,” says Morris. “It’s a feeling, isn’t it? Like a Debussy classical record – that gives me the exact same feeling as a Pat Metheny record. Maybe it’s just soul music, then. If it’s touching you that way, it’s touching your soul. It’s not touching your Balearic G-spot because it doesn’t exist. There isn’t one. But people have a soul.”

Boardman is certainly an advocate of inadvertent Balearic. He and Moonboots started Aficionado the label because they wanted to release a Shawn Lee record. The diverse identity they had established from their DJ sets meant they were approached by differing musicians and producers from across the world.

“We’ve released Welsh folk, chillout, Australian ambient, chuggy disco and indie-influenced stuff too – accidental Balearic stuff,” he says.

Dr Rob agrees: “I want to hear – and play – records made by bands that have an energy in them which has made them Balearic by accident. A Scottish industrial act next to a remixed Italian pop star, rather than similarly-sounding soft synth homages created by design.”

Today, the acts that fall under this banner cast their net far and wide. Granted, they might not want to be pigeonholed with the term. Although as label bosses Coyote astutely note it can come in handy with record shops, just look on Phonica or Piccadilly Records’ website for proof. But artists as varied as Mudd, Pippi & Willie Graff, Max Essa, Tornado Wallace, Maribou State, Khruangbin, Mushrooms Project, Poolside, Jonny Nash, Suzanne Kraft, the various guises of Andras Fox (Wilson Tanner and Art Wilson among them), Jura Soundsystem, Mind Fair, islandman, Residentes Balearicos, Yu Su, Idjut Boys, Be.Lanuit, Begin and Rheinzand all have some Balearic essence about them. Accidental or not. 

“I listened to the new Rheinzand album,” says Balearic stalwart Leo Elstob, who was in an early incarnation of A Mountain Of One and constructs beautiful remixes and re-edits as Leo Zero. “I contacted Kenneth (Bager) asking to do a remix of that Level 42 cover (‘Love Games’), because the back end of that is just heaven. A wonky, new beat take on Level 42.”

He goes on to praise acts like Gabriels (“Modern bluesy, disco-meets-soul”), Rita Ray (“She’s got a bit of that Stevie Nicks, Carly Simon-sound going on. Very purist soul. She’s from Estonia”) and Lou Hayter (“She’s got it. She knows the whole thing back to front”).

“Maybe it’s more labels that act as an umbrella for various artists who could be better described by the word,” points out Dr Rob. “Kenneth Bager’s Music For Dreams for example, home to Rheinzand, who aren’t Balearic, but just make brilliant European pop. These imprints act as curators. We’re back to Balearic by accident rather than design.”

Bager, Coyote, Boardman and Elstob cite labels like: Higher Love, Growing Bin, NuNorthern Soul, Music For Dreams, Is It Balearic?, Claremont 56, Italy’s Archeo and Isle of Jura in Australia as being exemplars of leftfield, adventurous electronic dance music. 

One can’t overlook the more chilled strain of modern Balearic music either. Last year, Ali Tillett, from booking agents Warm, compiled the extraordinarily soothing ‘Home Vol 1’. A chance to bring music, art and nature together – horizontally-friendly tracks by World of Apples, Coyote, Âme, Richard Norris, Kirk Degiorgio and Crack’d Man are complemented by field recordings of ships’ horns, owls and waves lapping to the shore – it’s a properly immersive and contemplative experience. One might refer to it as sonic mindfulness, a phrase that wouldn’t be out of place when critiquing a Chris Coco compilation for instance.

“Sonic mindfulness is a good shout,” says Tillett. “I have always loved nature and art alongside music, and it was just that moment (the pandemic) where I could take a breath from day-to-day work and put the release together.”

Releases such as ‘Home Vol 1’ also shine a light on the camaraderie that exists among the musicians, producers and DJs that float in and out of this orbit. Back in the late-80s and early-90s, a so-called Balearic Network existed in the UK. It’s still there. From Man Power’s nights in Newcastle (recently attended by Harvey and Sean Johnston) and London’s peripatetic We Are The Sunset’s loose-limbed gatherings to the pub shindigs hosted by St Leonards-on-Sea’s Marina Fountain and Todmorden’s Golden Lion, a community of like-minded artists continue to determinedly plough their passions. And these days, thanks to the internet, it’s a global network too.

It’s not just the preserve of middle-aged folk either. Last year, Alfredo, Colleen Murphy and Bill Brewster (“The elders,” jokes Murphy) played alongside John Gomez, Ruf Dug, Jonny Nash, Zakia and Mafalda at the A Balearic Beat Hotel event in Ibiza.

“There were all these different ages of people contributing,” recalls Murphy, “and it all worked. Different generations, different racial backgrounds, different genders – and the younger people fitted in perfectly. All of their sounds were eclectic.”

It’s this pan-generational cross-fertilization that feeds the Balearic story. Balearic is not a genre, but an attitude, a feeling, a spirit. Lines can be drawn between different eras and different sounds, but they’re not straight. They are dots on a journey. Dance music’s culture of remixing has borne some of Balearic’s greatest sounds. To wit: Johnston’s recent Hardway Bros’ makeover of David Holmes’ ‘It’s Over If We Run Out Of Love’ and Rheinzand’s transformation of Lou Hayter’s ‘My Baby Just Cares For Me’.

“The repurposing of pop records has been absolutely central to this thing. Crooked Man doing over Amy Douglas (2018’s ‘Never Saw It Coming) and Soulwax’s rework of Fontaines D.C. (‘A Hero’s Death’) are two recent instances that immediately spring to mind,” says Dr Rob.

At the end of the day – as the sun begins to set – Johnston believes you can just sniff Balearic out. The proof of the pudding being in the eating rather than theorising about it. His mind goes back to playing the Crooked Man remix of Amy Douglas at Convenanza. He’d been sent the track that day and hadn’t heard it played loud. He also knew Weatherall hadn’t heard it.

“As soon as I heard it, I knew it was Balearic,” he smiles. “Andrew turned to me and said: ‘What is this? It’s Balearic as fuck!’”

The story continues… 

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This article first appeared in issue one of Disco Pogo.

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Rheinzand occupy their own very special musical universe. An exotic universe that intentionally makes a mockery of boundaries – both musical and geographical – and has its eye on one prize: the dancefloor. The band tell Jim Butler about their longing for nightlife: “You know, decent hangovers and stuff…”

The Rhine, Central Europe’s second-longest river, has long played a pivotal role in the development of the countries it flows through. It was a key component in the Roman Empire; ownership of the territories it runs across have been contested at various times in history and it played a critical role in the industrial modernisation of Europe.

It has captured the imagination of poets and artists such as Lord Byron and William Turner, and today is a vast source of tourism as visitors cruise along its 765 miles stopping off at the great romantic cities of Basel in Switzerland, Strasbourg in France and Cologne in Germany.

Less heralded, however, is the small, but significant, part it played in the formation of one of leftfield dance music’s most innovative outfits – the cosmic-inclined, electronic pop-tinged, disco-dub magnificence of Belgium’s Rheinzand. For as well as being a commercial, industrial, transport and tourist artery, the river also produces fine grains of sand that have been used to make mortar – in Belgium known as Rijnzand.

When Mo Becha was leaving Reinhard Vanbergen’s studio in their hometown of Ghent in 2013, after completing work on their first track together – the appositely-titled ‘The First Time’ – multi-instrumentalist and producer Vanbergen called out to Becha, enquiring what the (then) fledgling duo should call themselves.

“I opened the door and there was a bag of Rijnzand standing right in front of me,” the long-haired Becha remembers, smiling at the memory. “I shouted: ‘Maybe, Rheinzand.’ He’s called Reinhard. That bag was there, right? There wasn’t a band called Rheinzand. And it’s difficult to find a good name.”

The similarly hirsute Vanbergen also chuckles, adding: “I was really happy that the first thing Mo saw was a bag of sand, and not a scooter or a police car. Better to be called Rheinzand than scooter or the police I guess.”

There’s another analogy between the Rhine and Rheinzand. Traversing through six countries – beginning in the Swiss Alps, before taking in the Principality of Liechtenstein, Austria, Germany, France and finishing its journey in the Netherlands – the river is not only long, but no respecter of arbitrary geographical boundaries. A bit like the band and their music. It soon becomes clear speaking to Rheinzand – alongside Vanbergen and Becha is singer Charlotte Caluwaerts, who being Vanbergen’s partner made the duo a trio around the completion of the group’s third track – the group are proud to be European. 

“We are a European band,” says Becha, aka Mo Disko, known to music lovers of a certain dotage as one-half of the DJ duo The Glimmers (formerly The Glimmer Twins). 

“It’s a very good thing to speak languages,” adds Vanbergen.

“We can very easily adapt to language,” explains Becha further. “It's good that people from the south of here to the north can get our message.”

This message – of hope, optimism, unity all coming together on the dancefloor – is fixed firmly in the DNA of Rheinzand. Their music is a hypnotic blend of cosmopolitan 80s Euro disco pop – evoking a world of Maxi singles and eye-opening (for us Brits at least) foreign exchange visits at school – Balearic beat, cosmic prog and free-spirited new wave. This endearing openness is embedded in the band’s second album, ‘Atlantis Atlantis’. 

Across the album’s 12 tracks, Caluwaerts sings in six different languages – seven if you count a small section of German on the title track – further cementing the band’s infectious sonic Esperanto.

“I’m a nerd,” she laughs. “I always loved languages. Always studied languages in high school. Latin, Greek. The whole thing. And we already did French and Spanish together. French, Spanish and English. And then Italian…”

This commitment to overcoming parochialism finds its best expression in the single ‘Elefantasi’. A strident punk funk tale about an elephant that no longer wants to be pink, but blue, the original version is sung in Danish as an homage to their label, Kenneth Bager’s brilliant Music For Dreams. 

“It was a surprise to them,” she explains, “because I didn’t tell them I was learning Danish. They asked for an English version because they said no one would love the Danish version. But actually a Spanish one came quicker. Then French. English was the hardest one to do and came last.”

In total, there are six different versions of 'Elefantasi': Dutch and Italian complementing the aforementioned. Plus on the single release a Make Your Own Version – an instrumental – for those feeling left out. 

“We thought it was good to announce there would be six different languages across the album,” explains Vanbergen. “So people could get acquainted with it.”

“I love that I can’t understand the original version of 'Elefantasi',” says Becha. “It makes it exotic to me. It’s something I search for a lot in music. You don’t have to understand it. Sometimes it’s better you don’t. It becomes a melodic thing. Like an instrument.”

“Different languages ask different things,” says Caluwaerts. “If you do a French track, you already move sideways a bit. And if you have different languages, you're not going to be… you’re not very straightforward. If you do it in English then it will become too pop or too generic.”

“Let's say ‘Sueño Latino’ in English,” says Becha, ever the consummate record selector. “It's a different story, right? 

“Yeah,” interjects Vanbergen. “You can make all your music with one synthesiser, but at the end you want to have 20 because they all do different things. It’s the same with languages.”

The next language Caluwaerts wants to learn is Turkish. There’s a big Turkish community in Ghent so why not take the time to learn their language? There’s also a Turkish band on Music For Dreams she loves – islandman. “It’s a way in,” she affirms. “A way into culture and people.”

Vanbergen and Caluwaerts recently got back from a month in Mexico. The first time they’d travelled anywhere since the pandemic. Having previously taken travel for granted, Caluwaerts says this trip opened her eyes to the amount of bureaucracy and red tape involved.

“To say I don't believe in borders or possessions is very hippy,” she explains, “but actually, to me, it doesn't make sense. It's not something we are. Also because I'm white European, I don't have to think about it. And I’m very, very conscious of that. It's just not fair. It's politics.”

Rheinzand’s first – self-titled – album was released in the ignominious month of March 2020. And while it proved a musical panacea for many during those first few months of lockdown – even going on to secure top spot in Piccadilly Records’ prestigious end-of-year poll (“We cursed in six languages,” jokes Vanbergen; “It gave us a real positive boost,” says Becha) – wider events meant all the band’s plans, most notably a series of live shows, came to a shuddering halt. Rather than feel sorry for themselves, the group decided to use the situation to their advantage. The plan was to write every day for a month. 

But first Vanbergen and Caluwaerts had to be invited into Becha’s musical universe. By his own admission, Becha is not a musician as such. He doesn’t play any instruments. His vocals on ‘The First Time’, were indeed the first time he’d sung on a track. And while his deep, gruff and sensuous tones adorn ‘Atlantis Atlantis’, his real skill – honed over years of DJing – are in musical presentation. He’s the band’s musical director. 

“Mainly I’m hanging around having a drink or a smoke and nodding my head,” he says. “If I’m not nodding it means we’re not there yet. I guess I’m more of a vibes man ensuring it all heads in the right direction for me personally.”

And for the vibes to be flowing correctly there needs to be atmosphere. The first album, Becha notes, had atmosphere, but unintentionally. Everything about ‘Atlantis Atlantis’ is intentional. To kickstart this he selected a bunch of tracks that could be used as inspiration and reference. 

“It’s basically my record box,” he explains. “The music that keeps me busy at the moment. Everything that I like; that I discover; that I get sent; that crosses my path. It all gathers in my box. My universe.”

“It really is a universe,” smiles Caluwaerts. “A world that Mo invited us into. It was really nice to start from, because the lack of nightlife, because we didn't play live, we couldn't go out… so we had to immerse ourselves in this world (of nightlife) during daytime hours and reimagine it.”

When the album was almost there, the trio invited back drummer Stéphane Misseghers and bassist Bruno Coussée, to record their parts. Misseghers and Coussée played on a couple of tracks on ‘Rheinzand’ and are an integral part of the live experience. Although it was never intended to be a band in the traditional sense (“It was all electronic and 12-inch-based to begin with,” says Becha) it soon became clear playing live and doing things within a band aesthetic made sense.

“It’s a hard-working band,” laughs Becha. “We don’t have roadies, each one does their own gear. Load the van, unload the van.”

The result of this ever-shifting, always-evolving, decidedly-experimental world is the triumphant ‘Atlantis Atlantis’ – so called, explains Vanbergen, because it sounds good when you shout it as a choir answering the lead vocal in the track itself.

Grander, perhaps even more ambitious, than its predecessor, ‘Atlantis Atlantis’ veers from rousing and hypnotic, Arthur Russell-like, wonky pop on the emotive call to arms ‘We’ll Be Alright’ to infectious and familiar tales of nocturnal (mis)adventures set to dreamy and sophisticated slo-mo disco on the opener ‘Better’. In between there is dancing as the perennial vertical expression of a horizontal desire ('Facciamo L’amore') and otherworldly odes to the power of the dancefloor on the gothic low-slung bass groove of the title track.

There’s also a sense of adventure and yearning throughout. The album itself represents a desire to reach Ibiza’s secret cove, Atlantis. A journey the group have attempted many times, but never succeeded in reaching.

“It’s been a few years since I went to Pikes, when Harvey started his residency,” says Becha. “We tried to go to Atlantis – this little cove close to Es Vedra. It’s hard to get there by land. So we’ve since tried by boat. But jellyfish kept us away. It’s become something of a running joke. I think the best thing of the journey is never reaching there. The journey always continues. Imagine you arrive there and its nothing. Yeah. It's maybe better to just keep it a dream.”

It’s also about a desire for the dancefloor – a place denied to so many for so long. Like the White Isle cove, Atlantis becomes a club the group seek, but never find. In the song itself Caluwaerts repeatedly asks Becha for directions, but alas he doesn’t know the way. “There’s certainly that longing for the nightlife, you know, decent hangovers and stuff,” says Caluwaerts.

So, it’s pop. But not pop. It’s diverse. International. A land of freedom. Of glamour. Of mythical nightclubs. Possibly in Ibiza. Frequented by Harvey. In other words, very Balearic.

“It depends who’s asking!” laughs Vanbergen.

“I can understand why people might think that,” says Becha. “It ticks a lot of boxes of what people might think is Balearic. For me Balearic is whatever is good. We’re certainly diverse and I think Balearic is diverse. There's a lot of different parameters that we touch of being, you know, Balearic, but there are other parameters that we touch that are nothing to do with it.”

“I didn't even know the genre before we started Rheinzand,” admits Vanbergen.

“Balearic? There is no genre,” Becha states. “It was the same with the new beat period here. That was just very adventurous dance music. And that's what we are.”

“I think it's a nice way of saying it,” concludes Caluwaerts. “Adventurous dance music.”

Call it whatever you want of course. Fundamentally, there’s only one question that needs answering. Are you dancing? Because Rheinzand are asking. 

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This article first appeared in issue one of Disco Pogo.

Just how did Ninja Tune go from being one of the 90s’ leading experimental outposts to the most important electronic music label of the 21st Century? By “employing the right people and letting them get on with the job without interfering,” hears Annabel Ross…

Fans of the label Ninja Tune can be roughly split into two camps: those who followed the career of its founders, trip hop/sampling maestros Coldcut from the beginning in the early-90s, along with other heritage Ninja Tune acts such as 9 Lazy 9, The Herbaliser and Funki Porcini; and those who may not even be aware of Coldcut as artists, and for whom the name Funki Porcini conjures a strain of magic mushrooms more than anything else. 

The split is largely generational (the latter group extends from millennials to Gen Zs, the former is mainly Gen Xers) and it’s indicative of how the London-based label has successfully reinvented itself over the past 30 years, from its heady trip hop/jazz roots to the electronic music powerhouse it is today, home to banner acts such as Bicep, Floating Points, Bonobo and Little Dragon and scores of trophies from BRIT Awards and Mercury Prizes to a Grammy.

Younger Ninja Tune followers might also be surprised to learn that along with pioneering, sample-heavy trip hop fare, Coldcut (Matt Black and Jonathan More) were responsible for producing one of the biggest pop hits of the 80s, ‘The Only Way Is Up’, for Yazz and the Plastic Population. Looking back though, this unlikely lineage and the diverse tastes and talents of Black and More – an Oxford graduate and computer programmer and an ex-art teacher respectively, whose key influences include New York sampling duo Double Dee and Steinski, Grandmaster Flash, the experimental dub of Adrian Sherwood’s On-U Sound label, and Black music from house to hip hop to rap to reggae and beyond – goes some way in explaining how Ninja Tune eventually became what is arguably the most important label in dance music today.

Coldcut launched Ninja Tune out of frustration with the creative constraints at major labels such as Arista Records and Big Life, where they were expected to keep churning out chart-toppers for the likes of Yazz and Lisa Stansfield. The name was hatched in 1990, while watching old ninja TV shows in Japanese hotel rooms while on tour with Norman Cook and Beats International, and it has remained the perfect moniker for a label that has expanded and shapeshifted with credibility intact. As for the name Coldcut: “I was living above a butcher’s and the heating was broken,” Black says. “The backyard was just full of cold cuts of meat.”

Starting Ninja Tune was also a means for Black and More to release their own music under other aliases (among them Bogus Order, DJ Food, Roots, Euphoreal) as contractual obligations with Big Life prevented them from being able to release as Coldcut for a number of years. So began Ninja Tune Mark 1: the trip hop/jazz/breaks/dub era, defined by releases such as DJ Food’s ‘Jazz Brakes’ series and Bogus Order’s ‘Zen Brakes’ records. Before too long, like-minded artists came knocking including Funki Porcini, Italian downtempo jazz outfit 9 Lazy 9, and London Funk Allstars. 

“It’s certainly true that we didn’t really try to sign artists to the label,” says Black. “I think what we stood for became quite legible quite quickly. And it was a needed beacon of independence in the electronic music world, so that was attractive to a certain type of artist.”

In the mid-90s, the 18-month tenure of Ninja Tune’s legendary club night, Stealth, held at jazz bar The Blue Note in Hoxton, cemented their burgeoning reputation, along with Coldcut’s legal reclamation of their name in 1995. This was topped off with their celebrated ‘70 Minutes Of Madness’ mix CD, named Best Compilation of All Time by Jockey Slut in 1998. Following success with the heady, skunky sounds of acts such as The Herbaliser, DJ Vadim, and Mr Scruff, another pivotal moment for Ninja Tune was signing acclaimed rapper Roots Manuva to their sublabel Big Dada in 1999. 

The brainchild of journalist Will Ashon, who wanted a home for the obscure hip hop-leaning music he liked to write about, Big Dada went on to sign other Mercury Prize-winning and nominated artists such as Speech Debelle, Young Fathers and Kae Tempest, and released Diplo and Spank Rock’s debut albums. Following the murder of George Floyd in May 2020 and ensuing protests, a decision was made that would not only reinvigorate the label, but hand over power to Ninja Tune’s Black and POC staff. 

“We were sitting in, I think, weekly calls with our CEO, to point out the things we thought needed to change and basically have very honest conversations with him,” says co-head of Big Dada Victoria Cappelletti. “One of the things we suggested is that we launch a record label by and for POC, and with no debate we got a green light and were given the opportunity to do that our own way.” 

The label is now an incubator for Black and POC artists, and, like Ninja Tune, hard to categorise musically. “We are focused on working with artists who have potential, represent and evolve within various communities, or have an artistic vision beyond music,” says Cappelletti. “We look at making sure we’re all on the same wavelength in terms of what sort of impact we want to have in this music ecosystem.”

Big Dada’s birth at the end of the 90s coincided with a new sonic era for Ninja Tune, defined by downtempo, jazz and ambient acts such as The Cinematic Orchestra and Amon Tobin, and by the mid-00s, artists as varied as Bonobo (whose own stylistic development has roughly mirrored the label’s) The Bug, Fink and Daedelus. 

According to Black, “like-minded and leftfield” is probably the best descriptor for artists on the label and its various imprints and partnerships over the years, including Flying Lotus’ Brainfeeder label, distributed worldwide by Ninja Tune and home to artists including Thundercat and Ross from Friends, the Technicolour imprint (Peggy Gou, Sofia Kourtesis, Octo Octa) and Counter Records (Maribou State, ODESZA, TSHA). Indeed, of those mentioned, Gou and TSHA are now signed to Ninja direct. Every time you try and categorise Ninja or one of its sublabels, you’ll come across outliers such as experimental rock group Black Country, New Road and avant-rap trio Young Fathers. 

“Sometimes, with Ninja Tune, it’s good to focus it and sometimes it’s good to make it diverse and there’s been periodic oscillations between that if you look at the Ninja Tune story over the last 30 years,” says Black. “Jon and I love all sorts of music and we love mixing them together. We’re John Peel’s children, we have open ears and you know, keep it wide, keep it open.”

Still, one could argue the Ninja sound is less esoteric than it once was. It’s still an exclusive club – not in a snobby way, but quality control is tight – but it’s more Zeitgeisty than ever thanks to a cabal of fêted house and techno artists who have joined the roster, most of whom followed the biggest signee of recent years, Bicep.

The Belfast duo of Andrew Ferguson and Matthew McBriar went stratospheric following the release of their self-titled debut LP in 2017, marking the start of Ninja Tune’s club music era. “Although Ninja Tune prior to us never released what some would perceive as straight-up club music, they were putting out a wide range of really interesting stuff as they had been for years,” they explain. “We’d recently seen some other album campaigns they had rolled out and could tell that they cared about the details whilst leaving the artists alone enough to do their own thing. We felt Ninja Tune would be the perfect place for us if we wanted to experiment more with our sound without the necessity for lots of 4/4 (beats) in the albums.” 

Bicep also knew Ninja Tune had the manpower and global network to help them make a bigger splash. “Our own Feel My Bicep imprint at that point was a one-man operation putting out 12-inches, which is a lot of work if you want to push things to the next level,” they add. “Ninja have really amazing teams in different countries worldwide and this just made taking the music across the world much easier.”

In the past year, breakthrough acts such as VTSS, Anz, Elkka and India Jordan have joined an ever-growing list of much-hyped club artists signing to the label and its Technicolour imprint including Jayda G, DJ Boring and Hieroglyphic Being. Whether they’re longtime fans of Ninja Tune or not, the newer artists are aware of the label’s history and significance and invariably excited and proud to join the Ninja Tune family. 

“Ninja Tune has been one of my go-to all-time favourite labels since I was about 16, so to say this means a lot to me is an understatement, I’m still pinching myself now!!” wrote Jordan on their Instagram when announcing their ‘Watch Out’ EP last March. Like many other artists Disco Pogo spoke with, Jordan also praised the enthusiasm and attentiveness of Ninja Tune’s staff. 

“The personable element of Ninja and meeting the wider team felt important to me. I don’t think I’d ever want to work with a label that felt removed, distant or transactional.”

A name that comes up frequently among current era signees is Adrian Kemp, who joined the business in 2010, became head of A&R around six years ago and is now also CEO, with Peter Quicke. Ninja Tune artists speak of having full creative control, but they also appreciate feedback from the A&R department. They have “an encyclopaedic knowledge of music,” says Swedish electronic producer DJ Seinfeld, who released his second album ‘Mirrors’ on Ninja Tune last year. “They give you the time of day and they’re very, very honest. They don’t just listen to your demos once or twice, they’re checking out tracks ten times and providing [feedback] which you can tell is very thoughtful. But if the artist doesn’t agree, they’re happy to back down. There are no big egos attached to anything either. They are all happy to be proven wrong.”

Nabihah Iqbal, who was signed to Ninja Tune as Throwing Shade in 2015 and is readying her second album for release later this year, is similarly complimentary of the wider A&R team. “I really like working with them because they’re not sycophants. All of them are quite analytical with how they listen to things,” says the electronica artist. “It was actually the first time I had people listening to my music from a slightly different perspective and thinking about new things to try out and how [I could] push myself.” 

The influx of new artists has also increased diversity in Ninja Tune’s ranks, with many of its star recruits being women and/or Black and POC. Iqbal was the first South Asian woman to sign to Ninja Tune “and they can definitely do more of it”, she says. “When my first release came out, with online trolling and stuff you could just kind of tell that putting out my music was trying to shift Ninja in a different direction and sort of penetrate this old-school trip hop, probably predominantly white male music nerd fanbase,” she says. “But I’m happy to be on there because all the time I get messages from people, especially other ethnic minority artists and female artists who’ll be like: ‘It’s really inspirational to see you on a label like that.’” 

India Jordan, meanwhile, thinks they might be the only non-binary artist on the Ninja Tune roster, but says they wouldn’t have signed with the label if they didn’t think it was committed to improving its representation of women, Queer and Trans artists. “There’s always more work to be done and labels need to ensure they are fully supporting the artist throughout the process, not just signing them to increase their diversity quotas,” they said.

Ambient techno auteur Darren Cunningham, better known by his artist name Actress, signed to Ninja Tune in 2012, after a lot of consideration. “I think I wanted to understand as deeply as possible how the machinations of the music industry works, particularly from an independent perspective,” he says. “Rather than actually give my music to people, I tended to sort of, for want of a better word, infiltrate different labels just to learn different things.” 

Cunningham had stints working at One Little Indian and XL while running his own Werkdiscs label, but ultimately decided to join Ninja Tune in 2013 (Ninja Tune now distributes Werkdiscs releases and has released Werkdiscs artists including Actress and Helena Hauff on Ninja Tune). 

“They seem like quite a restrained label, I think they’re quite stealthy in the way they operate,” says Cunningham. “And I’ve never really felt pressured when working with them, if I’m being honest with you, and very occasionally, if you know how to push the right buttons, they’ll allow you to pull levers they don’t usually allow you to pull, and then it’s amazing how quickly you will see certain things get done.” 

As an example, Cunningham cites Ninja Tune’s agility and responsiveness after he announced on social media he’d be releasing the 2020 mixtape ‘88’ in 24 hours, then had to follow through.

French-Canadian minimal wave artist Marie Davidson was approached by an A&R after performing at Sonar by Day in Barcelona and says it was their genuine enthusiasm that sealed the deal for her. “I believe that in the end, what makes a difference is if the people working for you are working for your music,” she says. “I’m expecting that a label will be as excited as I am about the music that’s going to be put out.” 

She released her most acclaimed album to date, ‘Working Class Woman’ on Ninja Tune in 2018, then announced her retirement from club music the following year. In 2020 she launched a new project, a new wave band called Marie Davidson and L’Œil Nu, whose debut album was released on Ninja Tune last year. 

“I haven’t felt questioned in my decisions or my artistic output,” says Davidson. “Ninja Tune have been great and I’m very happy and proud to be a small part of their history.”

Maddy Salvage, vice president of A&R in North America who has worked for the label for 12 years, describes their approach as “less interventionist.” 

“Personally, I’d rather find artists whose vision I already believe in and sign them rather than mould someone into something they’re not,” she says. “It should be about amplifying their art and enabling it to work in the current musical climate rather than trying to manufacture anything.” 

Salvage moved to the US in 2017 and has been central to expanding Ninja Tune’s presence in the States and attracting key American artists. “With a large office in North America and label staff internationally, I think our signings have become less UK-centric,” she says. “Moving Stateside really gave me a bigger sense of perspective when I’m looking for new music.” 

Salvage insists that the shift towards buzzier, club-oriented acts in the past few years has not been intentional. “We’re probably less influenced by hype than we were, and more about whether that artist is actually saying something that people are responding to,” she says. “The irony of course being that we probably have more hype and accolades across our roster now than we ever have. But I think that’s because there’s a genuine authenticity in all of our signings, regardless of genre, and people see that.”

Having started Ninja Tune to avoid being screwed over by major labels, Black and More initiated a 50/50 royalty split between artists and the label in the beginning, something which holds to this day and is doubtless another reason artists are attracted to Ninja Tune and tend to stay loyal to the label once signed. That and Ninja Tune’s large infrastructure, essential to getting their artists’ music heard by more people and having the resources to enhance releases, whether it’s a 24-hour radio station on Spotify to accompany Anz’s ‘All Hours’ EP, a private WhatsApp group, TikTok partnership and special Instagram filter to bolster Bicep’s second album ‘Isles’, elite stage and tour design, or the killer artwork that graces all Ninja Tune releases, commissioned from world-leading graphic designers, artists and photographers. 

A strong visual identity was a calling card for the label from the beginning. The first Ninja Tune logo was designed by Michael Bartalos, while various subsequent incarnations of the iconic Ninja Tune logo featuring a ninja brandishing a record were designed by Kevin ‘Strictly Kev’ Foakes as Openmind. Cunningham says that growing up, he wasn’t exactly a collector of Ninja Tune records, “but they definitely had an aesthetic which was the ninja and which was always in the corner of my eye. They’ve always had quite a power for a visual aesthetic, I would say.” 

Coldcut have always used audiovisuals to complement their music and live performances and have released video games with their “multimedia pop group” Hex, created award-winning music videos, and produced A/V works for London’s Barbican Centre and The Pompidou Centre in Paris. In the past decade they’ve also branched into software and hardware. A music remix app called Ninja Jamm was launched in 2013 (the upgraded version, Jamm Pro landed in 2020) and in 2019, Ninja Tune released its first bit of hardware (a first for an electronic music label), the Zen Delay. 

Says Black: “When someone like Floating Points or Maribou State gets hold of one and they tell all their mates it’s great, that doesn’t hurt our reputation because, as someone commented on the socials, it’s quite a radical move for Ninja Tune to do that. It shows that we’ve still got some zap and can take a different direction if we want to and mix it up.”

Black and More certainly still have zap, but are careful to point out they’re “not that involved” in running the label, which now numbers nearly 80 staff around the world, with offices in London, Berlin and Los Angeles. “But we think that as granddads, we have some kind of useful input and I think people at the label know who we are and respect what we’ve done as well, so it’s like having one lovely big growing family,” Black says. 

They also emphasise the immense contribution of Peter Quicke, who joined Ninja Tune back in 1992, as label manager. “Jon and I, we didn’t really want to run the label because we wanted to make our music and do our creative thing,” says Black. “So many artists say: ‘I wish I could find someone to take care of the business side.’ And Pete did that. We mix music, he mixes people and I think he deserves full credit for the success of the label.” 

Quicke was head of A&R until around six years ago, when Adrian Kemp took over, and is now the chair, but like Black and More, he’s less involved in the day-to-day running of the business these days, and more focussed on the company’s sustainability goals and net zero commitment.

Now in their 60s, Black and More could be forgiven for taking a back seat at the label, but despite their philosophy of “employing the right people and letting them get on with the job without interfering,” complete retirement seems unlikely anytime soon. 

“We’re going to continue to strive to put out good, cutting-edge music,” says Black. “And even though we’re not a tiny label right on the edges anymore, we still think that we’ve got a sharpness to what we do and the same love and passion for music. We’ve still got it strong, so I think that’ll carry us through.” 

Our money’s on another 30 years, at least. 

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This article first appeared in issue one of Disco Pogo.

SAULT are not only the best group to emerge in recent years, they are also the most important. By circumventing traditional music industry practices this clandestine outfit allow their music and the messages contained therein – to take centre stage. As their sixth album, ‘Air’, suddenly drops, author and journalist Tshepo Mokoena gets to the heart of why they really matter…

It started like a fire; embers lit before spreading. When SAULT, the enigmatic, genre-mashing group, first released two albums online in 2019, they were an insider secret. A whisper. By June 2020, Gilles Peterson relished the opportunity to play their album ‘Untitled (Black Is)’ in full, on his 6 Music show. 

None of SAULT’s six albums to date have cracked the UK album top 40. And yet, even though the group don’t maintain a YouTube account, pirated rips of insistent 2020 single “Wildfires” have racked up more than 4.6 million cumulative views on the video platform. How did we get here?

SAULT are a confounding, exhilarating proposition. We still don’t know who they are – nor even how many band members “they” entail. Careful archaeology into their albums’ digital metadata reveals producer Inflo (Little Simz, Michael Kiwanuka), Kid Sister’s Melisa Young, producer and keyboardist Kadeem Clarke and singer Cleo Sol credited as songwriters. And sure, both Little Simz and Kiwanuka were given performer credits on 2021’s ‘Nine’ and 2020’s ‘Untitled (Black Is)’, respectively. 

But for fans and critics alike, that’s beside the point. From behind the cloak of anonymity, the songs have shone through. In a few years, SAULT have begun to carry on a legacy of layered, multi-genre expression, in the tradition of Black British experimentation and adaptation. With the surprise arrival of 2022’s ‘Air’ in mid-April, they’re only getting started.

Let’s rewind. If you felt as though in that harrowing summer of 2020 you leapt suddenly from ‘knowing nothing about SAULT’ to ‘desperately seeking out every album in SAULT’s discography,’ you weren’t alone. Their 2019 albums, ‘5’ and ‘7’, belatedly blew onto a couple of ‘overlooked/underrated albums of the year’ lists. Both were released without music videos, promo, live bookings – minus any fanfare, really. 

On ‘5’ and ‘7’, SAULT leaned into funk, pitter-pattering drums and danceable grooves. They showed signs of a more political edge to come on ‘5’’s ‘Foot on Necks’, a horrifically evergreen, stomping, scuzzy treatise on anti-Black police violence that sits deep in the pocket of the beat. ‘7’ was less strong as a body of work. It still rumbled across a more crystallised political stance, as on rallying cry for Black boys, ‘Threats’: “They see you as a threat now / but don’t let them break you down”. The Guardian summed up both albums as feeling “simultaneously exploratory and confident, a really appealing, intriguing combination”. 

Then, to 2020. SAULT exploded into the public consciousness with ‘(Black Is)’, released on Juneteenth during a summer of protest framed by the hulking shadow of Covid-19. Signposting that this was to be the first ‘Untitled’ release, they shared a simple message on social media in solidarity with Black people and people of Black ancestry. “RIP George Floyd and all those who have suffered from police brutality and systemic racism,” it ended. “Change is happening… We are focused.”

Here, their grab bag of 70s funk and 80s post-punk basslines continued to clatter into spoken interludes, neo-soul meditations and layered vocals, sung sweetly then seemingly shouted from out a window. They took new listeners’ breath away, topping both 6 Music and NPR’s year-end lists while touted by Rough Trade as “the most essential album for 2020”. Mercury Prize-shortlisted ‘Untitled (Rise)’ followed in September, exemplified by pointed lyrics. Again, propulsive drums pushed everything forward, as on breakout psych-funk romp ‘Free’, which ascends into a chorus light as candy floss.

Following on from the pace of work they’d set in 2019, SAULT fell back into the rhythm of dropping two albums per year. Their impact came from more than their work ethic, though. Both ‘(Black Is)’ and ‘(Rise)’ spoke to an outpouring of grief after the murder of George Floyd. An estimated 20 million people joined protests in the US, with others counted in 60 countries. On ‘(Black Is)’, SAULT distilled a howl of rage, of pain, and the slow inhale-exhale that follows. No Black person aware of racism was shocked by Floyd’s dehumanising killing. But music like SAULT’s captured how Black people – whether protesting in the US, UK, South Africa or Kenya – could still find the will to fight back against systemic, ingrained inequality. We’re tired. And still, we fight.

SAULT’s songs feel like catharsis, like a breath; a way to take care of yourself to better serve your community. When the band swoop between genres and sonic textures, they slot into a history of Black British music. Sound systems from Jamaica arrived in England in the 1950s, bringing with them a practice rooted in crowd-soundman interaction and the fertile ground on which to test out hits that the white mainstream entirely overlooked. As journalist and author Lloyd Bradley has put it: “The parlay between soundman and audience allowed British Black music to define itself, and it developed accordingly, taking chances and making seemingly illogical leaps.”

A soundman could guide their listeners from reggae – itself a form of protest music – to jazz, calypso then lover’s rock in a packed room. The sound system, speakers stacked high, seemingly surveyed the scene. And from here the stage was set for the underground development of dub, dubstep, garage and later, via pirate radio, grime. Black British music is so often about transformation, about flourishing while being ignored and rattling at the boundaries of what “popular music” can mean.

Though SAULT may not sound much like Lord Kitchener, Joan Armatrading, Matumbi or Linton Kwesi Johnson, they have walked along the path those elders forged. Sonically, SAULT can tend to lean closer to Massive Attack, Tricky, the Bronx’s ESG and even the Chemical Brothers or Can, from one track to the next. That’s the beauty of relying on the drive of the rhythm section and what we assume are mostly Cleo Sol’s vocals sung in a mellifluous flow. You struggle, eternally, to neatly place the band in one genre box.

SAULT’s most recent album, ‘Air’, makes this explicit. It came after ‘Nine’, an album only made available to stream or buy for 99 days in late 2021 (999, of course, being the UK’s emergency services phone number). With ‘Air’, SAULT pick up the vocal harmonies and strings of songs like ‘Something’s in the Air’ (from ‘5’), ‘Us’ (‘Black Is’), ‘Rise’ and ‘Street Fighter’ (both from ‘Rise’), blooming into richer, dream-like choral arrangements. Soprano voices trill in butterfly-wing vibrato. Horns blare. Strings twist and fall. Fans expecting the band’s usual groove – one of their only defining characteristics so far – ought to buckle up. Here, Philip Glass, Michael Nyman and early Janelle Monáe come to mind more than the usual neo-soul, jazz and funk references.

The finest line stands between a gospel choir, a three-part soul harmony, an R’n’B layered vocal and a mantra, sung in unison, at the top of one’s lungs. By paying homage to various Black music traditions, SAULT tap into that connecting thread: Black creativity. They manage to sound both familiar and innovative. Their transatlantic appeal derives from more than Sol’s Americanised singing voice (she obviously is a disciple of the Beyoncé school of pop-R’n’B – find her recordings from 2011 to hear this most clearly). They make diasporic, open-armed music that has captivated audiences who still have no idea what this group would look like on stage. No doubt, SAULT will continue to keep us guessing. The fire may fade in quieter moments between releases. But it can easily be ignited again. 

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This article first appeared in issue one of Disco Pogo.

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​​Featuring tears, tantrums and ‘Teenage Kicks’, this is the behind-the-scenes story of John Peel’s unforgettable fabric mix, as witnessed by the legendary broadcaster’s friend: former Fabric employee and Jockey Slut journalist Nick Doherty. A friend of whom Peel once knowingly enquired: “Are you actually doing anything there or just trying to look cool?”

It’s sometime in August 2002, and on London’s Holloway Road four men are huddled into a recording space estate agents would call ‘compact and practical’. At his computer, a studio engineer is encoding vinyl records to lay into a mix. What might normally be a mundane and perfunctory task is enlivened by the man guiding him – Radio 1’s legend-in-his-own airtime, John Peel. The four of us – John, engineer Elliot, Fabric’s record label boss Geoff Muncey and myself – are there to make ‘FABRICLIVE 07’, an early entry in the London club’s CD series that will run for over 15 years. 

Having provided a longlist of tracks for us to clear, John gleefully plucks the approved vinyl from his record box – the box which, years later, will have its very own Channel 4 documentary – creating a setlist he’ll come to term “mood-demolishing, rather than mood-building.”

Throughout the day he’s extolled each song’s virtues, being particularly pleased that Joy Division’s ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’ – a track never licensed to a compilation and initially refused to Fabric – has been escalated up the chain of command at Warner Music and received a last-minute exception on the basis that it’s for John. Result.

But right now, breaking the mood of creative collaboration, there’s a big problem. John has spent the last five minutes in floods of tears. This itself isn’t a surprise – during the last year of getting to know him and will confirm again many times, tears are common-or-garden Peel behaviour and you never know what mundanity will set him off next. As he told Jockey Slut that same year: “I’m sure a psychoanalyst would come up with something fantastic. Until I met Sheila I don’t remember ever having cried before. Since then, I’ve become absolutely terrible. I’m not proud of it. At times it’s actually very embarrassing.”

Today’s trigger is the recording of ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’ by the Kop Choir – the sound of Anfield, home of his beloved Liverpool F.C., in full voice (a song that so reliably fires the Peel tear ducts, I even see him lose it one night to a feeble ringtone version on his Nokia).

John wants it to close the mix. It was always his finishing track as a touring DJ - the 70s and 80s incarnation, when he took the John Peel Roadshow to “resentful students who wanted chart hits and beer-drinking competitions” – and he’s convinced that fading out with the Kop singing is the perfect finale.

Huddled in a corner, Geoff agrees with me: the mix should end with the track most synonymous with Peel, ‘Teenage Kicks’ by The Undertones. The air is heavy. John is visibly pissed off with the disagreement, adamant about the issue, and – understandably – feeling a little bullied. It’s a standoff.

It was easy to know if you’d overstepped the mark with John. Sitting in on his radio show for Jockey Slut once, I got bollocked for nattering with his producer, Louise, while a record played: “I’m sorry, am I getting in the way of your conversation?”

Another time, at his 65th Birthday party at Peel Acres – an occasion when, incidentally, I learned of snake-hipped 80s footballer Pat Nevin’s love for both Peel and Jockey Slut – he admonished me for asking if he was having a good time: “Of course I am, it’s my fucking birthday.” (He later told me he found that question condescending from younger people, and I’ve never asked it of anyone older since.)

Even Geoff gets chided today. Casually dipping into Peel’s record box to gawk at THE copy of ‘Teenage Kicks’, the one with John’s handwritten label and asterisk rating, Peel peers over his shoulder and says, firmly: “Would you kindly put that back?”

We break for the day with the tracklist unresolved. As he leaves the building, I ask John if he’s taking his record box home with him. “It’s OK,” he says. “I trust you.”

After he leaves, Geoff and I agree to go with our preferred order. It makes me feel shit just thinking about how we defied John. But that’s nothing compared to how I would have felt had anything happened to that record box. Especially as – being young and stupid – I inexplicably choose to take it with me to my DJ gig at the Elbow Rooms on Old Street later that night.

It’s a completely futile exercise in the end. When I get to the club the little adaptor on the decks is missing so I can’t even play the old 45s I want to because they don’t have a spindle hole. I take it back the next day to finish the mix, the shame and horror of the potential consequences hitting me hard years later.

With the same cloying bravado of a young, idiotic, music industry type, I’d already laid down the start of the mix without John. I’d arrived at the studio a bit before him and used another piece of his favourite vinyl, Peter Jones’ BBC radio commentary of Alan Kennedy’s goal against Real Madrid in the 1981 European Cup Final, over the top of a track I’d heard him play on his show – Asa-Chang & Junray’s hypnotic and beautiful ‘Hana’ (I never did find out what the two experimental musicians from Tokyo made of that).

To start the mix for real, I also loaded in the Soledad Brothers’ 12-bar blues number, ‘Bring it On Down’, which I’d heard played on his radio show a few weeks before and, for the umpteenth time in my life, stopped what I was doing to stare at the radio. In one of those opportunities too good to pass up, the vocal on the Soledad track starts with a spoken line of barroom drawl – ‘My name is Johnny, you deal with me now...’ – giving Peel the ideal platform to work from. I was pretty sure he’d love it, and thankfully I was right. What came next was a set I’d come to know well, with most of the tracks featuring in his prior DJ appearance at Fabric.

That night – Friday, February 1, 2002 – can only be described as Peelmania. I did the warm-up set for him in Fabric’s Room Three – a small club-within-the-club – and you genuinely couldn’t move in there (an eight-months pregnant woman sat on the step next to the DJ booth all night, determined not to miss anything). At one point, observing my attempts at filtering on the mixer, Peel leant in and asked: “Are you actually doing anything there or just trying to look cool?” “A bit of both,” I said, rumbled.

Despite the lack of DJ dexterity, the next two hours were unpretentious muso bliss – track after unexpected track, as gloriously shambolic as his radio shows, capturing the man’s esoteric attitude and lack of prejudice: Status Quo, happy hardcore, dub reggae, rock’n’roll, techno, and country-style cover versions of the Sex Pistols.

At the end of the night – even in those simpler times before omnipresent smartphones and celebrity selfies – it took him a full 15 minutes to leave the club with scores of people shaking his hand, singing ‘Teenage Kicks’, and chanting his name. Out on the street he was scrambled, adrenalin pumping from his performance, unable to remember where his cab should take him.

When asked about his Fabric appearance, he told Jockey Slut: “I was amazed to be asked and very, very scared, and it was just fantastic. It was much better than the gigs I used to do in the 60s, 70s and 80s. They were all nightmarish, not just for me but for the audience. A couple of times I had to be escorted back to my car by a phalanx of policemen and on one occasion, in Silith near Carlisle, I had to be led to the border. So, Fabric was amazing, fantastic. It was as great a night as I’ve had in my life, and people will say: ‘Oh, he would say that wouldn’t he?’, but it actually was. The fact that people were singing ‘Teenage Kicks’ eight minutes after I’d finished was unforgettable.”

John only ever had one non-negotiable demand when playing Fabric, that – having suffered a brain haemorrhage in 1996 and a relapse in 1997 – there would be somewhere safe for his wife Sheila to sit, listen, and have a drink (he remained livid, years later, that a popular comedian had booted Sheila and his family out of one such area at an event he’d compered at Anfield: “just so some of his idiot cronies could sit there.”)

It’s Sheila I speak to on the phone, when I call to get feedback on the promotional copy of ‘FABRICLIVE 07’ with its special cover design featuring Liverpool’s famous number 7, Kenny Dalglish. I should be speaking to John but having seen that we’ve gone against his wishes with the tracklist he’s seemingly refusing to talk to me. 

“Don’t worry, he’s just being silly,” says Sheila, “he’s sitting in his favourite chair, drinking red wine, crying. He loves it.”

I didn’t have to work hard to get John talking endearingly about Sheila. When I sat down with him for Jockey Slut in April 2002, he spoke at length about her, remembering how he passed her a handwritten note when they first met, how, when they first got together, the song ‘Band of Gold’ seemed to be on the radio every time they had sex, and how he came to nickname her ‘The Pig’. But even that Jockey Slut interview had thrown up its own challenge.

John chose his favourite Thai restaurant in Maida Vale as the venue for our chat – as no-frills and welcoming as you might expect – and, alongside my research, I had a sheet of questions from Jockey Slut readers and musicians associated with him.

During the couple of hours we sat there – captured on my Sony Minidisc which was pretty much equivalent to rocking up with the Metaverse in my pocket – he only refused to go on record with one question: “Is it true you made the beast with two backs with Germaine Greer in the 60s?”

There were two problems with this. First, he hadn’t heard that expression for the physicals before and I had to explain its likely etymology. Second, there’d been some legal drama in the past and, when I investigated it a bit, some to-the-point comments from Germaine about the contents of the Peel Y-fronts, a no doubt justifiable response to his talking out of school. He asked that Jockey Slut not publish anything and, at least for a while, seemed a bit flustered by it all. This being 2002, the awkwardness was broken by everyone at the dinner table lighting up fags, and John going into a tirade about how lovely the smell of tobacco is until it’s lit. 

The musicians’ questions floored him, though. When I asked Howie B’s question: “When do you decide what’s going to be played on your radio show?” he shot back, incredulously: “Is that from THE Howie B?” More than any of his other responses, it was this reaction that taught me most about who John was, why he did what he did, and how he’d remained so relevant and dedicated: he never lost his fascination or admiration for musicians. His professional purpose was to wonder at their achievements and promote their endeavours.

This is why his support for happy hardcore and other unpopular genres is so explainable. He liked it enough to play it, sure, but what mattered was that someone had made it in the first place. As he said in the interview: “I like stuff that people think is uncool. I love it when people say to me: ‘You shouldn’t play that, it’s uncool.’ I always think: ‘You’ve completely missed the point’, as they did with punk when I first started playing that. People would write in, really disturbed, saying: ‘You’ve made a terrible mistake. Don’t you understand? This is not good.’ It was exactly the same with happy hardcore – I loved happy hardcore because the dance music fraternity by and large seemed to disapprove of it. Our Thomas adored it. He’d have those box-set things of eight cassettes of somebody’s set at some awful place in Luton. He’d be playing them in his bedroom and I’d think: ‘Actually, that sounds really good.’ So, anything that people tell me I shouldn’t play tends to be what interests me the most.”

On ‘FABRICLIVE 07’ John chose possibly his all-time favourite piece of happy hardcore – ‘Identify the Beat’ by Marc Smith and Safe ‘N Sound. Underlining his point, it completely split the camp at Fabric HQ with a general feeling that it didn’t fit the club’s music policy and should be removed. To his credit, in what was undoubtedly the right decision, Fabric’s owner Keith Reilly kept it in.

For so many years Peel just about survived changing audience tastes and the continual drive to refresh Radio 1 to attract younger demographics (he’d often quote a factoid that the Peel Session had the station’s youngest average audience, which might have been one of those facts no one wanted to check in case it proved to be false). 

At that time, he’d also built a parallel audience for his Radio 4 show ‘Home Truths’, focusing on life at Peel Acres, and had become a National Treasure before the term was in full circulation. He never seemed at ease with it, and sometimes it felt like he was hanging on in there, living in fear of the axe or a sideways shunt to a sister station with each successive regime change.

The press campaign for the album backed this up. Convinced we had a shot at the cover of the NME, we were told in no uncertain terms by the Editor that: “Peel is too Radio 4 these days, he’s not really for us.”

What was true was that his Radio 1 counterparts – Pete Tong, Gilles Peterson, Fabio & Grooverider – were popular, contemporary, club and festival DJs and, save the odd appearance at the Sonar Festival or Tribal Gathering, Peel was very much not. Which might be why he met playing at Fabric with such enthusiasm.

In what was to be one of the final times I saw John, we were sat in a Smithfield pub, The Butcher’s Hook and Cleaver, having a drink after some Fabric promotional work. I asked him how his autobiography was coming along and what deadline he’d been given. “They haven’t given me one,” he said, “so I suppose it’s just the ultimate deadline.”

As the pub’s name suggests, ‘The Butchers’ sits directly opposite the Smithfield Meat Market and, right next to it, is a small but pristinely maintained garden - the Smithfield Rotunda. The gate to the Rotunda is opened every day and, years later, I realised that’s probably for the benefit of patients at nearby St Bart’s hospital. For the Fabric team, it’s usually the pub’s unofficial beer garden and we would head there most sunny evenings.

On this cold morning – Tuesday, October 26, 2004 – I’m in the Rotunda alone, reeling from the news John has died whilst on holiday in Peru. I send a text to his son, Tom, but beyond that I’ve no idea what to do. In the coming days I’ll write to Sheila, as thousands of others do, and give quotes to the music press on behalf of the club. Fabric immediately donates the revenue raised from ‘FABRICLIVE 07’ to Médecins Sans Frontières, John’s favoured charity.

Two weeks later, I’ve borrowed my dad’s battered Peugeot 406 Estate to take the road to Bury St Edmonds for his funeral. Despite offers I’ve elected to go on my own, which turns out to be a mistake. Flying solo at a wedding makes you feel like a novelty; doing it at a funeral makes you feel like an oddity.

This becomes clearest when, as available car seats are divvied up to get people from the service back to Peel Acres, the brilliant American singer-songwriter, Nina Nastasia, wins the Shitbox Lottery and gets a spot in the 406. The car is filthy on the outside and much worse inside, and the experience seems to top off a quite wonderful day for poor Nina.

To break the ice, I ask her if she wants some music on. Getting the merest shrug, I pass her my ‘radio on a rope’ which I’ve brought along from my shower at home because dad’s car stereo is knackered. She doesn’t laugh and we putter off, very slowly, in silence.

The service had a fitting sense of occasion, with hundreds congregating on the Cathedral of St. James’ lawn, listening to a broadcast on a PA. Inside I’m reduced to audio-only too. In my haste to sit down I’ve taken a seat directly behind a huge pillar. John’s producer Louise comes to re-seat me with her nearer the front, but for whatever reason I decline. I’m sat next to Jo Whiley, but it isn’t the time to tell her how great I think she is so – fittingly – I spend the time in silence, just listening.

The service is exquisite. We hear Howlin’ Wolf’s ‘Going Down Slow’ which might be the most apt funeral song possible, and a reading of Shelley’s poem, ‘Love’s Philosophy’ – a final paean to Sheila, ending with the gut punch: “What is all this sweet work worth/If thou kiss not me?” Then on the lighter side there’s some top-grade reminiscence from John’s brother Alan who, remarking on how to be more successful with women, provides a canonical piece of advice to John: “Just always remember, they like it too.”

The service is top-and-tailed by John himself. Firstly, his entrance to the cathedral, carried by his family. As our heads turn in the pitched silence it’s like a single, shuffling, snuffling mass, the awe of the moment plain to all. And at the end, cutting through the dense atmosphere is his voice – played to us one last time: “I’m fabulously lucky, I’ve got everything I wanted as a kid, a house in the country, an astounding wife, and a job on the radio. I don’t know what could be done to improve it. If I drop dead tomorrow, I’ll have nothing to complain about – except that there’ll be another Fall album out next year and I won’t get to hear it.” It’s warm, unexpected, and somehow reassuring.

Then right at the end, someone presses play on ‘FABRICLIVE 07’ and the Kop Choir sings ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’, the track never seeming so apposite. As the strains fade, just as I’d heard a hundred times prior, there’s Billy Doherty’s short drum intro, a clang of John O’Neill’s guitar, and the urgent scream of Feargal Sharkey’s vocal as ‘Teenage Kicks’ erupts into the vast space.

I’m sorry John, but I think that settles it. It really was the only way it could end.

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“I remember when he played...”

“I was heading to Final Frontier in my second-hand Volvo 440 when I heard John play my remix of the Chemical Brothers. I was astonished. I mean, John had already been extremely supportive with previous tracks I had made or remixed, but here was John again beating all the other specialist DJs on Radio One by some weeks. I went into that club on cloud nine. Whenever John played my music or remixes I always seemed to be in a car thinking ‘wow’ and each time felt as special as the first.”

Dave Clarke

“I remember hearing him play ‘Hong Kong Garden’ - it was probably 1978. I just said: that’s fucking it! Ten years later, I was mixing Siouxsie and the Banshees in London. Mental!”

Howie B

“I remember when he played our cover of Prince’s ‘Sign of the Times’, ‘Sine of the Dub’ back in 2004. It was the first release on Hyperdub and I’d been told he was going to play it. At that moment, I was driving around the motorways of Glasgow and I tuned in excitedly to hear the first time some of my music had been played on national radio. Much to my surprise, instead of playing the track at 33rpm, for some reason he played it at 45rpm. Instead of a slow motion, deep and dubbed out slice of dub poetry, it turned into something much funnier.”

Kode9

“I remember when he played a track by Pere Ubu, ‘The Final Solution’. I think it would have been late 1976, as I was at college in High Wycombe. It was such a weird track to play at a time when we were still in the fag end of pub rock - such a blast of energy, it just blew me away. The next day I went up to London to hunt out a copy – Rough Trade possibly. I bought the 7-inch and I still have it.”

Jonathan More, Coldcut

“The first time I heard Underground Resistance, early releases on Warp Records, and grime was on his show. All of which went on to have a big influence on my musical life. I’ll always be grateful for that. I loved the fact that whoever tuned into John Peel‘s radio show was always going to hear something unexpected or unknown that may turn out to be really significant to the musical landscape.”

Surgeon

This article first appeared in issue one of Disco Pogo.

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Rave’s free party movement reached its zenith 30 years ago, when the likes of the DiY and Spiral Tribe sound systems were shepherded onto six square miles of common land in Worcestershire. Over 30,000 revellers eventually decamped upon Castlemorton, creating a town “ready to party”. As a new memoir from DiY founder member Harry Harrison and documentary reveal, however, it wasn’t just about hedonistic seven-day benders. DiY associate Tim Wilderspin remembers more idealistic times…

When Harry Harrison set foot in Nottingham’s Garage club in 1989 for his 23rd birthday, he was effectively boarding a runaway train – a train that would constantly threaten to derail, had nothing to eat in the buffet car and certainly no quiet carriage. For this was the first of countless nights the infamous DiY Sound System would promote over the course of three decades of dance, drugs and dissent. 

Once dubbed ‘The most dangerous people in Britain’, the core figures of this collective were Harry, Pete Woosh, Rick Down and Simon DK. And, actually, they were among the loveliest people one could ever meet (I know, having been involved as a DJ/producer from early on), but they wanted to smash the state, using ‘fun’ as a weapon: extreme fun. 

Their genesis can be traced to Bolton in the early 80s, where teenagers Harry and Pete bonded over a love of Factory Records and anarchist literature. “Small in stature but great of heart” Pete played “music from genres I didn’t even know existed,” according to Harry in his eye-popping new memoir ‘Dreaming in Yellow’, an account of the DiY Sound System. 

Ending up in Nottingham, where Harry became a student, they met another kindred spirit in Rick Down from Stockport. Incredibly tall, in contrast to Pete who would become his DJ partner, he was also there to study. A lover of hip hop and flamboyant dancing, “he was like the rhythm section of DiY,” Harry surmises. Rick also had the ability to fall asleep on his feet, like a horse, and skin-up whilst unconscious. 

They were soon discovering the joys of ecstasy and house, via Graeme Park at The Garage, and moved in together in early 1990. Amorphous plans were fermented over late-night discussions wreathed in smoke, when one night a friend of a friend knocked at the door to sell them some speed. It was Simon DK. This quietly charming ex-punk would go on to be “The Keith Richards of British house and DJ of the month in i-D, The Face and DJ mag,” yet he had, as Harry further writes: “No interest in wealth or status… and a pathological ability to fuck up.” 

Prompted to do it themselves for Harry’s 23rd after attending some disappointing, pricey raves, DiY embarked on a succession of chaotic squat parties. But it was their love of the odd bucolic bender at the free festivals that led to the moment, at Glastonbury 1990, when a great coming together occurred that would characterise an entirely new movement. 

Arriving at the ramshackle free field with nothing but decks, Harry writes of bumping into Jack, a DJ they’d recently enjoyed at a Nottinghamshire house party. He was to become one of the crew’s most popular DJs and, crucially, act as the bridge between the travellers and ravers. 

“Jack excitedly informed us that some travellers he knew had set up a marquee. They had a sound system, he had records … but did we know anyone with decks? Well, funnily enough…”

DiY strode into that marquee and, according to Harry: “Our world would never be the same again.”

Beautifully elucidated in the book, a mythical weekend ensued: travellers grooved with clubbers, a goggle-eyed Bez communed with a horse; the KLF’s Jimmy Cauty also appeared with a demo, ensuring future top five single ‘What Time is Love?’ was given its first public airing. DiY, however, weren’t the only Petri dish for this social experiment. Wandering about, Harry discovered a young DJ Harvey spinning for Tonka – the first house sound system in existence – creating similar scenes in another marquee. 

From this point, a brand new culture emerged. The travellers got a taste for house and ecstasy and began to invite urban ravers onto their sites to play, often for days on end. These became known as free parties, due to the completely voluntary nature of everyone’s contribution. The older travellers, perhaps recalling the extreme police violence at 1985’s Battle of the Beanfield, were initially reticent, but the younger ones, calling themselves The Free Party People, rushed at it headlong. 

Soon, other sound systems began to get involved, most notably Spiral Tribe, who’d done a few squat parties in their native London. Their chief instigator was Mark Angelo, who tells of their epiphany with the travellers and DiY at Longstock (a site where travellers had been forced to celebrate the Solstice in June 1991, instead of Stonehenge); but he also talks of witnessing, in microcosm, the forces they would come up against later, on a grand scale at Castlemorton. 

“There were a load of little kids, all naked, playing in these big muddy puddles and just loving it,” he recalls, “and these cops, including the chief, were just standing there, arms crossed with sneers on their faces, just calling to these kids and their mothers about how disgusting and filthy everything was, and it was just utterly shocking that they were stooping to such low levels to reinforce that sense of authority – over this really playful, joyful scene.”

It wasn’t just the travellers’ lifestyle the police and public didn’t understand, they could never get their heads around the concept of a free party: that anyone on Earth was free to attend and, unprecedented in youth culture, no one was in charge or profiting from it, contrary to the very fabric of capitalism. 

For charismatic motormouth Harry, this was the least of it: “To me, the most fascinating thing is that ecstasy and house music arrived at the same time. The coincidence is just extraordinary. It’s almost like it was planned and that there is a God and there’s a God of pleasure. They both combined so beautifully.” 

Alongside Harry’s book, a film ‘Free Party: A Folk History’ is currently in production that will try to evoke the thrilling culture that was exploding back in the early-90s. For film-maker Aaron Trinder, it was the extreme cross-pollination of diverse social groups that was so startling. 

“I remember standing next to a Yardie,” he says, “with gold teeth, speaking patois, and both of us seemingly best mates for the ten minutes we were chatting, next to a crusty with a dog, next to a Hooray Henry with a comb over. This amazing combination of people who would usually hate each other before; and perhaps since. And I think when you get all those people together in the same space, it felt quite alarming to the status quo.”

Previous music revolutions were generally soundtracked by one type of sound. Not so here. Spiral Tribe and DiY couldn’t have been more dissimilar. The Spirals, along with many others, favoured a quick-fire breakbeat sound, incorporating techno and hardcore elements. 

“It was heralding new possibilities,” Angelo enthuses. “It was as if it was an alien language, coming from some distant, unknown future and sort of beckoning people towards that.” 

By contrast, DiY’s sound was more submerged in Black American club music. “We were house purists,” Harry states. “From 91/92 the music went everywhere… drum’n’bass, techno. We just stood our ground really. That’s where the magic lay.”

By 1991, DiY had their own huge, purpose-built sound system and were running their highly successful Bounce club nights to help fund the free parties. However, in a typical display of either anarchism or downright flakiness, they had such huge guestlists they were tossing all the big bucks away. 

“People were always saying we could make more money,” Harry laughs. (It was like) We know that! We’re not trying to make money; we’re trying to change the fucking world.” By dint of a no-nonsense desire for action and lack of aptitude for DJing, Harry had naturally become DiY’s central organiser.

As Digs and Woosh, Rick and Pete were connoisseurs of eclecticism at their Serve Chilled nights, and other DJs were beginning to feature in the collective like Jack, Emma, Pezz and Pip; but DiY’s signature sound was truly helmed by the figurehead DJ, Simon DK. 

“American house was all he bought,” Harry gleefully remembers, “He knew fuck all about hip hop, he knew nothing about soul, funk or disco. He just became obsessed with this slice of music. And because he was just so utterly stuck to his groove a lot of people say he was the greatest DJ they ever heard.”

Indeed he was. Whether playing in the crazed cauldron of Bounce or the bracing wilds of a hillside, he never failed to deliver a throbbing revelation of what music could do to your body and soul. Well, except when he was being held up by two people and trying to play a slipmat, but that was rare.

By 1992, what had been a curious, eccentric aberration of dance culture was now turning into an essential lifestyle choice for the savvy, young gadabout. DiY and Spiral Tribe were seeing numbers rocket at their parties, and they were soon doing them every weekend, including holding them in quarries and disused airbases. 

Ever since the 1990 Entertainments Act which penalised anyone found guilty of organising an illegal rave with a fine of £20,000, it had been a game of cat and mouse involving last-minute announcements on pirate stations or answerphones. As the scene escalated, the battle between the scowling state and the beaming bacchanals would take some nasty turns. 

“We were relentless,” Harry states. “We were on a mission. We never really knew what that mission was, but we just knew what it wasn’t. I think we would’ve died for it at one point. We would’ve laid down our lives for what we were trying to do.” 

Prevented from accessing a site at Moreton Lighthouse on the Wirral in July 1991, DiY took the snap decision to ram a line of police Land Rovers and a policeman was run over. When the full riot squad turned up, countless locals, scallies and gangsters emerged from a nearby housing estate in a surprising show of support for the party interlopers. Incredibly, the party went ahead. There then ensued what Harry’s describes in the book as: “The single most infamous, lawless and deranged event that DiY were involved in, which is quite a claim.” 

It wasn’t just the police that could ruin things. Hardened criminals would ramp up the instability by marching in and attempting to rob, selling dud pills or raiding a contribution bucket for the generator. Harry recalls a lot of enmity between the gangsters and travellers at Moreton Lighthouse. 

Spiral Tribe developed a neat trick to offset this: “When we were fluffy and colourful, we had more robberies and guns on the dancefloor,” Angelo says. “So we just painted everything black: the buses, the trucks. We shaved all our heads and wore black, and the next weekend the same wannabe-gangsters were down but were too busy dancing and having fun to cause any trouble.” He laughs: “They liked it more. It was a facade and it worked. That was our shield.” 

As what would become Castlemorton approached, Spiral Tribe were left in little doubt about what the police were capable of. On Easter Monday 1992, at the end of a three-day party in an Acton warehouse, massed ranks of riot police outside began kicking and using batons on late arrivals. 

“They’d all come in, covered in blood, screaming, into this party with a thousand people in there,” recalls Angelo. “And this went on for two-and-a-half hours. Finally, they came through the walls, smashed them down, there was water flooding everywhere. It was absolutely brutal; they were just beating everyone to the ground. They smashed all our equipment - everything - smashed the decks, kicked in all the speakers.”

So it was that, about a month later, Spiral Tribe found themselves effectively limping onto the site of what would become the largest illegal rave in history, battered and bruised and sonically depleted. 

“It’s complete bullshit that we were the loudest at Castlemorton. It’s a secret,” he laughs, “but we were the worst! Bass bins were flapping, it wasn’t good.”

Much has been written about Castlemorton and ‘Dreaming in Yellow’ covers it with aplomb. What’s clear is that this six square miles of common land in Worcestershire was where the wave finally broke. The alliance between rustic travellers and urban ravers would reach its colossal apex. Upwards of 30,000 people poured into the valley below the Malvern Hills to dance and carouse for a week, having been shunted around county lines by police eager to stop the Avon Free Festival. 

From around 3:30pm on Friday 22nd May, when the first travellers were being reported by locals, a vast swarm of vehicles roared in from all sides. By 6 o’clock it was on the national news, with the police urging young people to stay away. Which, naturally, had the opposite effect.

Alongside around eight other rigs, including Circus Normal, Bedlam and Adrenalin, DiY and Spiral Tribe assembled their gear with the quicksilver panache of an elite squad. 

“‘As far as the eye could see, a town was being assembled,” Harry writes in his book. “A town unlike any other, a town with sound systems instead of monuments, a town almost exclusively under 30 years old, a town ready to party.”

The helpless police were criticised for adopting a policy of containment. Some have theorised they did it deliberately, to affect a watershed moment in the hope the government would give them more draconian powers to stamp out this culture irrevocably.

Musically, DiY were rapidly converting fresh disciples as folk wandered passed their pristine rig. They ploughed their unique deep house furrow, with its spacious, more soulful grooves, but also took things downtempo on the sun-soaked afternoons, playing hip hop, soul, funk and even John Coltrane. 

As Harry records: “Our music at Castlemorton was probably the most effective PR we ever did. Many, many people have told us since that musically we saved their lives. They came to our tent and never left.”

At one point, a new-born baby was brought out, so Jack played ‘We Are Family’ by Sister Sledge. People held hands and some cried. 

“It was just golden.” Harry recalls. “It wasn’t really DiY crew anymore, it was a mass, huge generation really.” 

The outraged tabloids bewailed supposed excrement and rubbish everywhere, though Harry notes: “The atmosphere was less of a drug-crazed dystopia and more of a village fête – some kind of English Shangri-La.” 

Angelo laughs recalling watching footage from the police helicopter in the subsequent court trial. “Everywhere it showed was absolutely spotless! Zooming in on people picking up dog-ends and putting them into plastic bags, everywhere was just clean!”

Spiral Tribe’s unrelenting stamina had meant they were the last to leave. The police finally swooped, and 13 members were arrested. 

Lasting ten weeks and costing £4 million, the court case demands a book of its own. It involved breasts being bared in the courtroom and, according to Angelo, a senior police officer going turncoat against the government who wanted to demonise Spiral Tribe in order to push through the oppressive legislation they were already preparing. The policeman in question, Superintendent Clift, had funnelled the “36-mile convoy” onto the common that day “for humanitarian reasons” and didn’t want to be an instrument of the state. Despite his unforeseen transition into star witness for the defence, the judge and prosecutor still didn’t expect the outcome.

“When the jury said: ‘Not guilty’, the judge went deathly white… and the prosecutor went throbbing purple!” Angelo cracks up. ”He was banging the desk like he couldn’t believe it.”

As we now know, despite large-scale protests, it didn’t stop the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act coming in two years later, essentially criminalising the free party lifestyle. 

“Yeah, it was beautiful house music, but we were trying to smash the state.” Harry insists. “We were trying to confound opinions about everything. We were trying to usher in a new fucking consciousness and destroy barriers.”

Spiral Tribe decamped to spread the free party ethos to Europe, creating their large-scale Teknival events and making records. DiY kept doing small free parties, largely undisturbed in Derbyshire. They also took their brand of ‘liberation through fun’ to San Francisco, Dallas, France and Holland, and had over 80 releases through their label. 

For the central figures, the profound exhaustion of partying nearly every night for years took its toll, with addictions and rehabs a-plenty. Today, brimming with life and razor wit, Harry is the consummate survivor. A drugs worker in Wales and, as his book so eruditely testifies, a gifted writer. Simon DK is also in Wales but veiled in mist: absent from any DiY events for several years now and with zero social media profile, he seems to have become a recluse. Rick/Digs, the ‘ace face’ of DiY and never one to be thwarted by a boundary, has transitioned into Grace Sands. Living in London, her DJ career is in rude health, as a regular at Adonis and Block 9. 

At DiY’s 30th celebrations in 2019, events at the licensed venues spilled over into a full-blown, impromptu free party on the Forest Recreation Ground, right in the centre of Nottingham. Incredibly, it went undisturbed, so much so that by 6:30am, even Harry was thinking of ringing the police so he could get some sleep.

A year later, people lined up at the same spot to pay their respects to Pete Woosh. Diagnosed with cancer in 2015, he had taken a typically unorthodox approach to his treatment, solely using natural remedies. He also reinvented himself as ‘The Peaceful Ones’ and began to play immaculate, pan-genre sets and release an enormous amount of music on his Spirit Wrestlers label. 

As far as I’m concerned, Pete was one of the most inspirational and original thinkers I’ve ever met. And when I reflect on the sheer number of people who had transformative experiences to his DJing over many years, I think it’s not much of a stretch to see him as a sort of shamanic folk hero. 

Harry’s book richly evokes the bumpy ride of those volatile times and Aaron Trinder’s ground-breaking film is equally set to be a triumph. But there’s a gaping hole at the centre of all these histories you can’t easily explain to future generations. And that is how powerful and unique the pleasure was. During lockdown, I dreamt I was back dancing in the wilds, bodies in motion, spirits soaring, smiles flashing freely between strangers and friends. A divine sense of belonging, in a storm of pure chaos. 

On waking, I realised I’d forgotten - because it’s easy to forget - that dancing in tribal communion with others is better than any art, any painting or sculpture. It’s better than any song, album, book or film you may languish in. It feels like the pinnacle of living. But you forget. You forget the pleasure… the pleasure. 

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This article first appeared in issue one of Disco Pogo.

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When the world’s best artists want a former weed-smoking, drum-playing, psych rock-loving, non-weirdo to produce their latest opus, who they gonna call? James Ellis Ford of course. From jamming along to obscure electronica with a double bass player to taking the stage with Arctic Monkeys at Glastonbury, Ford’s ascent to this generation’s must-have knob twiddler might have been unexpected, but it’s certainly been deserved. So, how’s he done it? “Not being a dickhead helps,”
he tells John Burgess…

As he neatly surmises James Ford has stuck his oar into lots of different places. Since his student days in Manchester, he has worked with artists and bands, initially as an amateur – jamming along to music in clubs – and then forming the psych rock band Simian in 2000. When they splintered five years later he continued with Jas Shaw as rave-up duo Simian Mobile Disco and in 2007 produced the zeitgeist-seizing, Mercury Prize-winning debut by Klaxons. 

Ford has since been involved in a myriad of Mercury-nominated albums producing most of Arctic Monkeys’ output, Jessie Ware, Foals, Florence & The Machine and – this year alone – helming the recent work from bona fide legends Depeche Mode, Pet Shop Boys and Blur. Not one to get lost in this starry sky and 23 years into this business, Ford was deemed ‘One To Watch’ by The Guardian in April on account of his first solo release ‘The Hum’. 

Inviting us into his home studio in Clapton, east London, for an afternoon chat in late-June, the super affable Ford brews us a cup of tea that rests upon a tray recently used by Carly Rae Jepsen and Perry Farrell. Able to play 18 different instruments with varying degrees of competence, a flute rests on an analogue synth next to an array of guitars. We discuss a lovely piece of vintage synth hardware which Ford claims was the type used to give R2D2 a voice. Apparently Martin Gore has three of these Ark 26100’s so he can play chords on it. 

We are both fresh back from the Glastonbury festival when we meet, Ford shyly boasting of the frills of being an artist – you can park near the stage you appear on for the weekend and get the hell off site with relative ease… 

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At Glastonbury you played two sets starting off on the Park Stage…

“(Interjecting) I started off on the Pyramid Stage actually! I did three tracks and keyboards with Arctic Monkeys. I was just going to play ‘Four Out of Five’ but then, Alex Turner said 15 minutes before they went on: ‘You may as well stay on for the next few songs.’ I was like: ‘I don’t know your songs though?’ So, ten minutes before I listened to them on Spotify and I worked out the chords. And then the first time I ever played these songs I was on the Pyramid Stage which was mad. My own gigs were fine. We played pretty early doors on the Park Stage on the Saturday and up at the Crow’s Nest that evening. Me and a couple of people in the band thought it would be a good idea to do a microdot beforehand. Halfway through the gig we started tripping.”

Did that change the music at all? 

“Maybe it made it a bit more jammy. Glastonbury is my favourite place. My mum took me when I was six and then I went every year in my teenage years. It’s partly why I got into music. I suppose at festivals you see the way music can affect people. I remember seeing Pulp when they filled in for The Stone Roses. Seeing bands on that scale on the Pyramid Stage, it gives you a feeling how important music is to people.”

What do you think people were expecting from you when you played live? I knew there was live sax on the album, but I thought you may also just be doing it all
off a laptop. 

“I sort of made the album in here on my own, just because I had a bit more free time than usual and a bit of impetus to do something. My management played it to a few people and Warp wanted to put it out so then I thought: ‘OK then I had better get a live show together.’ I did consider doing a few little shows on my own, but then I thought I should at least try a band out, see how I enjoy it; get lots of friends involved who can pick it up pretty quickly.”

How did you end up in bands like Toolshed with Graham Massey of 808 State? You’re nearly 20 years younger than him.

“I started playing drums in clubs. Just for pure enthusiasm at this (Manchester) club called Head Funk. It would be me and Sneaky, this double bass player, and then Andy Votel or Mr Scruff would be DJing.” 

You were like Shovell from M People jamming over club music? 

“(Laughs) Yes, it literally was like playing bongos with sax in a club. And then I think Graham Massey saw us and he asked us to play and tour with 808 State. That was the first time I ever went to America playing to the Day-Glo candy raver scene with them. At the same time, in Manchester, Kieran Hebden was around our weird student house. This was around the time of the Twisted Nerve stuff – you know Badly Drawn Boy and Andy Votel – so I was hearing weird psych records and all of that. It was a great space to be in at the time. I met Jas (Shaw) and Alex (MacNaghten), within the first few weeks of arriving in Manchester. I answered a notice looking for a drummer and went into their bedroom in student halls and they were there with long hair playing Primus and smoking weed. We started a band which eventually turned into Simian with the addition of Simon (Lord) the singer. We got signed and moved to London.”

Could you play 18 instruments by that point? 

“I’ve always been fairly gung-ho at trying things. Looking back, I’m thankful I grew up in a little town called Leek in Staffordshire as there wasn’t anything to do there. But it had this pretty vibey pub rock scene. I was just surrounded by good musicians from a very early age. We’d all just be playing in different bands, above pubs. It was a way to drink underage and we’d change the name of the band every few weeks. That was like my teenage years: taking mushrooms, drinking cider and playing in pub bands. My dad had a basement, so I had like a crap drum kit and a bass, a four-track tape machine, this maxi Korg synth. As a mid-teen I was making squelchy noises into the four-track and playing drums over it. I thought I was in like, Head Hunters, thinking this is literally the best thing ever. I just wanted to do this as much as I could. If I had to pick anything, I’m a bass player. I’m not like, brilliant on anything but I’m good enough to play most things. I’ve got a decent ear. Just being in the studio every day, I get to play a lot. It kind of helps you win trust. Because you can talk to musicians on a musician level.”

Was this solo album a lockdown project?

“It was already in the works. The main reason was I had built this studio in my house, so it’s given me a bit of space. The other big thing was Jas getting sick (Jas was diagnosed with the rare disease AL Amyloidosis in 2018) which put a hard end to touring – and with a pandemic even put a hard end to us being in a room together. Jas is such a brilliant person to be around, and he would come up with ideas and had this energy, so there was a hole left. I just put that energy into doing some stuff on my own. There was always this thing of: what happens if I don’t collaborate?”

You’ve worked with Gorillaz twice, so leave the special guest collabs to them?

“Yes, that’s the thing, I actually remember doing the second SMD record, we did this guest album, but we went overboard and had a guest on every song and lost our own identity within that. The whole point of me doing my own thing is to put my own flag in the ground, because I’ve made so many different types of records. It felt like a good idea to do something for myself under my own terms. It’s hard making music on your own. With Jas or with one other person, you’ve always got this kind of sounding board. When you’re on your own, it’s difficult, you get lost in the mire quite easily. But I was up for a challenge. And, you know, I got through it, and I made a thing.” 

How do you know when to stop? 

“I think time is the limiting factor in a lot of these projects. I always listen back to something I’ve made and think I could have done that better. It’s harder on your own. Because you’re not coming to a consensus, like everyone’s energy for this is dissipating. You’ve got to finish it off quick before it gets put in the bin. I’m fortunate that I’m busy. I’ve got more projects than time. So really the thing that stopped it is that the next project was coming up.” 

Going back 15 years ago to when Simian Mobile Disco became your primary thing. Do you look back on that rave era fondly? 

“Yeah. I had a really good time, there was something in the air. The second Simian (band) album was really difficult. I felt like we were out of time with what was going on. It felt like we were pushing against lots of closed doors.”

Did it feel weird having the door opened by the Justice remix of ‘We Are Your Friends’? 

“Yeah, but the whole dance thing going on looked really fun. It just seemed like what we were doing with Simian seemed quite serious. This whole melding of dance and rock music was happening with bands like LCD Soundsystem. So, it was an obvious thing to move towards. And then when that remix happened it was like letting off this flare. There was loads of opportunities to DJ everywhere and travel. We had a slightly weird relationship with the remix, where we resented it slightly. We would never really play it DJing, we’d play our version because we thought it was better. We were booked at clubs off the back of it. But then that sort of Ed Banger sound turned into what ultimately became Skrillex, and all that sort of stuff. We wanted to do the opposite to that. So, we were always sort of pushing against it in an odd way.” 

I remember people turning up expecting ‘We Are Your Friends’ and you’d play deep techno. You could see the crowd going: ‘Oh, we weren’t expecting this.’ But then you also weren’t techno enough to be playing Berghain.

“Yeah, we were never going to be accepted as like fucking Richie Hawtin or whoever. In our heads, that’s the music that we were into more. So, we caught ourselves in this middle zone.”

But there’s an element where you were out playing techno, but you’d make a largely choral album like ‘Murmurations’. 

“I think we’ve always been fairly contrary. There is an instinct in making music to not go with the flow and to try and push against it or go somewhere different with it.”

Like the Arctic Monkeys on ‘Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino’ after ‘AM’? 

“Well, kind of, yes. Career wise, you’re probably better off just sticking to what people are expecting of you. But you’ve got to push yourself, haven’t you, otherwise you end up like Coldplay, a big stadium entity. It’s a funny line to tread.”

You became a producer around that time as well with albums for Test Icicles, Mystery Jets, and then obviously big success with the Klaxons debut? 

“I’ve always been interested in what it takes to make a record, how’d you make that sound? So, there was a bleak point where Simian split up, but I was definitely like: I’m going to fucking keep going. I’ve come this far; I’m going to take on the rent of the studio. I’m just going to try and be a producer and see what happens. I’ve never been to engineering school and am not really trained, but I knew my way around my little system and I produced a bunch of friends’ bands. Me and Jas were DJing so that kept us ticking over. We played a gig at this night called Everything You Do Is A Baboon at The Old Blue Last (in Shoreditch). And the guy who put it on was: ‘Ah I can’t pay you. But I’m a music lawyer. And if you need any free legal advice, let me know.’ I remember going for this free legal advice. And it turned out to be Oli Isaacs. I wanted him to get me out of my old management contract – which he did – and then once he’d done that, he asked if I needed a manager. He was pretty tapped into what was going on. I think maybe he introduced me to Klaxons or at least tipped me off about them. One thing led to another and eventually Test Icicles happened. That was on Domino, and I met Laurence Bell and he’d liked what I’d done on that so he introduced me to Arctic Monkeys. There was just a bunch of different threads that happened at once. Suddenly you’re this new producer. Once you’ve got a bigger thing through the door – like for me it was Klaxons or the Arctic Monkeys’ second record. Since then I haven’t been short of work.”

Back then why do you think people took a chance on you? 

“You have a meeting with them initially. So, there is a whole bit which is: ‘Can I hang out with this guy?’ ‘Do I trust this guy?’ ‘Is he a fucking weirdo?’ The social aspect of it is quite important. And I feel like I’m able to read a room in terms of how people are feeling and even just by having broad taste, so I can get down to brass tacks with people about a certain type of music and be able to back it up. It’s a very multifaceted thing. But yeah, not being a dickhead helps.”

When you work with an artist do you suggest a route, if they’re not quite sure where to go? Or do you try and harness something out of them they probably don’t know is there?

“The process often gets proposed. ‘Do you want to work with these guys?’ And then I’ll get some demos. I’ll probably get an idea in my head; this album should sound like this. Then you meet them and sometimes that matches up and it feels like your instincts are heading in the same direction. Sometimes I’ve gotten into projects where it doesn’t match up and you can convince them that this is a good idea. And depending on their personalities, they’ll agree, and then they’ll get into it during the process. I’ve also had personal arrogance in the past. I think it was hubris that made me do a Mumford (& Sons) record. I can make this into something really cool. And actually, in the moment, you can’t change it that much. If you want to be realistic about it, it’s other people’s songs. For the most part, even with the Monkeys, I can’t tell them what kind of record to make. At the end of the day, Alex can only write the songs that he writes in that moment. I then help him present that in the best way possible.”

Can you remember what Alex Turner said to you about making ‘Tranquility…’? Did he come to you and say this is the route we’re going down.

“Because me and Alex go such a long way back, I was in touch with him all the way since ‘AM’. So, I saw the transition, it didn’t seem that weird to me. But it seemed like a massive departure for most people. They’ve been on such an extreme journey from their first one, through all these different phases. And I still think he’s making the best music of his career. But you’re either along for the journey or you’re not and some people get grumpy, because he’s not making ‘I Bet You Look Good On the Dancefloor’ again. He’s not that guy anymore, he couldn’t write that song even if he tried. Before this last album (‘The Car’) he literally came back off tour and said: ‘I want to make a more outward facing thing that we can play at these big gigs.’ And he went away and then he basically couldn’t write any of those. So, he wrote an album about how he can’t really write those songs anymore. You know, like saying goodbye to that phase of his life.”

How does it feel when Neil Tennant or Dave Gahan walk into your bedroom studio, what goes through your mind?

“I’ve been in quite a lot of those situations now. Neil and Chris are so genuinely sweet and lovely. They don’t put on a lot of airs and graces or anything. It’s only really when they start telling you some stories about Bowie and fucking Liza Minnelli and Trevor Horn. The moments that they’ve been part of throughout history are very important cultural moments for me. Same with Depeche, same with Blur, there are a few moments where you zoom out and go, actually, I’m in a room with these people. But like in the nitty gritty, you sort of forget about it. It’s a funny thing seeing people be famous. At dinner they just get bothered and it’s actually a massive pain. It’s an added-on bit to fame that they probably weren’t really striving for.”

How did the Depeche album differ without Fletch because wasn’t he a bit of an editor?

“Yes, from my short experience of being in the studio with him it felt like he had this sort of fans’ view of what people wanted. He’d be very vocal about: ‘That bit’s great’ or ‘That bit is too long’, you know? The dynamic between the three of them: Fletch, being Martin’s old school friend, Dave kind of wanting to do more writing and looking for Martin’s approval and Martin being very protective of his writing space. Martin is quite conflict averse. So often Fletch would step in on Martin’s behalf and get into it with Dave. So, there was this whole dynamic that was just really odd and strange to be around. I just remember that album (2017’s ‘Spirit’) being really difficult to make. There was one bit where Martin was going to walk off the project. The manager, called me at three in the morning to talk to me about it and me and him – with Martin and Dave – sat down and I was tasked with being like a marriage guidance counsellor. How am I in this situation?

“I wasn’t expecting to work with them again, and then I got a call to do another one and I thought, you know, why not? Then Fletch passed away unexpectedly and I expected it to be called off. Martin and Dave agreed that they wanted to carry on. It was literally the polar opposite to the last one. It was just me, Martin and Dave and Marta (Salogni) the engineer in Martin’s house. Martin and Dave had to talk to each other for the first time in a long time, and they were like long lost brothers, reconnecting, and it was just very sweet and melancholy. I was sitting there in this big veranda having long, leisurely lunches. And they were telling stories of the old Basildon days and it was honestly really lovely. That energy made the recording process very easy. I’m very glad it happened in light of the first one, because it sort of repaired a lot for me as well.”

How do you think your approach might differ to the producers Pet Shop Boys have worked with before like Trevor Horn and Stuart Price?

“I’m fascinated in people’s approaches, because it’s obviously a huge part of what I do. Trevor Horn is a hero. I kept digging, trying to get them to tell me stories about how he did this bit and that bit. But really, at the end of the day, you’re in this situation at that point in time, and Neil and Chris have great demos. So, a lot of times I’ll go through and make it sound like I want it to sound. They were fans of The Last Shadow Puppets, which was a surprise, they love that Scott Walker thing. So, we’ve gone in pretty hard on the string arrangements. Neil and Chris are great writers. They’re very switched on in terms of new music. Taste-wise they’re very on point.” 

You worked with Damon on Gorillaz, is that how the Blur gig came along? 

“Yes, but I also worked with Graham (Coxon) on his band The Waeve. Damon and Graham are some of the best writers this country has ever had. It was quite chaotic as Damon has a very short attention span. He’ll generate loads of ideas all the time. But like the minute he gets bored, it’s liable to just get thrown out the window. Graham is the same, he’ll come up with 20 great things on guitar. I’ll say: ‘That one is really good, let’s do that part.’ He’ll start and then literally a minute into it all the pedals come on and we’ll be off in a different direction. It’s like herding cats. Damon would just play half a piano take and just stand up and walk off halfway through. As a fan, I think it’s as good an album (‘The Ballad of Darren’) as they could have made at this point in their career. I think it’s really strong.”

Do you ever take something from one artist to another like when you did the previous Jessie Ware album you were immersed in that early-80s disco sound – does that then influence the next project? 

“Because I do lots of different types I’m always consciously trying to separate them as much as possible, like push a particular project as far down its own wormhole as it can go so it inhabits its own world. I’ve been doing a lot of strings recently so there has been that thread going through quite a few things. The thing that carries between the projects is experience. The more things I do, the more relaxed I’m getting. You look at someone like Rick Rubin and I think that you get to be that relaxed in that situation, purely by having done it a lot. I feel like being a producer, it’s something you can get better at as you get older, as long as you stay in touch with what’s going on and maintain that kind of playfulness and enthusiasm. The benefit of experience goes a long way.” 

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This article first appeared in issue four of Disco Pogo

Or, what happened when a bunch of “shit dance bands” (to quote the always innovative Liam Gallagher) bothered the charts and took to the stages of ‘Top of the Pops’. Featuring The Orb, The Grid, Bizarre Inc, Orbital and Altern 8, Harold Heath gets the lowdown on electronic music’s Thursday night dance with the devil…

As UK dance music exploded into the mainstream in the early-90s, the country’s clubbers began to experience a collective discomfort each Thursday evening as techno acts started to appear on ‘Top of the Pops’. Suddenly, music you’d likely last heard through a decent sound system, uniting a crowd of pinger-ed up ravers at 3am, was being ripped from its original context and played to your family in the front room at teatime. 

For the UK’s early techno acts, while a ‘TOTP’ appearance was an essential business move, it was often a macabre musical charade, a surreal trip into the bloated belly of the corporate beast where competent live electronic acts were forced to mime, a world of furiously stressed producers, backstage Gallagher-related spats and where Dot Cotton from ‘EastEnders’ was seemingly always just around the corner. And they all faced the same issue: how to transfer the raw revolutionary energy of their records and the transcendent group-communion of the rave to an outdated light entertainment TV programme that showcased lukewarm pop and where the mere presence of balloons was considered wild. 

So, how did Phil and Paul Hartnoll from Orbital, Bizarre Inc’s Dean Meredith, Richard Norris from The Grid, The Orb’s Alex Paterson and Mark Archer of Altern 8 deal with a night on ‘The Pops’…

Orbital

Phil and Paul Hartnoll went on ‘Top of the Pops’ a few times over the years, the first of two acts we spoke to who got banned from the show. Their debut appearance was in March 1990 with their fully certified classic ‘Chime’, which hit the national charts while Paul was still working washing up in a pizza restaurant. 

“Us, we played live,” says Phil, “and that was the first problem, because ‘TOTP’ was all mimey, mimey, mimey, so we were like fish out of water… We were going: ‘Please, please, please let us play live, because we can just give you a stereo out of our mixer, that’s it, job done.’ But they weren’t having any of it. 

“It would have been a much better performance because we would be doing things; we wanted them to film us turning knobs and pushing buttons, close up on the 303 and we felt really awkward trying to mime. So, we thought, well, fuck that then! At the time you weren’t allowed to have anything political on your T-shirts on the BBC, and [designer] Grant Fulton who used to do our artwork made us these T-shirts. I had ‘No’ and Paul had ‘Poll Tax’! That was probably the best thing about being on ‘TOTP’, getting away with political slogans on our T-shirts… Once we did it we got banned, but we didn’t get banned for the T-shirts, we got banned for being boring!”

Orbital were accompanied on their ‘TOTP’ debut by a lone silver-jacketed dancer, who apparently was one of the record company's office employees hastily enlisted for the task. “Having to mime and being forced to have a dancer was the worst thing about appearing on ‘TOTP’," Paul recalls. "She was great, but we didn’t see the point, but the BBC at the time couldn’t handle a band that didn’t have a lead singer and insisted on having a dancer instead.” 

“We asked for trestle tables from the canteen and set up on those using the boxes of the gear as we were uncomfortable with the posh keyboard stands they had supplied. We didn’t use them on stage at the time, so it was a case of making it feel like how it would look when we did play live… it was a bit of a weird mix of 'Is this really happening?' and 'This isn’t what I thought it would be like’. The small studio audience that always looked much bigger on TV were standing around confused and trying to like what we were doing!”

They were introduced by Orbital fan, Ibiza raver and UK house early adopter DJ Gary Davies, who had outsmarted BBC Radio 1’s no-instrumentals-during-prime-time rule by playing ‘Chime’ under his daily competition. “Gary Davies was a star!” confirms Paul. 

Nice Orbital ‘TOTP’ sidenote: Phil’s childminder at the time used to play Phil’s kid a video recording of Orbital on ‘TOTP’, who were swiftly followed on the programme by Snap! performing ‘The Power’ and for years, Phil’s kid thought his Dad was in Snap!

Altern 8

After dissolving their techno alias Nexus 21, Chris Peat and Mark Archer’s Altern 8 burst into the UK pop charts with ‘Infiltrate 202’ and then ‘Activ 8’ in the second half of 1991. As such, the duo suddenly found themselves, according to the breathlessly shouty ‘TOTP’ presenter: “Breaking in at number 11 with one of the hardest sounds around!”

In 1991, the BBC had switched from insisting acts mime on TOTP to insisting on live performances, so when Altern 8 appeared to perform ‘Activ 8’, they used a live vocalist and MC to recreate the various samples on the record, although wisely avoided employing a young child to perform its ‘Top one, nice one, get sorted’ refrain. 

“The worst thing about our ‘TOTP’ appearances,” Archer says, “was when the producer changed and they insisted on everyone singing live. This caused problems when dance records used sampled vocals and you had to try and get someone suitable to sing for you. I wasn’t happy with our first performance but because we weren’t a big name we weren’t allowed to re-record our track.”

Altern 8’s infamous amphet-telly tubby/hazmat-suit chic went down well at the BBC: “We were told that there was a meeting at the BBC," Archer explains, "where someone who was representing us tried to impress the producers by stating how we were going to look different from other groups of the same genre who had already appeared. We had to change what we did each time we went on TOTP to make sure we didn’t get boring, so I think our accidental image was a good selling point for the first performance.”

He continues: “It was all very bewildering to be honest, being in the same studio as loads of actual pop stars like Tina Turner and Cher, bumping into Dot Cotton in the canteen… Being there was totally surreal.”

Fun ‘TOTP’ Altern 8 fact: They were briefly banned from the show in 1992, apparently because, as Archer says, “...in an interview I complained about the programme!”

The Grid 

When Dave Ball and Richard Norris first appeared on ‘TOTP’ as The Grid with ‘Crystal Clear’, they were already an accomplished live electronic act. On stage the duo manned their chunky Moog and Oberheim systems, ably assisted by a percussionist and sax player and, as Norris recalls, “secret weapon and legendary Manchester door person” MC/singer Elton Jackson, who for their ‘TOTP’ debut was resplendent in (John) Galliano and (Vivienne) Westwood and perched on a massive plush throne. 

“The producers were a bit unsure of all the new dance acts suddenly hitting the Top 20, as many weren’t traditional bands as such,” Norris says. “We were a little more of a band set-up, since we’d toured extensively, so we thought we’d be fine. However, in one break I sneaked into the producer's control room, and he sat next to me, not sure who I was. Looking at the rest of the band below, randomly jumping up and down, the producer suddenly had a bit of an episode. “WHAT ARE THEY DOING??? WHY AREN’T THEY DANCING?” he shouted, while going a deep shade of red. “AND WHERE’S THE ONE ON THE LEFT GONE???” I replied that I was right here and would pass on the feedback to the band. The room went a bit quiet after that.

“They were all shot in Elstree, next door to the ‘EastEnders’ set... It was nice sitting on the bench in the square, pretty unreal. As was seeing Dot Cotton sitting with a fag chatting to that big bloke from the Do It All adverts in the bar."

The Orb

The Orb's ‘TOTP’ debut famously featured Dr Alex Paterson and Kris Weston responding to the BBC’s insistence on miming by not bringing instruments and refusing to perform. Instead, playing a vastly trimmed-down 7-inch radio mix (you can hear it on their recently released Best-Of ‘Orboretum: The Orb Collection’) of their 39-minute epic ‘Blue Room’, the pair dressed like spangled astronauts playing alien chess, one holding a fluffy sheep, the other an orb, all while some trippy dolphin visuals played behind them. 

Neatly avoiding the BBC no drinking on set rules by decanting bottles of brandy into coke cans, Paterson recalls this didn't go down well with the camera crew and set the tone for the rest of the day: “They really didn’t want us to play chess for a start. And we didn’t want to take any instruments which really pissed them off. And then we turned up drunk and E’d off our tits dressed like spacemen with a film of dolphins floating around behind us…”

The BBC attempted to spice up the performance with some spacey visual effects that made it look like the performance was underwater which was perhaps why they insisted the pair didn’t move while filming. “We were just having a laugh,” Paterson smiles, “but they were all like: ‘Don’t Move! If You Move One More Time We’re Gonna Take You Off The Set!’” 

Aside from bumping into Take That backstage which eventually led to The Orb producing a tripped-out reggae version of the old Bee Gees ‘I Started a Joke’ tune for Robbie Williams (Paterson: “Yeah, there you go, work that one out!”), he also remembers: “I saw the drummer from Def Leppard. Def Leppard! Didn’t see Dot Cotton but we did have a Dot Cotton microdot sheet…”

Bizarre Inc

Bizarre Inc appeared on ‘Top of the Pops’ several times in the early-90s. “It was something you grew up with and suddenly you are asked to appear on there," the band's Dean Meredith remembers, "but it also felt like you were betraying the scene, so it was a double-edged sword scenario. Things were definitely changing as the scene was moving into the charts. It happens with music culture, whether it’s flower power 60s beat, punk, disco, new wave, electro, acid house etc."

Looking back, Meredith admits the band’s appearances look a bit lame today. “I don’t think it transferred well, really we just danced around behind our 909 and samplers! We had live vocals, but the music was on a backing track. Electronic music is never really that exciting to watch in the raw and there are only a few I would want to watch live also performing with computers, sequencers and drum machines, because things tend to go wrong. Remember New Order doing ‘Blue Monday’? But that’s the fun I guess, anything can malfunction. In fact, there was one particular performance when we had these stands that had the gear suspended by chains and one fell apart during recording. They said: ‘Don’t worry that will be edited out.’ It wasn’t unfortunately!

“The best thing was the BBC canteen and having the crack with the other bands. I remember Bryan Ferry’s manager saying to me: ‘I like your shoes, will have to get a pair for Bryan!’” 

There’s a brief Richard Norris anecdote that neatly sums up the early-90s ‘TOTP’ experience for techno acts: “When Oasis were first on,” he says, “we’d been on a couple of times so knew the ropes a bit. Liam was getting a bit mouthy with Grid percussionist Pablo and a standoff ensued. Liam backed down, wisely, which is remarkable, given that Pablo was dressed all in white, wearing a white cowboy hat. Over in the bar, Elton was chatting to Noel as he knew him from Manchester clubbing days, when Liam came up to the table, shouted “Shit Dance Band!!” in Elton’s face, then stormed off. We didn’t get that reaction from Mariah Carey. Or Whigfield. Or Shaggy. Maybe we won’t be getting the support slot on the forthcoming tour after all, eh?”

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UK Techno and Rave Early-90s ‘TOTP’ Appearances, here’s the essential data at a glance:

Orbital: ‘Chime’ (1990) 

Famous people spotted: Neneh Cherry chatting to Boy George

Encountered Dot Cotton? No

Banned: Yes

Podiums: One, begrudgingly

Props/special items: Trestle tables, No Poll Tax T-shirts

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The Grid: ‘Crystal Clear’ (1993)

Famous people spotted: Elton John, that big bloke from the Do It All adverts

Encountered Dot Cotton? Yes

Banned: No

Podiums: None

Props/special items: Red throne

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Altern 8: ‘Activ 8’ (1991)

Famous people spotted: Tina Turner, Kurt Cobain, Cher 

Encountered Dot Cotton? Yes

Banned: Yes

Podiums: None

Props/special items: Branded keyboard lecterns, silver stilt dude

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Bizarre Inc: ‘Playing With Knives’ (1991)

Famous people spotted: Bryan Ferry’s manager

Encountered Dot Cotton? No

Banned: No

Podiums: Two

Props/special items: Double-keyboard set-up, rave ponytail

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The Orb: ‘Blue Room’ (1992)

Famous people spotted: Def Leppard’s drummer, Take That

Encountered Dot Cotton? No, but had a sheet of microdot LSD called Dot Cottons

Banned: No

Podiums: None

Props/special items: Alien chess set, stuffed sheep, an orb

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This article first appeared in issue six of Disco Pogo.

From the highs to the lows and back to the highs, music has always sustained Mark Rae...

Mark Rae can vividly remember when he first realised music was powerful. In his suburban 1970s lounge in Northumberland, he would watch his parents play seven-inches on the family stereo and dance joyously. He also recalls his dad listening to the car radio and coming alive when a song from his youth was aired. “‘Summer in the City’ would come on and he’d sing-along and go nuts,” he smiles. “He’d bang his screwdriver and go: ‘Listen to that son.’ That was my introduction. Music is powerful. Music changes my dad’s mood to the point where he’s almost losing it, smacking the steering wheel to ‘Mr Blue Sky’. I saw that energy.”

Those epiphanal properties – music’s dynamism, the happiness it elicits, the carefree abandon of just dancing – sustained Rae through childhood into his teenage years in the 1980s when his catholic musical education included both The Smiths and Mantronix; LL Cool J and Loose Ends. He harks back to hip hop’s explosion in the UK but also house music’s first flush of youth – he would frequent the Leadmill in Sheffield where Winston and Parrot ruled supreme.

“I remember Graeme Park playing hip hop 12-inches: Super Lover Cee and Casanova Rud. That was an exciting time, which I kept in my heart when Grand Central and Fat City started. It was like: no, this story of dance music is all these elements. It’s go go, it’s hip hop, it’s reggae, it’s soul, it’s house, it’s all this stuff. And I never let go of it.”

Rae fortuitously landed in Manchester to study in 1987. “What a time to arrive!” He immediately took himself off to the city’s famous music shop, Johnny Roadhouse, where he bought a pair of Garrard belt-driven turntables and a Realistic mixer set in a black wooden box. He covered the decks in talcum powder (“Eventually I worked out that you needed slipmats, not talcum powder, which was a good breakthrough”) and he’d practice mixing Mantronix’s ‘Who is It?’ for hours on end.

“My friends would say: ‘Mark, are you not going to go out and do something social?’ ‘No, I’m practicing.’ Because every time I went out, it would be loads of Manchester students in ripped denim going ‘Hang the DJ’. I was like: ‘You’re not hanging me. I’m practicing.’” He listened religiously to Stu Allan on Sunday nights when the influential DJ would spin house, hip hop, soul and more on Piccadilly Radio and then head into Spin Inn to buy the sounds he’d heard. He occasionally frequented The Haçienda – he loved all the Warp bleep stuff and anything that was deep and trippy – but his head was really elsewhere.

“I remember being there one time and just telling my girlfriend at the time how much I loved my mum and saying we needed to go to the PSV to listen to reggae in the back room.”

It was this musical melting pot that led to Fat City, first the record shop in Affleck’s Palace market and then the label, and eventually the Grand Central imprint. The influential compilations ‘Frying the Fat’ and ‘Central Heating’ introduced the world to a collection of talent from Northern England including Aim, Mr Scruff, Only Child and Andy Votel, with the music traversing the hip hop, funk, soul, dub, jazz and house worlds that Rae espoused. 

At the same time, Rae hooked up with his production partner Steve Christian. The pair were working in studios in Ducie House, when production engineer Christian walked past Rae’s room where the DJ was experimenting with a sample from Cherrelle’s ‘I Didn’t Mean to Turn You On’. “He said: ‘Why is that a 17-bar verse? and that’s out of tune.’ I was like, but it sounds good.”

The pair hit it off and by way of Rae’s energy and ideas allied to Christian’s production, engineering and musical skills, the duo initiated a successful partnership. “When those two worlds clash, they can be a fantastic combination because it’s control and wild energy; musical skill and musical sort of experimentation,” Rae explains. “I’d turn up with my bag of records and say: ‘Put these Biz Markie drums underneath this Weather Report sample. And then put these Paul Horn horns on there…’ Steve would be: ‘Hold on a minute.’ Slowing me down. I’d be in there on the coffee and the squidgy black going do this, do that. The energy was immense.”

Alongside the duo’s superb two albums, ‘Northern Sulphuric Soul’ and ‘Sleepwalking’ – across which the pair collaborated with the likes of Bobby Womack, The Pharcyde, Jeru the Damaja and Jungle Brothers – Rae was also a businessman, responsible for paying 20 people’s wages and clearing samples. “It was a lot. I used to have night terror from the stress.”

And much like Rae can recall the moment music’s alchemical powers were first revealed, he can also remember when its devious counterpoint – the business – spelled the end of his first act. In 2006, a disputed run-in with the Mechanical Copyright Protection Society, in which the MCPS argued Grand Central owed £80,000, forced Grand Central into voluntary administration. “I was breaking,” he recalls. “Not just emotionally, but psychologically. That’s something that I still have to deal with now. Think about what you’re trying to do, making emotional music and in the end it’s the accountants that kill you.” A month later he emigrated to America.

“It’s a big risk to move to Los Angeles when your business has failed,” he says. “But that’s neurodiversity and self-belief mixed together. I went there and my mental health couldn’t survive. I tried so hard, but everything came to a head, which was good because it revealed my true self.”

For three years he clung on, playing football with Robbie Williams and DJing with the likes of DJ Harvey and “the lovely” Heidi Lawden. In 2008, he was eventually diagnosed with bipolar (something he only publicly revealed earlier this year). “In the end, I realised I was too British, too English, too Northern,” he says. “I loved the people, but there wasn’t enough psychogeography to feed my inner creative self. I didn’t belong there.”

Upon his return to the UK, a new Rae & Christian album, ‘Mercury Rising’ was released in 2013. Since then, the partnership has remained dormant. “Steve is a brilliant musician and producer, but… put it this way I have no choice but to do art to survive mentally. It’s not so much of a demand for him. I’m quite jealous of that. He told me the last time he turned on his studio was when we did ‘Mercury Rising’. But who knows what might happen. The doors are always open in life.”

These days, Rae has cultivated a second act as a writer. He wrote his autobiography, ‘Northern Sulphuric Soulboy’ in 2016 (“I wanted to capture my story before I forgot it”), which was followed by his first novel, ‘The Caterpillar Club’ in 2021. His second novel, ‘New Town Ghosts’, a heart-warming tale of childhood friendship set during the long hot summer of 1976, is out now. A third book will complete the semi-autobiographical story of Simon Radcliffe. An accompanying emotionally-charged album complements the novel, much like similar efforts for his first two books.

Now living in Tunbridge Wells with his wife and son (whose delightful art adorns the cover of ‘New Town Ghosts’) Rae is content. “I’ve found my rhythm for this time of life,” he says. He’s also found a new battle: to represent neurodiversity in a positive light.

“A lot of the people I work with in the music industry are touched by this pie chart of difference and as I’m getting older, it’s my job to show that it is a power and a strength and that in your dark moments, remember there are people who have guided themselves to a positive outcome from the difference.”

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This article first appeared in issue seven of Disco Pogo.

In the era of SoundCloud, Mixcloud, YouTube, the commercial DJ mix no longer has the cachet it once did. In the 90s and 00s, however, they were one of the defining aspects of electronic dance music, helping to establish names like Kruder & Dorfmeister, David Holmes, Carl Cox, 2manydjs and co. Ben Cardew reflects upon this golden age for mixing it up and discovers that thanks to ongoing series like DJ-Kicks and fabric presents there’s still life in the concept…

‍Two bottles of cheap red wine, a pasta recipe from Jamie Oliver and Kruder & Dorfmeister’s ‘DJ-Kicks’: ​​these were the three key ingredients of any student dinner party in the late-90s. That’s how big DJ mix albums were back then: utterly mainstream musical releases to tap an absent toe to, as you awaited your mate’s vegetarian lasagne. 

And why not? Dance music was booming; CD sales stratospheric; and DJ culture was everywhere. Mix series like Journeys by DJ and !K7’s DJ-Kicks were household names and everyone had their favourite after-party gem or dinner table destroyer.

In 2025, mixes are more prominent than ever. SoundCloud, Mixcloud, YouTube and Apple Music are heaving with them. Mixes.db, the self-proclaimed “database for DJ sets, podcasts, radio shows and more”, has 301,000-plus mix pages and the number is rising every day. 

For the commercially released DJ mix album, though, 2025 tells a different story. Journeys by DJ is but a memory; and, while DJ-Kicks and fabric presents keep faithfully on, there hasn’t been a mix album that has gone really mainstream since Caspa and Rusko’s ‘FABRICLIVE.37’ in 2007.

You could argue that the DJ mix album has become a victim of its own success. Recorded mixes have existed for as long as DJs: from hip hop mixtapes in the 1970s, to Jamaican sound system cassettes, to people recording The Wizard off Detroit radio in the 1980s. In the UK, the legendary ‘Street Sounds Electro’ compilations were an early example of a commercial mix, although the practice really took off with the tape pack recordings from raves, which were ubiquitous in the early-90s.

As the decade progressed, the mix album became increasingly legit. ‘Mixmag Live Volume 1’, with Carl Cox and Dave Seaman, was released in 1992; the Journeys by DJ series launched in 1993 and DJ-Kicks followed in 1995. Soon the classic releases started to add up: Laurent Garnier’s ‘Mixmag Live Volume 19’ and ‘Coldcut’s Journeys By DJ (70 Minutes Of Madness)’ in 1995; Jeff Mills’ ‘Live at the Liquid Room, Tokyo’ and Kruder & Dorfmeister’s ‘DJ-Kicks’ in 1996; 2manydjs’ ‘As Heard On Radio Soulwax Pt. 2’ in 2002; we all have our favourites. And some of them became very popular indeed, with Kruder & Dorfmeister’s ‘The K&D Sessions’ apparently selling one million copies worldwide. 

With commercial success, went artist triumph. For some artists – Kruder & Dorfmeister, LTJ Bukem – a commercial mix CD arguably became their defining release. Coldcut are UK house pioneers and legendary beats producers. But what is the one record you would pull out to show people what they do? ‘People Hold On’? Or ’70 Minutes of Madness’?

For artists, too, these releases were hugely important. Coldcut’s Jonathan More says that ’70 Minutes of Madness’ was like “a validation” for the group, who had been regularly spinning two-hour sets on their Kiss FM show Solid Steel with PC (Patrick Carpenter) and Strictly Kev (Kevin Foakes), as well as in clubs. More, Coldcut partner Matt Black, Carpenter and Foakes spent “four days to a week” preparing ’70 Minutes of Madness’, although commercial concerns proved a headache. Sony apparently refused to license Coldcut’s own 1989 hit ‘People Hold On’ for the album, scuppering a planned ‘Doctor Who’/‘Planet Rock’/‘People Hold On’ section. 

The mix’s fêted use of Coldcut’s own ‘Beats and Pieces’ at 45rpm, meanwhile, was inspired by an incident at a club in the West Country. “Kev and I got asked to do a club in Cornwall somewhere,” More relates. “We got a bunch of trip hop and slow beats and hip hop. We rocked up at this place and it was full-on monging, gum-chewing, acid house music. And we were like: ‘Oh dear, what are we going to do?’ So, Kev brilliantly goes: ‘I’ve got an idea.’ And he bangs on an Aphex Twin tune and then mixes ‘Beats and Pieces’ in, well sped up and the crowd went berserk.”

It was a similar story with Kruder & Dorfmeister’s ‘DJ-Kicks’. The Austrian duo had been DJing intensively since the success of their ‘G-Stoned’ EP in 1993 and the songs in their mix reflect their typical selection of the time, albeit with a twist. 

“On the way to Berlin [to meet !K7], we said, if we are going to do it, we want to do it completely different than anybody did before,” Peter Kruder explains. Rather than a brash, colourful sleeve, the duo wanted something shot in nature; and the record wouldn’t be a standard live DJ mix, but something they could re-work in the studio, adding effects and making edits on Pro Tools.

“We literally dubbed every song that is on there, so that the versions are really different from the original versions that everybody knew,” says Kruder. “It was quite elaborate. I think it took us two days, three days, to put the whole thing together.”

Going to such extremes was not, perhaps, typical. But !K7 did encourage artists to think differently. “Built into the DNA of DJ-Kicks was a mix, combined with new music from the compiler,” explains !K7 head of marketing David Coleby and ensuring the presentation is closer to an album, the compilers have all taken their own interpretations of this and run with it.”   

For Kruder & Dorfmeister, this was time well spent. “I talked with Stefan Struever [the !K7 employee who first asked them to record a mix] about what he thought the record would sell,” says Kruder. “And he said to me: ‘Carl Craig just sold 50,000. But that’s Carl Craig!’” (Laughs) 

Kruder & Dorfmeister’s ‘DJ-Kicks’ has now sold more than 250,000 copies in Europe alone. But even that was eclipsed by the success of ‘The K&D Sessions’, a second mix album for !K7 that included 19 of the duo’s remixes and two original tracks. Remarkably, the duo are currently touring ‘The K&D Sessions Live’ across “various beautiful locations” around Europe and the US. “Nobody ever did a live version of a remix album,” says Richard Dorfmeister, “Normally you play your own stuff. But to play a remix album live, this is really something new.”

The first kink in the DJ mix armour came in the late-90s, when the UK’s dance music magazines started to routinely include covermount mix CDs with their monthly issues. By the turn of the millennium this had become standard, with big-name DJs like Roger Sanchez, Cassius and Paul van Dyk mixing CDs for Mixmag and Muzik.

While perhaps annoying for labels, this wasn’t a hammer blow to their mix sales, with Fabric launching its fabric and FABRICLIVE mixes in 2001. The blow would soon follow, though, with the launch of YouTube, SoundCloud and Mixcloud in 2005, 2007 and 2008 respectively. 

The effect wasn’t immediate. But it wasn’t long before DJs, labels and music fans discovered that they could easily distribute their own mixes, reaching potential audiences in the millions. And if online mixes weren’t easily monetisable, it did remove the headache of licensing tracks, printing CDs and finding distribution. 

The launch of dedicated music streaming platforms like Spotify and Apple Music has also contributed. The complicated licensing deals around commercial mix CDs mean that many are still unavailable on streaming. But Hiroki Beck, head of labels at Fabric, explains that streaming services have essentially turned music fans into DJs and curators, allowing them to create their own dedicated playlists.

This wasn’t the end for DJ mix albums either. But it did mean that commercial mix CDs needed to up their game if they wanted to stand out from the millions of online mixes. Often this would mean DJs putting exclusive tunes on to their mixes. But a new concept could also work.

This is what Paul Rose, aka Scuba, did in 2011, when he was called on to compile his own DJ-Kicks mix. “I’ve been a fan of the series, particularly the Kruder & Dorfmeister one,” he says. “So being asked to do that was great and I spent a lot of time on it. It’s a very conceptual mix: each tune slows down slightly and there’s a lot of piecing it together.” This was a nod to the SUB:STANCE parties in Berlin that Scuba had been playing, where he would slow the bpm at the end of the night.

As music sales in general fell in the 2000s, many mix album series slowed their release schedules or gave up the ghost. The last Journeys by DJ was released in 2007 on download only; the Global Underground series took a four-year break between ‘041: James Lavelle, Naples’ and ‘042: Patrice Bäumel, Berlin’; and fabric and FABRICLIVE both reached their 100th – and final – album releases in autumn 2018. 

“It was like a full-circle moment for the series, ending on 100 each,” Beck says. “But also, CD sales were very much on the decline. And I think the cost of the tins [in which the Fabric CDs were packaged] itself was untenable as well.”

Even then, the company was planning for the fabric presents series, which debuted in February 2019. “You do get the music fans that are collectors and still want that physical product,” says Beck. The focus with fabric presents, in fact, is largely the vinyl market: each release comes as a mixed CD and download - which is also released to streaming, sometimes months after the physical debut - as well as a vinyl edition with a selection of unmixed tracks.

Beck compares the fabric presents release strategy to “a mini album campaign format”. “We release four a year but treat these mixes with a bit more planning and marketing spend; we release a few singles off these mixes. We will always ask the artists to provide their own original tracks as well. So, in a way, lengthening these campaigns,” he says.

You can see why this appeals to artists and fabric presents has attracted some big names, including Bonobo, Chase & Status and, most recently, Laurent Garnier. Both Rose and More say they would definitely mix a commercial CD in 2025, were they asked. But would they buy one?

“I don’t know,” says Rose. “People always talk about physical product now and how it’s nice to own something. Personally, I don’t really like owning stuff that much, just anything. I’m not too big on possessions.”

“It is a shame that DJ mixes have become so devalued,” he adds, “but I think that’s just a reflection of the fact that music is devalued more generally.”

Clearly, there still is a market for DJ mix albums in 2025. Collectors love the physical product, while some mixes perform extremely well on streaming. More than half of the tracks on ‘fabric presents Chase & Status’ have passed half a million streams on Spotify, with 10 racking up more than one million plays. “If it flies [on streaming] then that is basically paying for all the other projects,” says Beck.

‘fabric presents Chase & Status’ is not, perhaps, the kind of mix that unites tribes, lights up dinner parties and gets endlessly discussed at the afters, like ‘70 Minutes of Madness’ or ‘As Heard On Radio Soulwax Pt. 2’ before it. But the dance music world in general is so fractured in 2025, that it is hard for any release to unite listeners like these records once did, be they artist albums, compilations or mixes. So don’t be misled: 50 years after the birth of hip hop, the DJ mix album isn’t dead or even resting; it’s right there, in the record store, on Spotify and even in a fancy concert hall, waiting for you to lend an ear.

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30 Mixes Of Madness

Coldcut: ‘Journeys by DJ: 70 Minutes of Madness’ (1995)

The daddy. A sonic adventure that swings from jungle to ambient, techno to the ‘Dr. Who’ theme tune. Often voted the best mix ever, ‘70 Minutes of Madness’ inspired a generation of DJs.

Various: ‘Blech’ (1995)

A mixtape, no less, in which Coldcut associates Strictly Kev and PC stamp their Day-Glo imprint all over the Warp Records catalogue, creating what may be the most anarchic record in the label’s catalogue.

LTJ Bukem: ‘Logical Progression’ (1996)

Logical Progression is Bukem’s defining statement, two discs of soulful, floating jungle from the Good Looking crew that was everywhere in 1996. The album helped drum’n’bass to break new commercial ground, while staying absolutely true to its roots.

See also: ‘Progression Sessions Vols 1–10’.

The Chemical Brothers: ‘Live at the Social Volume 1’ (1996) 

Before everything else The Chemical Brothers were DJs, bringing together disparate influences that thumbed their nose at the restraints of four-to-the-floor techno. ‘Live at the Social Volume 1’ was the duo’s first commercial mix and captured a newly eclectic wave of British clubbing.

Jeff Mills: ‘Live at the Liquid Room – Tokyo’ (1996)

In the early-1990s everyone knew that Jeff Mills was the best techno DJ, even if few people had heard him spin. That changed with ‘Liquid Room’, two discs that redefined what a DJ could do, as Mills pushed his records to breaking point. 

See also: ‘Exhibitionist - A Jeff Mills Mix’.

Kruder & Dorfmeister: ‘DJ-Kicks: Kruder & Dorfmeister’ (1996)

Kruder & Dorfmeister’s ‘DJ-Kicks’ broke the Austrian act by capturing the duo’s laidback-but-danceable, jazzy-but-twisted mixture of downtempo, jungle beats and dub. ‘The K&D Sessions’, which followed in 1998, was even bigger, selling one million copies worldwide.

Nicolette: ‘DJ-Kicks: Nicolette’  (1997)

Nicolette’s ‘DJ-Kicks’ is a rare example of a non-DJ mix, with Nicolette primarily known for her singing, rather than mixing skills. The results were astounding: a head-spinning mixture of jungle, techno and industrial that wove a picture of a singular artist. 

See also: DJ-Kicks from Playgroup, Carl Craig, The Glimmers, Hot Chip, Moodymann, Steven Julien… the list is endless.

Derrick Carter: ‘Mixmag presents The Cosmic Disco’ (1997)

Derrick Carter’s 1997 CD for Mixmag might be the best pure house mix ever, a fantastically inventive 68 minutes of boompty heaven from an absolute master of the art. 

See also: fabric 56 and Carter’s ‘Sessions’.

Dave Rofe/Jon Dasilva/Pete Robinson: ‘Viva Haçienda’ (1997)

Released just before The Haçienda lost its licence, ‘Viva Haçienda’ looks back at 15 years of the Manchester club. The result is the funkiest possible history lesson: 44 tracks of classic dance music united by a Mancunian thread.

Gilles Peterson & Norman Jay: ‘Desert Island Mix (Journeys By DJ)’ (1997) 

The record’s cover – a literal treasure chest – says it all. ‘Desert Island Mix’ is a selection of classic and contemporary tracks from two of the UK’s most keyed-in DJs, 35 genre-elusive gems most listeners would happily be marooned with. 

See also: Peterson’s ‘Worldwide’ mix series; Norman Jay: ‘Desert Island Mix Part 2’.

David Holmes: ‘Essential Mix 98/01’ (1998)

‘Essential Mix 98/01’ was so influential in its note-perfect digging that it (almost) single-handedly made classics out of songs like Marlena Shaw’s ‘California Soul’. The record’s ultra-cinematic charms also paved the way for Holmes’ pivot into movies. 

Richie Hawtin: ‘Decks, EFX & 909’  (1999)

Made with turntables, effects box and 909, Richie Hawtin’s second commercial mix blurred the lines between artist album and DJ mix, a distinction he would obliterate on 2001’s ‘DE9: Closer to the Edit’. ‘Decks, EFX & 909’ is famously intense but surprisingly groovy.

Larry Levan: ‘Live at the Paradise Garage’ (2000)

Larry Levan was the DJ’s DJ. Thanks to the release of Strut’s ‘Live at the Paradise Garage’, his legendarily empathetic and often idiosyncratic selection skills went public, bringing listeners closer to the Paradise Garage than any other album could dare to.

Eskimo: ‘Various Artists and Many Others Vol 1’ (2000)

The first compilation from Belgian label Eskimo, mixed by Glimmer Twins Mo & Benoelie, delivers on its promise of “100% pure emotion”, with a series of grooves that slink off the turntable. Eskimo became a key player in the 2000’s mixes market, making Ghent seem like the sexiest place on Earth.

Craig Richards: ‘fabric 01’ (2001)

The fabric mix series covered the London club’s Saturday night specialities of quality house and techno, with brilliant mixes from Villalobos, Omar-S, Nina Kraviz and more. It kicked off with a classic from resident DJ Craig Richards, whose melodic take on tech house – as was – showed why he was so important. 

The Unabombers: ‘The Electric Chair (Basement Soul Music)’ (2001)

The Unabombers served up an immaculate selection of hip hop, house and….  well, everything on their first mix CD, an album that shows that it’s not how big a song is, it’s what you do with it. Hits and underground classics align within the soulful world of ‘The Electric Chair’. 

Dave Clarke: ‘World Service’ (2001)

Techno Baron Dave Clarke brings you both types of music – techno and electro – on his towering ‘World Service’ album, mixed with the heart-racing hip hop skills that made Clarke one of the hottest DJs on Earth. 

See also: Clarke’s ‘X-Mix (Electro Boogie)’.

DJ Harvey: ‘Sarcastic Study Masters’ (2001)

The most legendary mix from one of the world’s most respected selectors, a sunlit excursion into gilded grooves and singular musical logic that help kickstart the trend for cosmic disco in the early-2000s.

2manydjs: ‘As Heard on Radio Soulwax Part 2’ (2002)

While mashups were definitely a thing by 2002, ‘As Heard on Radio Soulwax Part 2’ brought them into the mainstream, 2manydjs’ brilliantly adventurous – and often very funny – blends of, say, The Stooges and Salt-N-Pepa proving a phenomenon.

Jacques Lu Cont: ‘FABRICLIVE 09’ (2003)

If you want to know who Stuart Price really is then look no further than his exquisite 2003 mix for the FABRICLIVE series, which lays bare his influences, from Steve Miller Band to Pixies, with an immaculate musical flow. Honourable FABRICLIVE mentions go to James Murphy, Diplo and John Peel.

Optimo (Espacio): ‘How to Kill the DJ (Part Two)’ (2004)

‘How To Kill The DJ (Part Two)’ is a genre tightrope walk of a mix from Optimo’s JD Twitch and JG Wilkes, where CLS are mixed into Gang of Four and no one bats an eyelid. Daredevil DJing at its best.

Erol Alkan: ‘A Bugged Out Mix’/‘A Bugged In Selection’ (2005)

Erol Alkan was the perfect choice for Bugged Out!’s 2000s mix series: an incredibly flexible DJ who assembled bangers for disc one and horizontal beauties for disc two. Alkan updates his ‘Bugged In’ playlist on Spotify to this day.

Daniele Baldelli: ‘Cosmic – The Original’ (2007)

Italian disco innovator Daniele Baldelli lays down an ultra-smooth mixture of Italo-Disco, electronica and synth pop as a homage to the legendary Italian club Cosmic, guaranteed to lift you up and out of your gloomy existence.

Andrew Weatherall: ‘Masterpiece’ (2012)

Weatherall put together so many great mixes you could have a top 25 of him alone. Honourable mentions for ‘Sci-Fi-Lo-Fi Vol. 1’, an ear-opening collection of rockabilly and garage classics, and his acidic ‘fabric 19’ mix. But ‘Masterpiece’, a selection of A Love from Outer Space classics, is a cut above.

SHERELLE: ‘fabric presents SHERELLE’ (2021) 

London DJ SHERELLE would have been a shoo-in for a FABRICLIVE mix, had she made her breakthrough before the series was shuttered. As it is, her rousing DJ skills, joining the dots across decades of music, produced the first classic in the fabric presents series.

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From The Booth

SHERELLE

‘DJ-Kicks: Kemistry & Storm’

“Kemistry and Storm are huge heroes of mine and a real inspiration as a woman in the industry making bass music. They were integral to the birth of drum’n’bass. Their story felt forgotten about for a while but it’s great to see them get more recognition in recent years. I enjoy listening to this one on my way to gigs or when I am on a plane. I feel like I’m ready for anything after listening to this. Not one to listen to when there is turbulence though.”

Man Power

I-f: ‘Mixed Up in the Hague II’

“I was put on to this by my friend Tony Daly, who now runs 586 Records in Gateshead The mix came out in 2006, and it was a follow up to the seminal ‘Mixed Up in the Hague Part 1’ from 2001. It’s credited as one of the things that caused a resurgence in interest in Italo Disco. This was pre-social media so personal recommendations from older friends really helped me discover my own tastes. Mix CDs led me to discover what I valued in music and culture. Receiving and passing on personal recommendations has made me feel like part of a DJing tradition. Mixes like this have affected the actual music I play, but in a broader sense they’ve shaped my whole relationship with dance music.”

Jayda G

‘DJ-Kicks: Moodymann’ 

“I love it. It’s so well put together and really exemplifies what his sets are like. It really shows off his style, mixing great house tracks like Kings of Tomorrow’s ‘Fall For You’ with Little Dragon’s ‘Come Home’, which just shows how creative and skilled he is as a DJ. I also love how he always reps Black artists and supports the people that are really in the scene in Detroit like Marcellus Pitman. The mix feels personal too, it’s a perfect reflection of Moodymann, as it demonstrates how he likes to go leftfield and have fun with a mix. It was a big inspiration for my own DJ-Kicks mix, especially in how he mixes different genres while keeping it fun and real.”

Bicep

Ricardo Villalobos: ‘fabric 36’

“At the time this was released in the heyday of the ‘maximalist’ era, this CD looked back to the roots of refined hyper-meticulous feeling-based music. While most of the sounds from this era haven’t aged well, this sounds like it could be from any time, spanning the likes of minimalist movements in the 80s to micro-house that is still being redefined today. Upon release it was almost seen as arrogant to make a mix CD full of your own productions, but we feel only he knew precisely how the tunes were designed to work in a mix. This CD is a proper work of art that is timeless.”

Kelly Lee Owens

‘Late Night Tales: Jon Hopkins’ 

“I first encountered Jon Hopkins’ ‘Late Night Tales’, while working at a record store in 2015. We would frequently get new ‘Late Night Tales’ compilations on vinyl and I always looked forward to them. Each release felt like a behind-the-scenes glimpse into an artist I thought I knew, but this collection revealed a side of him I hadn’t yet experienced. At that time, Jon and I hadn’t met, but I admired his work. There was always something in his music that spoke to me – an electronic sound intertwined with spirituality and depth; qualities rarely associated with dance music. This mix gave me a deeper understanding of his art, showing me a more nuanced, intimate side to his sound.”

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…well, on social media at least. Welcome to the surprisingly entertaining online world of DJs posting gems from their record collections and chatting about dance music’s vibrant history. Of course, this being 2025, there are those who think they know better. But we’ll try to ignore them. Harold Heath investigates the latest (generally) smiley phenomenon… 

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You’ve no doubt seen Fish56Octagon’s videos on your social media feed at some point: mid-40s bloke, dressing gown, Technics decks, occasional ill-advised use of the word ‘bare’ when he means ‘a lot’, and massive enthusiasm for his vinyl collection of dance music. Internet home-DJ extraordinaire Fish56Octagon’s recent rise to fame led to a Glastonbury DJ gig and a Guardian interview, meaning he just needs to do a gap year and he’ll have completed three peak-middle-class ‘G’s in record time.

Whether he’s your cup of tea or not, Fish Man’s videos (we tried to find out his actual name but Google just tells you Fish56Octagon isn’t his real name, thanks big tech, you absolute length) have proved super-popular. And although Mr Fish inexplicably declined Disco Pogo’s kind offer to take part in this feature – we’re not angry, just disappointed – there are plenty of other DJs and record collectors raving about their record collections via social media videos who were happy to talk to us.

The world of social media vinyl vids is generally good-natured, where the ‘fire’ emoji is king and every selection is a banger, but there are hazards too. Legends speak of a forgotten cave in old Albion where a troupe of fearless Balearic DJs sleep an eternal dreamless sleep, only rising from their slumbers if a Mandy Smith 12-inch is in need. 

And lo, as Sheffield’s multi-instrumentalist Yarni , who started posting videos of his record collection to, in his own words “spread the love and spark meaningful conversations”, found out, a swift online retribution awaits anyone who ever-so-slightly misrepresents the sacred Balearic/Shoom legend. “When I posted about the original version of Mandy Smith’s ‘I Just Can’t Wait’ being Balearic,” he told us, “I was swiftly schooled by a group of veteran Balearic enthusiasts, who called me out for my ignorance!” 

Avoiding perils such as these is just one of the challenges for DJs who are brave enough to enter this realm. We spoke with Dave Seaman, Nina Kehagia, Dave Lee and Billy ‘Daniel’ Bunter to get the details about dance music’s latest online trend…

Dave Seaman

DJ, producer, label boss, former Mixmag editor and Brother In Rhythm Dave Seaman posts vids directly from his record room, showcasing old and new jams, telling the stories behind the tunes, and inventing new sub-genres (‘bass-face-inducer-house anyone?), all with a frankly cavalier approach to vinyl handling. “It’s amazing how irate some people can get about how you handle your vinyl,” he admits, “but I’ve had some people get really quite abusive, saying: ‘He knows fuck all about vinyl, look at the way he’s holding that record!’ I just think if you’d seen what my records went through in the 90s you’d be spontaneously combusting!” 

Overly-online-vinyl-nerds aside, Seaman’s vids have proved very popular and we wondered why he started making them. But he hadn’t quite finished with the nerds: “And, by the way”, he continues, “it’s MY vinyl, I’m not touching YOUR vinyl!” Anyway, like many vinyl collectors, the arrival of digital meant a mid-2000s halt to his record buying. He put his collection into storage until the lack of gigs and general boredom of pandemic lockdowns. “As I unboxed them one by one,” he reflects, “it was a very pleasurable experience on many levels (should’ve live-streamed that, Dave) and I really re-connected with that tangible experience that vinyl gives you.”

The physicality of vinyl definitely works better visually than digital music. Seaman standing in front of his laptop searching for a particularly choice WAV then clicking play in Rekordbox just isn’t as cool as him selecting a tune from his wall of vinyl and smearing his greasy fingers all over it. “It’s a real thing that you can actually see and touch,” he says, “and the younger generation are kind of obsessed with the 90s, what they missed out on and there’s a real movement of them wanting to understand what was going on during that 80s/90s golden age – and vinyl is a part of that.” 

It’s what’s on the vinyl that’s important of course, and for Dave the reason he posts videos of music he loves is the same reason he DJs: “It’s connection,” he concludes. “Music is one of the best, if not the best thing for making that connection between people. That’s the whole essence of DJing and it’s why these videos are so popular – because it’s instantly relatable.”

Nina Kehagia 

Music curator, creative strategist, educator/researcher, DJ and Resonance FM broadcaster Nina Kehagia has been creating videos cataloguing and celebrating music and vinyl culture for a few years. “Basically, my aim was always to share knowledge, to educate and entertain,” she states. “I’ve always had a passion for sharing culture and music in some way or another.” It’s a passion she currently indulges with regular vinyl selection videos from her several-rooms-strong record collection, often with accompanying nuggets of info or commentary, while her YouTube channel features lengthier, info-rich deep dives on subjects like the origins of the concept of genre, or how experimental composers and film scores helped electronic music become mainstream.

Like the rest of us she’s also seen the rise of DJs playing their record collections on social media. “I don’t really know the Octagon person,” she told us (we’ve only referred to him as The Octagon Person since). “It’s a different way to share your music knowledge. It might not be accurate a lot of the time, but people like it. I’m not one of those people who say: ‘This isn’t right’, or ‘You should hold your records like this’, so I appreciate the people who share the knowledge although they’re not experts and it’s nice to see younger people getting inspired by the older generation.”

She may not be one of the people who complain about others’ record-holding technique, but like Seaman, Kehagia has also encountered several people (men, it’s always men) online who get really angry about it. Or perhaps it’s the same dude who was angry at Dave Seaman; maybe he’s devoted his days to criticising DJs online, like a modern-day Sisyphus destined to never complete the task of annoying every DJ alive. “He kept saying to me: ‘Why are you holding the records like this?’”, she laughs, doing a superb impression of a professional incel losing their shit in the comments section. “‘You’re not supposed to be holding the records like that! LOOK AT HER FINGERS!’” 

She once posted Octave One’s ‘Black Water’, describing it as Detroit techno, triggering a fierce online reaction from the “IT’S DETROIT HOUSE ACTUALLY” reply-guys, which quickly escalated into a major international incident with the two sides mobilising supplies, ordnance and smartass observations about 909 drum sounds, before hostilities were narrowly avoided at the last moment with an Ashley Beedle-brokered peace deal. 

Dave Lee

While a love of sharing music is the main driver for our contributors, part of the rise in short DJ music curation videos is down to the expectation for them to produce content. “All us DJs feel a pressure to have an active social media presence,” UK ultimate disco champ Dave Lee explains. “So many potential bookers will first check your social media channels, see how many followers you have and the amount of interaction you get as a barometer of your popularity. Constantly finding content to post several times a week isn’t easy.” 

Luckily, while not all DJs playing their records and talking about them on Instagram or TikTok have good records or actually know what they’re talking about, clearly this isn’t the case for the man also formerly known as Joey Negro, Raven Maize and Jakatta. His social media videos feature choice music selections from his vast collection played on a tasty four-deck set-up, often with some nice little accompanying background commentary and tales.

Recently he played Roy Ayers’ classic ‘Everybody Loves the Sunshine’ LP and simply chatted about the tracks, the knowledge and affection he’s built up over a lifetime for this music as crystal clear as the production on the album. “I don’t want my social media to only be about my gigs and new releases,” he says. “One thing I feel I can authoritatively talk about is music and particularly my record collection. I was a fanatical vinyl collector for 30 years. Telling stories about a release, label or artist, when and where you bought/heard the song in question, some background info about the artist is always a nice nostalgia trip which other people are seemingly interested in hearing.” 

As with all our DJs, the vast majority of feedback Lee receives is from people enjoying the music (surely outside the firefighting community, dance music leads the world in the use of the ‘fire’ emoji), but he’s also experienced the full force of the tiny but loud minority of angry internet people, ironically often when making jokes. “My videos tend to be a bit tongue in cheek with a British sense of humour, meaning some people don’t get it – especially outside the UK. I made a video complaining about DJs dancing too much. It was half a joke as obviously the DJ dancing and being into the music is a good thing, but I was poking fun at the way some people overdo the body movements when they play, especially in the social media age. However, there were a lot of responses who took me completely literally and were quite annoyed.” 

So, for any DJs considering posting vids about your music collection, add ‘Don’t talk about DJs dancing’ to the list of DJ Online Curation Best Practices, right after ‘Don’t ever touch your records’ and ‘Never show your fingers onscreen’.

Billy ‘Daniel’ Bunter 

Trevor Jackson waxing lyrical about the (nominally) hardcore DJ Billy Bunter at the end of last year was not something that was on our acid house 2024 bingo card, it must be said. But when Jackson exclaimed that Bunter’s video vignettes were the “ONLY reason to be on social media right now”, he was, of course, correct.

Billy ‘Daniel’ Bunter began his 35-plus years DJ career as a fresh-faced 15-year-old at one of the UK’s most cutting-edge clubs at its very peak – London’s Club Labyrinth – and as his videos joyously celebrating his record collection demonstrate, he’s still overflowing with enthusiasm for his beloved tunes. “For me, as a vinyl geek, I’m absolutely fascinated with the history,” Bunter enthuses. “I don’t want people or pieces of history to be left out – this is a history that’s far more fascinating than Pete Tong and Paul Oakenfold telling you in Mixmag in 1988 that if it wasn’t for Ibiza and Balearic Beat, then acid house wouldn’t have been as big as it is… I want to share the things that are not the biblical myths, things that just interest me.” 

These things include his recent Bristol 1988 vid on Massive Attack and Smith & Mighty, 11 minutes of head-nodding audio delight punctuated with Bunter-chat. The selections are strong, his patter’s on the money, but really, it’s that boundless enthusiasm and passion for the music that make it all so appealing.

His 12 million video views a month mostly receive positive feedback but like Kehagia, he’s also learned how to do a decent impression of an incensed online comment guy. “I get all that ‘We hate this, we’re sick of him, how dare he!’” he says, “and some people think I’m providing a service that should be exactly how they want it: ‘Don’t talk over the records, only play records from the six months I went raving in 1993 and if you don’t I WILL let you know my discontent!’” 

Then there was the time that his What Really Was The First Jungle Hardcore Record video, via some misplaced hashtagging from King Britt and general online crossfire, ended up with a comment from Shut Up And Dance asking Bunter if he knew their music. “I said: ‘You DJ for me, you’ve been on my radio shows, I’m constantly PAing and DJing with the Ragga Twins, you used to bring your records round to Paul For Music record shop in the early 90s’…” At this point, he performs a small but perfectly executed rhetorical pause before continuing: “Of course I fucking know you!”

So, does Bunter think there’s a serious side to his social media dance music historian schtick? Is it important to catalogue and celebrate our music and culture this way? Surprisingly for someone so outspoken, he was somewhat on the fence for this one, giving us an unusually low-key, restrained and noncommittal answer: “One million, million, million per cent” he beams. “Especially when more and more of our friends are passing away. One. Million. Per cent.” 

Amen (break) to that. 

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This article first appeared in issue seven of Disco Pogo.

An album made by two people who have only met twice might not sound overly enticing. But when those two people are electronic maestro Mark Pritchard and canonical songwriter Thom Yorke who needs to meet IRL? The duo’s ‘Tall Tales’ is an exquisite trip into the combined minds of two of our most cherished and innovative musicians. “I could tell it was a thing for him to be on Warp, which is nice,” Pritchard confides in Piers Martin of Yorke…

Mark Pritchard and Thom Yorke go back a long way – they just didn’t realise it at the time. At the turn of the 1990s, the Radiohead singer was in his final year at Exeter University studying English and Fine Arts. Pritchard, a Crewkerne lad well into his synths, had a regular DJ gig at a club in Taunton, a 40-minute drive up the M5 from Exeter. Yorke was also an enthusiastic DJ and would often play between bands at the Lemon Grove, an Exeter venue that Pritchard would visit occasionally. Bands tended to end their South West leg at Exeter, swerving Taunton, as most still do.

“The Lemon Grove was one of the closer places I could go and see bands at that period,” recalls Pritchard, 53, from his studio in Sydney, Australia, where he’s lived for 20 years. “I saw The Orb there around the time Thom was at Exeter. When he used to DJ between bands, he would play that first wave of Warp – Nightmares On Wax, the bleep stuff. He’s been a fan of Warp since the beginning.” 

Pritchard is pointing this out because he and Yorke have collaborated on a fantastic record called ‘Tall Tales’, which is coming out on Warp, the pioneering electronic label that’s released the bulk of Pritchard’s output this century – as Harmonic 313, Africa HiTech and lately under his own name – plus some choice ambient house in the 90s as Link and Reload. Ever since Radiohead put out ‘Kid A’ in 2000 and talked about the influence of Aphex Twin and Autechre on tracks such as ‘Idioteque’, Yorke’s admiration for the label has been clear. “I could tell it was a thing for him to be on Warp, which is nice,” says Pritchard, “and it made sense to separate this from his Radiohead and The Smile records he does with XL.” 

Under Pritchard’s stewardship, ‘Tall Tales’ revamps the ghostly, conspiracy-laced electronica of Yorke’s solo albums into something stranger and altogether more appealing: a series of eccentric grooves and sloshed pop songs that glow with lurid intensity as Yorke documents, in his elliptical fashion, the state of play during the Covid pandemic when we were all under lockdown. On the surface, it’s very much a Thom Yorke record: his voice – that angelic, yearning, sinister sneer – is unmistakeable, particularly after three albums in quick succession by his prog-fusion trio The Smile. But it’s Pritchard’s playful production that gives ‘Tall Tales’ its legs. He threw all sorts of ideas and sketches at Yorke to see what would work – even stuff he’d had in the vault for a decade – and when you consider how prolific and versatile Pritchard is (not to say industrious), you get an idea of ‘Tall Tales’’ eclectic patchwork of styles. 

One song, for example, a queasy folk ballad called ‘The Men Who Dance in Stag Hats’ – the lyrics for which Yorke based on Benjamin Myers’ novel ‘The Gallows Pole’ – features a harmonium because Pritchard is a fan of the Scottish poet Ivor Cutler who would often play that keyboard as he sang. “I always wanted to do something with a harmonium and, to me, that song sounds like if Ivor Cutler did something with Lou Reed. So, I tried to balance it out by putting a bassoon in – I didn’t want it to sound too much on a Lou Reed tip,” he says. 

The pair have met in person only twice: the first time, in November 2012, when Radiohead toured Australia and played Sydney and Pritchard’s old Somerset pal Clive Deamer, who was there as Radiohead’s second drummer, invited him and his partner to a meal with the band. Before that, Yorke had been posting Pritchard’s tracks on his semi-regular playlists online and had asked him to remix ‘Bloom’ from ‘The King of Limbs’, in 2011. 

At the restaurant, Pritchard sat next to Yorke. “There was a moment where I thought, this is an unusual Tuesday night, because I’d never met the band before, but I knew their music. But it was very natural and open with Thom straight away,” he says. “We talked about music and all sorts of things and that has carried on through into what we do now. There’s no agenda, no hiding.”

This led to their first collaboration a few years later – Yorke singing the whimsical ‘Beautiful People’ on ‘Under the Sun’, Pritchard’s first album under his own name. They met for the second time in November last year when Yorke performed solo at the Sydney Opera House forecourt as part of his Thom Yorke: Everything tour. Having tied up ‘Tall Tales’ in March 2024 after working on it remotely for four years, this was a chance to take press shots for the campaign and go for a drink, though Yorke spent a lot of time setting up and rehearsing, as each of his shows can be quite different from the last. Pritchard was impressed with Yorke’s innovative tech rig, which showed how the singer thought about how best to deliver his music.

“I went on stage to do ‘Back in the Game’ (the lead song from ‘Tall Tales’) with him. He showed me a modulator and said: ‘Just tweak this.’ He’s got a sequencer triggering all his synthesisers and drum machines that are running live – it controls a palette of sounds – and it really works. He likes to strip his songs back to the essence,” says Pritchard, who’s never been keen on performing in public. “I’m actually worried that Thom might want to do this album live.”

Given Yorke’s profile and the giddy nature of the material – visualised in an album-augmenting series of films and animations by regular Pritchard collaborator Jonathan Zawada – ‘Tall Tales’ looks set to be one of Pritchard’s most popular projects. It might even return him to the UK Top 10, which he last visited in 1991, when the rave track he made with his schoolfriend Adrian Hughes, ‘Roobarb & Custard’, under the name Shaft, shot to number seven over Christmas after being picked up by FFRR. The track sampled the grungy riff from the 70s kids’ cartoon ‘Roobarb’ – catnip for British Gen-Xers – and led to two ‘Top of the Pops’ appearances for the 20-year-old Pritchard, as well as funds to buy new gear. Incidentally, Radiohead also appropriated a well-loved children’s show in 2016, when their video for ‘Burn the Witch’ depicted characters from ‘Trumpton’ turning feral.

‘Tall Tales’ began with an email from Yorke in the spring of 2020, checking in on Pritchard as the pandemic began to grip the planet: “Hope you’re well, mate. This is all a bit mad, isn’t it? Have you got any music? Send it through because I’m locked down at home.” Pritchard had been planning another project and didn’t have any specific material ready, so after some head-scratching he rummaged through his hard-drives and sent a folder with around 20 ideas in it: “Demos that were finished or close to being finished, bits of ideas, sketches, some ambient tracks, some drums that are quite mad.” 

Yorke replied straight away: “Can I do this one, please?” Then a few days later he emailed saying he would have a go at doing 14 more tracks. “I was like, cool, yeah, whatever you need. I left it chilled,” says Pritchard. That September, Yorke started to send his demos, sometimes two or three a day. “On the first day, the three he sent were unbelievably good,” recalls Pritchard. “He works quickly to get the vibes down and then sees what’s there. Sometimes he had lyrics, sometimes he was trying to find melodies and sometimes he had the whole song. I think he had The Smile going on at the same time. He’s superhuman the way he manages to do so much stuff. It’s almost annoying.”

They discussed the direction of the songs regularly over Zoom – Pritchard works nocturnally – and although he handled most of the production, Yorke would add modular synth parts or suggest removing elements to reveal a track’s essence or to create tension. Sometimes Yorke would acknowledge his partner’s skills: “When I’d send him stuff back, he’d say: ‘I don’t really understand how you did it’,” says Pritchard. “When it was all finished, I knew that Thom had done some different things and I had too. My mission was to make this as strong as I could and to push myself to make something that works as an album, which is difficult because the songs are very varied.”

In many ways, ‘Tall Tales’ is another of Pritchard’s deep dives into a certain genre or a particular way of working. Across his career he’s mastered a panoply of styles, from the early-90s house days of NY Connection and his Detroit techno-influenced Reload and Link projects via his hook-up with Tom Middleton – they met in that Taunton nightclub – plus the funkier Jedi Knights and Global Communication, through to his work with Dave Brinkworth as the Latin-flavoured Troubleman and exotica-inspired Harmonic 313. Pritchard doesn’t have a signature style or sound, yet his name is a mark of quality. 

“Mark is the absolute pinnacle of an artist to me,” says Jonathan Zawada, who lives in Sydney and is friends with Pritchard, having worked with him for 12 years. “He’s more dedicated and committed to his work than anyone I’ve ever met. There’s a kind of depth and authenticity at the heart of everything he makes which comes from his dedication to understanding the roots of everything he explores rather than just superficially dipping in and out.”

Pritchard’s next project could involve a virtual trip to South America as he seeks to dig into the sounds of Peru, Chile and Ecuador, and then maybe Egypt as well. He usually starts on YouTube and works backwards, often heading to the 1920s and 30s to see how a style started. “You can find anything these days.” 

More immediately, though, he’s due to catch his old West Country friends Polly Harvey and John Parish when they stop over in Sydney for a PJ Harvey show at the Opera House in a couple of weeks. Their friendship centred around the only studio in the area, The Icehouse in Yeovil, in the early-90s. Howard ‘Head’ Bullivant, who ran the studio, still does Harvey’s live sound. Pritchard’s friendship with Parish goes even deeper: Parish’s mother was a teacher at Pritchard’s school, who, aware of his interest in music, suggested he meet with her son who was making a go of it professionally. Parish plays percussion on a couple of 1992 Reload tracks.

“I remember all the teachers saying: ‘Nobody does music for a job – it’s not a proper career path’,” says Pritchard. That’s still sage advice, of course. But if things do go your way and you have a hit record at the age of 20, you know you’re doing something right. 

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This article first appeared in issue seven of Disco Pogo.

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For techno and house legend Kevin Saunderson music has always been more than a solitary concern. Saunderson has long embraced the notions of community, friendship and celebrating the city where he grew up and which made his name. Today, that idea of musical camaraderie extends to his own family, as he returns to his e-Dancer guise with his son Dantiez in tow. In a wide-ranging interview, Saunderson looks back on his past (Detroit, formative trips to Paradise Garage, Inner City, that Reese bassline…) and to the future, as he tells Ben Murphy, “the scene is always evolving…”

“You can’t take that legacy away. I think it’s more respected now,” says Kevin Saunderson, reflecting on the dance music heritage of his home city Detroit. “There’s a new exhibit that just went up about Detroit techno at Michigan State University. You have the Belleville Three at the African American Museum in Washington DC. So, it’s spreading.”

That musical heritage is something Kevin Saunderson had a key role in shaping. As part of the Belleville Three, along with Juan Atkins and Derrick May, he’s considered one of the original innovators of techno — the Black American dance genre that began in Detroit, alchemising disco, funk and advanced electronics into a thrilling new form. Saunderson’s group Inner City, with vocalist and songwriter Paris Grey, had huge chart hits in the UK, getting to number four with their debut single ‘Big Fun’ and number eight with the follow-up ‘Good Life’ in 1988, and scoring two Billboard Dance Chart number ones in the US, in the process introducing a sleek, chrome-dipped electronic groove to the mainstream. Throughout all his pop success, Saunderson maintained a host of underground pseudonyms, frequently inspiring dance music trends and even new genres with his releases as Reese, Tronikhouse and e-Dancer. 

It’s to the latter that Saunderson is returning in 2025, with a new album, over 25 years since his classic ‘Heavenly’ record. On ‘e-Dancer’, he’s joined by his son Dantiez, a highly accomplished DJ and producer in his own right, for a fresh recalibration of the classic Saunderson techno sound. It’s an exceptional record, filled to the brim with 4/4 behemoths built to turn warehouses, clubs and festivals into scenes of sweat-drenched pandemonium. The shimmering synth riff of first tune ‘Melodica’ rides over brooding deep bass and a kinetic rhythm track; ‘Dancer’ is a spine-tingling blend of vocal samples, warping sub and percussive heft; ‘Bring the Funk’ mixes deeply swung drums with sinuous keys; and ‘Feel the Rhythm’ is simultaneously super spaced-out and locked in a groove. 

Speaking to the Saundersons, it’s evident they’re proud of the record. As we talk, Kevin is wearing a Detroit Versus Everybody hoody, while Dantiez sports long dreadlocks. When we ask how Dantiez got involved with the e-Dancer project, you can hear the father and son’s evident rapport. 

“I walked in the studio and said: ‘Hey! This track sounds like mine,’” Kevin says, “and I played a record for him. He was like: ‘Oh, I see what you mean.’ I said: ‘I guess you just got my genes, don’t you?’”

“I did hear a lot of those records in the car and in the studio growing up, so obviously it’s imprinted,” Dantiez says.

“So, that started it again,” adds Kevin. “I said: ‘You just come on board as e-Dancer, it’s time for an album.’ It’s like: ‘Ok, let’s go back to doing something raw and real.’”

Though you can hear Kevin Saunderson’s distinctive sonic identity throughout ‘e-Dancer’, with those epic synth moods and dynamic rhythms present and correct, there’s something new, too: a more percussive feel and aspects that you just wouldn’t have got in his previous works. Dantiez reckons that his approach to production gives the new e-Dancer music a fresh character. 

“I bring something different sonically,” Dantiez explains. “I use a couple of vocal samples that wouldn’t have been used in original e-Dancer tracks, a little bit of my flavour. A lot of these synths are newer that I’m using, so it’s newer sounds, different soundscapes.”

It’s remarkable that Kevin Saunderson is still making vital music, nearly 40 years since his first release. He was born in 1964, and spent his early years in Flatbush in Brooklyn, New York. When he was around 10 years old, his mother decided to move them to Inkster, Michigan, where she grew up. A year later, they settled in nearby Belleville, a middle class suburb of Detroit. For Kevin, it was a huge change from the big city, in more ways than one.

“It was quiet, country… stuff that I wasn’t used to,” he recalls. “It probably calmed me down, as I was pretty hyper as a young kid, trying to find my path and do something that stimulated me. But it was also a very racist town. Racist remarks, people throwing trash in our yard. I got involved in sports, and I think it helped me maintain.”

He played American football, basketball and ran track, but soon music would come into the picture too. He befriended Derrick May at high school, who introduced him to the enigmatic radio host The Electrifying Mojo. The DJ would broadcast on Detroit’s WJLB station, and his shows broadened Kevin’s mind on the multifarious nature of good music, with Mojo’s eclectic blend of funk, soul, rock, electronics and post-punk. 

“I had stuff that I liked at that time, but Mojo was different, ’cause he helped me fall in love with artists like Prince, Parliament/Funkadelic, New Order, Tangerine Dream, B-52s. A great collage of music including, eventually, Juan Atkins.”

Kevin got to know Juan through his brother Aaron Atkins. By the time Kevin was at college in 1982, Juan Atkins’ outfit Cybotron (with Richard Davis) had released the futurist electronic dance singles ‘Alleys of Your Mind’ and ‘Cosmic Cars’, some of the earliest rumblings of what would later become techno. Derrick May had moved to Chicago, and then six months later, Kevin started hearing a different sound on Detroit radio.

“I heard a DJ on the radio playing all this house music – ‘Time to jack, jack, jack, jack your body’. I was like, ‘wow!’ It was cool, but they would never say who the DJ was. He would just be playing these mixes late at night. I find out that Derrick had moved back to Detroit and somehow got himself hooked up on the radio doing these mix shows with house music and whatever Detroit music there was, which was only Juan at that time.”

Kevin got further inspired by two friends on campus at Eastern University, Art Payne and Keith Martin, who had a great collection between them of early house and European dance records. A few years later, he decided to make a record of his own. Drawing from all his influences, ‘Triangle of Love’, made under the name Kreem, mixed a throbbing arpeggio bassline with raw drum machines and the kind of big female vocal you might have heard in New York freestyle or boogie records of the era. Released on Juan Atkins’ burgeoning Metroplex label, with some of his additional studio input, it set Kevin on the path. 

“That early record was a collage of influences, but also experimentation, trying to figure out how to make a record and then make it work with vocals, because I was the only one trying to make a proper vocal record at the time,” he says. 

“Juan actually replayed the bassline, which I know is kind of close to New Order too,” he laughs. “He came in and helped me finish the song.”

Having spent his early years in New York, and going back to NYC to visit his siblings, Kevin also went to the Paradise Garage. His love of disco and what came after would inform his next, and most well-known project, Inner City, with singer and songwriter Paris Grey. Several of his instrumental releases, like ‘Bounce Your Body to the Box’ and the wicked, sample-driven ‘The Sound’ were successful, but Kevin wanted to make something different, with vocals and actual songs. Having forged some strong links with DJs in Chicago, one day, he was told about a promising singer who could be just the collaborator he needed. 

“I met this guy named Terry ‘Housemaster’ Baldwin, we became cool,” he remembers. “He worked with Paris before I worked with her. He came to Detroit and just hung out. I was playing him stuff that I was working on, instrumentals, and I played the music to ‘Big Fun’. He was like: ‘Wow, my singer would tear this up man, you should give her a shot, let her sing and write to it.’”

Saunderson had a vivid vision of what he wanted Inner City to be. He sent Paris Grey some music and asked her to try writing vocals for it. There was instant chemistry and Kevin knew they were onto something special. “I was like: ‘Ok, I don’t want no love songs, I don’t want anything negative, I want to stay positive, to keep it uplifting.’ She came with the perfect first track and second track. She wrote to it, I listened to it on the phone and I brought her back to Detroit, ’cause I was thrilled to get her in the studio to sing it.”

‘Big Fun’ and ‘Good Life’ were the sensational result, two tracks that sounded futuristic but also rooted in the heritage of disco, with their trippy synth stabs contrasting with Paris’ sublime voice and celebratory lyrics. Closer to the music of Chicago than the nocturnal electronics of Juan Atkins’ Model 500 material, they were essentially house tracks, but the inclusion of ‘Big Fun’ on ‘Techno! The New Dance Sound of Detroit’ – a landmark compilation in the UK put together by Neil Rushton and May – gave them a different trajectory. 

“I went with the flow,” Kevin says. “I was just making a record that I thought would work as a dance record. I wasn’t trying to be a futurist. It got on that ‘Techno!’ compilation and of course then we had good press from The Face magazine and NME. But I would say it’s more house than techno.”

Saunderson knew he was on to a good thing but couldn’t have anticipated how successful the tunes would be. Coming to the UK in the summer of 1988, when acid house fever was at its height, he got a glimpse of the power of ‘Big Fun’.

“It seemed like somebody had just turned on the switch! I went to Heaven, Paul Oakenfold was playing at his night Spectrum. I was in the club just hanging out. He played ‘Big Fun’ and I’ve never seen so many people rush the floor. That’s when I knew I had something special. You could just feel it through the energy of the people.”

Concurrently, he was working on underground material. His track as Reese, ’Just Want Another Chance’, was a haunting mix of eerie synths, jacking drums, spoken word vocals and a rumbling, subterranean bass that seemed dredged up from the depths of the earth. That bass sound would end up sampled endlessly in the jungle/drum’n’bass scene in the UK and remains a staple of almost every dance genre today. 

“Years later, I was hanging out with Fabio & Grooverider, and they were playing drum’n’bass. Every record had the Reese sound – they sampled my bass. I was amazed. You might hear one person sample your record, but it was like every record. I was like: ‘Damn, I wish I could have copyrighted that!’” he laughs uproariously. “But that’s technology for you, it allows you to be experimental in different ways. It wasn’t sampled in a way where it was disrespectful, the sample was a sound with replayed notes to create a different feel.”

And inspiration soon proved to be a two-way street. Saunderson was spending a lot of time in the UK in the early-90s and absorbed some hardcore and jungle influences into his own music. As Tronikhouse, he fused Detroit techno with breakbeats and rough ravey synths. His tracks ‘Uptempo’ and ‘Straight Out of Hell’ became favourites on the rave scene as a result. 

“It was an inspiration for sure,” he says. “I thought breaks were cool, so I came up with my own feeling to put over the breaks, you know? Hearing Fabio and then going to some big raves like Raindance and seeing The Prodigy perform… whatever was going on at the time in the scene, I was experiencing. I didn’t want to sound like the UK, but I wanted to take some of what I liked and put my own vibe over it.”

Saunderson continued to have hits with Inner City, notably 1992’s all-time house classic ‘Pennies From Heaven’, but in the late-90s, he decided he wanted to focus on his instrumental, more overtly electronic sound. Reviving an old moniker, e-Dancer, he released 1997 album ‘Heavenly’, a masterpiece of metallic machine soul. From the mystic atmospherics and bubbling bass of ‘Banjo’ to the chopped up vox samples and breaks of ‘Velocity Funk’, via the ethereal melodies of ‘Heavenly’ and the surging sequences of ‘Warp’, here was a record that proved his techno credentials – if there were still any doubters. 

“I had this inspiration in me to make a more instrumental, darker, deeper record and that’s the path I took. You were always getting guys like Derrick and some of the Detroit guys, [saying] like: ‘You ain’t techno, you’re pop.’ So, that probably also pushed me to say: ‘Yeah OK, y’all see I got something here.’”

Saunderson has continued releasing solo music ever since and touring with Inner City. But it was Dantiez who encouraged him to relaunch Inner City with new songs, thanks to another fortuitous moment in the studio, similar to what happened with e-Dancer.

“I found this chord that sounded like Inner City,” Dantiez says. “It was a one hit chord sound, so I took that sound and just started writing, with nothing really in mind, no real vision of where it was going to go. He happened to walk in when I was writing it, obviously liked the song, and from there I think that’s where his head sparked. ‘We should do an Inner City reboot with you on board too.’ We put out that one single, and a year or two after, that’s when we did the show.”

That tune was ‘Good Luck’ and the band performed live with new vocalist Steffanie Christi’an at Detroit’s long-running dance festival Movement in 2017, before releasing a fresh album, ‘We All Move Together’, in 2020. Movement fest is where Dantiez first got intrigued by dance music. Nowadays a prolific producer with releases on labels like Soma, Defected, Nervous and countless others, he can trace his interest back to the first time he visited the Hart Plaza event in the city.

“I remember going to the first or second Movement,” he says. “Just to see the site, the venue, before the festival was even open. And then going to the festival, I had a great time, I was in a dance circle. I went every year since then and I was fortunate enough to play it a few times too. That was the beginning, the intro of me being in the scene.”

There are few better teachers from which to learn dance music production than Kevin Saunderson, but are there ever any familial disagreements or arguments in the studio or on the road?

“We get on for the most part,” Dantiez says. “Obviously there are some edits of stuff that he’ll have in mind for a track that I started collabing on, but I wouldn’t say that we butt heads in the studio too much. It’s special, I don’t think many people can say they can do that. It’s great to always have his feedback on my music.”

Beyond their current project, the future looks bright. There’s more e-Dancer and Inner City music on the way. Dantiez is helming Kevin’s KMS label, putting out singles by both established and upcoming talent. He’s also ready to release fresh tracks with his sibling Damarii under the Saunderson Brothers name. Meanwhile, Kevin is running a new party with his nephew Kweku Saunderson, The Hood Needs House. 

“We started to do some of these where it’s more house-related music, a little deeper as well,” he says. “We got that brand out there; people love the shirts and the slogan. We got a showcase coming up soon in Detroit, so we’re engaged with the scene and that’s what we love about doing it.”

As to the future of the Motor City itself, Kevin is hopeful. “We have youth making music,” he says. “There’s more connection because of the internet and social media and most of us are still playing pretty regularly. The scene is always evolving.” 

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This article first appeared in issue seven of Disco Pogo.

The Sabres Of Paradise are on a mission from a dancefloor deity. Their aim? To help secure the legacy of said fallen comrade, Andrew Weatherall. Armed with the re-release of their two studio albums and a series of live dates, Jagz Kooner and Gary Burns reveal all. Why they’ve got the band back together; which vocalists were lined up for the band’s never completed third album and throwing the rule book out of the window. “We didn’t have a plan. It was just make some mad music and enjoy it.” Hit it…

Picture the scene. Millennium Eve. The London Astoria. Onstage ‘The Reverend’ Al Green’s honeyed vocals are gently gliding over a mesmeric motorik-fuelled seven-minute opus that can best be described as electro soul. Buoyed by the fervid atmosphere, Bobby Gillespie rushes from stage left to join in on backing vocals, his gleaming grin indicative of the backstage euphoria. Speaking of offstage, those either waiting to join the throng or who have finished their turn include Tom Waits, Ice T and On-U Sound’s Little Annie. 

Also in the wings, watching on as his bandmates bring his studio experiments to vivid life, is Andrew Weatherall. His face betrays a mix of bemusement and pride. ‘How did it come to this?’ his countenance seems to suggest. Chris Cunningham is rushing around filming the gig for a forthcoming documentary telling the incredible story of the 90s most important electronic band. The occasion? The Sabres Of Paradise’s ‘farewell concert appearance’. Acid house’s Last Waltz. 

Fast forward 25 years and leaving that ‘vision’ to the parallel universe in which it belongs, the faces of Jagz Kooner and Gary Burns – the other two “studio bods” that comprised the Sabres – are also a mixture of confusion and joy. Sat in Kooner’s studio in Avebury, Wiltshire (“It’s the only studio inside a stone circle on the entire planet,” Kooner smiles, hence the name Stone Circle Studios) it seems the scenario outlined above, wasn’t that far removed from reality.

“After the Sabres imploded, that was it. End of story. Box it all up. Stick it in the archive. Move on,” says the voluble Kooner in short, sharp, staccato-like fashion. Around him and the less vocal Burns are banks of technology, instruments, microphones, wires, records, tapes… lots of neon red lights. “When we started getting the Sabres back together I went into the loft and found a load of DATs of unreleased songs. I found one that said Sabres and Bob G. I asked Gaz if we ever did anything with Bobby Gillespie in the studio. He went: ‘Yeah, we did and it was fucking great.’ I didn’t remember it; at the end it was all a bit hazy. It was imploding, disintegrating, things were falling apart. Got to sort stuff out, move on, get on.” 

It’s at this point that the hitherto taciturn Burns pipes up, warming to the memory. The Primal Scream singer was not the only musical luminary that might have appeared on a mooted Sabres third album. “There was talk of that next album having Tom Waits on it. We were going to do a track with Ice T. They were talking about all these people we should collaborate with. Andrew was like: ‘Bloody hell, I don’t want to work with Tom Waits. He’s one of my heroes.’ And then it all got a bit like how are we going to tour this if it’s loads of superstar guests on it? We’ll have to just have a little caricature of them on stage.”

“There was talk of doing something with Al Green,” Kooner interjects, his voice still revealing a sulphurous whiff of disbelief. “These were all the ideas that were coming in from the outside. Record companies, A&Rs… they were all suggesting it. It was like, what the fuck? You know what I mean? We were just a studio band, a production team – me, him and Andrew. We never set out to be in a band.”

We are of course getting slightly ahead of ourselves. To recap: ladies and gentlemen, it can’t have escaped your attention, but The Sabres Of Paradise are most definitely back in the building. Not for a long time. But certainly for a good time. Upon Andrew Weatherall’s untimely death in 2020, getting the Sabres back together was the last thing on Kooner and Burns’ mind. For starters, the pair had lost touch over the years, Weatherall’s passing bringing them back in contact. However, come 2023, Andrew’s brother Ian phoned Kooner with a proposition. It was fast approaching the 30th anniversary of the Sabres’ debut album, ‘Sabresonic’ and Ian wanted to mark the occasion by re-releasing both ‘Sabresonic’ and the band’s second, and final, album – their masterpiece – ‘Haunted Dancehall’.

The ball was rolling. Kooner was then contacted by Martin Brannagan from The Flightpath Estate, the online archive dedicated to Andrew’s extensive creative pursuits. Brannagan asked Kooner if he would take part in a Q&A at one of Weatherall’s spiritual homes, The Golden Lion in Todmorden. He was. So was Burns. This evolved into an additional DJ set, which would incorporate Sabres tunes and their many remixes and production duties too.

“I had a whole week of just deep diving into The Sabres Of Paradise,” recalls Kooner. “I had literally not listened to any of it for 30-odd years. That’s what we did; worked on a piece of music and then moved onto the next thing.”

 In Todmorden, Rob Fletcher, another member of The Flightpath Estate and the former promoter of the glorious 90s acidic Manchester night, Herbal Tea Party, also had a request. When the Sabres had played live at the rough and ready New Ardri club in Hulme in 1994, a recording had been made from the front of house desk. Fletcher wanted to know if he could play it before Kooner and Burns took to the stage.

“We said: ‘Of course, cool’,” Kooner says. “So, we’re standing at the side of the stage and they’re playing the live recording from Herbal Tea Party. I said to Gaz: ‘Fucking hell, this is us from 1994. Shit, this sounds really good!’”

“Yeah, it was quite a surprise,” laughs Burns. 

And with that came the idea of putting the band back together as a way of promoting the albums. “Because we were actually good,” smiles Kooner. “We had some serious bods with us. Rich Thair on drums, who was also in Red Snapper; Nick Abnett on bass, who was also in The Aloof and Phil Mossman on guitar, who split to New York after and joined this fly-by-night band called LCD Soundsystem. I don’t know what came of them. And then Gary. I mean, the beauty of the Sabres riffs and stuff… it’s all him. Gary came up with all of them parts.”

Enthused by their night at The Golden Lion, the pair approached Thair, Abnett and Mossman to gauge their interest. All were in.

“It had to be done exactly how it was,” says Kooner. “It’s like Four Tops or The Temptations. There’s only one Top left in Four Tops. The other three Tops weren’t even born at the time.”

Naturally, there were doubts. Back in the 90s, the band were only about the present and the future. Their collective sound – an amalgam of wayward post-Balearic dub perfection and electronic futurism – chimed with the spirit of the times, as Kooner acknowledges.

“Every day was Year Zero with Andrew,” he says. “He would be: ‘What we did yesterday doesn’t fucking matter, it’s what we’re doing today. What we do this week is what we’re focusing on. Next week is Year Zero again. We start, it’s a blank canvas, we do something new and you keep moving forward.’ So, like I said, I hadn’t listened to the albums in 30 years because it was all about moving on to the next thing.” He stops. The solemnity heavy in the air. “The problem is, and I spoke to Lizzie (Weatherall’s partner) and Ian about this, we can’t look forward now because there is not going to be anything new. Andrew’s gone and we’re not going to do anything new.

“If Andrew was in the band, from the point of view of playing with the live band, this wouldn’t have happened. The only reason this is happening is because Andrew was happy for the five of us to go and do the gigs. It was brilliant because he used to DJ before and afterwards, but he wasn’t on stage with the band.”

“There was no negativity for me,” says Burns matter-of-factly. “Not after we chatted about it. It just sounded like it could be good fun.”

“That’s partly it as well,” says Kooner. “The last time we did it, it was good fun. It was really hard work, but it was really enjoyable and luckily nobody ended up in rehab. We were all in a good place, but I don’t remember any of it. I think we all came back a little broke, because we took a dealer on the road with us. I think he was the only person that made any money.”

In the timeline of Andrew Weatherall’s ‘career’ – a word he constantly bridled at, preferring the more prosaic, but typically Weatherall-like, ‘job’ – The Sabres Of Paradise were just a brief highlight in a job littered with them. As his star continued to rise after his first flush of fame DJing and remixing the likes of Primal Scream, New Order, The Orb, My Bloody Valentine and James, he began collaborating with Jagz Kooner and Gary Burns from The Aloof. In understated fashion he approached the pair at Flying, Charlie Chester’s infamous acid house soiree, telling them he loved what they did and suggesting they should work together.

“You think it’s the beer talking,” remembers Kooner. “But a few days later he rang me and said: ‘It’s Andrew, I thought I’d chase you after that chat we had. Do you fancy working on a Jah Wobble remix?’ I immediately rang Gary and told him we had to go to Manfred Mann’s studio on the Old Kent Road.”

The success of that remix (‘Visions of You’ featuring Sinead O’Connor) saw the trio establish a prolific production partnership. Every week they’d craft makeovers of tracks for the likes of Galliano and Future Sound Of London, before working on One Dove’s beatific debut album, ‘Morning Dove White’. When they finished work on the Psychic TV track ‘United’, Weatherall proposed they release it under the name The Sabres Of Paradise, thus formalising their collaborative endeavours.

“Was it [the name] from a Haysi Fantayzee B-side or a book about Russian Cossacks?” asks Kooner. “This is debatable. He had the book – about all these good-looking bandits that would ride into town and steal all your gold and women. When you think of the imagery of Sabres – the cross swords, the horse riding, the cavalry coming – that comes more from the book. But in all honesty, I don’t know. We never really spoke about that, but it was one of those things: God damn, that’s a fucking cool name. Yeah, let’s have that.”

Alongside the remixes, the relentless threesome would work on their own stuff off the clock. They soon amassed a body of work that Jeff Barrett, Andrew’s manager, advised them to release. They had the studio – underneath the flightpath estate in Hounslow – the production team, the label, the club… “It wasn’t a corporation, but there was a lot of cross-pollination going on,” explains Kooner.

He continues: “Jeff was inspired by what he was hearing. He loved ‘Theme’, he loved ‘Wilmot’, he loved ‘Smokebelch’, he loved the ideas we were putting together. We’d go into the Heavenly offices and play Jeff a DAT of what we were working on. He would be dancing around the room; that was so infectious and inspiring.”

Their debut album, ‘Sabresonic’ was released on Warp in 1993. According to Burns, rather than an album proper, it was a collection of tracks that were sitting on the studio shelf which Andrew would take away, listen to and start to compile. “That’s why to this day I have trouble knowing what some of the tracks are called, because Andrew named them all. When we put them on the shelf, we’d just call it electro track. When it came on the album, Andrew called it ‘Ano Electro (Andante)’, which would be a bit like: ‘Erm, which one is that?’” 

By this point the studio outfit had evolved into a proper band. Their first gig – with Weatherall onstage “triggering off samples, firing off bits and bobs” – was at the YMCA on London’s Tottenham Court Road. They then played at David Holmes’ Sugar Sweet night in Belfast. After that performance, Weatherall came offstage and told the rest he wasn’t comfortable and that they should carry on playing live without him. He would remain in the studio and accompany them on tour as a DJ, which he did on the group’s first tour (alongside one Sean Johnston on merch and Vegetable Vision on visuals). Unlike Paul McCartney, who never got to see the Beatles live, Weatherall did get to witness one of his greatest musical creations.

“It was a great time to be away,” says Kooner. “It was a great bunch of people; we went up and down the country doing gigs and it was brilliant. That’s when we thought: ‘Right, we better take this a bit seriously really.’”

Taking it seriously led to ‘Haunted Dancehall’. The studio band had always experimented, but now they doubled down on their disregard for convention. Weatherall’s Year Zero aesthetic emboldened Kooner and Burns.

“We weren’t interested in traditional songwriting techniques,” says Kooner. “The tried and tested methods. It was throw all that out the window and see what you come up with.”

“We didn’t sit down and have a plan really,” adds Burns. “It was just make some mad music and enjoy it.”

By ‘Haunted Dancehall’ any last remaining inhibitions had gone. Weatherall, Kooner and Burns worked quickly and emphatically. They’d start by flicking through Weatherall’s “incredible record collection” and choosing three pieces of vinyl each. They’d then take those nine records to the studio to see if anything was worth sampling. If it was they’d build up the arrangements on the desk, while Kooner messed around with the effects machines. 

“This would then get recorded down to tape,” beams Kooner. “We would then listen back to see if we were happy with it. It’s a bit like the old dub reggae method of building songs.” 

One time, the group were in Berwick Street Studios when Ashley Beedle popped in. They wrote three demos that afternoon. “He saw the birth of three songs: ‘Wilmot’, ‘Theme’ and ‘R.S.D.’ (Red Stripe Dub),” Kooner remembers. “It was just beautiful.”

“The stuff we were doing for ‘Haunted Dancehall’… we kind of hit on a bit of a sound,” Kooner reminisces some more. “That kind of metallic dubby sound with interesting melodic hooks and riffs. It was really unique and different. That came from years of experience of being with Andrew and him not giving a shit about what is expected of him anywhere along the line.”

A tour with Primal Scream followed, including one memorable gig at Brixton Academy where, according to Kooner, two records, still unsurpassed, were set – the highest bar take in the upstairs bar and the biggest guest list ever. Oasis wanted them as a support act (“Noel’s a massive dance fan, he wanted us, unfortunately the dates clashed with Primal Scream”) and new songs were started (“We were still in that head space of putting more tunes together and having them on the shelf”), including the recording with Bobby Gillespie and Little Annie. 

In 1995, they went on tour to Japan. And that, with a sudden finality, was that. There was no great big fall out. Someone suggested calling it a day and no one seemed to put up too much of a fight. The pair say the details are still vague.

“I can’t put my finger on anything,” recalls Burns. “Still to this day I’m not quite sure what happened there.”

Kooner says a month after the split Weatherall contacted him. He asked Kooner if he thought they’d done the right thing. “I’m like: ‘I don’t know.’ But by that point, it’s typical blokes. Young blokes. You’re not going to go: ‘Do you know what? You broke my heart; we need to have a chat about this.’ It’s just blokes being blokes. ‘It’s done now. Move on.’ It was that kind of mentality. I think we did regret it from that point of view.”

After that brief moment of indecision, Kooner says the subject was never raised again. Kooner and Burns carried on with The Aloof, before Kooner went onto work with Primal Scream on ‘Exterminator’. He would occasionally visit Weatherall and Keith Tenniswood (the Sabres’ former assistant/engineer) in their Scrutton Street studio for tea and biscuits.

“It was all good vibes,” he says. “And then every now and again he’d be DJing somewhere, it was great fun. Years down the line there was no discussion of whether we did the right thing because we were still moving forward. That is what you do as an artist. The only time you can’t do that is when all of a sudden the person that you did do something with is no longer with us. Then it’s a time for reflection. To think about everything that you did, and hold that in a greater kind of regard than you did before. That’s kind of where we are now.”

Where Kooner and Burns are now is busy preparing for this year’s gigs in the mystical sonic stone circle. The old samples, files and technology have all miraculously been brought back to life, unlike, Kooner laughs, when he helped Primal Scream rebuild ‘Screamadelica’ for their comeback shows. “I had a bit of a panic before we started doing this,” he says. “When I was working on ‘Screamadelica’ every piece of kit, every bit of technology we used, every DAT and disc and everything that we tried to load up, either wouldn’t turn on or blew up the instant you ran a bit of electricity through it. So, I had an apprehensive few months of finding stuff and going please play, please load, please don’t fucking blow up. So far we’ve been really lucky. Everything’s loaded up. Everything plays back.” And because it’s 30 years on – and with the advances in technology “and the fact that we’re all better musicians now” – Kooner says the shows will be more impressive.

“We’ll be performing a lot more songs than 30 years ago,” he says. “I can’t tell you which ones yet, as we want it to be a surprise. The songs are developing in a great way as the arrangements are different from some of the versions on the albums – they work better from a live point of view.”

The ultimate goal with this flurry of Sabres activity – the re-release of the remastered ‘Sabresonic’ and ‘Haunted Dancehall’ – and the accompanying live shows, including a gig at fabric at the end of May, is to cement Weatherall’s legacy further. And that of The Sabres Of Paradise. 

“Our friends are excited about the shows and that’s great,” Kooner admits. “But you ask a bunch of 20- or 30-year-olds about Sabres and they’re like: ‘Who? Never fucking heard of you.’ So, it’s really a case of ok, you haven’t heard of us, but when you do see us, you will fucking remember us.”

Kooner twitches in his seat one last time at the end of an extensive two-hour chat and smiles, before issuing his final rallying cry. “We’re not coming back for a long time. We are literally going to get the albums out, do some shows, re-establish the name of The Sabres Of Paradise, show everybody what we were like, and then fucking ride off into the sunset again. That’s it.” 

The last gang in town are back.

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This article originally appeared in issue seven of Disco Pogo.

Before the unimaginable worldwide fame, the high-profile relationships, the activism, the meaning of her every move analysed by cultural studies undergraduates... Madonna was on the dancefloor, striking a pose and getting into the groove. As Mark Lindores explains, her enduring relationship with dance music in all its evolving guises is the key to explaining not only Madonna’s longevity but also her popularity. As the pop icon herself sings: ‘I know a place you can get away, it’s called a dancefloor…’

As 2024 limped to a dull, dreary finale it was the refuge of social media that presented us with the first glimpse of Madonna shortly after 3pm ringing in 2025 on the other side of the world. Comfortably ensconced in the DJ booth of Tokyo’s 1OAK nightclub surrounded by a wall of iPhones recording her every move, the OG pop icon was clearly having the time of her life, arms draped around her son Rocco, dancing and singing along to Peggy Gou’s ‘(It Goes Like) Nanana’. As the comments sections quickly filled with the usual casual misogyny, ageism and general disapproval that have greeted her every move for decades – “What is she wearing?”, “It’s time she acted her age”, it all rather begged the question: Where else would you expect to find Madonna on New Year’s Eve?

After all, this is the woman who, with ‘Everybody’, ‘Into the Groove’ ‘Vogue’ and ‘Music’ among many others, has displayed a comprehensive understanding and affinity for dance music, penning some of the most precise and perfect elegies of that unique feeling when music triggers the body to be a conduit for physical and emotional release. Following a year which saw her experience tremendous highs (she wrapped her Celebration World Tour performing to a record 1.6 million fans on Rio’s Copacabana Beach last May) and crushing lows (the death of her beloved brother Christopher), she was naturally to be found living her best life in one of the magical meccas she celebrates so enthusiastically in her music.

Madonna pinpointed the exact moment that she fell in love with dance music – in a New York club called Pete’s Place in the late-70s – in a 2005 interview with The Observer. Describing a profound feeling which many can relate to, she cited it as one of her main sources of inspiration when creating. “My initial thought was ‘WOW’!” she said. “I thought: ‘Oh my God, are there other places like this?’ I didn’t know you could just walk into a club and start dancing by yourself. I thought someone had to ask you! You could just dance for six hours and nobody will bother you and you don’t even have to drink. I felt an incredible sense of liberation and I felt happier. That sense of freedom and feeling independent. There was nothing fun or glamorous about my life at that time and I needed some excitement. In the nightclub I was free.”

Officially the biggest selling female artist in history, she is concurrently the most decorated artist on the Billboard Dance Charts with 50 number one singles (collated on her 2022 ‘Finally Enough Love’ remix collection) , a summation of a career in which she has transitioned from style-savvy street urchin to globe-straddling wanton bride, daring dominatrix to born-again spiritual scion, cyber cowgirl to politically charged renegade to glitter-strewn dancing queen, the list goes on. While she has manoeuvred each sonic and stylish shift with ease, the one constant through them all has been her devotion to the dancefloor.

“When it comes to dance music and club culture, Madonna’s influence is immeasurable,” says DJ and producer Tracy Young, who has worked with Madonna for over 25 years, reworking hits such as ‘Music’, ‘Hung Up’, ‘4 Minutes’ and ‘Don’t Tell Me’ and even DJed at her wedding to Guy Ritchie. “From the very start of her career, she seamlessly blended underground club sounds with mainstream pop, opening doors for dance music to reach broader audiences. Tracks like ‘Holiday’, ‘Physical Attraction’, ‘Vogue’ and ‘Music’ weren’t just hits—they redefined what dance music could achieve on a global scale. Her partnerships with producers like Shep Pettibone, William Orbit, Stuart Price and countless others consistently pushed boundaries, bringing the energy and creativity of the club scene into the mainstream without losing its authenticity.”

By the time Madonna released her first single, 1982’s ‘Everybody’, with its sleazy synths, funky bassline and killer refrain demanding the listener ‘Let the DJ shake you/Let the music take you’, she had already established herself as a fully paid-up member of New York’s Bacchanalian Bohemia. She had arrived in the city just in time for disco’s last dance from her native Detroit four years earlier as urban legend would have it, with just $35 and her ballet slippers to pursue her dream of becoming a professional dancer.

A series of menial jobs including a brief stint working at Dunkin’ Donuts, waitressing and nude modelling for art and photography classes kept a roof over her head, but it was the city’s nocturnal playground that defined her future. As Studio 54’s Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager were jailed for tax evasion in 1980, the exclusivity and outdated glamour of the infamous superclub gave way to a new wave of nightlife in Manhattan where creativity was currency and the clientele of clubs such as Danceteria, the Mudd Club, Palladium, Roxy, Club 57, Funhouse and Paradise Garage were hotbeds of untapped talent social networking its way to success.

Although these would expel a remarkable wave of creativity in the worlds of music, art, fashion, photography and film, including the Beastie Boys, Keith Haring, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Rick Rubin, Steven Meisel, Russell Simmons, LL Cool J and RuPaul, the biggest star to emerge was the one considered by many as the one least likely to. Madonna had dabbled in new wave and disco but was known mainly for being seen on the scene. While excess and experimentation were rife to withstand the musical marathons of Larry Levan or Jellybean, Madonna’s dance training had instilled in her a steely self-discipline which saw her avoid the pitfalls of her peers, barely even touching alcohol (her relationship with Basquiat had been wrecked by his heroin addiction). As one talking head in the 2015 documentary ‘Keith Haring: Street Art Boy’ recalled: “People didn’t take to her at all. They thought she was just a trashy white girl that couldn’t sing.”

Mark Kamins was the principal DJ at Danceteria – a simmering creative cauldron where punk kids, B-boys and hipsters put aside their differences to party – and an A&R scout for Chris Blackwell’s Island Records, when he agreed to play one of the tracks from a demo tape Madonna had been touting to anyone with industry influence. 

Speaking in 2012, just months before his death, Kamins fondly recalled how Madonna’s potent star quality and unbreakable self-belief convinced him that she was going to confound her naysayers before he’d even heard a note of music. “She was always on the dancefloor,” he said. “She had a tremendous need to perform – when she danced, people watched. I agreed to listen to her tape, and I liked ‘Everybody’, so I agreed to play the demo on the Saturday night. The floor liked it, so I took it to Island Records, I was doing A&R for them at the time, but they passed on Madonna. I’d also been working with Talking Heads, so I had a relationship with some people at Sire (an imprint of Warner Brothers) so I took her to [label boss] Seymour Stein who was in hospital recovering from surgery, and he signed her on the spot.”

Although delighted to have finally landed a deal, the reality failed to live up to her expectations and she was frustrated in her label’s lack of faith in her abilities or talents. She had envisioned her path would be like that of labelmate Prince, who had free reign to write and produce his own music and when that didn’t happen for her, she was compensated with being allowed to choose her producers. Paired with Reggie Lucas to record her debut album, the pair butted heads on several occasions due to creative differences. With hit records and experience to his name, Lucas expected the newcomer’s input to be minimal: the opposite turned out to be true. 

Though confident their collaboration had wielded future hits, Madonna was concerned that they sounded too similar to his work with disco divas Phyllis Hyman and Stephanie Mills and asked her boyfriend at the time, Funhouse DJ John ‘Jellybean’ Benitez to remix some of the album to reflect what was happening in the clubs. “There was something different about her because she was really a dance artist from the very beginning,” Jellybean told online newspaper First For Women of her inherent instinct for what makes a good dance record. “Madonna’s music had a lot of heart and passion and a rhythmic groove that people loved to dance to, with melodies and lyrics that you could memorise and sing-along to. That feel-good combination along with her pizzazz transformed ‘Holiday’ into an international hit. I had DJs reaching out to me from England, South Africa, France. There was no social media then and I would get letters mailed to the club and read about how much someone in Switzerland loved the record. I was getting all this information in bits and pieces.”

Cautious that she wanted her records to have style and substance, Madonna wanted to ensure that her records conveyed a message as well as made people want to dance. “I was very much invested in empowering women,” she told Paper magazine in 2022. “Because I think, while women were making great dance records, I feel like in the early days, while the songs and melodies are really strong and the singers are really good, they weren’t really invested in making women think: ‘Wow, I don’t have to live in a man’s world, living under the male gaze for the rest of my life. I can look at life in a different way and not settle. I can have my own voice and my own vision.’ So that was an important element.”

Contrasting the lyrics of disco standards such as ‘Don’t Leave Me This Way’, ‘Never Can Say Goodbye’ or ‘If I Can’t Have You’ with ‘Express Yourself’’s ‘What you need is a big strong hand to lift you to your higher ground/Make you feel like Queen on a throne/Make him love you ‘til you can’t come down’ or even ‘Into The Groove’’s ‘Boy, you’ve got to prove your love to me’, it’s easy to see that those statements have been there all along. One of the most recent examples of those self-empowerment anthems, ‘I Rise’ from 2019’s ‘Madame X’ album made history when DJ Tracy Young became the first woman in Grammys history to be even nominated in the Best Remixed Recording category, let alone win it.

“To be the first woman to receive that recognition felt monumental, not just for me but for all the talented women in the music, engineering and producer community,” Young says. “Winning the Grammy for a Madonna remix made it all the more meaningful – that song felt like such a celebration of everything she stands for and everything we’ve worked on together over the years. It’s a song that speaks to resilience, strength and the fight for equality, which resonates so deeply with her LGBTQIA+ fans and one which also reflects the power of music to unite, uplift, and inspire.”

It is these universal themes that have resonated with Madonna’s fanbase on a profound level – particularly the LGBTQIA+ demographic with whom she has shared a longstanding symbiosis. Throughout the 80s, as the gay community was ravaged by HIV/AIDS and forced back underground by prejudice and violence, Madonna was one of the few allies to show public support and endorsement. She hosted AIDS benefits, donated proceeds from her concerts, inserted safe sex leaflets into her albums and gave frank interviews to specialist gay publications such as The Advocate. She also featured queer representation heavily in her work, the most notable example being ‘Vogue’.

While her peers, Prince and Michael Jackson retreated behind the gates of their multi-acre compounds and disappeared into the vortexes of their own mythologies, Madonna was to be found on the dancefloor of 530 West 27th Street’s Sound Factory vogueing with the House Of Xtravaganza. Junior Vasquez spinned while they preened and posed, inadvertently inspiring what would become one of her signature hits. Reminiscing on their relationship at that time, Vasquez described their bond as being “like brother and sister” (they fell out in 1996 after he released the house track ‘If Madonna Calls’ featuring a voicemail message Madonna left for him). “She would come down to the Sound Factory,” he told In Magazine. “I would start playing sometimes at 10pm and she’d come into the booth or sit on the speaker. At that time it wasn’t crowded yet, so you could see the dancefloor and she saw [dancers] Jose Gutierez and Luis Xtravaganza. They were the stars of that Sound Factory runway show. They were a big deal and she saw that they stole the show – they were primo.”

The conversation about ‘Vogue’ in 2025 is a complex one, fiercely debated between two camps. On one side there are those that accuse Madonna of cultural appropriation for taking a gay subculture and gaining from it, and on the other, those that believe her helping it sashay into the mainstream was more a case of cultural elevation. Dancer/choreographer Jose Gutierez believes the latter. It was he that taught Madonna how to vogue and went on to co-choreograph the ‘Vogue’ video and dance on her groundbreaking Blond Ambition Tour. He also recently reunited with her onstage during the New York stop of the Celebration Tour to judge the mock voguing contest played out onstage in tribute to the Harlem drag balls.

“She didn’t steal it,” Gutierez recalls today. “She didn’t go to some Ivy League dance department and try to recreate voguing, she came to the club herself and sought us out. What people seem to forget is the good that came from this great pop/gay icon taking voguing and putting it onto the world stage – giving it the platform it needed. She came to the club and found two of the community’s own – myself and Luis [Camacho, aka Xtravaganza] – and took us with her. That was her way of honouring it and giving it credit and keeping it what voguing traditionally is. It gave me so much.”

Aside from cementing her relationship with her LGBTQIA+ audience, ‘Vogue’ was the impetus for another significant relationship, that between Madonna and Shep Pettibone. Though he had remixed her earlier singles and worked on 1987’s ‘You Can Dance’ remix album, ‘Vogue’ was the first time the pair had co-wrote and produced original work together. They went on to collaborate on the bulk of 1992’s criminally underrated ‘Erotica’ album (a gritty sonic snapshot of 90s New York with its deep house, hip hop, swingbeat and jazz), establishing a pattern which would continue throughout Madonna’s career where producers remixed tracks for her before going into the studio to create originals (William Orbit and Stuart Price walked the same path).

It was Shep’s remix of ‘Express Yourself’ in 1989, that transformed how Madonna viewed remix culture. She had previously been protective about her original art being altered too much, but when Pettibone rebuilt the song from scratch retaining only her vocal, supplementing the brassy funk of the original for a house-inspired beat, she loved it so much she dubbed her video (at the time the most expensive video ever made) with his version and performed it in her live performances, setting a precedent in how her music would be created and presented moving forward. 

As artists who had previously been successful in the 80s and had become synonymous with that decade (U2 developed their ‘Zoo TV’ project after finding themselves in a similar predicament), the art of remixing enabled them to reach an audience that maybe wouldn’t have been checking for them before. Madonna tapped into the trend and commissioned a series of mixes that revitalised her sound and saw her embraced by the club crowd – something that continues to this day. From performing ‘Like a Virgin’ for the (very) first time at the Paradise Garage at Keith Haring’s Party Of Life to launching ‘Confessions on a Dancefloor’ at London’s Koko (where she’d last played in its previous incarnation as Camden Palace in 1983), her bond to club culture is unbroken.

Although it became the norm in the 90s for pop or rock artists to turn their tracks over to superstar DJs whose names had become as famous as the artists they were remixing, Madonna’s impressive credentials as a dance enthusiast reveal themselves in her remixology, boasting a knowledge that extends way beyond bpms. Though her canon includes the work of the house giants servicing all the pop divas at the time – Junior Vasquez, Peter Rauhofer and David Morales, a deeper dive into her discography boasts an impressive range of eclectic talent ranging from Orbital, Groove Armada, Deep Dish and Stereo MC’s on remix duties, to Dallas Austin, Nellee Hooper, Timbaland and Diplo co-producing with her. While some artists rely on A&R teams and labels to pair them with the hot producer or coolest DJ, that has never been the case with Madonna. Whoever she is collaborating with reflects who she is currently listening to.

“That’s why her remixes have felt authentic – because she treats them like genuine extensions of her artistic vision,” Young offers. “She never treats them as an afterthought – they’re integral to how she engages with her music and audience. I think her roots in the club scene and her respect for its culture are why her remixes resonate so deeply. They’re not just reworks; they’re celebrations of the music, the energy and the community that surrounds it. She’s always curious and open to discovery and looking for what’s next. She doesn’t like to repeat herself as an artist. Over the years there have been many conversations between us about music, where she’s shared tracks she’s into or asked for recommendations. That genuine love for dance music is something that’s always evident – it’s not about chasing trends or following what’s popular but about creating something authentic and meaningful.”

Perhaps the greatest example of Madonna’s risk-taking paying off came in 1997, whilst working on her ‘Ray of Light’ album. When early sessions with Babyface (with whom she had scored one of the biggest US hits of her entire career with ‘Take a Bow’) and Rick Nowels failed to wield the results she wanted, she instead took a complete leap of faith on William Orbit based on the fact that she loved his ‘Strange Cargo’ suite of albums. Wanting her record to reflect the rebirth she was experiencing in her life as a new mother, Orbit’s baptismal bleeps and bubbles provided the perfect soundscapes for the introspection of her spiritual odyssey.

“I’d always loved a lot of techno music, but you never really think of it as being emotional,” Madonna explained in 1998 when the album was released. “So, what I wanted to do [with ‘Ray of Light’] was to make it intimate, make it emotional, to prove that it could be. I heard what William had been doing musically and it was exactly what I was looking for, so I asked him to produce the album.” 

“She’s an amazing person, producer and it was a true collaboration – it’s important to get this across,” Orbit told Hunger TV in 2014. “I don’t like it when people assume that I was the clever one doing the whole job. I’d feel mortified if I was her because she didn’t put her name on the production out of vanity, she was fucking in there with me. I’ve never met anybody who has more ability to make things happen like she does. Stuff happens and she makes it happen just by the sheer force of her will.”

When a revitalised Madonna decided on another sonic shift influenced by her love of the French dance boom of the early-2000s, she once again went to the source. Underground maverick Mirwais, whom she heard when his ‘Production’ album was submitted to her label, helped veer her in a harder, futuristic direction with organic elements for the ‘Music’ album. With his roots in the Parisian DIY punk scene, he wasn’t sure what to expect from a global pop icon but was soon impressed by the studio-savvy superstar and her willingness to take risks.

“She never imposed limits on me,” he told Keyboard magazine. “My natural side leans toward more experimental music. And with Madonna, she’s not only commercial. She’s also experimental. She has a natural feeling for new music and for good commercial music. She listens to a lot of underground music. She has a natural feeling for it. The mixture of her energy and her character are good for that. I think provocation is a really important element of pop music because without it, music isn’t exciting. Working with people like Madonna and trying to make something more experimental is provocation for the underground.”

It is perhaps this role as pop’s premier provocateur that has been key to Madonna’s longevity. As she brought her record-breaking Celebration Tour to a frenetic close on Rio’s Copacabana Beach last May, performing ‘Bitch I’m Madonna’ flanked by a troupe of dancers all dressed as the many different incarnations she has adopted over the past 43 years, it was hard not to marvel at her evolution. At a time when artists of her calibre are expected to embrace the “legacy artist” mantle and settle for a Vegas residency or rework the greatest hits into as many different iterations imaginable, Madonna’s curiosity for what’s next and fearlessness to experiment is what keeps her interesting. Only David Bowie comes to mind when trying to think of anyone else that refused to “play for the gallery” and was prepared to take the risks she does.

Twenty years on from her seminal dance opus, ‘Confessions on a Dancefloor’, Madonna thrilled fans by announcing on Instagram just before Christmas that she had reunited with Stuart Price to work on her next album. He had shown deep understanding and reverence for her discography when crafting the audio-biography setlist for her tour, seeking out rare mixes and deep cuts and the pair were inspired to work on new material, due later this year.

While the news of their reunion sparked a flurry of online reports with the term “return to form” already being bandied about and talk of Stuart “bringing out the best in Madonna”, it brought to mind something he said when Madonna’s name came up in conversation a few years ago which also echoes that of her other high-profile allies. 

“People always talk about ‘Madonna’s collaborators’, but she really doesn’t get the credit she deserves,” he said. “You don’t really produce Madonna, you collaborate with her. She’s always well prepared and has considered everything before she even gets into the room with a collaborator. It’s fantastic to work with someone with such strong direction.”

A quick search online and you will see similar testimonies from almost everyone that has worked with her (and is almost always given credit for the work before she is) from Nile Rodgers to William Orbit, Mirwais to Diplo, Shep Pettibone to Pharrell Williams. Whether it’s ‘Into the Groove’, ‘La Isla Bonita’, ‘Like a Prayer’, ‘Vogue’, ‘Music’, ‘Frozen’, ‘Hung Up’ or ‘4 Minutes’, there is only one name on the credits to all of those songs and that’s Madonna’s.

Read: Madonna's 12 best dancefloor 12-inches

Read: When Madonna played The Hacienda

Read: How Madonna's first album changed everything

‍

This feature first appeared in issue seven of Disco Pogo.

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Cut Balearic Mike and he bleeds two things: Madonna and the dancefloor. Who better to extol the virtues of 12 Madonna 12-inches?

Before anything, Madonna was a dancer. This unbridled act of personal expression has always been central to Madonna Louise Ciccone the person and Madonna the persona. It follows then that the importance of the dancefloor – as a source of community, sanctuary and joy – has long been fundamental to her music.

Although originating from Michigan, Madonna the artist was really born in the downtown music and art scene of late-70s and early-80s New York City. Arriving in Manhattan she soon found herself in the creative centre of the most exciting city on the planet. A city where punk rock, disco and hip hop were all mixing with street art, and where uptown and downtown were coming together to turbo charge pop music and culture for the new decade.

From dating über-cool downtown New York DJs Mark Kamins and Funhouse resident Jellybean, and upcoming artists like Jean-Michel Basquiat and Futura 2000 (who took Madonna to the Roxy on a date) to appearing in the video for Konk’s disco-not-disco classic ‘Konk Party’ which was filmed at David Mancuso’s 99 Prince Street Loft and to her work as a defender and campaigner for LGBTQIA+ rights and HIV and AIDS awareness, Madonna has consistently been rooted in and drawn inspiration from club culture.

I fell in love with Madonna the first time she appeared on ‘Top of the Pops’ in 1984 (the night before her now legendary Haçienda gig on ‘The Tube’), performing her first UK hit ‘Holiday’, but I don’t think anyone could have predicted what was to come. Madonna has gone on to become the biggest selling female artist of all time, while consistently turning out club classic after classic. Over the decades when I’ve been lucky enough to play records to people, or when I’ve been a part of that sweaty mass of bodies, so many special moments have been soundtracked by her music. 

Here are just 12 of my favourite 12-inches (ok, so one is digital)! All hail her Madgesty!

‘Everybody’ (Original 12-inch Vocal or Dub Version) 1982

Madge’s debut is a bona fide New York electro-disco-style club classic. It was produced by her then boyfriend, legendary Danceteria and Mudd Club DJ Mark Kamins and was accompanied by a video filmed on the stage of the Paradise Garage (Madonna would also perform at the Garage, when she took to the stage for her friend Keith Haring’s first annual ‘Party Of Life’ in 1984). The track’s nine-minute dub version was so futuristic and visionary it soon became a staple of Levan’s. Nearly 20 years later it enjoyed a second act as the basis for the Norwegian cosmic disco epic from Erot and Annie, ‘The Greatest Hit’.

‘Into the Groove’ (UK 12-inch Version) 1985

By the summer of 1985 and the UK was in full Madonna-mania mode! Not only did the ‘Like a Virgin’ LP and subsequent singles rampage over the charts, but all the singles from Madonna’s debut album were reissued and charted. Every cool girl was now dressed like Madonna with bangles, cropped tops and tights. And then, a film arrived where Madonna basically got to play herself and be cool as fuck. This single was its centrepiece. This was the finest, most concentrated essence of Madonna committed to wax; a pop and dancefloor masterpiece which detonates the coolest underground warehouse party and your cousin’s wedding. There’s a Shep Pettibone remix of this as well, but the original 12-inch, produced by Madonna and Steve Bray, is the one which delivers. Astonishingly never released as a single in the US, it was her first UK number one.

‘La Isla Bonita’ (Extended Remix) 1987

From the clubs of downtown New York to the open-air dancefloors of Ibiza. With its breathy vocal and percussion intro, chugging 100bpm tempo and Spanish guitars-a-plenty, this 12-inch Extended version is undoubtedly Madonna’s most Balearic record. File next to other Balearic classics such as Linda di Franco’s ‘TV Scene’ or Sade’s ‘Paradise’, as essentials for that Adriatic boat party set.

‘Like A Prayer’ (Churchapella/12-inch Extended Remix/Mike Simonetti Edit) 1989/2014

When I landed in Manchester in 1991, Adrian and Mark LuvDup had just begun to host the LuvDup parties which would launch their careers. Adrian had this brilliant live mix he would perform as the end-of-night anthem (clubs mostly still closed at 2am back then) involving cutting between two copies. 

I’ll let Ade tell you how: “I started by playing the Churchapella, and at 45 seconds when the second verse started, I brought in the Shep Pettibone 12-inch Extended Remix from the other 12-inch. I let them play together for a while and then did various drops in and out to just the Churchapella to heighten the tension throughout the song . It’s a wonderful, uplifting song anyway and this worked a treat – when I cut across to just the Churchapella at 3:28 (the bit that has the choir singing ‘Just like a prayer, I’ll take you there, it’s like a dream to me’) it was just joyous and there wasn’t a dry eye in the club…”

Fast forward to the new millennium and I’m onboard a Horse Meat Disco boat party in Croatia when Will Tramp drops that Churchapella and the dancefloor explodes with so much joy the Argonaughty almost sank! Over the subsequent decade more and more DJs begin pulling out the same party trick, with either the original version or the excellent Mike Simonetti edit of said Churchapella becoming something of a dancefloor standard again.

‘Vogue’ (Shep Pettibone 12-inch Version/Strike-A-Pose Dub) 1990

By the summer of 1990, Madonna was the undisputed Queen of Pop. While her 80s rivals were finding life hard going, she was at the peak of her powers, following up her best album yet (‘Like a Prayer’) with this all-conquering single. Co-produced and written with Shep Pettibone, it was inspired by and precision tooled for the New York LGBTQ+ Drag Ball scene. It’s considered the first house record to hit top spot on the Billboard Hot 100 and it topped the UK charts just as her legendary Blond Ambition tour was taking off. Although the original 12-inch mix is damn near perfect, the Drag Ball roots are made even more explicit on the superb ‘Strike-A-Pose Dub’, with liberal sampling of The Salsoul Orchestra classic ‘Ooh, I Love It (Love Break)’ over a stripped back track, which seems to only increase the drama.

‘Deeper and Deeper’ (Shep Pettibone Classic 12-inch) 1992

Basically, this is ‘Vogue 2.0’, and utterly wonderful. An ecstatic, anthemic powerhouse of a song and vocal delivery (again, co-written with Pettibone), elevated to beyond the clouds on this stunning, classy house remix, which nods stylistically to the Def Mix productions of David Morales and Frankie Knuckles, and is every bit as gorgeous.

‘Bedtime Story’ (Orbital Remix) 1995

The original album version is one of Madonna’s most groundbreaking songs, a trippy, psychedelic, slo-mo house affair, complemented with an equally surreal video. The remixers she was working with around this time tended towards the tribal house sound favoured at NYC clubs like The Sound Factory and Twilo, hence Junior Vasquez on remix duties here, and Danny Tenaglia on ‘Human Nature’. Not really my thing, so I was delighted to discover this weird and wonderful remix from UK techno pioneers Orbital on the UK 12. They manage to retain the wonderfully disorientating, hypnotic feel of the original, while allowing Madge’s voice to float around in a sea of rattling breakbeats, nagging basslines and discordant synth pads, taking the song into new territory while keeping the feel of the OG.

‘I’ll Remember’ (Theme From ‘With Honours’) (William Orbit Guerilla Beach Mix) 1994

The William Orbit-produced ‘Ray of Light’ album is probably Madonna’s creative peak, and certainly my favourite LP. That working relationship began a few years earlier with 92’s ‘Erotica’ and then this stunning remix. Sandwiched between Orbit’s ‘Strange Cargo III’ and ‘Strange Cargo: Hinterland’ albums, this mix is the distillation of the sound he was perfecting on those masterpieces and which would reach its zenith on ‘Ray of Light’. A gorgeous Balearic soundscape of chunky, chugging beats, fluttering percussion, twittering synths, throbbing basslines and haunting piano melodies, while snippets and phrases of Madonna’s vocal float in and out of the mix, seemingly at random. Wonderful.

‘Frozen’ (Stereo MC’s Remix) 1998

In its original form the lead single from the superb ‘Ray of Light’ is all skittering breakbeats and ethereal washes of sound, like a drum’n’bass record on heroin – a total wonky masterpiece, with a Chris Cunningham-directed video to match. On remix duty, Stereo MC’s manage to bring the funk to the track, with haunting yet subtle North African influences, a bassline which sounds like it’s lifted from the Disco Dub Band and a rock-solid groove of the Balearic chugger variety. Manages to somehow improve on perfection.

‘Nothing Really Matters’ (Kruder & Dorfmeister Mix) 1999

Pure, unadulterated, magic! I’m guessing that William Orbit suggested K&D for this remix – they had previously remixed his own ‘Million Town’ track – although their public profile had been raised substantially after they remixed Depeche Mode’s ‘Useless’ the previous year, so her Madgesty could have been aware of their work anyway. No matter. What we get is an 11-minute-plus epic of jazzy breakbeats, squelching analogue synths, dramatic brass stabs and one of the all-time classic remixes. All that remains of Madonna’s original, admittedly wonderful song, is a few snatched vocal phrases, which are laced liberally throughout, creating a dark, smoky, sweaty and fierce, future-funk masterpiece. K&D are (understandably) quite proud of the mix, as they’ve added it to the recent 25th anniversary reissue of ‘The K&D Sessions’.

‘Don’t Tell Me’ (Victor Calderone Sensory Mix) 2000

Madonna met Victor Calderone while he was resident DJ at Liquid in Miami, the club she and her friends chose to party at whenever she was living in Miami. He would go on to remix 11 tracks for her, but while the majority are the kind of ‘big room house’ that he was known for playing to the coke-fuelled beautiful people and celebrities who made up his club audience, on this track he turns in a stunning 103bpm, trippy, psychedelic, chugger of a remix. It’s heavy and throbbing, but Balearic in a ‘would sound good at ALFOS’ style! Also includes the album version on the same 12-inch, which is a career high point.

‘Borderline’ (Butch Le Butch 5AM Garage Rework) Download Only 2013

This incredible re-work took its own good mystical time to make a name for itself, but by about 2017 you couldn’t attend a quality music event, be it a basement in Manchester or a festival in Croatia and not hear it! Stretching the song out to over 11 minutes and allowing the component parts to stand alone and shine makes this pop classic sound like it was remixed by Larry Levan specifically for the dancefloor at the Paradise Garage. I was lucky enough to DJ on a boat part in Rio de Janeiro a few years back and this was my closing track. Epic doesn’t do it justice. 

Read: Madonna's greatest inspiration. Her enduring relationship with the dancefloor

Read: When Madonna played The Hacienda

Read: How Madonna's first album changed everything

‍

This article first appeared in issue seven of Disco Pogo.

Over the course of her five-decade career Madonna has become all things to all people, she is, of course, one of music’s greatest chameleons. But for her pure quintessence, argues Paul Flynn, you only have to look back upon her first clamation – the New York hip of her debut album. ‘Everybody get up and do your thing’ indeed…

There is some retrospective confusion, in my mind at least, as to what Madonna’s debut album is called. Is it ‘Madonna’s Madonna’? ‘The Madonna Album’? ‘Madonna’? Only adding to the befuddlement, two years after its original, perfect, July 1983 release it was reissued with a horrible new dust jacket, retitled ‘The First Album’, an act of basic derision that must surely have been cooked up around the Perspex boardroom table of an early-80s corporate record label. Is it, in fact, untitled? If so, why is Madonna’s name unfolded discreetly up one side of the sleeve in white, with the ‘o’ picked out in red, and then back down the other in black with the adjacent ‘o’ picked out, too? 

That considered accentuation of the hole never felt accidental. The record opens with celestial sex – ‘Lucky Star’’s ‘shine your heavenly body tonight’ loop – and never really lets up. It ends in a steel-plated invocation for togetherness, ‘Everybody’. Maybe it was intended as The ‘O’ Record, patient zero for a firebrand new division of elite pop music, overseen by its inaugural new overlord, one spliced down the middle of Debbie Harry and Donna Summer, then built back up in the image of a new, unforeseen, emerging figurehead for end of the century womanhood. A fabulously photogenic face with a disco twist. 

This is music with a foundation in the spritely boogie of some of the greatest nightclubs to ever exist, then translated neatly back to the mass market over the wireless. Unfurled in its wake is an unprecedented new heroine, one whose voice could summon both the demonic and angelic with every phrase. A sweet intersection of the seven deadly sins and act of contrition. 

Ladies, Gentleman and those in between: Madonna. Voila. If its nomenclature remains a fastidious riddle, there is little doubt as to what the album represents. It is an announcement, a proclamation, a deceptively simple declaration of intent. The opening mission statement of the greatest pop star that ever lived. For the sake of expedience and convenience, let’s call it ‘The Madonna Album’, a strangely definitive epithet for a record that takes zero explanation, that leaves no room for misunderstanding, one that documents the last moment that the artist’s name reminded you first and foremost of the mother of Jesus Christ. By ‘Like a Virgin’, that time was long gone, honey. 

‘The Madonna Album’ was the final battle-cry of innocence from pop’s emergent Joan of Arc. Its ambition is slyly woven through. It is a neatly clipped nine songs long. These songs’ primary concerns are love and dancing. They take in new wave, disco, electro flavours. They are aided and abetted by men who lived underground, for the night, disco citizens Mark Kamins and Jellybean Benitez, studio wizards Stephen Bray and Reggie Lucas, men who made their way into the light assisted by the last and greatest 20th century heroine.

When one of the nine songs fleetingly addresses heartache, on ‘I Know It’, with its useful, simple refrain, warning all of us from the bad-boys (‘I know you’re gonna take your love and run’), it is matter-of-fact acknowledgement that heartache should be folded and factored into the rhythm of living, if you want the best out of it. The Madonna of ‘The Madonna Album’ is an unusual combination of the learned, wise and new. She is studied in her lack of complication. The messaging of the record is bold, simple and pure. Her nine songs ripple with sex, in a completely oblivious manner, peaking with a bodily joint called ‘Physical Attraction’. There are some discretely hammy 80s motifs: the little southpaw jabs of sad saxophone on ‘I Know It’, the synthetic congas of ‘Holiday’. ‘Borderline’, on the other hand, is perfection. 

Over the years, these glimpses into studio trickery now decades old have come to preserve the record in history, as reminders of a time for Madonna before everything else interrupted. They are flecked with lyrics reminding you to look her way. To spring her ‘Lucky Star’ into life. When she was just a girl, moving her flesh in nightclubs in a Keith Haring print Vivienne Westwood skirt, bracelets fashioned out of hoover bands. Madonna’s voice is introduced to the listener as an invitation to frisk, a funnel of joy. A reminder: she styled herself for the cover, turning up at art director Carin Goldberg’s Manhattan studio with a bag of clothes she thought might work. 

Before this, the dance-pop album was an empty, cold bath. After it, you dipped your elbows in, felt the warmth and ran the tap five minutes longer, to maximise the embrace of its giddy, uncynical beautiful bubbles. From the opening number, ‘Lucky Star’, it is a record to point to a man, any man, in the middle of a dancefloor and nod in that approving manner which communicates with instant efficacy, we may not have met yet, but we’re almost certainly going home together tonight. 

‘The Madonna Album’ is the artist’s most geographically specific. It isn’t just a New York record or a Lower Manhattan record, it is a record that carries with it some of the timeless glamour of the centre of the room at Danceteria, the space where New Order learned to embrace their groove and The Haçienda decided to shift its axis. It is the bedside at Seymour Stein’s hospital when he asked his A&R to sign Madonna to Sire on the back of a four-track demo. It’s her last vestiges of working-class record, still traced by the systemic values of hegemonic, pure, raw, feverish Saturday Night escape. It is a subway ride into the city across the river, as the lights spark up and everything seems, at last, possible. 

For the lucky star at its centre, that promise turned out to be unusually true.

‘The Madonna Album’ is the go button pressed, the despatch button ignited, the firework lit on one of music history’s fundamental U-turns. It is a move from male to female, straight to gay, rock to pop. A thing of simple, electric, optimistic wonder. 

Read: Madonna's greatest inspiration. Her enduring relationship with the dancefloor

Read: When Madonna played The Hacienda

Read: Madonna's 12 best dancefloor 12-inches

‍

This article first appeared in issue seven of Disco Pogo.

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When Madonna appeared at The Haçienda in 1984, she was a relative unknown. Within 12 months she was the coolest pop star on the planet. Could pioneering DJ Greg Wilson have predicted such a meteoric rise when he witnessed her performance at FAC 51? As he recounts, possibly not. Manchester, as ever, so much to answer for…

On Friday 27 January 1984, Madonna performed one of her earliest shows in Europe (she’d done the promo circuit the year before taking in London’s Le Beat Route, a couple of appearances at Camden Palace and some Italian TV spots). However, rather than some night-time soiree – the kind she was used to back home in New York – this was a late-afternoon slot as part of a special outside broadcast of the Channel 4 TV music programme, ‘The Tube’, which was normally filmed live from Tyne Tees TV studios in Newcastle. The venue, on the other hand, she would have been comfortable in. That week’s edition of ‘The Tube’ was filmed at the Factory Records-owned nightclub, The Haçienda, itself inspired by New York’s clubs like Danceteria, Funhouse, The Roxy and Paradise Garage, among others.

The broadcast was a big occasion for The Haçienda, which had struggled to establish itself following its May 1982 opening, an opportunity for the venue to announce itself to a wider audience – the event even given its own Factory Records catalogue number, FAC 104. This was four years before 1988’s second summer of love, which launched the club into national and, consequently, international fame.

Madonna was a late addition to the line-up, her name not mentioned on the tickets. The Factory All-Stars, consisting of members of New Order, Quando Quango, The Wake, A Certain Ratio and 52nd Street, was the most anticipated performance, whilst the former Sweet Sensation singer, Marcel King, showcased his own Factory release, ‘Reach for Love’. Local dance heroes The Jazz Defectors and Broken Glass (mis-billed as Breaking Glass) completed the advertised line-up.

Although it was ‘The Tube’ who’d directly booked Madonna, rather than a Haçienda suggestion, it was highly coincidental given she had previous history with Factory, dating back to New York in December 1982, when the singer supported A Certain Ratio at the influential downtown arts venue, Danceteria, her very first solo gig. She performed just one song, her debut single, ‘Everybody’, which had been released in the US a few months earlier.

I first came across Madonna via an import 12-inch of ‘Everybody’. I had no idea who she was or what she looked like. The sleeve for the 12-inch was a vividly colourful street collage, clearly set against a Black urban landscape – there was no image of the artist. At the outset it was all about aligning her to a club audience with the illusion of Blackness to enhance the record’s street credibility.

Listening to ‘Everybody’, it was clearly a white vocalist, but it wasn’t the song I was interested in personally, but the largely instrumental dub mix on the flip – back then, dubs and instrumental versions were generally preferred to the main vocal sides in the underground clubs, revered for their more experimental nature. That year was a groundbreaking year for dance music, opening up a vista of new electronic possibilities that DJs, remixers and producers, spearheaded by the likes of Arthur Baker, François Kevorkian, Larry Levan, Shep Pettibone and John ‘Jellybean’ Benitez, wasted no time in exploring. 

Madonna had recorded a demo of ‘Everybody’, and Mark Kamins, the DJ at Danceteria, offered his help in finding a label to release it, whilst becoming the singer’s boyfriend of the time. Kamins produced and mixed ‘Everybody’ as her debut single, the record blowing-up in the New York clubs. Factory’s relationship with Kamins was further cemented when his mix of Quando Quango’s ‘Love Tempo’ took the group into the US dance chart in 1983 (Kamins would also remix Marcel King’s ‘Reach for Love’ and, later in 1984, become the first US DJ to play at The Haçienda).

Whilst ‘Everybody’, plus the 1983 follow-up, ‘Burning Up’/‘Physical Attraction’ (this time produced by Reggie Lucas), both reached number three on the US dance chart, they pretty much passed without notice in the UK. Madonna’s self-titled debut album, released in the US in the summer of 1983, would only enter the charts, on both sides of the Atlantic, the following February.

This was facilitated by the success of her third single, ‘Holiday’, written by Curtis Hudson and Lisa Stevens-Crowder of the NYC dance act, Pure Energy. It was a top 20 hit in the US that did better still in the UK, where it provided Madonna with her first top 10 hit anywhere. Produced by Jellybean Benitez, who would become her new beau, it was initially a slow-burner, entering the UK chart at number 53, before climbing to number 40 on 21 January, the week of ‘The Tube’. Her appearance was undoubtedly a factor in the single’s subsequent success, which would peak at number six the following month (re-entering the chart in 1985, this time reaching number two). 

At The Haçienda, then, there was no great fanfare for the future Queen of Pop, instead the Manchester audience stood statuesque, some with folded arms, as Madonna, up close on the dancefloor, and her two dancers (her brother, Christopher Ciccone and Erika Belle) worked their bodies as she lip-synced to ‘Burning Up’ and ‘Holiday’. This was at the time when the all-action street style of breakdancing was exploding in the UK. The city’s main exponents, Broken Glass, who I then managed, accompanied Marcel King’s performance, so Madonna’s choreographed routine seemed a little tame in this context. It was also way too poppy for the Haçienda regulars, then largely students and indie kids, often with a distaste for dance music and especially contemptuous towards performers miming. Some people claimed to have glimpsed her star potential, including the Guardian writer, Tim de Lisle, who recalled, some years later, that “she mesmerised the crowd – you just knew there was a personality there”.

From my own observation, there was nothing to suggest we were watching one of the superstars of the late-20th century, the audience displaying collective indifference, rather than being under some mesmeric spell. I remember, a few years later, seeing a teenage Whitney Houston perform at a DJ event in London before she’d released a record and it was clear to all that she was someone destined for big things; not something you could have confidently said about Madonna that day.

What was more insightful was her backstage persona. It was clear she knew that she was going places, regardless of what anyone else thought. Whilst exchanging some banter with the Broken Glass guys, I also remember her being somewhat moody and demanding, already playing the diva role and giving some of the Haçienda staff/TV crew the runaround. She was a bundle of attitude, who demanded star treatment. When her tour manager introduced her to Mike Pickering, he pointed out that Pickering was friends with Mark Kamins (not the best of icebreakers, given Madonna had moved on from her professional and personal relationships with Kamins) and that he was responsible for ‘Love Tempo’ by Quando Quango, the big New York club hit. “Oh, that dross,” was dismissively offered in spite-filled response.

What would later occur to me was that it wasn’t just Madonna, but a handful of artists congregated backstage that day, who’d go on to have number one hits. Norman Cook, who we’d met the previous month in Brighton, when I DJed for The Haçienda Review, a short tour of the south, which featured Quando Quango and Broken Glass, had come to Manchester for ‘The Tube’. He stayed with Kermit, then one of the Broken Glass crew, but soon to move from breakdancing to rap. Norman would hit the peak with The Housemartins, Beats International and as Fatboy Slim; Kermit would land a number one album with Black Grape, in partnership with Shaun Ryder, previously of Factory’s Happy Mondays.

Mike Pickering, prior to his legendary DJ role at the club, was then the booker for The Haçienda, but also a musician with Quando Quango and later T-Coy, before hitting the top spot with M People. There were various members of New Order floating around and although I never saw him backstage, Morrissey was interviewed on the balcony, The Smiths having recently made their chart breakthrough.

Including Madonna, that’s six future chart toppers, but we shouldn’t forget that only one of the people there that day, Marcel King, held the distinction of having scored a number one hit prior to that evening, Sweet Sensation’s ‘Sad Sweet Dreamer’ going all the way ten years earlier, in 1974, when he was a teenager. ‘Reach for Love’ would be his swansong, finding favour in the US clubs, but overlooked here. As he returned to the obscurity of his post-Sweet Sensation years, Madonna’s meteoric rise was gaining full momentum, her first US chart topper, ‘Like a Virgin’ coming the following Christmas (a UK number one was delayed until the arrival of ‘Into the Groove’, in the summer of 1985).

Rob Gretton, New Order’s manager and The Haçienda co-owner, was said to have offered Madonna £50 to stick around in the club to repeat her performance that night. She was neither interested nor impressed, inviting Gretton to “fuck off” before making a hasty exit. Some years on, when she met Tony Wilson, he received an ‘ice-cold stare’ on reminding her that she’d played his club. “My memory seems to have wiped that,” she snarkily replied. 

Her dancing brother, Christopher, hadn’t wiped the memories, however. In his 2008 book, ‘Life With My Sister Madonna’, he recalled ‘The Tube’ appearance. “Usually during ‘Holiday’ the crowd gets in the mood and starts dancing, but not this time,” he recalled. “They just stand still and watch, faces impassive. Then, suddenly, they start booing and throwing things at us. I’m hit with a crumpled up napkin, Madonna with a roll, Erika with something else. We’re stunned. It’s obvious that this isn’t about music, it’s about us. With cash in hand, we bolt.”

And so, it ended, a brief, but fascinating moment in pop culture, when a future global star came to a soon-to-be iconic club to announce her presence on a cult UK TV show. Who’d have thought, as she mouthed the words to ‘Holiday’ on The Haçienda dancefloor that day, that the following month this would become her first of over 60 Top 10 UK hits, a remarkable figure only surpassed in the history books by Elvis Presley and Cliff Richard. None of us saw that.

Read: Madonna's greatest inspiration. Her enduring relationship with the dancefloor

Read: How Madonna's first album changed everything

Read: Madonna's 12 best dancefloor 12-inches

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This article first appeared in issue seven of Disco Pogo.

DJ Koze is a dictator. A friendly one, who is intent on creating a safe space for the artists he works with, but a dictator, nonetheless. His insistence on control has led to such spellbinding albums as ‘Amygdala’, ‘Knock Knock’ and now ‘Music Can Hear Us’ though, so he’s clearly on to something. Sean Griffiths caught up with him to discuss chatting German poetry with Damon Albarn, the ultimate clean high of Brazilian jiu jitsu and why the album format remains the pinnacle of musical expression. “I’m like a stubborn goat on a mountain,” he maintains…

Few artists manage to create a musical universe as perfectly formed as DJ Koze. The Hamburg native (real name Stefan Kozalla) concocts a heady brew that touches on everything from house and techno to folk, backpack hip hop and Eastern mysticism. It’s hard to put your finger on exactly what the secret ingredient is in Koze’s music, but you always know when it’s touched you. Fresh from producing Róisín Murphy’s ‘Hit Parade’ in 2023, he’s back with ‘Music Can Hear Us’, his first solo album since 2018. 

‍Hey Stefan. How are you? The world feels like a completely different place from when you put out your last album, ‘Knock Knock’ in 2018. How have the intervening years been for you? 

“I guess in general, things have been good for me but I’m having to strengthen my mindset to stay positive as that’s getting more and more difficult today. Things happen so quickly in the world now and there’s a lot of dark forces at work. I never thought I could have anxiety just facing life but I’m definitely more anxious about the state of the world. But then there’s always music which is a beautiful escapism.” 

Music’s an escape in general but your music in particular gives the listener a sense of being cocooned or protected inside a bubble. Is this something you try to recreate in your life? 

“Yes, I do. I try to create a bubble and a safe space with the artists around me. It’s the old idea of a posse but we’re more of an inward looking posse. The artists on this album and the artists around me are people who share my outlook and approach. I have a precise idea of what I like and my music making process is about spending hours and hours, getting deeper and deeper into that space. Sometimes it resonates with people and sometimes it doesn’t, but I don’t have a choice but to do this. I’m lucky to have like-minded people around who say: ‘Let’s keep on working how we can’.” 

Tell us about some of the collaborators on the album.

“I have Ada singing on two tracks and she’s kind of my muse. She released an album on Pampa 10 years ago and we talk on the phone every day. And Sophia Kennedy too, who sings on two songs in German. I’m friends with my collaborators and we’re on the same page musically so it’s never my idea to try and get superstars on tracks to lift my profile.” 

You’re all in Hamburg too. How important is the city to your music? 

“Well, it’s not Berlin at least, maybe that’s of some importance. Hamburg’s a boring, nice place but also somehow quite rough. It’s open and we have the sea and the harbour. We have a great blend of nationalities from all over the world. There’s not too many distractions here and I think that allows me to drift off in my music. It’s a bit like lockdown even when there’s no lockdown.” 

You’ve got a track with Damon Albarn on the album. You and Damon are both masters of beautiful melancholia, so it feels like a collaboration that makes a lot of sense. How did it come about? 

“I did a remix for Gorillaz in maybe 2018 or 2019 and then I asked if he’d be up for singing on a track with me at some point. Then we met at Coachella and had a fun hour backstage in my trailer getting pissed. I think he even has some German roots and we talked about (Swiss-German poet, novelist and painter) Herman Hesse and Africa and all sorts of things. I sent him some music and he sent back a vocal and I played around with it for a long time. My style of music making is like slow cooking whereas he works very fast. He’s a real musician. I think he does music all day every day. I really admire him and think he’s a role model for other musicians.” 

Is that how you always work on music? Are you ever in the same room as the artist?

“Yes, the artist has to let go of control quite a lot. Some artists like that and some artists don’t but I think through this work process more interesting stuff can happen. I send some music for them to record a vocal and then I almost deconstruct the whole thing and I think that’s where the magic happens.” 

It’s interesting because we often celebrate the idea of musicians working together in the same room. Especially in bands. Bowen, the guitarist from IDLES, said the band had been working remotely a lot since Covid and he felt that had really unleashed his creativity. 

“Yeah, I think the collective is overrated. I’m like a dictator. Otherwise, you end up with three people sat in a room and one thinks: ‘What am I doing here unless I say something?’ Then you end up with opinions and ego slowing the process down and diluting it.” 

There’s a few tracks in German on the album and I always really enjoy your tracks with German vocals. Do you think starting your career making music in German gave you more space to develop? I always think there can be more space for playfulness when people are making music outside of the English language. 

“I think it probably did give me more space to develop and do my own thing, yes. It doesn’t really make sense if you want to attract a huge international audience, but the wonderful thing now is how our listening routines have changed. We’re streaming everything that exists next to each other and one minute I’ll be listening to a Spanish or French songwriter next to music from Japan or auto-tune rap from Miami or Swedish folk and, for me, it makes sense somehow. I love the idea of creating something that works like a mixtape and it might not make sense straight away but when taken as a whole it really does. I love Gilles Peterson’s radio show for example. He’ll play a jungle breakbeat tune, then 20 minutes of Sun-Ra, then Nina Simone and then Shabaka Hutchings, but it’ll all somehow make sense together.” 

Even your mixtapes and compilations have a really strong sense of flow and narrative – programming seems really important to you. Do you think we’ve lost the art of album programming and sequencing with the way everyone listens to music nowadays? 

“I do, but I’m like a stubborn goat on a mountain. When putting this album together, it has to compete with all the old, classic albums I go back to. If I shift two tracks around, it can completely change the feel of the album, so I spend a lot of time getting it just right. The album is still the format to beat for me. Everyone plays the singles game now but an album, it’s a cultural statement. Sometimes it might not make sense to people straight away but five years later, people come back to it and it all falls into place for you. It’s like when Jean-Michel Basquiat first came out everyone was like: ‘He’s cool, but he’s just some graffiti guy.’ But now, you use a certain yellow or a certain blue in a certain way and it’s ‘Basquiat’. And that takes the passing of time. For me, in music, the album format is still really the only way you can do this. Could Aphex Twin bring people into his own, unique world with just one track? ‘Windowlicker’ maybe, but I think you need a bigger body of music for it to really make sense to people. It’s like a guided trip. That’s the power of music for me, to put your brain into another state.”

Aphex is interesting, because over 30 years into his career and at a time when he’s not putting out loads of music, he seems to be bigger than ever. There are parallels with you both in that you’ve not really compromised who you are or the music you make but slowly, more and more people have come into your world. 

“Totally, and that takes some time for people to digest and understand. In our current ADHD Insta way of existing, you need people whose music or art is completely uncompromising and you need to take time to be sucked in by it.” 

You mentioned wanting each album you make to be able to sit alongside classic albums in your collection. What are the classics you always go back to? 

“You know, one album I was thinking about yesterday is ‘Chocolate and Cheese’ by Ween. It’s a crazy album from 1994, but feels so timeless. ‘Selected Ambient Works Volume II’ I always return to, but I skip a few of the super spooky dark tunes as they scare the life out of me. The KLF’s ‘Peel Sessions’ I always go back to and then ‘Doggystyle’ by Snoop Dogg. Then ‘Homework’ by Daft Punk is still a blueprint for me. When I make dance music I still look at that album and think: ‘How can I make something with that rough energy that’s abstract but still so in your fucking face?’ Or then, someone like Nina Simone, how can anyone’s soul not be moved by that? There’s so many, but these albums are some of the reference points I always come back to.” 

You produced Róisín Murphy’s ‘Hit Parade’ album. How was that experience for you? 

“That album was quite a long process. A real slow cooking experience. Roisin’s a really special artist and really gifted. Y’know it feels like a long time ago now though.” 

Did the controversy around Róisín’s comments on Trans Rights overshadow the album for you at all?

“It was all a bit confusing and kind of irritating. It was definitely a lesson in realising everything can just explode in one second these days. You say something, someone reacts and then this whole storm comes. But the world keeps spinning. I don’t think it overshadowed the experience for me. I’m really proud of that album and that Róisín came through it stronger.” 

Any other dream music collaborations on your wishlist? 

“I always end up working with my bunch of friends or people I’m talking to. It usually happens quite organically but maybe, Pharrell, Busta Rhymes and Missy Elliott would be cool. And Burna Boy would be great. I love his voice and his music, but I’d have to come up with something really unexpected for both of us. I’d like to get them all round for a dinner party and some slow cooking.” 

What’s on the menu? 

Oh, it would have to be something simple and not too overambitious. Maybe a Ramen soup, or maybe spinach and potatoes and fish fingers. They’d say: ‘Oh, this is cute, he doesn’t want to impress me.’ Then they’d fall in love with me because the food was so unglamorous.” 

People might not know but you’re a black belt in Brazilian jiu jitsu. 

“Oh, I could talk about this all day. I’ve done it for 11 years and it’s the cleanest high. It’s the perfect counterbalance to circling around myself in a loop in my artistic bubble. I train constantly. I want the high all the time. You’re so in the moment when you’re doing it because otherwise someone could choke you! You can’t really think of anything else while you’re doing it, while swimming or running your mind can drift to think about other things. The chemicals it allows your body to release are so addictive.” 

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This article first appeared in issue seven of Disco Pogo.

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.

DJ Harvey is the DJ’s DJ. His exuberant and carefully curated sets have made him the doyen of his profession for close to 40 years. In a rare interview, he looks back over his stellar career, but admits his eyes are firmly on the present and the future. “It’s better now than it ever ‘used to be’,” he tells Joe Muggs. “All those moaning, bitching, middle-aged fucking DJs, I’m fucking sick of it. Just retire.” Shine on, Harvey, you lovable loon…

“Sixty is the new 19!” grins Harvey Bassett from his home in LA, in response to a suggestion that he doesn’t appear to be slowing down much in life. Though to be fair, there can’t be many 19-year-olds with lifestyles like his. He’s just got his blues rock band Wildest Dreams booked at his favourite motorcycle festival in Southern California where last year his “1979 Kawasaki KZ 440 big block dragster” won Best Japanese Bike In Show, and he’ll “set up a pop-up store with some surfboards and music and motorcycles and stuff” there. 

He’s just celebrated a year of Klymax in Bali, the “best club in the world” as he’s happy to put it, which he helped found and design. As well as being a resident there, he still gigs constantly as a DJ around the world to adoring crowds, to the point where: “If I was to go to Shanghai tomorrow and walk down the street, someone would come and ask to take a picture with me, and that tells me that I might not be huge, but I’m global.” When he’s in LA he still surfs regularly and rides a skateboard around his neighbourhood. And he is absolutely basking in it. “Oh, I am living my best fucking life,” he grins again – Harvey grins a lot – “you better believe it!”

The thing is, though, he kind of always has done. An alternative scene musician from pre-teens and DJ for his entire adult life, he’s always been in the thick of things: from 80s squats into the white heat of acid house and on, his events have been consistently where it was happening, his selections impeccable, his crowds the funkiest. Tonka Sound System, Moist, New Hard Left, Mercury Rising, Harvey’s Sarcastic Disco: just the names of the parties are enough to get discerning clubbers’ eyes glinting, and that’s before you get to the records released, the legends from Larry Levan and Underground Resistance on down that he’s played alongside, and the DJ sets themselves which right up to today can turn any venue into a capital letters P-A-R-T-Y and turn burly, bristly men of a certain age into gibbering emotional wrecks. Through all of that, he has shown every sign of – as his occasional colleague in mischief Artwork would put it – “having a lovely time” pretty much all the time.

He even describes his 70s childhood as “absolutely fucking amazing”. Harvey was born in the Royal Middlesex Hospital, just off Tottenham Court Road (“I’m not a spiritual person, but central London is my spiritual home”) but the family moved out to a village outside Ely in Cambridgeshire when he was young. He was set up early for a musical life: his mum was a party girl who made him learn to dance to her Buddy Holly and Johnny Cash records with her in the kitchen (“She could really dance, pushing off a door frame to rock’n’roll and spin round!”) while his dad was an electrical engineer, so “we had the first colour TV in the village, he brought home a video recorder in 1972, we had some Western Electric tube sound system that he’d rescued from the Lyceum Ballroom when he kitted it out in 1968…” 

Maybe even more than his parents, though, he soaked up cultural influences from the generation before. On his mum’s side his granny and great aunts had been kind of it-girls of London in the 20s and 30s. “In fact, my Auntie Carmen modelled for the icon of Selfridges, so every time I walk down Oxford Street I salute my Auntie Carmen and that always makes me feel happy.” Meanwhile his paternal grandmother “was glamorous in a different way – she was boyish with short hair, had travelled in North Africa and rode motorcycles, which of course I loved. Her and my grandfather may have had a ‘lavender marriage’, we never knew. She was very stern; she would open a tin of war rations and if you didn’t eat it for tea it would be served for breakfast – whereas my other granny would be persuading me to eat smoked salmon. They were a huge influence on me, the yin and yang, really. Even now I could live on hot dogs if I had to… but I’d rather eat endangered species!” 

By the age of nine, Harvey reckons the wheels were already in motion for everything that was to come. He remembers a babysitter introducing him to Hendrix at that age. “She said: ‘This will probably be too heavy for you’ – I had no idea what ‘heavy’ was, I just really liked it because it was all whizzy, whooshy, dynamic noises!” Around the same time his glam granny would take him to Soho: “She’d drag me around delicatessens or whatever, and I would see these people – you know the dandies, the rent boys, the teds, the punks, the cool cats that stood on the street corners in Soho and look like they did nothing except be cool – and I knew what I needed… it was that. And of course that’s what I spent most of the 90s doing.” Add to that a heady atmosphere in 70s Cambridgeshire, “the legacy of the Pink Fairies and Pink Floyd and squats and magic mushrooms and all these clever young people wandering around the university”, and it naturally seemed like bands were the way forwards. He got hold of a drum kit and by the age of 12, in 1978, he was playing with punk band Ersatz and even recorded a Peel Session.

Having absorbed Hendrix, glam, soul, reggae and punk – as well as his mum’s rock’n’roll – as a kid, he became stylistically voracious through his teens. By the time he left school and dived headlong into the Cambridge, and then London, squat scene, this was leaning more and more into music for dancing. He and his punk friends were also spending time at The Midland Tavern, which mainly served as a drinking spot for Cambridge’s Jamaican community; there, “we were exposed to sound system culture and would go and hang out at blues parties. And then as the music was developing, like maybe we wanted to listen to James Brown or Fela Kuti or some electro sounds, we were like: ‘Well, okay, we could play music on this kind of sound system rig and then invite friends!’” With suitably hefty speakers and turntables acquired, the squat parties started getting longer and longer and more and more popular.

The growing culture around hip hop and electro was also fascinating to Harvey and his Cambridge friends who started calling themselves Tone Deaf Krew or TDK, adopting b-boy fashions and writing graffiti. Harvey naturally tried to adopt the techniques of hip hop DJs – “as a drummer, I realised that scratching and phasing and double copying and all of that kind of thing were just like drumming” – and a trip to New York at 19 got him taking it very seriously. This coincided with the warehouse parties, where the likes of Norman Jay, Soul II Soul and Coldcut were cutting their teeth, taking off in London and he rapidly started to realise that being a DJ as such might be a viable way forward – and out of band politics, which he increasingly found “like having four girlfriends, and then all your four girlfriends get girlfriends and everyone wanted a say… what I realised was that as a DJ I could be a one-man band and determine everything!” 

TDK became Tonka Sound System and the parties with the DJ team of Harvey, Choci and The Rev at the heart of them kept snowballing… and then there was a big shift. “At a certain point in the 80s,” remembers Harvey, “a lot of clubs were pretty scary. You want to go and see [legendary soul DJ] Steve Walsh at the Tudor Rose? Take your fucking life in your hands, mate. Just to go to a gig like that, you might get stabbed, you might get beaten up, you might get your shoes, clothes taken off you. Then it changed. Suddenly someone comes up to you, they’re going to hug you, probably give you their T-shirt and shoes too! I remember a gig in Brixton, an acid house thing set up in the back, smoke and strobes, so I wandered in… some guy came over, I thought he was the bouncer and was going to kick me out, but he just gave me a big slimy hug. I’m like: ‘I have fucking arrived.’ The music is heavy and the philosophy is good, man, and I’m like, that’s it, we’re here. Now 35 years have passed and I haven’t looked back.”

In many senses, it really is as simple as that. When acid house hit, Harvey was ready and waiting. He had the mixing skills, the good taste, the already-enthusiastic regular crowd and the endless appetite for getting stuck into the party himself – and he got on board, and very genuinely didn’t look back. In fact, anti-nostalgia is something you quickly discover he is militant about. For sure, he’ll enthuse for a bit about Tonka parties on Brighton beach or setting up at the notorious Glastonbury of 1990 – “probably our finest moment, I remember seeing a horse and cart on the dancefloor and someone else rode a motorcycle through the dancefloor... it was pretty outlaw stuff” – but he absolutely will not dwell on “those times” as a whole as something special. 

Rather the entire Harvey ethos is that the acid house disco party formula worked then and works now, and the best party could be, in fact very likely is, just round the corner. “Fuck ‘like it used to be,’” he rages with sudden vehemence as the conversation moves on to how things shifted after the first flush of acid. “It’s better now than it ever ‘used to be’. All those moaning, bitching, middle-aged fucking DJs, I’m fucking sick of it. Just retire. Maybe your career peaked at a certain time and I’m sorry if it didn’t work out for you, but maybe… maybe you weren’t keeping your eyes on the prize, mate. Think about that.” 

So, it’s without sentimentality that he relates: “We were a solid crew and it was exciting and good times, but the thing with Tonka is it didn’t have a leader or whatever, so making decisions was, well… after five years some people couldn’t even remember their names, let alone where we were playing that weekend, so that kind of sort of slowly fell apart. That was definitely some fun, but you know, there’s some people that would like to think that was the defining moment of their lives, but it wasn’t mine, it’s just a small facet of a big picture.” 

By the time the Tonka parties stopped, Harvey already had other irons in other fires. With Heidi Lawden – his romantic partner back then, still his manager to this day, and of course a sterling DJ in her own right – he started Moist in Covent Garden, and around the same time became a resident at the brand new Ministry of Sound, quickly expanding to doing both Friday and Saturday nights. Moist he describes as “a New York garage and sleaze boogie kind of sound as an alternative to the sort of cookie-cutter scream-up handbag of the major dance floors of the time”. It allowed them to book a who’s who of US legends: Darryl Pandy, Mad Mike, Larry Levan and Mr Fingers to name just a few. At Ministry he played “a bit more electronic, I suppose techno if you really must use ‘the t-word’, on the Friday and house and disco on Saturday”. 

In reality these all flowed together. And – especially – when he got to do the graveyard shifts at Ministry he had well and truly settled into the anything-goes, genre agnostic Harvey groove that again continues to this day. “I suppose that’s just my punk mentality. I always like to provide maybe a little bit of an alternative, a little bit contrary, a little bit exciting, do you know what I mean? And I like to not underestimate an audience – because I might come on after a DJ that’s been banging it out and maybe not bang it out quite so much and the crowd really don’t seem to mind, you know?” That contrariness famously includes being willing not to mix when he feels like it. “I’d rather play one good record at a time than try and make one good one out of three shitty ones. And the good record, if it’s well made, does everything for you. All you have to do is press play.”

So, it continued on through the 90s: a Ministry mix album, a whole load of studio work remixing for everyone from Ninja Tune and Mo’ Wax to the majors, and a new residency – New Hard Left – at The Blue Note as Hoxton began to bubble. Electronica, psychedelia, “the t-word” and more were continually in the mix, so he did take particular umbrage at attempts to lump him in with a mooted disco revival at the end of the decade, perhaps related to his series of edits released on his, errrr, Black Cock label. “Actually though,” he says, “if you listen to the disco edits there’s the first ever techno edit on there so people ain’t paying attention! I’ve never played a whole disco set in my life, it’d be boring! It’s just that I played some disco when not many people were playing much disco, so it’s like: ‘Oh fucking hell it’s a disco DJ!’ A disco DJ? I play fucking Berghain, mate!” 

Rather than identify with any genre or scene, Harvey calls himself that most unfashionable of things – and possibly an anathema to certain Very Serious Music Heads – “a personality DJ”, which comes complete with signature dance moves, tambourine-shaking, theatrical pretending the sound has gone wrong before slamming a track back in and all the rest. Although his definition of this might go some way to explaining the deep emotional attachment people get to his sets. “I’m a personality DJ, you get my personality when I play,” as he puts it. “I speak with the music. I learned that from Larry Levan. You play the music with a lyric that suits the moment. If you’re feeling good, play a song that says, ‘I feel good.’ If you’re feeling bad, same, ‘I’m feeling sad.’ You talk to the crowd. And they listen. Even if they’re not listening, they hear it.” 

So, it has gone on right through the 21st century, with an “it’s not broke so don’t fix it” mentality, week-in-week-out. He started gravitating to LA early in the 00s, but issues with a visa overstay left him unable to leave the USA if he ever wanted to come back, and to keep things interesting he moved to Hawaii. His absence from the UK and European scene led to an immense deepening of the mystique around his reputation due to a lot of what he calls “computer gossip, chat rooms and suchlike” – though he claims not to have been aware of any of this at the time as “I didn’t have a phone or a bank account or a watch” and his main concern was the nuts and bolts of keeping the club he’d founded, thirtyninehotel, going “despite there only being about 100 hipsters in Honolulu when we started out!” 

During this time, he kept involved in the studio with the dark Balearic electro-disco of Locossolus and the sleazy psychedelia of Map Of Africa (with NYC mainstay Thomas Bullock of  ARE Weapons/Rub’N’Tug). And when he emerged out of that period back into international touring in the mid-2010s, it was to find that that “computer gossip” had, in the UK in particular, helped coalesce an already keen fandom into the fully-fledged Cult of Harvey. He regarded it with some bemusement but ultimately says: “I don’t mind it at all. I mean really, I think it’s great. I have heroes I worship. I love François Kevorkian and Frankie Knuckles and Dave Mancuso and Larry Levan, all the people that I looked up to and checked out their charts and their music and their stuff and whatever. It’s cool. If people care and they’re down and it’s passionate and it’s productive, then amazing, fantastic. I want to thank those people for the love and support.”

Right there, maybe, is the hidden essence of DJ Harvey. For all the goofing and gallivanting and raconteurship, and for all that there’s enough ego there that he can so casually put himself into a category with the legends of dance music, when it comes to the crunch there’s a fundamental sincerity. And once again, it’s about the nuts and bolts, it’s about the craft and tradition of DJing and learning from the masters by dancing to them and poring over their playlists. It’s the same reason every conversation about his passions – be that motorcycles, sound systems, fashion or food – comes back to ultra specifics. And he’s explicit that it’s why he’s never got jaded, even in an era of infinite choice and information glut: because DJing remains, as it was when he first learned the skills in the early-80s, a set of techniques for self-expression.

“If I wasn’t a DJ,” he says, “I’d be a comedian or an actor or painter or a sculptor. I exist within the realm of art and I love to entertain. And if that can pay my rent, that’s a mission accomplished. My medium is this unlimited heap of musical vibrations that I can then put in order through my mind and give it to the people via the medium of the CDJ. People will say it’s just playing other people’s music, but if you’re a writer you only say other people’s words, right? If you’re an artist, you’re only painting with other people’s colours, there’s only three basic colours available, right? But you make those choices.” 

So it is that through Harvey’s Sarcastic Disco warehouse parties in LA, through the Mercury Rising sessions at Pikes in Ibiza and untold more worldwide, he’s continued delivering those same fundamentals of a good party as he has for 40 years now. He is happily ensconced in LA – “not for the club scene, that’s for sure, there isn’t one, it’s all under the surface here, you don’t go to a nightclub, you go to somebody’s house that has a nightclub in!” – and optimistic about life. “My grandma used to be freaked out about the modern world and punks and drug dealers,” he muses. “I would say: ‘When you were my age they just dropped the atomic bomb. There was a fucking Holocaust going on down the road and the child infant mortality was one in three. And you’ve got pink hair. So, shut up!’ As I see it, this crap’s been chugging on this way for probably a couple of hundred years already – so get with the programme, play the card you’re dealt and love your friends and family, man.” 

As ever with Harvey, this is played for laughs – he’s ever the entertainer – but there’s more to it. For all that it might come over as jokey or glibly positive, there’s worldly knowledge and rational thinking there and what’s more it reveals a deeper underpinning to that vehement hatred of better-in-the-old-days misty-eyed club culture mythologising. That, in turn, underpins the deadly seriousness about the craft and commitment to the best party yet potentially being the next one. And it goes a long way to demonstrating why the oldest teenager in town is still worth listening to. 

Read: When Harvey returned to the UK to DJ for the first time in years

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This article first appeared in issue seven of Disco Pogo.

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A self-confessed contrarian, the Canadian artist Marie Davidson sees the duality in most things. That’s why she’s unretired from club music and returned to the fray with her caustic new album, ‘City of Clowns’. On the one hand, it’s a brave, questioning diatribe of surveillance capitalism and society’s increasing descent into dystopian automation. But it’s also a whole lot of fun and an invitation to cut loose on the dancefloor. The title is also instructive, as she tells Anna Cafolla: “As a clown, you can fearlessly question the status quo. There’s a power to being silly that I love…”

A familiar cackle rips through the thick fug of air in the loft gig space of Hackney’s Oslo, chased by a belly-deep percussive cavalcade and an ominous, stalking bassline. ‘I know what I do and I do it well…’ sings Marie Davidson, scavenging the depths of her alto voice. The crowd - already pretty sweaty for a February night in London - yells back.

“On a scale of one-to-ten, who feels like having children right now?” she bellows into the mic, “and who feels like having a good time?”

It’s a riotous welcome back for the transgressive Montreal producer and musician that this crowd – and all the rest – have missed for the last four-and-a-bit years. In 2019, Davidson announced that she was stepping off the dancefloor and retiring from live club music. She was four albums in and lauded for her dexterous live performances, withering lyrical lens and deft hand with hardware. Her juggernaut third solo release, 2016’s ‘Adieux au dancefloor’, was a poetic, pulsating electronic epic that explored the dual romantic pull and repulse she felt for club culture. 

The Polaris Prize-nominated ‘Working Class Woman’ (2018) was a tight concept triumph, with caustic spoken word and blunt synthy arcs that interpolated feminist theory, the stresses of the dance music world and her ability to laugh at herself. Now, Davidson returns with her formula for electronic music – a skewering point of view, her commanding vocals, an ever-curious abundance of sounds from Italo to Chicago house, French Touch and hammering techno – and expands into fresh sonic blends and considering new territories of thought. 

The narrative arcs of ‘Working Class Woman’ and the subversive, sinister pop pressure points of 2020’s ‘Renegade Breakdown’ (in the band she created with Pierre Guerineau and Asaël Robitaille), which swung from Kraftwerk to Chet Baker, are interwoven into ‘City of Clowns’, her sixth studio album. It’s an ambitious record that takes in the expanse of an accomplished artist’s touchstones and exacts something new.

“I love to contradict myself,” Davidson says of coming back to the club with a wicked grin, nursing a cup of black coffee in a corner of the cafe attached to her London hotel. It’s a day before the city’s show and the day after a gig at the hulking, industrial, heavy sound systemed RSO Berlin. She’s been enjoying playing out again with her new tracks, weaving in some of her most storied bangers for a fluid and fun set that sees her behind the decks and stalking stylishly through the crowd.

The propulsive track ‘Fun Times’ in particular appears to be an ode to getting things done and for purposefully stomping around the city. “That’s exactly what I want for people listening to it,” she says laughing, “to walk.” It’s a rollicking track about choosing whether to have kids or to keep to having fun. The short answer? You’re in for a good time. It’s anchored in delightfully sing-song rhyming, with a pelvis-raising, Jeffrey Sfire-esque beat. ‘Sexy Clown’ is a confident statement of self and intent: ‘If I sound salty, it’s that in the past few years I’ve been way too friendly,’ she orates over layers of ear worming synths.

But there was a time where Davidson didn’t think she’d ever touch her hardware again. She took a break in late 2021 after a UK and European tour with her band L’Oeil Nu. “I had a dip in energy... and my will to stay in the music industry,” she says. She went back to Montreal and applied to schools and considered a career in naturopathy – inflected by some of her own health struggles and search for answers and respite. Despite what had been quite a definitive announcement of her music industry exit, music remained an ambient presence. 

“It’s all I’ve ever known – I don’t have a degree. I dropped out of school to do this. I had the urge to just explore myself in other ways. I could make a bit of music for myself, but without the scene suffocating me.” No social media, and no album in mind – yet.

Then she began composing music for the dance company Animals of Distinction. She hadn’t been near a machine in two years. The following year, she took up a random offer for a DJ gig. “My booker rejected the offer of a live show first and the promoters said they would take anything – even a DJ set. I’d not DJed properly before – I couldn’t mix! So, this felt like a nice challenge. I rented CDJs and realised I really, really like it.” 

The CDJs felt like a playground – a tactile screen, various cue points and fun functions that reminded her of the hardware she did know well. After a few months of DJing, it made the idea of playing live appealing once again.

An album, though, was still totally uncertain. It was only when she spent one long summer reading ‘The Age of Surveillance Capitalism’ by Shoshana Zuboff that ideas began to form. The 2019 book proposes the concept of ‘surveillance capitalism’ as what we’re all living through today; where users’ online information, our likes and dislikes, are used to predict and shape our behaviours for corporate profit. A system that erodes personal autonomy and demolishes the very foundations of democracy. Davidson was enraptured and enraged by it.

“I saw such a strong direction,” she says. “It was so important for me and I wanted more people to be aware of it. I felt scared and frustrated. I was naive: what the fuck was big tech? What were they doing with our data? Why is nothing private? And it’s reshaping our world! I did what I could only think to do.” 

A recent skirmish at a Ryanair check-in desk over her digital artist’s visa to even get into the UK for her London show was just another incident that added to the frustrations she’s felt over data and privacy. “Even just to come here and do what I do… as artists, we’re handing over so much. And who is it benefitting? We’re living in an automated society; we’re losing our humanity and we’re all totally apathetic about it. This kind of thinking has really driven the record.”

Davidson has long dealt in dualities and says there are two sides to this latest album. First: an exploration of big tech, its influence over us all and the numbness it has imposed upon us. Second? “We’re all getting screwed! We have to find the fun times and the sexy clown in all of us.”

She adds: “I knew that I was stepping in a very heavy, loaded territory, we needed some lightness. I didn’t want this record to fall into the cracks – its message is too important to me. So, you need playfulness.”

‘Fun Times’ was the third track that she wrote. It was, Davidson says, a “for real attempt at a pop club track”. She recalls the clubby sensibilities and danceability of ‘Working Class Woman’ and the poppier structures of ‘Renegade Breakdown’ with her band L’Oeil Nu. “Choruses and verses, let’s do it!” she says. “But I’ve never had the skills or the interests to do ‘pop, pop’. I wanted to lean more towards beats and baselines, with a pop vibe.”

This was the first demo she showed Pierre Guerineau – her sound engineer, co-producer and husband. “We define ourselves as husband and wife in life, but not in music,” she says astutely. “We were bandmates (as the duo Essaie Pas) before anything. I call him my partner with music – ‘husband and wife’ is too dismissive to describe what is a real creative partnership. We’ve been making music for almost 15 years.” She asked him to co-produce on ‘Fun Times’, and the collaborative spirit of their last musical lives emerged once again and they decided to co-produce the whole album together. 

When Davidson picked up production again it was with her original hardware, but when she began collaborating with Guerineau, they put everything on Ableton. “But I am so bad at Ableton,” she says emphatically. “I had only used it for remixing. I want to better my skills because I have so many ideas.” Davidson bought an Elektron Syntakt that she still uses. “I try to be more efficient now.” 

‘Fun Times’, she believes, is the most sonically ambitious on the album – the rest are straight to the point. But all the while, her voice has remained her most important instrument. “I don’t consider myself a great singer, but I have a voice that is founded in years of research,” she says. Davidson references Miles Davis, whose biography deeply inspired her: “I cannot compare myself to him, on no level at all, but I love his approach to music. He talks about working on his tone in the same way guitarists do. I love that musicianship mindset and so I really worked on my tone: how I speak, sing, sing-song.” ‘Validations Weight’ has her voice morph into Amazon’s voice-on-demand service Polly.

David and Stephen Dewaele of Soulwax and their label imprint DEEWEE came into the mix a year later. “Four producers... was an interesting process,” she says with a quick laugh. “It was long, but very rewarding.” To release music on DEEWEE, the record has to at least all be mixed at their studio in Ghent, Belgium. Davidson and Guerineau came armed with most of the album. The button twisting, darkly melodic ‘Push Me Fuckhead’ was the only track done totally from scratch. Soulwax added dynamic new layers to the release. “I had a total blast doing it,” Davidson says. 

‘Sexy Clown’ was the penultimately made track, just as Davidson had returned from a small Asia tour in 2023, where she was “fucked from the cycle”. The process unlocked something in her mind, and she wrote the track in two days. “I kept having these little lines and jokes coming to me. It was an internal dialogue taking the piss out of myself and the entertainment industry – I felt like a comedian!” 

‘I’m ever so sorry, I don’t think I fit,’ she sings slyly. It sounds like stand-up. “I love that,” she says.

It was an opportunity for Davidson to both have some fun and go off at an industry she had once, indefinitely, turned her back on: with its influencers and the pressure to be extremely ‘on’ social media to push your ‘brand’ rather than cultivate true artistry; its fake personalities; the feminism that she expounded on ‘Working Class Woman’ that had become commodified and the incoherent line-ups she found herself on where the only thing she had in common with the other artists was gender. 

“I never took the industry or all its scenes seriously, but it was liberating to write this,” she says. While ‘Y.A.A.M.’ leans into this as a punky, hard-edged techno steam-release, ‘Sexy Clown’ introduces the record’s key figure – the clown, someone who always gets underestimated but knows exactly who they are. ‘You like it when I’m mean? You find it sexy?’ she talk-sings, both sensual and menacing. ‘Don’t get it confused, because I do it for me.’

“I never wanted to be a ‘queen’ or a ‘girl boss’ or a ‘bad bitch’,” she says, batting the air with each corrosively femme moniker. “I’m happy to be a clown. I think of the joker card and how it can change the whole course of a card game. As a clown, you can fearlessly question the status quo. There’s a power to being silly that I love.”

Humour has always been at the crux of Davidson’s work, with her withering lyrics and sonic twists and turns. She found her love for comedy shows and sketches in the pandemic – watching performances by George Carlin, Bill Hicks, Louis CK, Dave Chappelle and Wanda Sykes. “Wanda has this line: ‘I’m an entertainer!’ I wrote that line in ‘Sexy Clown’ before I even saw her do it,” she says. “I love to squirm with comedy – I want people to squirm with me too. This shouldn’t feel comfortable.”

If there’s one overarching topic that binds Davidson’s digital rebel and clown characters from this dual-themed album, it’s the tension of self-perception and self-performance: in the online space we have to self-annihilate in, but it’s also the world where we forge our identities. How does Davidson navigate her own sense of self?

“My identity has always been complicated,” she says. “When I’m writing songs, I try to be a voyeur. I try to consider how other people perceive me, my generation.” Davidson shares that she’s been through six years of psychoanalysis. “Jungian, not Freudian... I’m not really into Freud,” she says. This therapy became a part of her creative process. She stopped going to analysis around the time the album was completed last spring. The record, then, felt like catharsis. “‘Working Class Woman’ and ‘City of Clowns’ are my most authentic and true responses to living in this world,” she says assuredly.

But it’s in her character play that Davidson most confidently exalts her own themes. “Technology is lusting after our data,” she says. “I wanted to harness that BDSM energy.” 

The hulking ‘Demolition’ is like a sexually charged order for your own destruction, an AI-voiced Domme that you’re happy to have bend your will. 

“You might think you’ve heard this dominatrix voice before on ‘Work It’ (her anthemic 2018 track memorably remixed by Soulwax),” says Davidson, “but I think of that track as more commanding – I am a life coach! This is a new persona for me. On ‘Demolition’, you must submit... to the terms and conditions. I am the voice of the endless pop-ups and algorithmic searches.” 

She leans back and folds her arms in a playfully goading manner. “Are we going to get into artificial intelligence?” she asks.

Let’s see how far we can take it.

“Well, I have never thought of AI as being inherently bad,” she says. “I think it was a wonderful invention and it’s inevitably going to keep changing everything. What I’m worried about is how people use it and who trains it. People like Elon Musk, the tech bros... if they could all die maybe we would have a chance to evolve the world into something nice. But no, it’s all used for genocide and security, rather than fighting climate change and allowing people to make great art.”

Davidson is keen to embrace her own quandaries and contradictions, as an artist and a person that has to engage with technology in order to live, work and make art. More personally, she considers the tension between telling the truth and being truly creative. Is it necessary to have an unwavering view of yourself as an artist? Is change and contradiction, and all the messy nuances of humanity, an obstacle to pure art? The wall-to-wall banger and pure hardware track ‘Contrarian’ takes on that question, bolstered by ravaging techno beats.

“I think it’s really important in an artistic process to allow yourself to change your mind,” she says. “I love that I’m a contrarian. I’m very aware that I’ve publicly gone back on myself as an artist, even on making techno music. I can come back years later to something I’ve said and really laugh! Look, I’m moody! And it’s tough to be an artist where your whole job can be based on being judged.” In an industry that pressures artists into pigeonholing themselves to please algorithms and corporation playlisting, this feels like an important testament.

Yet Davidson has evaded such boxing-in throughout her career. “People have always been uncomfortable with artists being in grey areas,” she says. “Even when I was ‘underground’ – ‘oh, you make techno!’ But that’s not really techno. There’s instruments. You have a guitar. ‘Oh, you’re a cold wave band!’ You bring a synth on stage. ‘You’re synth wave!’ I have always found it unhelpful to think of music this way, it doesn’t offer much space to grow.”

Women particularly have to challenge this – singing on a track? That’s pop. You’re a woman? Maybe we can book you for our sanitary pad-sponsored International Women’s Day line-up. We keep at this for more than the wordcount of this profile will allow. Suffice to say, Davidson has thoughts.

“It’s back to that commodified feminist marketing that I hate,” she says with a sigh and a hiss. “I can listen to a whole playlist of artists who just so happen to be women without thinking about it – they just make good music. ‘Woman’ is not a genre.”

As her perspective has lifted now as both a producer and a fully-fledged DJ, Davidson thinks all the more about her listeners – and the dancers gyrating their bodies in front of her decks. “I really thought about the dancefloor a lot more this time,” she says. “I opened up the structures. Yeah, ‘Work It’ has verses and choruses if you want there to be, but there’s barely a melodic element – to me anyway. I wrote it on a TR-707 only using kick snares and a mic. I added a little synth line on the Arturia MiniBrute and then a bassline to the chorus in the studio version. Soulwax added just one melodic line that’s what made that remix a hit.” By contrast, the tracks on ‘City of Clowns’ are first and foremost what she wants to DJ herself and see people move to – and be moved by.

Now, with a new arsenal of music that asks the big questions of our time to even bigger, bolshier beats, getting the opportunity to speak so directly to her audience again with real life shows is what keeps her propelling forward. 

“It really gives me so much hope and energy to connect with people in real life at shows,” she says. “It validates the energy I’ve always put into this and it makes coming back feel so good. Positive feedback online comes and goes, but there’s nothing like people sweating and putting their whole balls into it, right in front of you.” The next few months sees her picking up at festivals and serious sound system-housing venues around Europe. 

When Davidson takes to the stage the next evening, the glow of her gear lights up her face, sinisterly celestial. ‘I Dedicate My Life’ gets hands in the air and a back-and-forth chant going. ‘Sexy Clowns’ immediately enchants the crowd, now deep in the set and in the palm of Davidson’s hands, sliding things nimbly into ‘Work It’  - the juddering Soulwax mix that feels as fresh and dynamic today as it did on first release. 

“2025 is your year, our year,” she shouts. “2025 is the year of the clown!” 

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This article originally appeared in issue seven of Disco Pogo.

Richard Russell has always been a fan. It’s this unadulterated passion for music that runs through everything he’s done: from his early love of hip hop through his rave hit ‘The Bouncer’ by way of XL Recordings, producing the final recordings of Gil Scott-Heron and Bobby Womack and writing one of the best music autobiographies of recent times. Now back for a third album with his sporadic Everything Is Recorded super collective (this time featuring Florence Welch, Bill Callahan and Kamasi Washington, among others), Russell tells Craig McLean why he remains an unabashed fan, stating: “If you’re a fan, you can’t get it wrong. You can only love it…”

The first record, amidst stacks – and stacks – of well-thumbed records, that you might see upon entering The Copper House is ‘Symphonie Pour Une Homme Seul’ by Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry, a piece first performed by the pioneers of musique concrète in 1950. 

Immediately above it, piled at the end of another shelf that stretches towards the kitchen area, is an LP by Barton McLean. It contains ‘Dimensions II for Piano & Tape’, ‘The Sorcerer Revisited’ and ‘Genesis’, the latter “realised” in 1973 “in the Electronic Music Centre at Indiana University at South Bend”, where McLean was the Director and teacher of composition, “on the Synthi 100 synthesiser, a massive and highly versatile instrument which combines the features of the traditional synthesiser with those of the computer” – at the time, the only such instrument in the United States. According to a fraying label stuck to the top of the sleeve, the LP was dug from the crates of one Ilhan Mimaroglu, of West 119th Street, New York. That’s presumably the Turkish-American musician and electronic music composer who died in the city in 2012, aged 86.

Above The Copper House’s kitchen area, the legend ‘Residence La Revolution’. In the middle of the floor, on a geometrically patterned rug, a jumble of electronic instruments. On the opposite wall, inscribed in firm chalk, the names and definitions of clouds: stratus (layered, flattened, spread out), cirrocumulus (mackerel sky, fish scales), cirrostratus (gossamer, foggy, vapour). 

Leading down the stairs from the first floor, a message is marked on each of the treads, like a 12-inch remix of a haiku: “I tried to send you. A text message. Around 4:00am. Sunday but I didn’t. Reach you. I only wanted. To tell you that I had a great. Time with the project. Take care of your family. Maintain your calm. And stay safe. Everything else. Will be all right. Bless you.” This descending benediction is overlooked by a sole image hung on the stairwell, a black and white photograph of Gil Scott-Heron, suggesting that he’s the author – although the master of the house would prefer to keep that detail private.

And up those stairs? A studio where the owner of The Copper House – producer of Scott-Heron’s final album, 2010’s career-reviving ‘I’m New Here’ – does what he does in as rooted-but-booted a way as possible. The small space is busy with gear but calm; inspo in every direction (Laurie Anderson’s ‘Big Science’ on the turntable, tracklistings on the wall, a Hermann Mayr upright piano with its guts exposed and mic’d); comfy with its own funk shui. It’s anchored by the studio’s foundational equipment, an avowedly easy-to-use, 1972, 16-track API mixing desk sourced from Detroit. “A beautiful thing to look at. It’s simple. It’s small. And it has a sound, and an analogue warmth. We look after it, service it every year, replace parts. We’re recording everything through this.”

From recording everything to Everything Is Recorded. As Richard Russell – the DJ-turned-rave-act-turned-A&R-scout-turned-label-boss-turned-DISCOVERED-ADELE-turned-producer-turned-artist – puts it: “I’m not really a musician and I like working with people who are more accomplished musicians than I am.

“But I also like working with people who are not musicians at all,” he adds. That’s a (likely) reference to Samantha Morton, the Oscar-nominated actor with whom, last year, he made an album, ‘Daffodils and Dirt’, under the joint name SAM MORTON. She also appears as a vocalist on ‘Temporary’, the expansive but intimate third studio album from Russell’s multi-artist collective, Everything Is Recorded. It comprises 14 tracks, with seven more waiting in the wings for an additional release, its roster of some dozen-and-a-half contributors marshalled by Russell from the The Copper House, sun-like centre of his many musical worlds.

“It’s interesting, to see what people do, how they put their hands on [musical equipment],” continues the 53-year-old who, as an indie label executive (and ultimately co-owner), helped turn XL Recordings from a rave imprint into the powerhouse home of The Prodigy, Dizzee Rascal, The xx, The White Stripes, Radiohead, The Avalanches, Basement Jaxx, Adele and many more. “So that’s been a big factor in having this space. This is as simple as it could possibly be. And things can be made quickly and instinctively here. You can just put your hands on stuff and use it. There’s nothing in here which is like a museum piece.”

The freewheeling Everything Is Recorded project might be Russell’s own ‘Symphony for a Man Alone’. It’s a long (a very long way) from his first artist incarnation, as half of rave duo Kicks Like A Mule (the one-hit wonders behind 1992 Top 10 single ‘The Bouncer’). But there is, at the same time, as we shall see, a red-thread of consistent creativity throughout. 

He initiated EIR in his mid-40s, after his recovery from a life-threatening illness. But to populate the rich in atmosphere, folktronica soundscapes of this third album he has, as ever, roamed far and near. ‘Temporary’ features the versatile and varied talents of Florence Welch, Sampha, Berywn, Jah Wobble, Noah Cyrus, Bill Callahan, Kamasi Washington and the jazz-disruptor’s flautist dad Ricky, a sample of the late Nick Drake’s mum Molly, and English folk queen Maddy Prior. The latter is the former Steeleye Span singer, to whom Russell was hipped by Vampire Weekend’s Ezra Koenig and Jack Peñate, both of whom he signed to XL and both of whom helped him record the 77-year-old near her home in Cumbria. 

Aren’t friends eclectic?

Here in Notting Hill, west London, it’s a cumulonimbus (hail, deep, dark, bases) kinda day. But inside The Copper House, the magician’s lair of Richard Russell, all is imagination and light and the smell of burning sage. Or is it cedar? We’re possibly not spiritual enough to know and definitely not as spiritual as Russell. This is a man for whom the phrase “in tune” contains multitudes. As he said in a statement teeing up the release of ‘Temporary’: “My experience of the people that I work with is that they are all deeply, deeply spiritual. If you’re channelling music, that’s the game you’re in.”

In his thought-provoking, bpm-powered 2020 memoir ‘Liberation Through Hearing’, Russell recounted how, around the age of 40, newly contemplating his mortality, he’d begun “devouring” books with titles such as ‘The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying’, ‘Letters from a Stoic’ and ‘Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind’. “Eckhart Tolle’s ‘The Power of Now’ and ‘A New Earth’ took on biblical significance,” he wrote. Then in 2013, aged 42, things got really biblical: Russell was diagnosed with Guillain-Barré syndrome, a brutally painful neurological condition which left him temporarily paralysed.

He was struck down just as work began to convert The Copper House. It was an architect-designed dwelling that, unavoidably rich on the millions that Adele and co. had brought XL Recordings, Russell bought from the then-occupant (“she told me what she wanted for it, and I said, ‘done’”). He was intent on turning it into what he needed most: a home studio that was neither in his home nor in the nearby offices of XL. He’d been on a trajectory out of the indie label C-suite since pivoting, four years earlier, into production with the Scott-Heron project.

“That was an absolute turning point,” Russell – cross-legged and pony-tailed, a rave monk in tinted glasses and flowing layers, faithful terrier mix Bobo by his side – confides over a cup of hot water. “It was Gil saying to me: ‘Is this what you do now? I wasn’t sure this is what you did. This seems to be what you do, because we’re doing it. But is this what you do?’ I felt like he was putting me on the line. And in answering that, I was committing to something.”

It was a turning point, too, for Jamie xx. Russell, whose team had signed The xx when the south London band were barely out of school, asked the quietest member of a quiet band to remix ‘I’m New Here’.

“That was super important,” Jamie xx tells us of a project, retitled ‘We’re New Here’, that was released in 2011, when he was 22. “Obviously, I was so naive. But that’s why it was important. I was just so excited to make something, to be asked to do something, that I barely thought about it. I made it quite quick, in my house in Brixton. There are no stems of it that exist because I just bounced it out of my computer and that was it, I sent it to XL. It was a really nice, naive way to start the solo career.”

Russell, then, was a key figure in the creative maturation of a musician turned producer/DJ who’s now as big as his day job band (if not bigger). And for Jamie xx, his former label boss remains a quasi-talismanic figure. 

“Richard’s very good at getting very deep, very quickly!” he says approvingly. That thoughtfulness and rigorousness, he continues, “has trickled down as well. Especially when he used to be at the XL office a lot more, when [The xx] started out. You could see it permeating all the different people that worked there and the vibe. And then it transferred over to Young,” he says of the imprint (formerly Young Turks) to which The xx are signed. “He was very inspiring. And that whole energy is very inspiring.”

Today in The Copper House, the rain drumming off the cuprous exterior, it’s clear what Jamie’s on about. “There was a parallel between the experiences Jamie and I had making those records,” Russell is saying. “Jamie was making an album on his own for the first time. I was producing an album for the first time. He was in his early-20s. I was getting on for 40. Gil was about 60.”

Russell – who alternates between a rapid-fire tumble of ideas and a more thoughtful, rhythmic, repetitive, almost hypnotic style of speaking – pauses. “That’s meaningful,” he goes on. “Because there I am, right in the middle of these two different generations. I was able to be a connecting force between them. And I’ve found myself in that position a few times. That’s a special position to be in. You can really do stuff with that. I get that that’s unusual. You can’t really contrive it. You can just find yourself there for reasons that are a bit beyond me, really. But I do find myself there.” 

Finding himself there, in the thick of it, by following his nose, and his ears, has always been one of Russell’s innate skills.

Raised in northwest London, Russell was a hip hop-loving teenager who was there at the birth of rave. An avid DJ and club-goer from his mid-teens, in 1990, on his 19th birthday, he flew to New York on a cheap Air India ticket. He promptly landed a dream gig, working at Vinylmania. As he wrote in ‘Liberation Through Hearing’, the West Village store was a DJ mecca that was “an up-to-the-minute treasure trove of nothing but vinyl, glorious, exciting black wax, mainly dance music, some hip hop and R’n’B”.

Back in the UK the following year, he joined the recently launched XL Recordings as a scout – although when Kicks Like A Mule released ‘The Bouncer’ the year after that, it was on another dance-focused indie, Tribal Bass. The scene was popping off, with XL in the thick of it: also in 1992, they released another breakbeat hardcore belter, SL2’s ‘On a Ragga Tip’, followed by ‘Experience’, The Prodigy’s debut album. 

“Which was not completely explainable,” Russell reflects now, marvelling at the label’s early, back-to-back success. “It was three people in a basement with a photocopy machine. There was magic to it, for sure. And there was also magic in the scene at that time,” he adds, giving due credit to other crucial labels of the time: Shut Up and Dance, Moving Shadow, Suburban Base, Formation, Reinforced. “These labels were incredible. XL was not categorically any better than any of those other labels. If you look at the [the different labels’] tunes, it was all really one thing in that moment.” 

Steeped from his teens in the values and vibes of labels and studios and club culture, and the magic to be made therein (and you won’t find a more vibey place than The Copper House), Russell is a peerless, passionate connector and conductor. Setting a template for future kaleidoscopic roll calls of vocalists, the first Everything Is Recorded album, 2018’s self-titled Mercury nominee, featured Obongjayar, Giggs, Owen Pallet, Peter Gabriel and Green Gartside. 

Equally, perhaps emboldened by a two-decade career in the music industry in which he helped develop the careers of talents as visionary and strong-willed as Adele, Liam Howlett, Jack White, MIA, Tyler, The Creator and late-period Thom Yorke, he is, too, clearly a collaborator who doesn’t shy from a challenge. After all, the second project he produced turned out to be the final album by another troubled icon of Black American music, ‘The Bravest Man in the World’ (2012) by Bobby Womack. The third was ‘Everyday Robots’ (2014), the debut solo album by Damon Albarn. On both those records, Albarn – no pushover in the studio – was his co-producer. 

I last interviewed Russell in 2020, ahead of the release of the second EIR album, ‘Friday Forever’, a “concept record exploring the universality of a Friday night out, starting at 9.46 on a Friday evening and ending at 11.59 the morning after”, which featured typically diverse Russell heroes Ghostface Killah and Penny Rimbaud from punk band Crass. I asked him then for an Albarn story. 

“Where do you begin?” he answered with a laugh. “OK, we’re in a Parisian boîte. This is when we’re playing with Bobby Womack on French TV. I’m talking to Damon in this club and he suddenly dematerialises… I look round and he’s sprinting to the dancefloor. They were playing The The, ‘This is the Day’, quite an unusual song to hear in a club. But this is one of Damon’s favourite songs of all time. So, he starts dancing, on an empty dancefloor… completely free, untethered. The female DJ sees this. I watch her do a double-take – ‘that’s Damon Albarn!’ And she abandons her post – which is not on for a DJ – and joins him on the dancefloor and starts having the time of her life.”

I think through the artists Russell has signed, developed, shaped, alchemised over the years, whether on their own records or his. That could be Damon Albarn. It could be Liam Howlett. “The thing with Liam Howlett was that he was a great producer,” he said five years ago. “So much of it with these rave records was about the drums. We were all frustrated hip hop producers; we wanted to make those records that had those incredibly exciting drums that were usually sampled from funk records. What Marley Marl made, what The Bomb Squad made – we wanted to do that. But Liam’s drums were the best of everyone on the rave scene at the time. Because they were simultaneously really stupid and really clever. He was also an actual musician… and authentically punk in his outlook. He had it all, that rare package, every possible strength. So, it was very irritating for him that ‘Charly’ was seen as a novelty tune. The same way it was for us with ‘The Bouncer’. But Liam didn’t let that knock him off course. And he’s made a lifetime career out of the noises he wants to make. That’s inspiring.”

That could be Adele (the “discovery” of whom he’s quick to credit to various members of his team). “She knew exactly what she was doing, and more,” he says now. “She liked the idea and the environment of XL. But she was like: ‘Yeah, it’s a bit trendy, though, and I’m not doing that. Here’s some people I want to work with…’ And they were these pop writers and producers who I’d never worked with. I was like: ‘Interesting, not what I thought she was gonna do…’ I thought she was gonna be folky, because that’s what it was on stage. And what I was able to add to that, correctly, was nothing. Just getting out of the way and not having some unnecessary opinions… It’s about listening.” 

So, from Liam to Adele to Damon to, on ‘Temporary’, Florence – one wonders if a throughline in all this is Russell’s first “proper” job in the music industry. That is: once an A&R, always an A&R. He thinks for a minute. “I mean… once a fan, always a fan,” he counters. “That’s the foundational aspect of it. The A&R thing’s a bit dangerous. One of the reasons that A&R has a bit of a bad name is that it’s a difficult job. Especially in most of the places where you could actually earn a living doing it.”

You mean major labels?”

“Yeah. There’s a lot of pressure there. People are not able to just be a fan. They’ve got to think: ‘Where’s the hit?’ That obviously creates a lot of issues and a lot of friction. But if you’re a fan, you can’t get it wrong. You can only love it. What fan’s ever been wrong about that? ‘Why do you love it?’ ‘I don’t know.’ ‘What’s the connection between these five different artists you like?’ The connection’s you, the fan.”

For Russell, the dancefloor has always been a place of fandom and of transcendence. ‘Liberation Through Hearing’ is thick with playlists and flyers from nights he ran or spun at as “Rich”, one of the members of Housequake Productions, “our attempt, often inept, to emulate the London sound systems of that moment”, as he put it in his memoir. He can still namecheck cornerstone tracks from his teenage hip hop sets: 1988’s ‘Ain’t Nothin’ To It’ by K 9 Posse and, from the same year, Supreme DJ Nyborn’s ‘Versatility’, although preferably the ‘Versatile Extension’ remix. 

“These songs both had really long intros. That was part of it – I was a technical DJ, and I used to like playing around with the drums. So those songs were key.” 

The militant values of his early years in the rave and club trenches – fast-moving, no frills, DIY – echo through our conversation when he talks about a track on ‘Temporary’. ‘My and Me’ is the first full track after the sound collage/acoustic guitar/spoken word overture of the album opener, ‘October’. ‘My and Me’ features a flute solo by Ricky Washington, who tours with his son Kamasi.   

“That’s one of my favourite moments on this record. That is a spectacular bit of playing – and the type of playing that I’ve never really allowed myself to record before.”

In what way?

“Because it’s not very hip hop and it’s not very punk and it’s not very minimal. And I’ve always been nervy about being in a more musical world like that. Like that could be indulgent or something like that. Initially I was trying to make a record without any drums on it, because I thought that was gonna push me. And I always rely on [being pushed]. So, I thought, let’s take that away. That’s a crutch. And in retrospect, that meant I had to focus more on melody, more than I’ve ever done before.”

But suggest that also means he’s had to part-exorcise his lifelong passion for breaks, beats and bleeps, to make a sprawling, almost ambient in places, folk-leaning record and Russell pushes back.

“I don’t feel that. I feel like it’s just done in a subtle way, befitting the era I find myself in. That’s all!”

So, you’re still a raver at heart? 

“Yeah, I was making a rave tune this morning. I can also see how, maybe from the outside, that this music and the making of a rave tune, they’re different. But it doesn’t feel that different to me.” 

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This article first appeared in issue seven of Disco Pogo.

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GLOK, Ride, Mantra Of The Cosmos, Oasis, releasing under his own name, collaborations galore… Andy Bell is a busy, prolific and ultimately happy man. Music, he says, has given him everything. Following the release of his third solo album under his own name he tells Jim Butler why its title, ‘pinball wanderer’ is apt: “It’s a very comfortable way for me to live my life, bouncing around from this to that…”

Andy Bell likes trying new things. This morning, he attended his first tai chi class. Sitting in one of his favourite north London boozers, The Compton Arms – reputedly the inspiration for George Orwell’s celebrated essay about the perfect pub, The Moon Under Water – not far from his beloved Arsenal and it appears he thoroughly enjoyed his inaugural brush with the ancient Chinese martial art.

“I didn’t know what to expect,” he says in his softly effusive manner. “It was great. I also enjoyed being one of the youngest there!”

Over the last decade this willingness to push himself out of his comfort zone has led to a sustained bout of prolificity. Alongside the three albums and numerous tours undertaken with his nominal day job as one of the vocalists and guitarist in Ride, the fêted band he formed with his school friend Mark Gardner in Oxford in the late-80s; he’s released three solo albums under his own name, a collaborative improvisational piece with the modular synth and harp duo, Masal, another three albums under his electronic alter-ego GLOK and joined the intermittent psychedelic supergroup Mantra Of The Cosmos with Shaun Ryder, Bez and Zak Starkey.

“I spent a long time not doing it,” Bell offers, in-between sips of his soft drink. “Just being in bands. All the time I was doing that I was slowly building up a hidden catalogue. There was this huge unreleased pile of potentially good music that wasn’t really suitable for any of the bands that I played in.”

The twin spectres of David Bowie’s death in 2016, followed by Covid in 2020, provided Bell with both an inspirational and practical push respectively. His aural accumulation began in the wake of The Thin White Duke’s death following a chat with his former Oasis and Beady Eye bandmate and one of his best friends, Gem Archer, about the number of songs he’d started. Archer invited Bell down to his studio and they worked on tracks, which were then left to marinate. When Covid hit, Bell finally had the opportunity to get into the songs “in-between home schooling the kids and doomscrolling”. 

The year before the pandemic, Bell had begun his initial, furtive, solo journey with the release of a two-track single for Nat Cramp’s Sonic Cathedral Singles Club. Although it was designed as a one-off release, Bell realised he had to follow it up. “I couldn’t just do a single and leave it. That’s just not how it works, in my head.” Delving back into the Archer sessions he began to pull tracks out for a 12-inch, the problem was he had too many songs for an EP.

“Compiling is very important to me,” he says. “I’ve always liked EPs and groups of four. I had these two alternate sets of four songs that I couldn’t get my head around. I didn’t want it to be a full instrumental EP, but I wanted some instrumental energy in there.”

The compromise? An eight-track album, ‘The View From Halfway Down’. “I released the first track on my 50th birthday, hoping that I’ll live to be 100,” he smiles, knocking theatrically on a wooden table. The follow-up, ‘Flicker’, was released the following year in 2021, as a double album, those original Archer recordings proving to be a bountiful source of sonic stimulation.

“What I’m trying to get across is it was easy,” he reflects. “It was pulling into tracks that had already been done. Finishing them off – sometimes quite radically changing them, but always in mind that you’re filling either two sides or four sides of vinyl.”

Running parallel to the work released under his own name – ostensibly an infectious blend of ethereal shoegaze-cum-psychedelic folk rock, Arthur Russell, The Byrds and Cocteau Twins all being gently shifting touchpoints – were his cosmic electronic outings as GLOK. These were initially born out of a desire to become a film composer. He began feeding work to a label on a casual deal, however, apprehensive about using his own name he opted for GLOK, the German for bell. “I wanted to use the Russian for bell, Kolokol, which I love,” he explains. “But it’s also slang for one of the poisons they use in assassinations.” He’d eventually use ‘Kolokol’ for a track on the first GLOK album.

Despite a bewildering lack of interest from the film world, word began to spread among the electronic community that Andy Bell, erstwhile bassist with Oasis (will he return this year? There’s still no official announcement), was concocting all manner of dancefloor-adjacent experiments. The Bytes label released the first two GLOK albums in 2019 and 2021. Both ‘Dissident’ and ‘Pattern Recognition’ kick off with two 19-minute mind-altering bangers: ‘Dissident’’s title track is a pulsating dive into cinematic Italo disco, while ‘Dirty Hugs’ is an ultra-infectious elephantine freak out. Mr Fingers-like acid symphonies lace both releases.

All of which is a very long way of asking how does Andy Bell sleep? Well, if his latest album, ‘pinball wanderer’, is anything to go by, he doesn’t. He finishes off albums when he should be tucked up in bed. Last July, the night before he was due to fly to the other side of the world for a Ride tour, he decided to mix the track that would be the first single from ‘pinball wanderer’. A cover of The Passions’ ‘I’m in Love With a German Film Star’, featuring vocals from kindred spirit Dot Allison, it was due to be remixed by Neu!’s Michael Rother. However, rather than give it a Krautrock-endorsed makeover, Rother sent Bell some guitar parts, telling him to use them how he saw fit.

“This was a thousand times more than I expected,” Bell recalls. “A remix would have been cool but having him play guitar… And when I heard them it was prime Neu!. So, I slotted them into the mix.”

Bell was now buzzing. It was close to midnight and a cab was picking him up at 7am. Inspired, he worked on some more tracks. By two in the morning, he’d mixed half the album. “I hadn’t decided at that point what the final eight tracks were, because I’d made 11 or 12. I just thought: ‘Fuck it, I’m going to do it.’ I was going somewhere where the best thing to do on the plane was sleep, so the best thing I could do was stay up. I made a coffee and I was in. All the vocals on the last track were done at three in the morning. I tranced out completely.”

‘pinball wanderer’ – the title comes from a nickname he gave himself (“I do seem to ricochet around from thing to thing. It’s a very comfortable way for me to live my life, bouncing around from this to that”) – is an idyllic listen. Inspired by the opening bass and drums production sound on Serge Gainsbourg’s ‘Melody Nelson’, it veers from gossamer-light melodic psychedelia to Balearic dream pop. The sound world Bell effortlessly creates touches upon determinedly British guitar/electronic auteurs like Vini Reilly and Mark Peters, but also brings to mind the textured vistas created by American instrumentalist/composer Raymond Richards and the wonderfully-titled Nashville Ambient Ensemble. There’s a pleasing sun-dappled folktronica to the album. “It’s a kind of quite lightweight record,” Bell demurs modestly – and unnecessarily. “The lyrics are quite silly. There’s not many lyrics on it.”

When pressed as to where the record fits, or where the best time or place to listen to the album is, he’s more forthcoming. “It’s shoegaze barbecue music,” he laughs. “For the first record we were going to do that, have a barbecue. Mac DeMarco did it. He’s great. He’s someone listening to his records and seeing how prolific he is, who’s an inspiration when it comes to my stuff. He had a barbecue at his house and that led us to shoegaze barbecue. It never happened… lockdown. I think there was a playlist. Maybe this summer.”

It will come as no surprise to discover that Andy Bell is something of an arch theorist. He loves ideas. “I’m the sort of person who loves to sit around and conceptualise a record before making it. If we were in a band we’d be talking about how it would be really cool to do an album like this and we could wear that. You dream the whole thing up. And then you try and do it. That’s something that does really drive me. The idea of doing something in a certain way.”

But equally, the ideas can evolve, the direction can change. “Often when you’re doing that you forget why you were doing it. Or you get distracted and it changes. And that’s just as good really.”

To help keep some sort of distinction between his various musical worlds, he has guitars that he uses for each project and “bits of equipment that are particular to that world”. But, as he says, those two worlds are increasingly blurring. GLOK began as a purely instrumental outlet. On ‘Pattern Recognition’, however, he started to work with singers and “began to break all my own rules. Just for fun really”. 

Indeed ‘pinball wanderer’ and ‘Alliance’, the collaborative GLOK album he released with Timothy Clerkin at the end of last year, certainly have some pleasing overlaps. You’d be hard pushed to describe ‘pinball wanderer’ as a dance record, but there are hints of producers like Koushik and Bibio, as well as forward-thinking outfits like The Beta Band.

“I don’t agree,” he says when its put to him ‘pinball wanderer’ shares qualities with GLOK. “It’s a rock record. Just a minimal one. Because the drums and bass are exposed people seem to hear it as more electronic. There is a little bit of synth on it. I mean I’m not upset by that. I’m interested by it more than anything. Maybe the lines are all blurring and maybe there won’t be a need to do another GLOK record if it’s all incorporated into the one thing.”

The push and pull of the dance/electronic world has always been hovering around Bell, even if it wasn’t always in focus. He talks of an older friend taping him Mr Fingers and Can records when he was just starting out in Ride and he remembers buying ‘Voodoo Ray’ on 12-inch, as well as Bobby Byrd and James Brown records that paved the way for a love of early hip hop. Despite being 18 in 1988 though, he was never a clubber. 

“Mark, the singer of Ride, he was a raver at that time,” he says. “Full on. He was going to raves, illegal parties, because a lot of them were happening just outside Oxford on the ring road. He remembers them very fondly. I never went. I kind of regret that now. I would have liked to. I was stuck in the band world.”

Through the 90s he would buy Aphex Twin records and remembers taking in The Sabres Of Paradise’s ‘Wilmot’ to the studio when Ride were recording their ill-fated fourth album, ‘Tarantula’. “We were trying to record hairy old rock music,” he laughs. “We’d gone full Free at that point. Which I think was mainly my fault, I hold my hands up for that one. If we hadn’t broken up we might have been smart enough to do what Radiohead did, which was to incorporate that a little bit. But I didn’t have the tools at that point. That came later. With a bit of maturity. Not maturity, that’s the wrong word. More openness.”

This openness was confirmed when he had what he calls his electronic “eureka moment” during the recording of Beady Eye’s second album with producer Dave Sitek. Instead of operating within a traditional ‘band’ set-up, the TV On The Radio linchpin opened Bell’s eyes to new ways of working.

“He came over with so much outboard gear and so many synths, so many rack effects and guitar pedals,” he explains. “I think I thought up to that point that you used guitar pedals on guitars, synths were for keyboard players and you know outboard gear was for the mix. But this was such a different approach. He came in, everything was going through everything and he’d put the whole band through a reverb.”

Bell started to trawl eBay for gear – a Yamaha CS5 mono synth, the Eventide guitar pedals, Space and Timefactor. His brother-in-law, the DJ and producer Arveene, convinced him to buy an SH-101 synthesiser. “I started to get into more bits and pieces.” 

An opportune meeting with Andrew Weatherall in the mid-10s, saw him record many of his early GLOK experiments in the studio next to The Guv’nor in Seven Sisters. It was short-lived, but the connection was made. Later, Weatherall contacted him because he had a guitar that he thought Bell might like.

“A Vox Invader,” he beams. “An amazing 60s instrument with all these inbuilt effects. A fuzz effect, a wah effect and a kind of tremolo effect.”

Bell bought it off Weatherall, but not before he played on around 20 tunes for him. He says he spent around two weeks going into the studio playing on various things. Alas, only three tracks that he contributed to have seen the light of day – ‘Making Friends With the Invader’ from the ‘Blue Bullet’ EP and both tracks on the ‘Unknown Plunderer’/‘End Times Sound’ EP. “I was honoured to play on what he was doing. Three released tracks and then a whole load more which I don’t think will see the light of day because they all needed to be finished by him.”

Now firmly ensconced in that ALFOS/Convenanza world of openness, musical freedom and community, Bell recognises that music is at the heart of all his “enduring friendships”. His good friend Erol Alkan, whom he meet when Alkan produced Ride’s comeback album, is now the first to hear his music for instance. “It’s always about music,” he says. “That’s the language we talk. Talking about people like David Holmes, Sean Johnston... We’re all in a world where we’re doing fine. We make a living from music, which is brilliant. But we still live real lives, normal lives. We’re doing it because we love doing it.”

Music remains the central aspect of his life, not just figuratively but literally. A few years ago, Bell went into therapy. One of the tools he was given was picking a time in his life when he was most himself. He chose his 13-year-old self, when he was just getting into The Smiths, The Cure and Echo & The Bunnymen. 

“I described a very confident, very open-minded person,” he reflects. “Which I’m not always. As a grown-up I’m quite shy and riven with anxiety sometimes. I can be quite dark and hard on myself. But I actually started a dialogue with my 13-year-old self in therapy where I would literally talk and let him talk back, kind of. It’s something I still do. Late at night, when I’m pissed (laughs).”

He smiles once more, basking in that happy memory. “That guy has got my back. He will always have my back and will always see the good in me and remind me that it’s cool. It’s fine,” he concludes. ‘Put that stupid record out. It’s fine.’” 

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This feature first appeared in issue seven of Disco Pogo.

Auntie Flo has got something for your mind your body and your soul…

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It’s not often that arch raconteur Luke Una is lost for words. But last October, the grand entertaining conscience of electronic/leftfield dance music was found failing to articulate the astonishment in which he held one of his recent sonic discoveries.

“It’s blown my mind,” he waxed lyrically on Instagram, as the sounds of an elongated, hypnotic funk-laden disco-cum-house groove emanated from his studio speakers. As the effervescent track approached the eight-minute mark and a vocal kicked in elevating the track to some other, higher transcendental portal, Una’s mind was blown further. “So fucking beautiful… Balearic, Afro, fucking fusion… dunno what you call it. It’s a belter.”

Auntie Flo’s majestic ‘Green City’ is indeed a belter. It’s a 15-minute trip into the outer reaches of genre agnostic dance music that was rightfully named Track of 2024 by the likes of Una, DJ History’s Furtive 50 (as voted for by the forum and “various milquetoasts and popinjays associated with Bill Brewster”) and this very publication. Not bad for a track that Brian d’Souza, the inspirational figure behind Auntie Flo, had reconciled to being “not as good as I thought it was” after various DJs he sent it to ahead of last year’s Glastonbury didn’t react as he hoped.

“It was when Luke got on board that I thought: ‘Finally!’” the gently-spoken Scottish musical polymath recalls a few months later. “I’d sent it to a few folk and wasn’t really getting much of a response. But he came back with his sort of stream of consciousness thing that he does. Finally, someone got it in the way I did.” He stops and adds thoughtfully: “Because you do question yourself.”

‘Green City’ (named after Nairobi – d’Souza has Kenyan heritage) is emblematic of how Auntie Flo views music. The track, initially started in 2019 as a field recording, was built up with the help of various collaborators, including Kokoroko’s Yohan Kebede on keys and Ziggy Funk on guitar. It was the addition of Ambassa Mandela’s vocals – fittingly recorded in Nairobi – that completed the jigsaw. Music as an infectious blend of sounds (in this case Western and African) that demonstrate the ridiculous artificial boundaries between cultures and people? 

“Yeah, 100 per cent,” he avows. “Music is such a connecting and powerful force.”

This sense of assemblage and various strands underpinning Auntie Flo becomes even more apparent when you start to untangle d’Souza’s work. There are innumerable conversations you could have with him about music. Not only is he a DJ, producer, musician (although he declares himself not to be in any traditional sense) and label boss, but he also works within the realms of digital sound therapy, sound installations and bio-sonification (the biological sound of nature). 

His work exists at the intersection of science, nature and the cultural, economic and political impulse of music. The themes of migration, multiculturalism and the diaspora all reside in his world. And it all comes together under the umbrella of his label A State Of Flo, which is also home to his musical wellbeing Ambient Flo radio station.

“The label is this world building exercise,” he explains. “I’m trying to find where I’m placed on a map and build a kind of structure that makes sense to anyone that’s interested.”

Auntie Flo’s heritage – his family hail from Goa and Kenya – allied to his Scottish birthplace mean maps, boundaries and identity all play a central part in his music. His multifarious sounds are often described as world music and the questions that arise from that – the well-intentioned side of world music versus notions of cultural appropriation - are something he clearly grapples with.

“What gives me the rights to collaborate with a Kenyan singer?” he asks. “Is it because of my heritage? I wouldn’t say so, it’s just about coming together and making music on the sort of purest level.”

As simple as that?

“Yeah, as simple as that,” he responds. “Why should it be any more complicated? Music is this amazing, special, magical thing that allows us to communicate non-verbally; to travel through sound or whatever. And to block some sort of access because it’s something that’s protected by a certain culture in your head, but perhaps not by that culture itself – and who represents a culture anyway? No one really – that becomes a self-defeating notion I think.”

Of course, without Auntie Flo’s intoxicating sounds none of this would matter. Last year’s excellent longplayer ‘In My Dreams (I’m a Bird and I’m Free)’ is about to be followed up by ‘Birds of Paradise’. Whereas ‘In My Dreams’ was a series of collaborations with musicians across the world, ‘Birds of Paradise’ (his fifth studio album) is just Auntie Flo.

“This is me in the studio playing around and coming up with ideas. Therefore it’s an instrumental record. It’s essentially more of a club or dance record I guess.” A case in point is the majestic ‘Ceibo’, a mini-epic (compared to ‘Green City’) that takes in techno, Afrobeat and Highlife in one seven-minute dancefloor-slaying package. 

Alongside finishing ‘Birds of Paradise’ – a recent visit to Goa and Kenya saw him assemble some new field recordings to provide the record with further textures – and preparing a new live show, d’Souza is also working on a generative AI app that explores the different ways in which sound and frequencies of sound affect your brain.

“That gets to the bare bones of sound waves and frequencies,” he explains. “I’m equally as interested in that as the cultural connections that music can bring. These are two completely disparate areas to explore; you’re down to the mechanistic, the physics of it. But then you’ve also got this huge cultural space that connects all human beings in a way.”

Having previously kept these fascinating topics separate, d’Souza can now see a way in which his sound-related passions can converge. 

“I think that now is the best time that there’s ever been in my lifetime to be able to have these conversations,” he finishes. “When I started doing this there was a lot more hedonistic culture around losing yourself on the dancefloor and going on the sesh. And these could be hugely informative for the rest of your life; you could have epiphanies on the dancefloor. You can meet your life partner on the dancefloor – as I did. But you wouldn’t really want to be thinking about the science. What was actually underpinning it! That would ruin the whole bloody thing, talking like that, you’d be a pariah, right. I feel like there’s more scope to have this kind of conversation now. Which is why I feel there’s an opportunity to bring my two worlds together.”

It’s time to go with the Flo.

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This article first appeared in issue seven of Disco Pogo.

It would be easy for Skream to rest on his laurels. The dubstep pioneer isn’t interested in looking backwards though. Over the course of his 25-year-plus musical career, the south Londoner has increasingly pushed a genre-agnostic sound. This has reached its apex on his new album, ‘Skreamizm 8’. Felicity Martin finds the producer and DJ in a thoughtful, yet playful, mood. “I can’t do anything else,” he laughs. “Can’t even put up a fucking shelf…”

'‘Ello yous, hope you’re alright. It’s a bit scary right now, innit?' says Skream, in his conversational south London drawl. It’s taken from ‘Thinking of You’, the outro to ‘Skreamizm 8’, the vocal culled from a Voice Note he recorded in the midst of lockdown and never cleaned up, to keep it raw. It was targeted at kids going through adolescence and the struggles that come with that, made exponentially worse by events being locked off. 

“I just had a feeling of how shit growing up can be, socially,” he explains over a pint and tacos at a King’s Cross pub owned by his mate. “There’s the line: ‘Don’t worry, these probably aren’t going to be your friends in 25 years.’ And it was… because my son was starting secondary school and it was just a message like, it’ll always be alright in the end, try not to worry.”

Skream has just been to hear the album in spatial audio with Dolby Atmos, a technique that creates a 3D soundscape when listened to on headphones or speakers. He’s clearly chuffed about the experience, grinning widely to reveal a missing tooth. ‘Skreamizm 8’ is the first ‘Skreamizm’ instalment in 10 years, but he hates the word ‘album’. “It adds so much pressure to everything,” he says, explaining that – for his mind, anyway – it’s an EP.

Now 37, Ollie Jones has been involved in music for at least 26 years. He’s known for being one of dubstep’s originators and for his later disco and house sets. He’s also renowned for being a notorious party animal. Where other music stalwarts jumped out of the game or have faded into obscurity, Skream has stayed consistent with an overwhelming work rate, an ear for future sounds and for the tight friendships he’s made within the industry. It’s why lockdown worried him so much. “I can’t do anything else! Play tunes and make tunes, that’s literally all I can do. Can’t even put a fucking shelf up.”

His role in the creation of a genre that went from dark London clubs to arenas in the US has been much mythologised. Skream started DJing aged 11 and not long after began hanging around at Croydon’s Big Apple Records, where his brother worked. You could hardly blame him for skiving off school: his school was shit, “really shit”. The West Wickham Catholic college was run by an ex-nun who stole up to £500,000 from the grant-maintained institution. “Suddenly there was paparazzi everywhere and [the school] was on the front page of every newspaper in the country,” he recalls. It was even the subject of 2006 BBC drama-documentary ‘The Thieving Headmistress’.

Big Apple, situated in “non-trendy” Croydon, was where he first met Benga, Artwork, Hatcha and the other music enthusiasts who were congregating around the FWD>> club night, dedicated to the sounds that were weirder and darker than what was being played in the garage raves. 

“It was an iconic place, it was just buzzing all the time,” Skream says. He’d already been working there for a year when his school’s work experience programme began and he picked Big Apple for his placement – he had to go through a pretend first day while being monitored by a school staff member.

While he wasn’t allowed to touch the till, Skream was tasked with making ringtones for tracks that were created in the shop’s studio, which was owned by Artwork (fun fact: Skream made the official ringtone for Daniel Bedingfield’s ‘Gotta Get Thru This’). When the store eventually closed, Skream cried. “Because it was the only place I felt normal. Whether it was an office worker coming in on their lunch break, a builder, or DJs – you met so many people. Being behind the counter at such a young age, I got treated like an adult rather than a kid.”

Everything in his life became about music. In his lunch break he’d visit the second-hand record store behind the shop, digging through Indian and African records to find stuff to sample. He and Benga were creating tracks on Fruity Loops and the PlayStation, “in creative competition, but it was friendly”. They’d ring each other up on their house phones for hours, playing parts of tracks to one another before running back to their individual workstations, newly inspired. Hatcha used to send tracks to Neil Jolliffe, who ran FWD>> with Sarah Lockhart, letting them play on his voicemail before hanging up so Jolliffe wouldn’t know who was behind them. 

“Then there was this buzz going round that it was these two 13-year-olds who were doing something new,” Skream says. Eventually ‘The Judgement’ came out in 2003 on 12-inch, a warped, moody joint record that proved the pair were “vinyl-worthy”.

He and Benga thought they’d made it (“we were like little rock stars; it was a dream come true”) before they gradually started doing their own things and exploring their own sounds. Then in 2006 Skream released one of dubstep’s most recognisable tracks: the warbled semi-verse-chorus structure of ‘Midnight Request Line’, before a few years later hitting the big time with his chart-scaling remix of La Roux’s ‘In for the Kill’. By this point, he was touring the world, loving to travel and meeting people on the way. Together with Benga and Artwork, they became dubstep-pop supergroup Magnetic Man, with their eponymous album in 2010 reaching number 5 in the UK album charts.

Eventually, as dubstep became more testosterone-fuelled and indebted to big drops, Skream distanced himself from the sounds, drawing upon house, techno and disco when he DJed. It didn’t help when he was misrepresented by the Daily Star, who chose to frame his words in the headline: ‘Dubstep is DEAD’, when he’d just been talking about his personal choice to step back from the genre. “I got death threats and shit,” Skream says. “Why would I talk about my own baby like that?!” It proved to be a setback too, blocking the move he wanted to make into the house realm as all the attention was on his thoughts on 140bpm.

Over the years since, Skream has unleashed a stream of slamming house and techno cuts – for example, Michael Bibi and Jackmaster co-productions ‘Otto’s Chant’ and ‘The Attention Deficit Track’, while playing slots in Ibiza flagships and festivals worldwide. His ‘Open to Close’ party series in 2016 and 2017 championed the all-night-long set, allowing him to go deeper, earning a loyal audience. Still, there were people who’d just yell at him to play dubstep. They still do. “It’s not their fault, though,” Skream admits, “it’s only when they hear I’ve been playing dubstep sets at certain festivals” – the old school set he did with Rusko at EDC in 2019, for instance. “I try to put out a statement about it, otherwise people drive me fucking mad. I could do it every weekend, but I’m not into nostalgia. I want to go forward, you know?”

‘Skreamizm 8’ was originally going to be a dubstep album. Then he scrapped the whole thing, determined not to do something that looked to the past. (In the background, his manager plays a great-sounding unreleased Coki and Skream collaboration from his phone). “I thought this one felt more honest, because it was actually what I was writing.” But, although forward-looking, it’s also a retrospective record in some ways: ‘Funky Sailor’ features former Roll Deep member Trim and a lurching oboe line, a nod to early grime and pirate radio, as well as Skream’s love of UK funky. “It’s gonna be massive,” he says in between mouthfuls of rice. “I’ve been playing it for two years now, but it’s changed over time.”

In the vast stretch of time in lockdown when clubs were shut, Skream began inventing new genres, finding it easier to experiment without the pressure of making club bangers for the following weekend. He made a massive number of tunes – 425, he thinks. “I was doing Eski hardcore, which was old grime synths over really fast pounding hardcore beats. I’ve got a whole album’s worth of it.” He describes another style he’s worked on: afrobeats with old school underground UK basslines, “which were really sparse and minimal, really dark, real UK music”. He used a recent set for London’s HÖR takeover to showcase these sounds, with deep, resonant bass cutting into zero gravity vocals. He calls it “FWD>> bassline”.

As well as the lockdown angst that’s filtered into ‘Skreamizm 8’, there’s a track written for Skream’s late friend Jamie Roy, the Scottish DJ responsible for ‘Organ Belta’ who passed away last year aged 33. ‘Not Ready Yet’ was written the day he died, while another track is named ‘Roy the Boy’ after him. “It’s all quite melancholy to a degree – a lot of them are end-of-the-night tracks, [so I] can’t really play them early. But I like it as a... Not a concept record, but it’s a very honest record.” Elsewhere there’s heartstring-tugging garage, ravey breakdowns and trance-inspired synths, further proving the genre-less field in which Skream now operates.

Rather than the kind of A-list producer or vocal features that he could quite easily pull, the album has cameos from newer talent such as garage newcomer Bklava and Barbados-born Lagoon Wavey, plus his mates, the rave duo Prospa. Relationships have been an important part of Skream’s trajectory, and still are, from long-time friendships with the likes of Seth Troxler to newer pals such as Ewan McVicar. He’s recently been going b2b with Interplanetary Criminal and dubstep newcomer Hamdi, and championing Manchester’s Ghoulish. “I like doing my bit,” Skream explains. “I hate the idea of people thinking the industry’s full of arseholes. I had good people around me [when coming up], and sometimes the DJ world can feel like everyone’s a cunt, basically. I just try to help people out.”

Music aside, Skream wouldn’t be Skream without his well-documented love of a good party, from his highly-memed throwing of a CDJ into the crowd at SXSW in 2013, to Annie Mac saying he was more hardcore than the Sex Pistols. “I think sometimes people are focused on partying rather than actually how hard I work,” he says. “They think I’m a party animal or whatever, when people forget that Monday to Friday I’m a parent. I’ve had to cancel a few shows this year due to health reasons, and another due to personal reasons, but other than that I’ve probably missed about ten gigs in 20 years or something. And I’ve played probably over 1000 gigs.” 

What do his kids think about his music? “My daughter loves it, yeah. My son, he – I don’t think he likes the music, but he sent me a really nice message saying: ‘I think it’s amazing that you get to live your dream.’”

A couple of weeks after we meet, Skream announces on Twitter that he’s going sober. “Tonight’s my first show in 20-odd years without having anything in my system,” he writes, saying he feels “jittery” about the prospect. “Let a few things in my personal life slip and possibly some things in my career where I just wasn’t on the ball,” he clarifies, although adding: “Not saying I’m never gonna have a party again, but for the meantime this is my choice.”

To celebrate the album coming out, he’s planned a bumper weekender at fabric in October. Alongside a host of other guests such as Kode9 and an Oblig takeover, it will see Skream and Benga play together for the first time in around 10 years. In 2015, Benga opened up about having a mental breakdown, saying he had developed bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, and that he would be retiring from music. This will be the first time he’s played a show since 2016. He’s been doing well recently, Skream says. “Really good, really positive. I’m excited for him.” He grins about the prospect of their onstage reunion. “But it’s not gonna be an old school set. He’s been working on a lot of new music, and obviously I have. I think it’s gonna be a bit more electro-y.” 

For a record store obsessive who came up in a tight-knit community, it’s easy to see where Skream’s love of collaborating and continual quest for evolution has come from. “I’ve got a track with Jamie T, a full-on indie track,” he reveals. “It’s hard because when you’re doing a project you’re tied to that, so you can’t really release anything else. But I wanna get stuff out – I might start releasing music under my kids’ names, you know – just get it out there! 

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This article first appeared in issue four of Disco Pogo.

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Collaboration and an ever-expanding musical network lies at the heart of Adrian Sherwood’s On-U Sound Records. From hanging out with Neneh Cherry and Ari Up in the squats of post-punk London to resurrecting Lee “Scratch” Perry’s career and releasing records by the likes of Tackhead, African Head Charge, Mark Stewart and Dub Syndicate, this is a story of creative and communal co-operation. As Sherwood looks back upon five decades of experimental dub, he proudly tells Joe Muggs: “I’m still doing what I want more than 40 years on…”

On-U Sound all came together in and around the squats of London. “When I met Ari, she was living with her mum and John,” starts a typical label founder Adrian Sherwood anecdote: he’s referring to then just-ex-Sex Pistol John Lydon, his life partner Nora Forster and Nora’s daughter Ari Up of The Slits. “I think Nora wanted Ari out from underfoot, so she went and opened up a squat for her – she’d been roller skating past it, seen it was empty and just opened it. Ari said: ‘Oh Nora’s found me a place.’ And I ended up living there for a year with Ari, Glenmore Williams, who was her boyfriend and father of her twins, and Neneh Cherry!” 

Now 65, with several lifetime’s worth of experience, his mighty On-U Sound label and collective is 43 years young and still going strong. Talking from his girlfriend’s house, down the road from where he lives in Ramsgate, Kent, he’s endlessly genial and proud to look back over the achievements of the label and his work with everyone from Lee “Scratch” Perry to Depeche Mode. In the last few months alone, the label has released the mind-bending Afro-techno-dub of label stalwarts African Head Charge’s ‘A Trip to Bolgatanga’, hyper-politicised country-soul with dub-wise horns on Jeb Loy Nichols’ ‘United States of the Broken Hearted’, and the monumental ‘Midnight Rocker’ from the 72-year-old legend Horace Andy – all of them produced or co-produced by Sherwood. But there’s a note of sorrow shot through it all as he speaks, too, at remembering so many lost friends and colleagues. Just a week ago, after all, he was at the memorial for his lifelong collaborator Mark Stewart, so a lot of those memories are raw. 

Back when he was living with Ari, though – in 1978, right at the start of his illustrious career as a producer, with the ideas that would coalesce into On-U bubbling away – he was only just 20. He’d already racked up some serious musical experience, mind. He’d grown up in High Wycombe, a commuter town to the north west of London with a large population of Jamaican and St Vincentian families: from an early age he loved to go to friends’ houses and have “chicken, dumplings, properly seasoned food”, and from 12 he was attending all-night blues parties with ska, rocksteady and very early reggae cranked up loud. 

He was barely into his teens when he started avidly collecting records, then DJing – he was encouraged by local club owner Joe Farquharson who he says, “was a true father figure to me”, and quickly suggested that they get into the business of distributing reggae records. JA Distribution (“it meant Joe & Adrian, not Jamaica!”) took off quickly, and began working with revered labels like Trojan, and as soon as Sherwood could drive he was off, “mapping out the country by reggae shops”. 

Naturally gregarious, he began making friends and valuable connections this way. The journalist, academic and songwriter Vivien Goldman, who would later record with him, recalls being struck by “this absolute cherub of a teenager with long hair and bright eyes coming into Dub Vendor in Notting Hill with these amazing records”. Adrian in turn remembers going into Revolver Records in Bristol and noticing Mark Stewart – then still a schoolboy, on the cusp of forming The Pop Group – “who really stood out because he was so tall and spotty and enthusiastic”. Already a network was forming.

He was making musical connections further afield too, with Jamaican musicians including the great singer/producer Prince Far I, who became a close friend, sending Sherwood his master tapes to play around with, which he mixed to become ‘Cry Tuff Dub Encounter Volume 1’. He pulled together a bunch of High Wycombe friends and connections, plus reggae musicians from their extended network like prodigious percussionist Bonjo Iyabinghi Noah, to overdub new parts and got the dubmaster Dennis Bovell to engineer. “I was this kid pestering him,” he says, “going: ‘Turn this up! Do more of that!’. He’d roll his eyes and go: ‘Right, OK’.” 

Eventually, Sherwood coaxed this ragtag backing band into the studio to record original material, and they began gigging. Their studio sessions became ‘Dub from Creation’, and they became Creation Rebel, thus starting a pattern of very loose “bands” falling together by happenstance that would repeat again and again through the decades. Immediately Creation Rebel started making waves. Sherwood had connections into the punk scene already, via his record shop networking, but even more because High Wycombe rocker – and investor in JA – Ron Watts was promoter of Thursday nights at punk’s ground zero, the 100 Club, and Sherwood’s friend and now bandmate Dr Pablo would drive him there each week. 

He didn’t take much to punk (“a bit of a din if I’m honest”), but the punks loved dub, and, as Noah bluntly puts it: “Right then we were the only band in the world playing dub, no vocalist, just dub reggae.” 

“We were gigging a lot,” Sherwood recalls, “so before long we were supporting The Slits, supporting The Clash, and because I was mixing the sound live, people were coming up to ask if I could mix them too.” After moving to London, he found himself in the thick of a fertile scene, mingling with the likes of Lydon, Jah Wobble, The Raincoats and of course The Slits and Mark Stewart – who had by this time moved up from Bristol along with his Pop Group bandmates.

The atmosphere bubbled with creativity, with anyone and everyone getting roped into recording sessions. “We were young and excited about the future,” says Noah, “I was happy to be playing in a band as good as Creation Rebel, so I was happy to play with whoever else come by too.” Goldman recalls an atmosphere where “you might go round for dinner and end up singing harmonies – I’d be singing along to something with Ari and Neneh, and a couple of girls just from the neighbourhood. Adrian only ever noted down people’s first names on recordings at first, so people often assumed I was Viv Albertine from The Slits, but that was the atmosphere we were working in”. The American singer-songwriter Jeb Loy Nichols recalls visiting the squat, being woken in the morning by Sherwood who greeted him with the words: “Hi, can you drive?” and immediately being asked to help deliver some records “and becoming best friends from that day to this”.

After a couple of false starts, this frenetic activity came together with the birth of On-U Sound in 1980, releases coming from the short-lived collective The London Underground and most importantly, reflecting the sprawling collaborative ethos, New Age Steppers. N.A.S. featured an insane array of talent including various Slits, Raincoats and Pop Group/Rip, Rig & Panic members, experimentalist Steve Beresford (best known for Flying Lizards), reggae musicians Bim Sherman, Style Scott, Ras Levi and Crucial Tony and more, all held together by Sherwood’s increasingly out-there production. 

It would be impossible to list all the radical characters that orbited and contributed to On-U in those early years, but they manifested both on the label and off. With backing from Rough Trade, Sherwood set it up “to be a showcase to get people a deal with other companies” and never contracted anyone to the label, rather seeing it as a sprawling family of some 40 people. Collectives would form within it – as with Dub Syndicate from the various reggae players, among which Style Scott emerged as a leader – as would more abstract entities like African Head Charge which started as a studio project built around Noah’s percussion and gradually mutated into a steadier band.

People would also come from outside – as with the New York poet and performer, Annie Bandez. Crass Records called Sherwood in to record her first solo album as Annie Anxiety, and as she tells it: “We had fun together trying things out, and once we were speaking each other’s creative language it felt like home.” A decade later she would end up making an album for On-U as Little Annie – the alias she uses to this day – and remains close with Sherwood and many of the label family now. Sometimes it was literally family: Sherwood and Kishi Yamamoto, whose keyboards are all over the Annie Anxiety album, and who designed the On-U logo and many of the most iconic sleeves, were dating at the start of On-U and would soon marry.

There were ups and downs to say the least. On-U was perpetually in debt early on. “I was paying for studio time upfront; I had debts secured on my mum’s house,” says Sherwood. He credits Yamamoto with keeping the business on the straight and narrow, and Mute’s Daniel Miller – another lifelong friend who he just saw at Mark Stewart’s memorial – with giving him remix work for Depeche Mode, which in turn made him a producer of choice for huge acts like Ministry, helping to keep the label afloat. Things got very shaky, though, in 1983 when Prince Far-I was shot dead in Jamaica. “That shook me up really badly,” says Sherwood. “It was so stupid and mindless; we’ve lost so many great people that way. I found it hard to make or play dub for some time after that.” 

However, the following year the collective got a huge boost. Sherwood, with Steve Beresford, had produced ‘Watch Yourself’ – an electro-funk track by Akabu, and incidentally the first time he’d used a drum machine – and it attracted the attention of Tom Silverman from legendary hip hop label Tommy Boy. He flew Sherwood over to New York, where he made a whole bunch of new friends – most notably the revered session musicians, Doug Wimbish, Keith LeBlanc and Skip McDonald, better known at that point as the Sugarhill Gang band. They were busy, playing with the likes of James Brown, at the time, but also jaded after an exhausting couple of years on the road and shabby treatment from Sugar Hill Records.

Doug Wimbish, like so many others, remembers the social aspect as vital. “He (Sherwood) had real clarity of vision,” he says, “but more important, after I met him at New Music Seminar, he came to hang out at Keith LeBlanc’s pad on 14th Street. I was able to introduce him to friends from uptown and downtown, and we could just talk at length about his vision – and we realised he knew exactly what to do with this little trio.” 

The rapport was so total that the trio would almost immediately become part of the On-U family, first as The Maffia – the backing band for some of Mark Stewart’s most extraordinarily brutal work – and then in their own right as Tackhead. The UK connection wasn’t without some culture shock though. Sherwood laughs as he remembers picking up LeBlanc from Heathrow on his first visit and to get to East Ham driving through Wapping when the print strikes against Rupert Murdoch were kicking off. “There was a full riot – horses, petrol bombs, the lot – he thought: ‘Fuck me, England’s mental!’” 

From here into the early-90s was On-U’s imperial phase. “We were such a good crew,” says Sherwood. “We could deliver anything. By the time Tackhead were on board we had this incredible funk rhythm section, we had the best reggae musicians, we had African music, when Talvin Singh came in (the teenage Singh played on many On-U releases at the start of the 90s) he brought Indian music... we had a very good posse.” Mixing this potent groove factory with eccentrics like the late Andy Fairley (“he spent every penny he got his hands on on Russian literature, a very, very bright man, beautiful guy and a great poet”) and the firebrand Gary Clail generated gold creatively and even commercially. In 1987, Sherwood helped resurrect Lee “Scratch” Perry’s faltering career, starting a close relationship that would last until Perry’s death in 2021.

The collision of dub, funk, industrial, poetry, psychedelia and more kept the post-punk spirit alive through the glossy 80s, and sparked inspiration for many inquiring minds. Optimo’s JD Twitch for one. “In the mid-80s,” he says, “On-U Sound had such an impact on me I became evangelistic about it, and it directly led me to DJ. My very early sets were probably around 40% On-U or Sherwood, and of course my moniker, ’Twitch’ came from the Sherwood produced Ministry album of the same name.” 

The late Andrew Weatherall was a huge fan too, and their worlds often overlapped, with Sherwood describing Weatherall as his “favourite DJ”, and On-U keyboardist David Harrow working on several projects with him in the Sabresonic/Bloodsugar years.

The creative and personal intensity of so many radically different, incandescently brilliant creative minds all firing off one another was unsustainable though. Sherwood and Yamamoto broke up in 1994, and without her business nous and steadying hand, he hit a point of mental and financial collapse. 

“I got swamped,” he says, “with having to talk to too many people, trying to deal with business and expectation, and just hit the shank and went through several years of not really being in good shape at all.” He never stopped working though. Indeed, he produced some great work like the monumentally moody 1997 ‘Echo Dek’ rework of Primal Scream’s ‘Vanishing Point’, but it was sporadic and took him the best part of a decade to pay off his debts.

The slow climb out of this trough began in earnest with the lively, dancehall-infused ‘Never Trust a Hippy’ – remarkably his first solo album – signed by Peter Gabriel’s Real World in 2003 and picked up significantly as newer generations connected to his work. Unsurprisingly, the dubstep movement provided a point of connection, with artists like Mala and particularly Pinch championing On-U. Pinch’s introduction to heavy bass had been through his brothers’ copies of the On-U ‘Pay it All Back’ compilations, and he and Sherwood struck up an instant personal and creative rapport.

“He’s like a son to me,” says Sherwood. “In fact, him and his missus are coming to stay in a couple of days.” To date, the pair have made two albums together and performed many heavyweight live shows.

As post-punk and industrial gained new traction, Sherwood’s work has found new fans in more Bohemian corners of clubland too. NTS radio stalwart DJ DEBONAIR describes her discovery of African Head Charge’s ‘Songs of Praise’ thus: “There was something distinctly punk yet spiritual about that record which made me play it over and over trying to wrap my head round it. This definitely appealed to the budding DJ in me, always fascinated in music that was somehow unclassifiable – making a nod to different disciplines but creating something of its own.” She also points to his newer work as vital – notably Japanese hypno-rock band Nisennenmondai appearing on On-U in 2016, and the Pinch collabs: “Where you can feel the sound of the UK underground crackle through.”

So now – for all that he’ll talk unabashedly about past fuck-ups, and his sadness at the loss of friends like Mark Stewart, Scratch, Style Scott (who was also shot in Jamaica in 2014) “and way too many others” – Sherwood is happy with his lot. His kids are involved with music too, and he is as busy as ever. He’s just finished reworking Sonic Boom and Panda Bear’s collaboration from last year and enthuses about putting together a new solo project which will be performed in Dolby Atmos surround, which he hopes to take into cinemas as “an audiovisual attack on people.” 

And despite the rollercoaster nature of On-U’s history, he seems notably short on regrets. “I often wonder,” he finishes. “Whether I should have taken it more seriously as a business, got proper investment, actually tried to make some hits. But then if I had, I probably would have ended up selling it out – whereas now it’s still going, it’s still independent, and I’m still doing what I want more than 40 years on. That’s definitely something, right?” 

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This article first appeared in issue four of Disco Pogo.

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As DJ Krust, Kirk Thompson was one of drum’n’bass’ poster boys, but in 2006 he disappeared. Here’s how he came back with a new creative cycle…

By the age of 19, Krust/Kirk Thompson’s hip hop group Fresh 4 had signed to a major and scored a national top ten hit. Within three years he’d launched Full Cycle with Roni Size, and their Dope Dragon label came the following year in 1995. For well over a decade - as DJ Krust -he produced a catalogue of searing, purified, genre-defining drum’n’bass, including three artist albums. He remixed Björk, Moloko and Sneaker Pimps, as well as d’n’b’s top artists, and as part of Reprazent he picked up a Mercury Music Prize. And he achieved his success without bending to commercial forces, insisting instead that the rest of the world keep up or be left behind in his relentless breakbeat slipstream.

And then in 2006, having been fully immersed in the industry since he was 14, Thompson withdrew from music, stopped gigging, shuttering Full Cycle in 2008. “I was one of those textbook success guys: the car, the house, the girls, the money, everything,” he explains today, “but there was this feeling:
‘Is that all there is?’ And I woke up one day in a club and came to this realisation that I just wasn’t happy. And so, from there, I just stopped.” 

Thompson’s career has always been defined by continual creativity. He’s constantly pushed musical boundaries, his diamond-hard beats as deadly as a shark homing in on its prey, his creative drive every bit as restless as the shark’s fabled ceaseless motion. It’s an approach, Thompson admits, that originates from the B-boy code as laid out in 1983’s seminal hip hop movie ‘Wild Style’: “Be original, be first, be fresh, be unique, treat others with respect, and have honour. I took those codes and I said: ‘How can I apply that to my version of the Bristol sound?’” 

Clearly, it was an extremely effective approach but by 2006, Thompson realised he’d never once actually paused, and that the constant motion had become unsustainable. “I come from the whole Bristol sound. When I was 16 I was hanging around with Tricky and Massive Attack…” he continues. “I grew up in the Bristol scene, the national scene, then the international scene. I’d been Krust all my adult life and I didn’t know who Kirk Thompson was, and that person needed to express himself. I’d made Krust up because he was capable of doing lots of things that Kirk Thompson wasn’t, but inevitably it wasn’t built to last.”

It sounds like a breakdown and Thompson is content to see it as such, but ever the creative he flips it, stating: “It was a breakdown, so I’d have a breakthrough.” In practical terms this meant he gave up partying and drinking and entered a period of personal exploration. He began to read, research and travel, studying consciousness, meditation, neuro linguistic programming and creativity, a process that helped him understand himself, heal and then refocus. 

“It kind of re-centred me,” he says, “I was kind of reborn! I’ve integrated Krust (minus the DJ prefix) now: it’s more of a tool, something that I do when I go to work. When I perform, he comes out. I use that as a vehicle for work, and I know the difference between the personalities and what they’re for.”

The language of therapy can sometimes seem a little detached from real life, but for Thompson, understanding the impact his upbringing had on his creative process proved to be, literally, life-changing knowledge; knowledge he realised he wanted to share. “I understood how the trauma I went through when I was growing up made me retreat into myself,” he continues. “Why there was a need for Krust and what it was for, and that in itself gave me a lot of empathy and has helped me understand other people’s thinking.” 

Fired up by his journey Thompson began to embrace a whole new set of skills: “I learned how to do public speaking, how to build businesses, how to coach and mentor, then I learned how to do that for other people, and it all just kind of blossomed.” 

This blossoming included Thompson’s Disruptive Patterns, a mentoring-for-creatives agency that later became Adapt The Canvas, and with his partner he also began Amma Life, a successful CBD Oil business. 

Then in 2016, Krust relaunched Full Cycle, beginning a new creative period culminating in 2020’s triumphant ‘The Edge of Everything’. So, what happened in 2016 to trigger his musical renaissance? He casually replies, as though talking about double glazing or hoover bags, that 2016 was the end of his seven-year cycle. Yes, it turns out that Krust operates on a seven-year creative cycle. 

With 2024 the beginning of the next cycle, there are lots of new plans: “Now it’s all about [his label] Wonder Palace where we’ve just put out all the back catalogue, we’ve got a new compilation coming later in the year, I’ve got a lot of new music coming including the Cloud Lord project, that’s me and Need For Mirrors. There’s a few other projects that I’m not allowed to talk about – and I’m working on a new album.”

Ever the creative facilitator, Krust concludes by sharing a single, pithy piece of advice that perhaps sums up his entire career. A few days previously, he had a dream in which he was brandishing a sledgehammer that he used to smash down a wall. It turns out that back in Bristol in the late-80s, there was a scout hut at the bottom of the garden of the house he was squatting. He and his mates hired a generator and some sledgehammers, smashed a hole in the wall, put a tarp on the roof, cleaned it up and began to put parties on. 

“And I remembered that,” he finishes with clear glee. “But it was more of a metaphor for me because I’d felt a little stuck creatively. And it’s like: You know what, bro? Just go get a fucking sledgehammer and knock the fucking walls down!”

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This article first appeared in issue five of Disco Pogo. Which you can buy here.

Jon Carter was dance music’s George Best in the 90s. So where did it all go wrong? And how did he make it right again?

Jon Carter looks out to sea from the safety of a beach hut at St Leonards-on-Sea’s vibrant Goat Ledge café. It’s a grey, overcast summer’s day so the Space Hut – fittingly bedecked with hand-painted planets and stars – makes a suitable refuge from the intermittent East Sussex drizzle. His gaze is still fixed on some point out towards France as he takes a bite from his sumptuous fish bap. “There’s so many fucking stories, man.”

As anyone who witnessed one of his raucous DJ sets in the mid-90s through to the early-00s (bookended by his superb mixes ‘Live at the Social Volume 2’ in 1996 and then 2002’s ‘Viva Bugged Out!’) will testify, Jon Carter never really did understatement. His barnstorming productions from the same time, particularly Monkey Mafia’s ‘Blow the Whole Joint Up’, where he did just that, combining hip hop, acid house, techno and ragga to stunning effect, helping to crystallise the ‘Brit Hop and Amyl House’ sound that would later be known as big beat, were similar. 

Listening to him recount his rave war tales, and beyond, one afternoon in his new home on the south-east coast and it’s apparent that ‘so many stories’ is, for once, selling himself – perhaps knowingly – short. In his heyday, his name was a kind of byword for dance music hedonism (“I just wanted to create mayhem, musically. Which of course fitted my character”). It was, he happily admits, a great time to be young and living that life.

“Wonderful. Brilliant. Grew up with it, got involved in it… At the time I remember thinking I was a couple of years too late. But it was just the right time. I loved all that Renegade Soundwave and Depth Charge stuff. I used to go back to Beth Orton’s house on Ladbroke Grove after the Heavenly Social. I met Mark Jones who was then starting Wall of Sound, got introduced to the Heavenly lot, and the rest is history.”

By the mid-00s however, the bookings began to slow down. The world of dance music was changing. Carter admits it was frustrating, but he understood the shifting landscape.

“My day had happened,” he concedes, philosophically. “Unfortunately, agents tend not to have conversations with their artists when things are slowing down. If someone had said: ‘You’re not getting this fee anymore’, I would have said don’t ask for it. Reduce the fee. Looking back, you realise agents should have a winding down department. There’s an idea. ‘Are you failing? I’ve failed. Let me teach you how to fail the right way.’ Fail better? Yes! (Laughs). That would be something wouldn’t it? Niche. But back in my day there wasn’t an agency that helped you fail better.”

A bout of tinnitus, allied to a very public divorce from Radio 1 DJ Sara Cox, certainly didn’t help. He recently listened to some production work from back then and says everything sounds tired. “I’m not blaming anyone. I could have taken on less work, got more sleep… But, yeah, I was burned out.”

Behind the scenes he had already begun to diversify. He got involved in pubs, opening the Lock Tavern in Camden in 2001. “The night before it opened I was in there painting under benches listening to Radio 1 when Gilles Peterson mentioned my name,” he adds surreally. Having spent enough time in watering holes he had an inkling what would work. The Defector’s Weld in Shepherd’s Bush, the Keston Lodge in Islington and others followed. 

The pubs were a success. His music career less so. After a short-lived comeback of sorts towards the end of the 00s, he found himself labouring. His 580 Limited pub group was doing well, but while he was asset rich he was also cash poor. One day he was driving the van when he was told his next job was at Keston Lodge – his own pub. The manager of the pub, however, had gone on a bender and didn’t open up.

“So, I never actually had to have that embarrassment,” he recalls, “but I was totally prepared for it. I actually loved it. It was like Ali: If I was a binman I’d be the best fucking binman. I like going out and meeting people. My mate, the boss, had more DJs on his roster at one point than DJ agencies did. We all have to work.”

In 2014, Carter and his partners sold 580 to the Young’s brewery for £10.4m. It led to headlines such as Drinks On Superstar DJ As He Banks Millions. Only it wasn’t £10.4m that Carter pocketed. “The bank took most of it because they owned most of it,” he says.

Soon after, Carter and his second wife decided to open a retreat in East Sussex, with Carter redesigning and rebuilding the derelict farm in Etchingham four days after having twins. This is when things started to unravel.

“Fuck! I’ve worked in music, entertainment, advertising, promotion, pubs, hospitality… every backstabbing fucking industry you can possibly imagine and not picked up an enemy. The second I move into the countryside, Jesus Christ. They had it in for me before I even turned up.”

Carter’s reputation preceded him. A minority of his neighbours thought he had bought the farm for parties. In reality, the 2010s were, musically, a barren period. “I spent a lot of time away from it utterly immersed in other things and thought it had gone. I remember feeling guilt. Andrew [Weatherall]’s death really affected me. I felt I had betrayed a lot of things by moving away from music. But I hadn’t. I just did what I had to do.”

Following the breakdown of his second marriage, he moved down to St Leonards. He started bringing pieces of kit with him. One night when listening to the reggae soundtrack to ‘Countryman’ he had something close to a spiritual – certainly a sonic – awakening. He began to hear something in a percussion loop.

“It stopped me in my tracks,” he beams. “I hadn’t used Logic in ages. I ran this loop. I got a 303 out the cupboard and got that in time with the loop. I put that to a beat from a Derrick Carter bootleg EP. It was the first time in 10 years I heard a piece of music that I could hear a track around. And that’s what started it again.”

That loop became ‘Brothers & Sisters’, which forms part of his genuinely superb new album, ‘Medication Time’ for Brighton label Jack Said What (formed by Irvine Welsh, Steve Mac and Carl Loben). He’s also working on a new project Due South, which he describes, tongue-slightly-in-cheek, as a ‘cathedral of sound’. 

“It’s a piece of music that will never end,” he explains. “It aids meditation and psychic travelling. It’s 90 minutes long at the moment. There’s lots of healing frequencies in there.” 

One version culled from Due South’s never-ending musical explorations is ‘Sail We Must’. He explains how it’s 116bpm - “the tempo of the waves” apparently – which makes sense as he was making it with the windows open looking out to sea. He’s used it as the opening track on ‘Medication Time’.

Back at Goat Ledge and the now lukewarm fish bap is half-eaten. The talkative Carter has taken his naturally ebullient self to new-found garrulous levels. He’s still gazing out to the calming waves.

“Music has been such a razor-sharp saviour,” he concludes. “I’ve never felt such salvation from making music. I’m in the middle of an awful divorce and putting music out again is wonderful. I have no expectations. It’s purely for enjoyment again.”

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This article first appeared in issue four of Disco Pogo.

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Cast A-Z: 

Betty Boo (singer on The Beatmasters’ ‘Hey DJ!’)

Dave Dorrell: (M/A/R/R/S)

Debbie ‘Cookie’ Pryce (Cookie Crew, collaborated with The Beatmasters on ‘Rok da House’)

Jonathan More (Coldcut)

Mark Moore (S’Express)

Paul Carter (The Beatmasters)

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Not all revolutions are stylish, glamorous, or pored over constantly in countless tomes retreading familiar stories. Some revolutions happen in ordinary towns on Thursday nights when the indescribable sound of a brand-new music is beamed into living rooms across the land. Such was the case in the UK in the late-80s. While metropolitan club kids were having their minds switched on in the likes of The Haçienda, Shoom, The Trip et al, many teenagers’ first experience of house and/or acid house came via ‘Top of the Pops’. 

A slew of club hits crossing over into the pop charts – think M/A/R/R/S’ ‘Pump Up the Volume’, Coldcut’s ‘Doctorin’ the House’, The Beatmasters’ ‘Rok da House’, S’Express’ ‘Theme From S-Express’ and Bomb The Bass’ ‘Beat Dis’ – pointed the way to a (b)rave new world. This was a time before the demarcations between house, acid house, techno, hardcore and so on, were rigidly drawn. It was also a time when the cut’n’paste, musical collage aesthetic of hip hop cast a magical spell over producers like Mark Moore, Tim Simenon, Coldcut and co. 

So, as Coldcut asked on their first hit: ‘Say Kids What Time Is It?’ It’s time to go back to the future…

Mark: “In the early days of house there wasn’t a scene per se. We – me and Colin Faver and Ian Loveday (Eon) – that was a scene, but it was before you would say this was a house club. It hadn’t quite arrived yet. The people that were supporting house music, believe it or not, were the established record labels. The record labels wanted it to happen so badly. They were the ones getting house mixes and signing stuff. ‘Love Can’t Turn Around’ got in the charts. ‘Jack Your Body’ went to number one. So, everyone thought it was going to explode. And then nothing happened. So, it seemed like a blip. The mainstream record labels who were pushing it and pushing it, they dropped it. They just thought: ‘OK, it’s dead. Let’s forget about it.’ Which was great because it meant we could develop an underground scene away from all that. Away from the media.”

Jonathan: “I think the 87-89 explosion was quite a slow burn, even though it didn’t look like that on paper. I started DJing in 1979-80. 1984-85 is when things started happening. I bought my first house record, for example: The Browns’ ‘What’s That’.”

Mark: “We all knew each other. M/A/R/R/S, Bomb The Bass – Tim Simenon was DJing here and there. I knew Coldcut. I knew Jazzie B. We’d visit each other’s clubs. There was a lot of camaraderie. There was this kind of unwritten thing of who’s going to drop the first British record from all this stuff that we were playing and loved. There was like a race to be first. The first was Coldcut with ‘Say Kids What Time Is It?’ which mixed ‘The Jungle Book’ with the break from ‘Funky Drummer’. And then M/A/R/R/S got in the charts. I remember being sent the white label, playing it and everyone going crazy. Suddenly it shot up the charts and got to number one. So, everyone was like: ‘OK, we need to work harder; we need to move faster.’”

Dave: “Before Shoom there was RAW. RAW was a legendary club in Soho on a Saturday night started by the famous foodie Oliver Peyton, his partner Kate, myself and my son’s mother, Sophia. It was a kind of West End collective. I don’t think there was anything quite like it at the time. It took its inspiration more from New York clubs.”

Jonathan: “I was DJing doing warehouse parties. As was Jay Strongman, Norman Jay, various other London bods… Jazzie B, and anything went. I was massively into go-go and soul and funk, but also house and some, you know, post-punk and new wave stuff got a look in. Rockabilly was a big thing. Jay was particularly into rockabilly. There was a real, off-the-radar scene – warehouse before rave, but very much the same spirit. I was teaching a couple of days a week and working in Reckless Records. And that’s where I met Matt (Black). He’d been doing the same, DJing parties and I suppose ‘Say Kids…’ was the culmination of that experience.”

Dave: “The original DJs at RAW were me and Rob Milton, one of the co-founders of the Dirt Box parties – legendary parties that brought together a diverse tribe of psychobillies, soul boys, punks and post-new romantic… what would become club kids. We were very much in the rare groove and hip hop world. Those records were hugely informative for all London DJs. We looked in awe at Jay Strongman who was the DJ du jour of London’s nightlife scene. He had the original cut of Double D & Steinski’s ‘Lesson 1’ and then ‘Lesson 2’. No one could get these.”

Paul: “We (Carter, Manda Glanfield and Richard Walmsley) all went clubbing prior to this period. We worked for a company that made TV commercial jingles. That’s how we met. So, we had a recording studio at our disposal.”

Cookie: “The fanbase was very experimental. They were into British hip hop, into house music, dance music or the rave scene. We all came together under one roof. It was a very important time for music, obviously at the time none of us realised that. We were just living in the moment, absorbing the energy and just excited about everything. It was just one big fun happiness of music.”

Paul: “One day after work, we just said: ‘Why don’t we have a go at this?’ We thought it would be great to hear our own tune in a club. This was early 1986. So, we made ‘Rok da House’. We thought it needed vocals because a lot of these early house tunes had vocals. It was a lot more song-based than it grew to be. We didn’t really know any singers, we knew PP Arnold, who was a soul legend and used to sing on adverts at the time. But at that point we didn’t really feel we could ask her. We were recommended these rappers from west London called Cookie Crew – we were thinking it would be a combination of house and hip hop.” 

Cookie: “We went to meet them. Liked them. They had this track which became ‘Rok da House’. They asked us if we could write something to rap over it. We were like: ‘We can rap over anything.’”

Dave: “One night after RAW I was approached by an American chap, Jon Klein. He was opening up MTV Europe and asked if I’d be interested in doing some musical idents. He had enjoyed my musical selection. It was 4am and I didn’t really understand what he was talking about. But I took his card and got in touch. Within a couple of weeks he’d given me a budget – which was quite substantial – some animations to write to and a deadline. I was managing a band called Nasty Rox Inc at the time. The singer, Dan Fox, was best friends with Martyn Young of Colourbox who were on 4AD. I’d become friends with Martyn so I called him up and told him I had a studio booked and explained what I wanted to do. He came down, I brought a box of records and we started to splice tiny things together – a horn stab, a drum roll… things we liked. We put those together and MTV loved them, and they were broadcast as part of the first month or first year probably of MTV’s run.”

Paul: “We got six acetates cut. They got handed around. We got thoroughly rejected by every record company in town. Eventually, we more or less gave up. And to be honest, it felt a bit wrong anyway. You know: ‘Who do we think we are?’ All the labels wanted was for you to sound like someone else in the charts. They’d say: ‘Can you make it sound more like Bronski Beat?’ One guy definitely said that.”

Mark: “I was hanging out at Rhythm King. I’d be going in saying this record is amazing. I told them about Taffy’s ‘I Love My Radio’ which they were playing at Leigh Bowery’s club. Jeffrey Hinton was playing it. I told Rhythm King that everyone’s going crazy, sign it. They signed it and got their first Top 10 hit. I then said: ‘I’ve got this acetate from Tim Westwood – the Beatmasters and the Cookie Crew’s ‘Rok Da House’. He can’t play it because it’s too house, but I’ve been playing it and everyone’s been going nuts. Sign it.’ They signed it, eventually it went Top 10.”

Paul: “It came out first of all in 1987. So, it was already a year old. It didn’t do much. It got a very good response from the north of England, up in Scotland. From Manchester northwards it did really well.  It didn’t do anything in the south. London especially was in the grip of rare groove at that time. That was a very entrenched scene.”

Dave: “A few weeks after the MTV thing, Martyn called me up and asked me if I wanted to come down to the studio. The boss of 4AD, Ivo Watt-Russell, had come up with this genius idea of putting two bands together, his top two selling acts at the time, AR Kane and Colourbox. His thinking was if he put them together, their combined audiences would get him in the Top 40. That was his entire mission. But it wasn’t working in the studio. AR Kane were just working on their stuff. Martyn was saying it’s not Colourbox so what is it? He wanted to do what we’d done on the MTV idents, build up that sampling thing. We pieced it together – using the ‘Pump Up the Volume’ sample on Eric B & Rakim’s ‘I Know You Got Soul’, the trumpet from Tom Browne’s ‘Funkin’ for Jamaica’, the Ofra Haza part, a bit of ‘Roadblock’, you know Stock Aitken Waterman’s deep fake rare groove track… the genius bit was getting CJ Mackintosh to scratch over the top. Next thing I’ve got a test pressing, and I take it out and play it at RAW. It went down well. That was it, we didn’t think too much about it, but a few weeks later ‘Pump Up the Volume’ was in the Top 40, then the Top 20, before finally knocking Rick Astley off number one.”

Mark: “I got Rhythm King Renegade Soundwave; I got them Baby Ford. I was taking all this stuff in. I wasn’t even working for them. I was just taking it in for them, just for the hell of it. Eventually they said: ‘Can we give you some money?’ Then they asked if there was anything else they could do? And I was like: ‘I’ve got these ideas running around in my head, put me in the studio.’ That was in ’87. They knew I hadn’t been in the studio before so they said I’d need someone to show me around. They hooked me up with Pascal Gabriel. Me and Pascal hung out. We got on like a house on fire. We both loved things like Yello, old electronic stuff. New Order, Soft Cell. And we went in the studio. I had all my ideas. I had all the samples I wanted [for ‘Theme From S-Express’]. I knew I wanted the Rose Royce break; I just loved it; it didn’t go on long enough for me. Lots of my ideas were based on hip hop. I wanted to bring in the house music and Detroit techno, but I didn’t want to copy it.”

Dave: “As soon as samplers could handle something more than a few seconds the possibilities grew.”

Jonathan: “We were all committed to doing what we were doing. But we didn’t really know what we were doing either. The arrival of cheap equipment as well. You know, we bought an RZ1 Casio drum machine, which we bought with some of the proceeds from ‘Say Kids…’. That funded a lot of the next record.”

Mark: “I wanted to do it properly. I wanted to be a cult band for four or five years and then become huge. I loved pop music and I loved all the underground stuff. We didn’t even call it underground. It was just the stuff that no-one else liked - outside of the mainstream. I could see the music business for what it was. I was happy to take my time. But ‘Theme From S-Express’ ruined my plans by getting to number one.”

Dave: “I don’t think we thought we were making a house record. I really don’t think that there was any point at which anybody sat in the studio… CJ, Martyn, Steve or me and really blatantly referenced house.”

Paul: “There were a lot of DJs who wouldn’t play house, you know, I mean there was one particular DJ on Kiss who said I wouldn’t play house music if you paid me to. Within two years he was playing nothing else. Actually, it was a pair of DJs that worked as a team.”

Dave: “I don’t know about the influence of ‘Pump Up the Volume’ on everyone else. You’re probably best asking Mark, Tim and whoever. Partly because I feel that they all happened in such quick succession, you suspect, and this is one of those stories you know like the idea of morphic resonance where you’ve got 100 monkeys smashing coconuts on rocks on one island and somehow on the next island a monkey starts smashing a coconut on a rock. How does it leap across the islands? Fuck knows.”

At first, these exciting new records were ignored by the mainstream. But the groundswell of support coming from clubs up and down the country meant they couldn’t be disregarded for long…

Mark: “The only reason ‘Theme From S-Express’ got in the charts was because of clubland. It went in the charts at 28 or something. Radio 1 wouldn’t touch it. Then the next week it went up to number three. Clubland. Radio 1 thought they’d look stupid if this got to number one, so they played it. They played it and it got to number one.”

Jonathan: “Clubs were the lifeblood of what we were doing. Just going and playing records really, really loud with lots of people going bonkers. It’s just life affirming, and it made us want to go back and make another record that would make them do that.

Mark: “Radio just didn’t want to know. ‘Jack Your Body’ and all that had come and gone. They thought: ‘Thank goodness. It’s not real music.’ To them real music was Kylie and Jason. A verse and a chorus. They could understand that. They knew who was in the band. With these things you didn’t know who was in the band. A lot of the mainstream music industry did not want it to happen. Apart from the record labels obviously. But the record labels were caught off guard because they’d tried to push it a couple of years earlier and had eventually given up on it. So, they weren’t touching it with a barge pole at this point in time.”

Paul: By the time we were having hits clubland was full of fantastic underground records. They just didn’t get in the charts. You had ‘Move Your Body’ (Marshall Jefferson), absolutely seminal. It was everywhere. The only place it wasn’t, was in the charts. There was ‘House Arrest’ (Krush) and there was T-Coy’s ‘Cariño’. I don’t think that hit the charts. Maybe it did take records by us and the other artists on Rhythm King to wake the radio stations up.” 

Jonathan: “‘Doctorin’ the House’ started as a kind of joke between Matt and me. We loved Adonis’ ‘We’re Rocking Down The House’. So, we started singing: ‘We’re doctors in the house’ and changed the melody a little bit. Then we were introduced to Yazz by her husband Jazz Summers and it kind of just came together. She changed the melody a bit more from where we changed it and she messed about with it.”

Paul: “In late-87, Rhythm King said we’re not going to let this – ‘Rok da House’ – go. This is too good. So, we did a remix, someone in New York did a remix and we put it out again in late-87, coming into January 1988. And it had some club action – again up north. But it just turned into a massive hit and went to number five. Pretty good for a first tune. We were totally gobsmacked by it. Because our real intention was to just have our own tune maybe played in nightclubs. That’s really as far as our ambition went.”

After the success of ‘Pump Up the Volume’ the floodgates opened. Coldcut had Top 20 hits with ‘Doctorin’ the House’ (with Yazz) and ‘People Hold On’ (featuring Lisa Stansfield). The Beatmasters scored four Top 20 hits between 1987-89: ‘Rok da House’; ‘Burn it Up’ (with PP Arnold)’; ‘Who’s in the House’ (with Merlin) and ‘Hey DJ!’ (featuring Betty Boo). S’Express struck gold with ‘Theme from S-Express’, ‘Superfly Guy’ and ‘Hey Music Lover’. ‘Top of the Pops’ beckoned…

Jonathan: “Doing ‘Top of the Pops’ was crazy. It was like going back to school in some respects. The BBC was still quite austere at that time. You know, men in white coats with pencils in their jacket pockets to a certain extent. Then there was the realisation that actually there’s only about 20 screaming kids in the audience that have been hyped on sugar all day and are kind of hustled around by this massive crew of people. And then certain DJs being quite creepy. I won’t go into details, but there was certainly a whiff of that which I picked up on and so did Matt in relation to Yazz. It was all a bit weird. And then, you know, we were miming. That was pretty weird. But it was also a lot of fun and quite exciting. I got Barry Manilow’s signature for my mum. So that was an important moment.” 

Dave: “We turned down ‘Top of the Pops’ because we thought we were punk. Simple as that. Even though there’s ten years between ‘Pump Up the Volume’ going to number one and the Sex Pistols going to number one, it didn’t feel 10 years to us.”

Paul: “We were kind of rather reluctant pop stars, you know. It became pop completely by accident. We didn’t set out to make pop music. But everything we did turned out quite poppy. We were still doing our day jobs. We were still there when we appeared on ‘Top of the Pops’. I went from the office to ‘Top of the Pops’ on the bus.”

Dave: “I think success really freaked Martyn out to some degree. And that’s probably best judged by what Martyn did next. Which was, with the exception of a remix or two – a fantastic remix of Mory Kanté’s ‘Yeke Yeke’, and I think something for Wolfgang Press or somebody – nothing, he just stopped. Literally seemed to stop producing. I don’t think there’s another Colourbox record as such. It kind of froze and eventually killed our friendship, which is a shame. I have my own thoughts on that which I’m not gonna make public.”

Mark: “Hip hop was so important. Obviously the essence of house music and techno is in there, but so are lots of other things. Philip Glass, Yello and Soft Cell. But the main thing is hip hop. One of the main influences was Double D and Steinski’s ‘Lessons 1, 2 and 3’. That was how I approached it. But doing it with disco. Of course, hip hop had sampled disco and funk records, but they didn’t sound like disco after the sample. I wanted to do a hip hop record that sounded like a disco record. And it was still a dirty word at that time. You weren’t allowed to like disco at that time.”

Jonathan: Hip hop was just grist to the mill. Or, as we said at the time: ‘You’ve got to pick a pocket or two.’ I can’t remember if it was me or Matt that said that, but there was that English sense of humour in some respects. It’s in Tim Simenon’s Bomb The Bass, it’s in his record and my not-DJ-cousin Mark Moore as well. There was a kind of sly nod in the use of that. A wink and a nod towards a kind of humour and a knowingness about the samples that were taken. None of those records were easy to make to be honest. There was a lot of blood, sweat and pain.”

Mark: “I found a 1988 diary of mine. And what was interesting is we weren’t just doing the Shooms and the Spectrums. I think we all went up to DJ at the Haçienda at one point. I do remember in the diary going to see Ice T in Brixton. So hip hop was still a big part of my life at that point.”

Dave: “The sonics of hip hop were super important.”

Paul: “Everyone was mad about hip hop at the time. That’s why we got Cookie Crew in. Rap was very important. As was funk and soul.”

Mark: “Everything was up for grabs. It didn’t have to sound like a genre. It didn’t have to fit into a genre. I remember in the early days, me and Tim did a TV show together and the presenter was asking about this new style of music – house – and both of us said it wasn’t really house music. It’s influenced by it, but people didn’t know what to call it. It was really original. But within a few months it became very generic – not all the records, but a lot of them.”

Jonathan: “It felt like you could do anything. And the fact that you were doing it in a kind of semi-illegal way because most of the time you couldn’t do it in commercial clubs at that point… it had that outsider pirate vibe which is always exciting and often quite important to a lot of music scenes. I’m moving all my records at the moment, which is a bit of a nightmare, and I found some old paperwork in the studio and in this envelope were four hand-typed charts from 1985. It’s fascinating to see the range of music.”

Dave: “People were making things up and across a very short period of time all of this information explodes. It’s like the beginning of the universe. There’s a micro moment and suddenly everything suddenly expands from there. Galaxies are formed, stars, black holes are shot out… and that’s what happened. If you look back on the timeline, it’s a matter of months. Genres appear one after another. We played everything and the important thing here is The Wag gave me the offer of a night. And we partnered up to create Love. RAW came to an end and that era came to an end in a funny way. Rare groove carried on, but this sound that was pushing through was this new thing. By the spring of the next year, I was doing a whole new thing. There were 1,000 people in the line and they’re all wearing pastel-coloured Wallabees, dungarees and droopy shirts. It was Tony Wilson, I think, who noticed that this was a massive shift from the square shoulders of the Jean Paul Gaultier-wearing elite classes of London to a much more mass wardrobe of soft shoulders. Follow the drugs, you know. From the right angles of cocaine to the kind of wavy lines of ecstasy.”

Mark: “It was dance music. To me S’Express were following in the footsteps of Devo or something like that. Or Yello. There was something arty about it. I was involved in all the videos. I was involved in everything. To me it was a kind of art band.”

The explosion in clubland was transformational…

Mark: “We were all so E’d up and loved up we thought it wasn’t just the music scene we were changing, we thought we were going to change the world. Change the world for the better. There were going to be no more wars. No more poverty. Everyone was going to support each other and love each other. It was that deep. That’s how much we were into it.”

Dave: “Suddenly it felt like the floodgates opened. Suddenly it was like dang-dang-dang-dang: number ones coming thick and fast. Radio 1 got behind it and of course it also caught that huge wave that was coming through from suburban London and warehouse parties in Manchester and elsewhere around the country, which was house. And acid house. And what would become Balearic.”

Betty: “It felt like a whole generation came out of it. A scene that was crossing over and appealing to people up and down the country. And this was a time when there were dance records that were all over ‘Top of the Pops’. It was like an uprising… like, we’ve had enough of PWL and that kind of thing.”

Mark: “It felt transformative. i-D magazine did a shoot with all the DJs who were coming through. People like Coldcut, Tim Simenon, me, Jay Strongman, Jazzie B, Graeme Park and Mike Pickering. There were no girls in there whatsoever. Shocking. No girls. And it was mainly white. You knew something was bubbling under. These were the main people on the underground scene. So, yeah, there was something in the air and there was this expectation that we would make records.”

Betty: “It was inspiring because I thought I can do that. I’ve got a good knowledge of music, beats, old records and things that I want to sample, and I want to experiment myself, but I don’t want to audition my ideas to anybody. I just wanted to audition them to myself and see if they’re good. And when it’s good I’ll play it to somebody. I didn’t necessarily want to be a pop star. Because I think you get people that are, you know, they might have gone to stage school and all this sort of stuff. And they’ve got stars in their eyes. Those weren’t my dreams. My dream was to just make something, because I wasn’t… I was told, like loads of kids growing up in the 80s in an inner city, that you’ve got no hope under Thatcher’s rule. It was like there was no hope for working class kids. There’s no future. So, I thought I needed to make a future for myself. And that was it really. A lot of my friends were like that. I was friends with Mark Moore and Tim Simenon. And this is a weird thing. I’m half-Scottish and half-Malaysian. Tim’s half-Scottish, half-Malaysian. Mark is half-Korean and half-English. So, you know, we were Eurasian people. Nobody had really heard the expression Eurasian before. So, it’s quite weird, it’s quite a coincidence, isn’t it? We were sort of from the same area and influenced by the same things. In fact, I was in Bomb The Bass for a short while. I was working with Tim.”

Mark: “You had all these kids suddenly getting obsessed with S’Express and turning to Smash Hits and me talking about clubbing. I still get people now telling me that I got them into clubbing, that I changed their lives. It definitely felt part of that. It felt like a clarion call for that.”

By the end of 1989, however, and as the 90s loomed, things were moving so fast that not everyone could keep up. Even if they wanted to. But while it lasted, it was magical…

Jonathan: “When the shutters came down, when the divisions started to solidify... it was weird because we wanted to play what we wanted to play. I remember a moment where we got invited to DJ somewhere and we were going to do our thing and we went and the woman said: ‘Oh, you’re in the main room.’ ‘All right, great, thanks.’ And then they said they were really looking forward to our house set. Matt and I looked at each other… we managed to survive that one but when we were starting to be told what we were supposed to be playing that was not a moment that was comfortable at all.”

Paul: “It splintered very, very quickly. Once it got into the early-90s, it just sort of exploded in so many different directions. I can’t tell you the difference between hardcore techno and all the various other versions of house. Everything was coming so quickly. It was just house to me. You had deep house and deep, soulful house. Everything split and people started only wanting to go to certain types of nights and clubs. It was so new and so fresh. People were hungry for it. It only took a couple of months for there to be so many records out there that suddenly there was an enormous amount of competition. I think S’Express, us… we all shot our bolts… The Beatmasters split up as a trio during the making of our second ‘difficult’ album.”

Jonathan: “We just ploughed our own furrow. It was conscious in a subconscious way. For us to survive we had to do something that we were comfortable with. Both Matt and I had seen this whole superstar DJ beginning to manifest itself. It was something that we weren’t comfortable with. And then, you know, hitting quite a lot of legal problems with the record company that had quite a significant effect as well. That pushed us in to wanting to start our own record label. And that also meant that we couldn’t put any music out under the Coldcut name for a certain period of time. We made a conscious decision to sit out our contract and do Ninja Tune.”

Mark: “Before it all got siloed it was so exciting. You couldn’t wait to get into the record shops to see what they had. It was like that for a while. From hip hop onwards in the 80s.”

Paul: “It was like a wonderland. We all went on various little tours – the Rhythm King family. Not world tours! They were either PAs or television appearances. A lot of it actually was us and S’Express. And Tim sometimes. Neneh Cherry too. She came along. It was a laugh. Baby Ford was there as well. I became great mates with Peter Ford. I mean, you can imagine it - a group of chancers really. Altogether, all expenses paid, knocking about Europe together. It was an incredible time.”  

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This article first appeared in issue four of Disco Pogo.

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Sofia Kourtesis’ life story serves to remind us that the personal is the political – and vice versa. Her colourful, emotional and beautiful ride is at the heart of her debut album, the stunning ‘Madres’. Anna Cafolla quizzes the Berlin-based DJ and producer and discovers the reason for Kourtesis’ knack of telling stories that resonate. “I am a frustrated filmmaker that never made a good movie!” she reveals…

Sofia Kourtesis wants to take you on a journey with her music. But first, she has to swerve the German police. When we speak, the Peruvian, Berlin-based artist is driving home from the studio. She’s in a rush, has forgotten her passport and the authorities are close by. “But how are you?!” she says warmly, when she’s pulled up and settled, smiling with her signature red lips and all her teeth.

“Everything is beginning to get more serious,” Kourtesis says, settling in the stationary vehicle. “[Previously] I’d been careful and creative with how I shared parts of myself. With my first album, I’m giving the full spectrum. I’m sharing a lot of emotions – losing somebody, having hope again, meeting somebody and falling in love, heartbroken again, moving house again. It’s autobiographical, as I evolve to express myself in new ways.”

‘Madres’ has been two years in the making. Her expansive life so far – its tumults, tragedies and triumphs – is articulated in her vivid, whorling soundscapes. She released her debut EP, the tenacious ‘This Is It’, in 2014. And following her self-titled 2019 EP, Kourtesis has received riotous enthusiasm for shimmering, heart-on-sleeve groovers – see the EPs she released over the last three years for proof: ‘Sarita Colonia’ (2020), ‘Fresia Magdalena’ (2021) and ‘Estación Esperanza’ (2022). Her sensual sound has enraptured clubbers from Berghain to the Balearics and Barcelona’s Primavera Sound. Her fanbase has grown thanks to support sets for Caribou and Bicep. She is a deft crowd controller – watch her rousing Boiler Room set for evidence – with emotional ebbs and flows from bittersweet to beatific house. 

Kourtesis’ Glastonbury 2022 set was a turning point – hitting the deck, she got straight back up again to the roaring crowd. Wrapped in a Peruvian flag, she powered through a bombastic set: “I fall down, but your energy is keeping me up!” Playing Berghain – four times and counting – remains magical. “In German, we say ‘Ritterschlag’ – to be knighted,” she says. “I feel that hand on my shoulder when I play there. It is perfection to me.”

Yet punctuating her stratospheric rise has been intense personal strife. Kourtesis took a break from making music following her father’s death from leukaemia – the mesmeric ‘Fresia Magdalena’ was written for him. Shortly after, her mother was diagnosed with cancer. She travelled often from Lima to Berlin to see her. On ‘Madres’, Kourtesis chronicles her life’s path and purpose through her relationships: her mother and father, her lovers, activists on the ground, and one surprising central figure: Peter Vajkoczy. The album track ‘Vajkoczy’ is dedicated to the in-demand neurosurgeon, who Kourtesis reached out to on social media with her music and a plea to help her mother. Vajkoczy agreed to perform a risky surgery and it was a remarkable success. Her story of enduring hope swirls through the record.

“EPs for me are chapters of my life, and this album is a decade of experience,” Kourtesis says. “I thought about what I needed to say, and what people maybe needed me to say if they’re going through things too.”

The title track is the ultimate tribute to Kourtesis’ mum. “I love her so much, and she loves this record, this painful record. It is important to have music that speaks to that.” ‘Cecilia’ recalls her mother’s work protecting South America’s Indigenous tribes. “She found beauty and pain across the country,” Kourtesis says. 

“I live with a lot of anxiety and pain, but also sweetness and hope,” she continues. “I wish I could listen to more songs about how people cope. It is something people go through very quietly. Making that a creative, musical experience feels important."

Kourtesis neatly finds the throughline between two distinctive worlds to meld in music – whether that’s her South American homeland and Germany; the protests of the street and the pulsating club or the crescendos of love and loss. It’s reflected in a life she’s had to fight for. At 15, she was caught kissing another girl in her strict religious school’s bathroom, which sent her to conversion therapy. “I was expelled so I would ‘recover’ from my Queerness,” she says. Aged 17, she absconded to Germany with her Greek passport, studying film and working in bars. 

“Moving to Germany was a liberation,” she affirms. She built upon her love of music and counterculture. As a teenager, Kourtesis adored the Smashing Pumpkins, Tupac, classic film soundtracks, Afro-Peruvian artist Susana Baca, and old Salsa bands. She fronted a punk band and “tried and failed” to be a rapper. 

“Moving to Berlin, I witnessed clubs treated like museums and institutions,” she says. She began her long relationship with the celebrated venue Funkhaus, where she still works as a curator. And alongside its industrial, heavier and new wave sounds, she found Berlin’s Queer spaces. “I felt safe to explore my Queerness,” she says. “Being unafraid to be the person that you are is beautiful, creatively freeing. I was struggling to find an apartment and doing shitty jobs, but I was able to access this thrilling otherworld.” 

She laments Berlin’s break-neck speed of gentrification, witnessed across the last decade. “It’s wrapped up in tape now,” she says. “A Silicon Valley vibe. It felt underground, spontaneous and dirty when I got here. It was so different from South America – I felt like I was in the ‘Matrix’! Even seeing people dance by themselves was so new to me. It felt communal, welcoming. You could see Kraftwerk in a tiny venue. Ben Klock and Ellen Allien would jump on the decks in DIY spaces. There was a lot of effort in creating new experiences that combined art and film, long before Instagram. You’d get a tattoo at the rave or see ballerinas dancing to techno. I think of it as an era like Andy Warhol’s Factory.” 

“I always say my heart is Peruvian, but my motor is German,” she says. “There’s a German conviction for getting things done. In South America we say: ‘Mañana, mañana!’”

Her first musical home was Stockholm-based label Studio Barnhus, which also houses Axel Boman and Kornel Kovacs. “They really believed in me when I felt like a bedroom electronic producer,” she says. She joined Ninja Tune in 2022 after releasing ‘Fresia Magdalena’, which contains the track that made many sit up and take notice of her talent, the astounding ‘La Perla’ on its Technicolour imprint. “I’m more confident opening up as a songwriter. I’m enjoying the poppy, sunshine-y sounds. They parallel my feelings – for love, dating, new ways of life. An album is a proclamation of what makes me, and what I hope to be.”

Kourtesis feels the pressure – like everything – acutely. “I’m scared!” she says. “I’ve been taking risks.” Her vocals are at their most prominent, lyrics deeply personal and political. Listeners might expect the urgent pop pressure points that ‘La Perla’ and now ‘Madres’ articulate, and while they’re present, fizzing and insistent, there’s the reach-in-your-record bag electronic and techno mainstays too. “I’ll always make those songs that DJs can bring the shutters up with,” she says. The tracks glide through twinkling piano loops and deeply melancholic, melodic basslines, to arpeggios of sparkling euphoric synths. 

The full-bodied sonics mirror Kourtesis’ sprawling narrative. ‘Estación Esperanza’ is about taking to the streets and opens with recordings of a Peruvian protest against homophobia. It traces Kourtesis’ guilt for being far from her home’s political groundswells. It’s also a collaboration with legendary French-Spanish musician Manu Chao, known for his amorphous catalogue that traverses punk, reggae, and Latin music to address immigration, poverty, and globalisation. It’s a rare partnership, but Chao was moved by a long letter Kourtesis wrote asking him to work with her. “It’s a duty to speak politically with my music,” she says, “and we share a cause.” Politics has been imbued in Kourtesis’ life – from a left-wing, politically active family, her father was a pro-bono lawyer during the disgraced Alberto Fujimori presidency period, and Kourtesis has campaigned for gender equality and abortion rights. In her music too, she preserves and celebrates Afro-Peruvian culture. For ‘El Carmen’, she travelled to meet the Ballumbrosio family and developed authentic percussion techniques with a cajón, a traditional Peruvian rhythmical instrument. It’s a vibrant community tribute.

“People are out there doing the hard work, and to represent them in political music is both a mark of respect and a privilege,” she says. “It becomes difficult for me to express this passion in English, but I find the new generation get where I am coming from. You can engage people in a different way that isn’t just Instagram captions about showing up.”

Kourtesis has cultivated a following for speaking candidly about loss, elucidating it into stark, stunning music. ‘Moving Houses’ finds her vulnerable following a huge break-up. “I thought I was going to die,” she says curtly. “It was so dramatic. I was watching so much ‘Twin Peaks’. I was eating so much chocolate.” Still, Kourtesis leads us to the hope on the horizon: ‘Si Te Portas Bonito’ is a feverish anthem of pop bliss, for “falling love with people who treat you right”.

Community abounds on the record with collaborators from Funkhaus, as well as long-time creative partners David Krasemann and Thomas Stephens. This yielding of some control is new territory, but it offers different energy and sonic possibilities. “I’ve learned bringing people into my personal universe only adds to my work,” she affirms. The ecstatic, frenetic ‘Funkhaus’ celebrates her community. And instead of relying on her previously sample heavy approach, Kourtesis created field recordings in Peru, and asked collaborators to recreate samples to make more organic sounds. 

Her evolving priorities are reflected in this reconsidered approach to production: “I was happy to lean into a chaotic, ravey musical world before,” she says. “I’m older now, and I’m conscious of focusing on what I’m expressing for people to listen. I used to let machines talk for me. It’s less about perfect drums, the right hi-hat. Now I’m talking. I’m not hiding behind an MPC.” 

“And when you work towards perfection, you can lose your authenticity,” she explains. “I’m not a native English speaker, and sometimes people would suggest collaborating with a big English-speaking artist, but I really wanted to go my own – my own honest, imperfect way.”

Kourtesis says Caribou’s Dan Snaith gave her some amusing device. “He told me you need 50% love songs and ballads, 50% bangers,” she says, “but then he said: ‘Oh, you wrote all love electronic ballad bangers’,” she laughs. “Bassy 135bpm songs about my greatest loves and family. I’m less worried about dancefloors, and now I’m more into getting the message straight. There are clubs I cannot wait to play, but I am just wanting to reach more hearts!”

Her filmmaking background is reflected in her musicianship, and the live shows will build out a cinematic production with dancers and live visuals. “Honestly, I am a frustrated filmmaker that never made a good movie!” she says. “I try to be a film director in a musical way. I love David Lynch and Pedro Almodóvar – ‘Volver’ is the movie of my life.”

Vajkoczy, her mother’s surgeon, has been another enduring force that’s buoyed her life, a lighthouse on Kourtesis’ own path. While making the album, Kourtesis would show Vajkoczy, a music lover himself, drafts and ask for his thoughts. A few months after her mother’s surgery, she took him to Berghain. “He showed me life again, so I wanted to show him mine.”

Kourtesis wants her music to connect to people similarly. “I just want to be involved in life’s journeys,” she says. “I want to take people on a journey to find and use your voice. I want to be there for having a beer – two beers! To lose themselves. I want to be the sound when they’re feeling heartbroken and be with them when they take risks in and out of love. I want my music to hold them through tough family times. No matter what age, or gender, whether a parent or child or friend.” 

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This article first appeared in issue four of Disco Pogo.

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They might have made a song and dance about most things, but Lemon Jelly didn’t make a fuss about their departure…

First, the good news. Despite not having released an album since 2005, nor played live since 2007 (and even then not under their band name), Lemon Jelly, those loveable curators of soundscape collages that chimed with the early-00s playful sonic drift, have never officially split up. One could describe their extended absence as a hiatus, something Fred Deakin and Nick Franglen – for it is they – actually did announce back in 2008, but there has never been a tearful press conference citing irreconcilable musical differences nor a series of backstabbing interviews in the music press deriding each other.

And now the bad news. Anyone expecting Lemon Jelly to return in any form is best advised not to hold their breath. Yes, there are obvious reconciliations – Oasis, we’re looking at you; sometimes bands split up, get back together, split up, get back together, ad infinitum – Orbital; and then there are reunions that blindside everyone – Velvet Underground. But according to Deakin, always the more voluble member of the outfit, despite no full stop or final nail in the coffin being applied, those of a gambling bent are not advised to put money on any form of a Jelly get-together.

“I think we should have probably just gone that was the end of it,” he smiles from his north London home. “But no, we have never officially stopped. Our activities, however, have certainly ground to a halt.”

The truth is the pair (still very good friends by the way, “we speak to each other, not frequently, but we speak on a fairly regular basis”) did try to follow-up their final album, ‘64-95’, but it never worked out and neither wanted to release anything that wasn’t the equal of their previous work.

“I would hazard to say that the music we made came from a place of love and it was received with love,” he explains. “We all know when we hear music like that. It’s a real lightning in a bowl. It’s magic. It doesn’t happen on a regular basis. I don’t think we realised it was stopping, but I mean after a while you kinda get the feeling. I think people have probably got the message. I mean, you never know, maybe when we’re both pensioners, who knows?”

Deakin and Franglen were childhood friends – indeed, the latter dated the former’s sister for a while – who went away and did their own thing in their twenties and early-thirties (Deakin: DJing, teaching graphic design at Central St Martin’s and running the lauded design company Airside; Franglen: landscape gardening and session work for bands like Primal Scream, Pulp, Blur, Björk and even the Spice Girls) before reuniting in 1998. 

Arriving after the likes of Mr Scruff and Air – two acknowledged precursors to the beautifully sculpted sounds of Lemon Jelly – Deakin and Franglen’s aims were clear from the outset: to make something more imaginative than the relentless thud of generic house. “We loved dance music, dance music was the soundtrack of our generation,” he recalls. “But could we evolve it a bit? Could we make something slightly less banging, that’s got more ideas in.”

Their rich and vibrant sound struck a chord with the downtempo-cum-chill out sounds of the time and gave post-club ravers something more to listen to than just “old Durutti Column albums” at the afterparty when things started to get horizontal.

“We were the soundtrack to the stay back,” smiles Deakin. “That was kind of the intention. Yes, it’s in the background, possibly, but also it might kind of come in and fuck with your mind a little bit. Give you a little joyful treat if you were listening. You might move your body a little bit, but it’s not really banging.”

After signing to XL in 2000, following the release of three acclaimed EPs, Lemon Jelly released their debut album proper, ‘Lost Horizons’, in 2002. As well as appearing on the cover of Jockey Slut in August that year, the pair were nominated for the Mercury Prize, where they lost out to fellow XL artist Dizzee Rascal.

“We were on the same table as Dizzee,” he says. “And yes, the champagne flowed that night. That was almost the pinnacle for us. It’s nice to sell a lot of records, but it definitely meant a lot to us to have that kind of recognition.”

Since Lemon Jelly was left to fade lovingly into the distance, Franglen has continued to work in music. He co-produced Badly Drawn Boy’s ‘Born in the UK’ album and in 2010 performed a 24-hour symphony under London Bridge using a theremin and the ambient sounds of the capital.

Deakin meanwhile has recently drawn on one of his first creative passions – DJing – to form the backbone of his first theatrical work, Club Life. As the title suggests the show is an autobiographical ode to Deakin’s experiences in clubland. Rather than run another club night (“I’ve eaten a lot of that cake”), write a book or do a talk with video (“Does that really summon the spirit of a club night?”), Club Life is an immersive story of how Deakin went from being a “maths-obsessed board game nerd and complete spod who wasn’t making it with the women and wasn’t enjoying myself… then I went through this arc of finding my place and finding my tribe”.

One of the show’s many genius conceits over its two-and-a-half-hour’s running time (in among Deakin’s jocular and engaging monologues and his choice musical DJ selections), is the use of a cast to demonstrate the vagaries of British club life leading up to the millennium when Deakin ceased DJing to concentrate on Lemon Jelly. These actors don’t actively encourage the crowd to get up and dance, but their presence reassures the audience that to do so is the best way to enjoy proceedings.

With the show landing in London this November, after stellar reviews in Edinburgh, it is a timely reminder of why clubs and club life are so important.

“I still think there is something about the physical act of being in a space with a bunch of people,” concludes Deakin evangelically, “who by their very presence have indicated that they share the values and interests that you have. It’s a generational conversation that is most important when we are finding our own identities in our teens and twenties and it’s still important at this age. It’s where diversity really happens because you party with people from different backgrounds. And you realise that everybody is the same. And that is an engine of tolerance. Nowhere better than a club or a festival does that happen; where you really get the sense that we are all one, we are all the same, there is no difference, rich or poor, Black or white and we will honour each other’s differences and discover new mutations that come out of that. That’s what innovation is. It’s taking the existing elements and combining them in a new and interesting way. And you see that in club music, more than any other kind of music, I would argue.”

Lemon Jelly might be no more then, but Deakin is arguably embarking on his most crucial creative iteration yet.

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This article first appeared in issue six of Disco Pogo.

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Dave Clarke’s Red Series has rightly gone down in the annals of techno history. But only now can Clarke feel proud about his creations…

Whilst respected and lauded as one of techno’s key figures, in the early-90s Dave Clarke was struggling to be heard above clubland’s white noise, whilst barely scratching a living from his mould infested bedsit-cum-studio in Brighton. With a budding DJ career that stretched back to mid-80s hip hop and electro through to acid house, rave and techno, by the end of the decade he was often gigging at small alternative venues, the odd blagged gig in Europe and, quite often, a local roller disco. 

Similarly, his myriad production aliases (Pig City, Magnetic North, Graphite, K.O.D.) and numerous styles – ranging from bass-driven house to techno, hardcore and unwittingly gabber – had neither a collective cohesion nor provided him with an artistic identity. Then, in early 1994, Dave Clarke released ‘Red One’ on Bush Records and everything changed. By the time the series closed out the following year with ‘Red Three’ on Deconstruction he had become a headline DJ, techno statesman, major label artist, household name and even dented the UK Top 40.

‍The origins

“There was some frustration about releasing sort of disjointed 12-inches on many, many different labels and not being able to really put it all together. In those days, you’d sign a deal and the deal would say you can’t record for anyone else under this name. And of course, it had your name underneath that on the label copy. But it was a very sort of disjointed way of doing things. And I think by 1990-91 I started to feel sort of confident that I had a sound and that I didn’t need to experiment by using different names anymore. I wanted to raise it under my name, but I didn’t want to just do one single here and one single there. So, I then had the idea of doing a series of three, which meant that at least there’d be a flow.”

Clarke had been working on the sound of the Red Series (named simply because he wanted to put it out on red vinyl) since late-91 and prior to the first EP’s release had actually recorded all three A-sides across two, less than salubrious, flats on Brighton’s beach front. 

“I was, without realising, a neighbour of Adam Freeland. I was living in Clarendon Terrace in a really damp, fucked-up basement and then I was living in Marine Parade in a basement. Which was, guess what, really damp! You actually had to put plastic sheeting inside the cupboard, between the cupboard and your clothes, so that your clothes didn’t stink, stuff like that. I had a table with breeze blocks on top of it to hold the speakers and some office furniture that would hold the limited amount of racks that I had, which wasn’t that much. Underneath there was a futon bed that would roll away during the day and then come back out at night. So, I was sleeping on the floor almost underneath my studio.”

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All the gear, lots of ideas

“There would have been a Tascam keyboard mixer, which basically means it’s right mountable. I think it had 12 channels, maybe 16, and had MIDI, which you could actually do MIDI mutes on, which was actually very useful, because in those days signal to noise ratios were a real issue. I soaked up all my pennies to get the Alesis Quadraverb which was £325. And then I programmed some really fucked-up delays in that, which is what ‘Red Two’ is all about. I had an Ensoniq sampler originally, I think it was an EPS, and it had point five megabyte of sample time, and then I managed to upgrade that to two megabyte of sample time. That was exciting! The computer I was using was an Atari 1040 with C-Lab Notator in the very, very beginning. And Notator was the precursor to what is Logic. And I used to quantize the shit out of everything. I had a Technics cassette deck with HX Pro. So, all the singles were mastered on TDK MA-XG cassette and I had a second-hand pair of Tannoy Mercury speakers that I got from a colleague that I used to work with at a second-hand Hi-Fi shop. I also had an Alesis 3630 compressor, which Daft Punk asked me about and then they got one as well.”

Whilst simultaneously running the Magnetic North label (he had even earmarked ‘Red Three’ to come out on the label under the Axiom alias) he released ‘Red One’ in 1994, little realising the chain of life-changing events it would subsequently set off. The sinister, reverse reverb of ‘Protective Custody’ and bionic, bass-heavy breaks of ‘Xeno Zero’ had finally crystallised the sound Clarke had been searching for and simultaneously captured the very essence of where techno was heading.

“Everything in life, there’s always an element of luck. Anyone that claims that’s not the case is over playing their hand a little bit too much. So, there was a lot of luck, I think that I just managed to find some sounds that I really liked. I was always really intrigued by some of the weird edits you get on some things, or backward drums or a guitar reverb coming in from reverse. It was always really interesting, like Jimi Hendrix and ELO even. There were a lot of tape edits going around in those days, of people being really clever with tapes, but the sharpness of how they used to do edits was insane. When you heard ‘Breaking Bells’ from T La Rock, what you heard they could do with it! That stuff inspired me. Mantronix really, really inspired me.

“For me, techno came with house. It was already techno when it was house for me because whilst you had the more traditional sounds on the A-side, you had the more exciting, experimental edits and dubs on the B-side. That’s where my heart was.”

The reaction

The acknowledgment of house music’s foundations would later be given a knowing salute on the sophomore EP’s lead track as Clarke lifted the title from a vocal hook in The Elect’s 1986 hard-to-find classic, ‘I’m House’. Spearheaded by the first track he had recorded in the series, the nuclear dubbed-out reverb of the speaker shredding A-side ‘Wisdom to the Wise’, Clarke’s name was now well and truly on the techno map. But he was ill-prepared for the global attention that was to come off the back of the release of ‘Red Two’. He soon found himself flooded with remix offers, DJ gigs, attention from the majors and the life-changing effects of fame.

“I have an element of imposter syndrome regarding the Red Series, especially on the release of ‘Red Two’. Like a bit uncomfortable, bit weirded out, not really feeling, you know, like beating my chest on it in a big way. And of course, living in Brighton had this incredible ability of squashing you like a shit on the sidewalk. And in those days where even if you are being successful, people will just fucking shit on that from a large distance, massively.

“I was being slagged off for signing to a major record label (Clarke signed an album deal with Deconstruction), like heavily by journalists, by this, by that, by everyone. As if, now being signed to a major record label, my whole personality was going to change.     

“It’s kind of akin to being a techno DJ and then, all of a sudden, starting a residency in Ibiza, and then becoming the biggest cunt the world’s ever known, right? I wasn’t going to do that, because for me, it was always about the music, that was the most important thing. I got a whole load of shit from it, massive amounts. People like wishing me death.”

Whilst Clarke tried to navigate the strange new world that fame had thrown at him, he now had the added pressure of recording his debut album ‘Archive One’, plus the unfinished business of closing the ‘Red’ trilogy with a bang. The nuclear kick and Euro rave stabs of ‘Thunder’ duly delivered the big dancefloor FU, but the B-side ‘Storm’ saw Clarke do something of a techno no-no. As the press were beginning to dub the genre as faceless and devoid of any personality, he stuck his voice above the parapet and on to red vinyl.

“I used a borrowed ART Rhythmic Modulator, which was like a sort of cheap version of the Eventide Harmonizer, that I was a big fan of, that I saw in the R&S studios in 1990. There was a flea market behind me and I went there sometimes to buy things because I couldn’t afford shit. And then I found this book called ‘Pantagruel’, that was originally published in 1532. It was just a random page opening and I was like: ‘Holy shit, this is really cool.’ Then I adapted the lyrics to suit modern times. And then people were going: ‘Oh, fucking hell, he’s even using his own voice now, he sounds like a fucking idiot.’ It was constant, really!”

The legacy

Now 30 years on, after a set of protracted legal wranglings, the Red Series and ‘Archive One’ are remastered, remixed and repackaged into a celebratory limited six-vinyl numbered set, signed print and booklet. How does Clarke look back on the three EPs that are justly heralded as landmark techno releases, took his career into the stratosphere and even gave him a title (The Baron of Techno) bestowed by John Peel? Yet which, conversely, also came at a heavy personal price.

“It’s been a difficult time because when ‘Red Three’ came out I was really struggling with getting a lot of recognition, and I found that very difficult to deal with. I sort of changed who I was personally and became less smiley backstage and far more insular. I took a bit of time off because I was struggling with dealing with it. And this is like pop fame. This isn’t like walking down the street and everyone recognises you. This was like, Oh, I can’t deal with this. This is really strange. I don’t like this, so I sort of withdrew a bit. 

“It changed me a lot. I was very grateful, because it helped me circumnavigate a lot of politics that were stopping me from even being able to DJ. People could now make money off you by supporting you, so it was like bypassing a dam made by others.”

“I didn’t play it (Red One’s ‘Xeno Zero’) for so many years. The first time I played it again was in Bordeaux at the beginning of this year, because finally I got over the emotions of all of that, of not having the rights of my music. Finally, even though it wasn’t at the front of my mind, or even the mid of my mind, it was always there. You know, sometimes you have a relationship with someone and they keep trying to get your attention through negative attention? It was like that. It was constant negative attention. So, I just cut it off. Then the moment I got it (the remastered Red package) back, I got complete closure. I saw it and held it. I was like, I’m proud of this, yeah, I’m proud of this.”

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This article first appeared in issue six of Disco Pogo.

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When alternative dance-pop-cum-Balearic producer, musician and DJ Lou Hayter wants inspiration she knows where to look. Studying the best – from Rodney Jerkins to Prince by way of Moodymann and Wally Badarou – has enabled the former New Young Pony Club keyboardist to serve her apprenticeship and ensured she can make the records she always wanted to. Her new album, the fantastic ‘Unfamiliar Skin’, is the product of everything she has learned, as she tells Jim Butler: “I think you have to trust that everything works out in divine order…"

Like a lot of children born comparatively late after their older siblings Lou Hayter jokes that she shouldn’t be here. “I was an accident,” she smiles. “They were all ten years-plus older than me.”

Musically, however, there were considerable advantages to be gained from such an age gap. Her elder siblings constantly fed her a comprehensive diet of sounds. She recalls being obsessed with Level 42’s ‘Something About You’ and listening to The The’s ‘Uncertain Smile’ on her Walkman. 

“Weirdly, I can remember wanting to sample the start of ‘Uncertain Smile’ when I was really young,” she says. “All the stuff that I liked when I was sort of five and six, I’m still equally fascinated with now. I think that children can really understand music. I understood it from that age. My brother was playing me Erik Satie’s ‘Gymnopédies’ and ‘Gnossiennes’ and the ‘Betty Blue’ soundtrack. They encouraged me to play that on the piano.”

Chatting to the versatile Hayter – no doubt she’d be described in some quarters as a multi-hyphenate given her various roles as musician, singer, producer, DJ, musical director and style maven – and it soon becomes apparent that for her music and time are inseparable. Her narrative arc is not so much linear, rather an enticing and circuitous trip back and forth through the various musical landscapes of the last few decades. 

A native Londoner, she speaks excitedly about going to Metalheadz at The Blue Note as a teenager and attending Gilles Peterson’s That’s How It Is at Bar Rumba. “I really appreciate those things,” she recalls today. “All this stuff that people are looking back to now has become legendary and I’m really happy that I was there at that time soaking everything up. I bought every Masters At Work record I could get my hands on, every Moodymann, every Photek, every Metalheadz release… I know that informed what I’m doing now and I’m pleased that I was there at that time.”

By the time the 90s had sashayed into the 00s, Hayter had graduated to working within the culture she had embraced at hip east London labels Nuphonic and Trevor Jackson’s Output. “If you can call it work,” she laughs. “I don’t really know what I was doing!”

This was the era when the glitz of electroclash morphed into the earthier sounds of the international punk funk disco. It was a time of LCD Soundsystem, 2manydjs, Erol Alkan’s Trash, Felix Da Housecat and more. Tellingly, her favourite producer from that period was the vastly underrated Maurice Fulton; she gushes admiringly when mentioning Fulton’s work on his wife MU’s ‘Afro Finger and Gel’ album – the track ‘Let’s Get Sick’ in particular.

“I’m still completely obsessed with that record,” she says. “And then he put out the Syclops stuff. Trevor was doing The Rapture and LCD Soundsystem. We’d go to their first gigs and Tiga was putting out ‘Burning Down (London’s Burning)’ and we were going to raves, going to Sonar. I was DJing too. It was such a great time, it was so exciting, but I was really into what Maurice was doing which was slightly out of that I thought. That stuff he made was timeless for me.”

All of which, in a suitably roundabout fashion, is to say that the music Hayter makes is a captivating blend of her various musical passions: the sparse and intricate melodic classicism of Satie; the ecstatic Sturm and Drang of the dancefloor; the wildly colourful flavours of pop music (she’s an avowed fan of Prince, Madonna and co) and the majestic production of 70s outfits like Steely Dan and the Average White Band, both of whom she’s covered to stunning effect.

Her latest album, the dazzling ‘Unfamiliar Skin’ is easily one of the year’s landmark releases and contains aspects of all of the aforementioned, but takes her songwriting into fresh, yet familiar, climes. If her debut album, 2021’s ‘Private Sunshine’ was “sunshine-y and yacht rocky – an LA vibe”, this is a “bit less saccharine – more of a minor key thing”. And rather than a specific or emblematic city, ‘Unfamiliar Skin’ evokes – for Hayter at least – “outer space”.

“I was very into ‘What About Us’ by Brandy, which is [produced by] Rodney Jerkins,” she explains when asked about a sounding board for ideas. “There was this kind of space age moment in time in 00s R’n’B and I was really fixated on that. It might not translate into how you hear the record, but I felt like that particular moment in the early-00s when ‘What About Us’ came out was very now and I wanted to get into that.”

That crazy, sexy, cool period of end-of-the-century-into-the-00s R’n’B (think artists like Missy Elliot, Aailyah, TLC, Destiny’s Child – just not the ballads – and producers such as Jerkins, Timbaland and The Neptunes) was praised by none other than Andrew Weatherall and led fellow musical dissident Leila to dub the best of these otherworldly productions “mad, slow techno”. 

“It’s the really futuristic stuff I’m interested in,” she explains, before pointing to the album track ‘OK OK’ – all decelerated beats, eerie electronics and off-kilter strings – as an example of how that sound found its way into her music.

‘Unfamiliar Skin’ then is an album for after-hours adventures. The Mr Fingers-like proto-house shuffle of ‘3AM’ might be the most obvious example, but the neon-heavy vibe is apparent in the electro-not-electro ‘808 Beat’, while the Manga-inspired video for the slo-mo Balearic chug of ‘In My Heart’ features a cartoon Hayter riding around an endless night-time metropolis on her motorbike.

Of course, Hayter is no stranger to the vibrant antics of the night. A DJ since the age of 19 – she used her student loan to buy her first set of decks – today, she regularly spins at fashion parties for the likes of Chanel, Chloe, Paul Smith, Alexander McQueen and Miu Miu, having previously played at clubs such as Pikes, Homoelectric and fabric. Her catholic tastes, powers of curation and her innate ability to understand what cuts through – all honed behind the decks – have super-charged ‘Unfamiliar Skin’, although ask her how her DJing feeds into her music and she’s unsure how to answer.

“I don’t really know,” she replies. “I get asked that a lot. I suppose putting things together when I’m mixing inspires me with tunes.”

She’s more assured, however, when quizzed on the move into soundtracking the world of catwalks and compressed watermelon sushi. “I like the environment to be honest,” she beams. “This is something I can do in London; I’m not having to fly all over the place. I like working with a client and a brief and having an assignment and making sure that I do a great job.”

These nocturnal voyages also find expression in another of the album’s themes: love, passion, heartbreak, desire, unrequited romance, sex… These of course have long been the lingua franca of pop music and ‘Unfamiliar Skin’ is no different. The title was culled from a conversation Hayter had with a friend concerning why people had affairs (“What is it about the unfamiliar skin that makes people have affairs? What is this pull that the unfamiliar skin has?”) and she’s unapologetic about exploring another suite of songs dedicated to affairs of the heart.

“It’s probably the thing that I gravitate towards in songs,” she says. “Well, it definitely is. My engineer would say: ‘Oh, another one about love!’ My brother calls them bad boyfriend songs. There’s always something to write about. Or good boyfriend songs; ‘Cherry On Top’ (from ‘Private Sunshine’) was a nice happy love song. You can go either way.”

And while tales of doomed ardour (or happy infatuation) might sound autobiographical, Hayter is quick to point out oftentimes she’s detached from the subject matter; on other occasions the confessionals can be cathartic. “It’s all of those things, yeah,” she explains. “I might write a song about someone and it might sound like I’m completely broken-hearted, I’m not really, it’s a song. There’ve been lots of times where it’s a case of: ‘At least I got a song out of that.’

“Even the sleeve of ‘Cherry On Top’. I was on holiday and this boy asked me to send him a photo. So, I sent him that and I thought it was quite a nice photo. So, that became the sleeve. I got a good sleeve out of that. Other times, I’m just making it all up!”

Despite only releasing her first solo album in 2021, Hayter has been a permanent fixture in the leftfield electronic pop scene since those early days gallivanting around Shoreditch at the turn of the millennium. When former Nuphonic boss Sav Remzi was looking to expand a band he had signed to his new label, Tirk Recordings, he asked Hayter if she could help find him a drummer. Having succeeded she was then asked if she knew anyone that could play keys.

“I said I can,” she says of the fateful conversation that led her to join one of London’s archetypal mid-00s, new rave bands, New Young Pony Club. “I told Andy (Spence, co-founder alongside vocalist Tahita Bulmer) I had Grade 6 piano and he was like: ‘Oh, you’re overqualified!’ I went to a rehearsal and found myself playing at Cargo. I was terrified. I’d never been in a band and suddenly I’m in front of all these people onstage. I thought we’d do a couple of hipster gigs on Brick Lane to ten people and we’re doing festivals in Australia in front of 10,000 people.”

After two albums with New Young Pony Club (and following a Mercury nomination for their ace debut, ‘Fantastic Playroom’), Hayter left to concentrate on her own music. She released a noir-ish new wave single as The New Sins (alongside Nick ‘Boxsaga’ Phillips) in 2008 and then collaborated with Air’s J-B Dunckel on the acclaimed Tomorrow’s World project. “That was a big deal for me,” she says. “I followed Air from their first two EPs.”

She mentions that a second Tomorrow’s World album is finished and sitting on a hard-drive in Paris. “I imagine we will revisit it when we’re both ready. I’d love for it to come out.”

Although it’s been a meandering journey from New Young Pony Club to here, Hayter is thankful for the scenic path she’s taken. She talks about the last two decades resembling an apprenticeship in how to make a record. 

“I think you have to trust that everything works out in divine order,” she notes sanguinely. “If I had put stuff out back then I might have disappeared by now, whereas I have a whole new career as a solo artist, which is 15 years on from when I was in that band, so I see it as quite a blessing to be honest. I trust that everything worked out for the best.”

This drawn-out preparation, allied to her magpie tendencies, has involved studying the best musicians and producers out there. On a fundamentally practical level she explains that the way she’s learned to make records – she produced ‘Unfamiliar Skin’ – has been by studying the best.

“I very much aspire to American R’n’B production,” she states simply. “How they get records sounding that good. I always want everything to sound really good. I study Rodney Jerkins like a hawk. I’m fascinated by him; I think he’s unbelievable. I’m obsessed with The Neptunes and Timbaland. I’m obsessed with Quincy Jones and Prince. You can learn things. You can listen to a record and ask: ‘What are they doing?’ and deconstruct it. ‘Oh, they’ve bought a hi-hat in in the chorus, they’ve put a sub on the one here, they’ve dropped all the drums out here and pushed them back in again.’ Little tricks like that I’ve taken into this record. It doesn’t sound like Rodney Jerkins at all. But you can try!”

Another major influence on ‘Unfamiliar Skin’ are the records made at Chris Blackwell’s Compass Point Studios in the Bahamas in the early-80s when the likes of Grace Jones, Talking Heads, Tom Tom Club, Mick Jagger, Gwen Guthrie, Joe Cocker and more, all received the unique new wave disco sound of the Compass Point Allstars house band. Indeed, the opening track, ‘Scorpio’, is built around a Wally Badarou sample from the synth wizard’s ‘Fisherman (I-Theme)’.

“I’m fascinated by all of the Compass Point output,” she says. “I would love to make a record that sounded like it was made at Compass Point, instead I’m working in Brixton. Sly and Robbie, Chris Blackwell, Alex Sadkin, Wally Badarou… they’re the best of the best. Whatever they were capturing had this magic to it, that’s the only way I can describe it and when I make a record I always look for magic. If it doesn’t have that I don’t make it. I will only work on songs that I know have the magic to me.”

Lou Hayter then; she might be an accident, but her magical music is anything but. And for that we should all be thankful. 

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This article first appeared in issue six of Disco Pogo.

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Whether it’s a style of music, a way of playing or more an emotional feeling, spiritual jazz is having something of a moment right now. As part of a deeper, wider story the music stretches back to the likes of Pharaoh Sanders and John Coltrane in the 1960s and the latter’s widow Alice into the 1970s. Today, fuelled by Kamasi Washington, Nala Sinephro, Isaiah Collier and more, the music’s lineage is stronger and more international than ever. Tony Higgins tries to unpick the many facets of spiritual jazz and hears how according to Gilles Peterson the sometimes provocative term has enabled “a huge amount of music to get new ears…"

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In early 2020, an excited young saxophonist was looking forward to the next phase of his musical path and the possibilities that had opened up before him, including plans to take his music around the world. That was until that very same world suddenly stopped. Stopped not just for him, but for virtually everyone on the planet.

“I just got done doing a tour in Mexico. I was feeling revitalised. I was just charged. ‘Man, when I get back, I’m hitting the ground running.’ I get back 13 March  2020. But I hit the ground running into a lockdown. Everything was flipped. And I remember I watched a lot of documentaries like the ‘Birth of the Cool’ about Miles Davis, Malcolm X documentaries. I watched Nina Simone’s documentary, plus the John Coltrane one. Those were the main ones that were my reality checks and my anchors.”

For Isaiah Collier, the Covid pandemic was a watershed moment for him and the development of his music. “I refused to allow this to define me. The pandemic could have defined me. There were a lot of artists who quit. There were a lot of people who stopped doing what they said was their life’s purpose. I had to make a decision and my decision was, I’m gonna stick with it.”

Stick with it he did. In doing so, Collier recorded an album that elevated him and his music into the consciousness of a bigger, global audience. Released in 2021, that album was ‘Cosmic Transitions’. Given a five-star rating by influential American jazz publication, DownBeat, it’s a majestic and powerful suite that is considered a contemporary classic in a genre called spiritual jazz, a style of jazz that has been in constant flux since it first appeared in the 1960s and one that has been undergoing a huge resurgence in popularity in recent years. 

As a musical style, spiritual jazz first emerged in the febrile tumult of the American civil rights struggle via the works of artists like John Coltrane, Pharaoh Sanders and Albert Ayler - a triumvirate sometimes referred to, respectively, as the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost. Collier is considered by many as the inheritor of that spirit first divined by that sanctified trio, a spirit carried on through the works of Coltrane’s widow Alice, as well as other key figures including Archie Shepp, Yusef Lateef, Don Cherry, Sun Ra and thousands of others over the years. 

Today, the flame of spiritual jazz remains undimmed. Indeed, in 2024, as we approach the 60th anniversary of the recording of what is considered spiritual jazz’s origin story, John Coltrane’s ‘A Love Supreme’, the music is in rude health, developing along new and exciting vectors that embrace modern classical, minimalism, drone, ambient and electronica.

This story of a continuum, of continuing that legacy and pushing spiritual jazz forward, is a defining characteristic of both the music itself and Collier as a person. A native of Chicago, he recognises his small part in that story of change, of maintaining forward momentum whilst rooted in tradition. 

“In early 2020, there was a producer called Sonny Daze and he told me he wanted to do a project. And I was like: ‘If you can get me Rudy van Gelder’s studio, then maybe I can do it.’ Which was a cheeky statement to make. Then, lo and behold, about May 2020, mid-pandemic, I get an email: ‘Hey, we got a date.’ Man, we’re set to record September 23. I ask myself: ‘Why is this familiar?’ Well, not only is it Coltrane’s birthday, but most importantly, it is the equinox which, when you put it in perspective, is why he wrote the song [of the same name].”

As well as being recorded in the same studio Coltrane cut ‘A Love Supreme’ and so many of his incredible Impulse recordings, Collier’s album ‘Cosmic Transitions’ was steeped in the tradition of classic spiritual jazz – channelling the energy and vibration of the present while tapping into something far deeper and eternal – but it was far from an ersatz pastiche. It was an exultant cri de couer birthed in the political and social chaos of modern-day America. 

“At the time, I was thinking that the world is on fire,” says Collier. “I went to the George Floyd protest in Chicago and watched all the anarchy, man. You could feel the adrenaline in the air, you could feel the hurt, the rage, the disappointment, it was very feral and then seeing the police move in and mobilise and people start stampeding and running for their lives.” 

That stark phrase Collier uses – ‘world is on fire’ – also happens to be the name of his new album, just released on Division 81 Records. It is the final part in what Collier sees as a sequence of recordings by his group, The Chosen Few, that reflect and interpret the state of mind of not just contemporary America, but the current global psyche, engaging in topics ranging from environmental collapse and police brutality to hope and redemption. His previous album with The Chosen Few, ‘The Almighty’ delved into the relationship between the everyday person and the Divine Source. ‘The World is On Fire’ takes an outward look into society and reverberates with the zeitgeist of today’s socio-political landscape. 

“This project is a sonic exploration, blending sounds, consciousness and activism to raise awareness about the pressing issues of our time,” says Collier. “Through my music, I strive to capture and personify the profound impact of the challenges we face.”

For British spiritual jazz and reggae musician Nat Birchall, Collier is someone he “always heartily recommends to anyone who asks me, he’s something else and I’m sure he’s just going to develop more and more over time”. Broadcaster and DJ Gilles Peterson echoes Birchall’s assessment, calling Collier “the future”. 

For all of that, the term spiritual jazz is one that Collier himself resists, preferring ‘black cosmic music’ to refer to what he does. In this regard, he is in the tradition of Max Roach and Roland Kirk, who baulked at the music they made being termed ‘jazz’ at all, a word they saw as a derogatory white term applied to a highly developed and complex form of black expression. Peterson also alludes to this when he says the term spiritual jazz is, in a way, applied to the type of jazz that rock journalists deem acceptable: “The Mojo, Melody Makers and the NME writers who are OK with Coltrane but don’t get jazz funk or fusion. They bracket it with a kind of post-rock, free improv scene too, so it all blends into what they approve as gatekeepers.”

This is where we get to the thorny issue of definitions. What is spiritual jazz? And what is spiritual jazz today? Well, it depends on who you ask as it’s very much in the ear of the beholder. It may be easier to say what it is not rather than what it is.

For Peterson, spiritual jazz was used in the 1990s among DJs and record collectors on the jazz scene that covered “modal jazz; a slightly more reflective, deeper jazz that you can also play on the dancefloor, tracks like ‘Brother John’ by Yusef Lateef or ‘Effi’ by Max Roach. I think it became spiritual jazz on a major level after Kamasi Washington released ‘The Epic’ in 2015. That was the record that opened up the Pitchforks and the Resident Advisors to this term which until then had been bandied around among collectors and DJs for several years before, like some secret code. I’m the one who pretty much coined the term acid jazz, so who am I to criticise? It’s a space that has allowed a huge amount of music to get new ears. And that’s got to be a good thing, right?” 

If Washington’s ‘The Epic’ (released on Brainfeeder, a label established by producer Flying Lotus, who also happens to be Alice Coltrane’s nephew) was the tipping point that saw spiritual jazz take its place in the musical mainstream, it was in no small part due to Washington’s association with hip hop star Kendrick Lamar. Washington appeared on Lamar’s huge hit album ‘To Pimp a Butterfly’ and the follow-up, ‘DAMN’. 

Even if Washington’s album did get the likes of Rolling Stone and Mojo to sit up and take notice of spiritual jazz for the first time, other artists had been exploring that sound for years and continue to do so. One of the leading exponents of contemporary spiritual jazz is saxophonist Muriel Grossmann. Originally hailing from Austria, Grossmann is currently based in Ibiza and has released a series of highly-regarded albums that have positioned her at the forefront of the current scene.

“The core would be modal jazz, free jazz and the blues,” says Grossman. “Then influences from Indian music, African music, Latin American music, gospel, funk, soul jazz, avant-garde music. Concrete music, too. Stockhausen, Varese, Pierre Boulez. What I enjoy about it is the vast possibilities to explore.” Her crossover album ‘Golden Rule’, released in 2018, was issued on an Estonian label, the excellent RR Gems (home to other notable spiritual jazz releases from Devin Brahja Waldman, Organic Pulse Ensemble and Mush Tone Ensemble). Each of Grossman’s albums has explored spiritual jazz from different perspectives, embracing a range of influences and instrumentation. 

“On ‘Reverence’ (2019) I was trying to incorporate more African music into my blend of spiritual jazz. On ‘Quiet Earth’ (2020) I was exploring the core elements of spiritual jazz. Using rubato and out-of-time presentation of the theme. On other records like ‘Earth Tones’, the focus was on the drone music, no time, no structure, no rhythm. On the record ‘Birth of the Mystery’ (2010) the line between free jazz, avant-garde, spiritual jazz, minimalist music and musique concrète in general is blurry, yet very organic.” Grossmann’s forthcoming album ‘The Light of the Mind’ is likely to show yet another facet of her seemingly limitless skill at reinterpreting spiritual jazz without sounding derivative.

One of Grossmann’s peers is British saxophonist and composer Nat Birchall. Across his numerous albums, Birchall sticks closely to the classic style and structure set out by John Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders, focussing on a mainly acoustic sound. His close association with trumpeter Matthew Halsall – also a prime mover in establishing and spreading the sound of spiritual jazz in the UK – cemented Birchall’s reputation as a player and composer steeped in the tradition of spiritual jazz’s elders. Over that time, Birchall’s output has been as consistent as it has been prodigious. Albums such as 2009’s ‘Akhenaten’, ‘Sacred Dimension’ (2011), ‘Cosmic Language’ (2018), and ‘Afro Trane’ (2022) are replete with tracks that evoke meditative, almost devotional moments. For Birchall, spiritual jazz is synonymous with modal jazz and, in that view, he echoes both Gilles Peterson and Muriel Grossman.

“If we take spiritual jazz as a style or genre rather than a way of playing, then I think it’s important to note that it’s modal music for the most part,” says Birchall. “In modal music, the song can be based on any number of modes but is often just one mode or scale, in which case there would be no set number of bars which act as the ‘form’ of the piece. This tends to give the music a more open sound which can generate a more flowing feel to the music. This modal approach also tends to make for more evocative music. I think a term like spiritual jazz certainly means different things to different people.

“That classic horn/piano/acoustic bass/drums combination is a timeless sound to me. Even though a lot of people seem to hear my music as meditative or mellow, it’s actually quite rhythmic and dependent on certain dynamic variations. If you play purely in the service of expressing a particular feeling then the music tends to communicate something to the listener which they can feel and hopefully resonate with. Your ego has to be removed from the equation as much as possible. This is why a lot of devotional music, like Rastafarian music or other ancient religious music, tends to have a very deep or communicative quality. I don’t think you have to be religious to play spiritual music, you just need to be able to remove your ego from the process of playing, so to me spiritual jazz isn’t a style of music but a way of playing.”

Ultimately, it is the emotional connection between the listener and the music that is the key characteristic of spiritual jazz. For DJ, producer and record label owner Rebecca Vasmant, spiritual jazz “is a feeling, it’s the way the music I listen to that falls under spiritual jazz makes me feel. It’s about peace and it’s about feeling calm. There are certain elements and instruments that seem to feature on these records. It’s about a feeling. It’s about an emotional reaction, rather than the structure or the components.”

Compared to the spiritual jazz of the 1960s and 1970s, the contemporary incarnation exhibits certain characteristics that set it apart from its antecedent. One is the prominent place of women in the mix. It’s worth noting that spiritual jazz has always had a female musician and composer, Alice Coltrane, as one of its lodestars. Yet, despite the transcendent and elevated position she occupies in the spiritual jazz hierarchy, there were not many prominent female artists within the field.

There were a few notable exceptions: vocalists such as Dee Dee Bridgewater, Jean Carne and June Tyson must be name-checked as does pianist and composer Amina Claudine Myers, whose unique sound and space remains compelling. Jazz legend Mary Lou Williams holds a special place too, with her mix of gospel, blues and swing. And let’s not forget another harpist, Dorothy Ashby, whose ‘Afro Harping’ (1968) and ‘The Rubáiyát of Dorothy Ashby’ (1970) albums earned her a seat in the spiritual jazz pantheon. 

Given Alice Coltrane’s position as queen of spiritual jazz, it’s no surprise that female harpists are centre stage once again. Ukrainian-born but UK-based Alina Bzhezhinska has made a name for herself with her radiant playing and Amanda Whiting’s albums on the Jazzman label show how the harp is still a vital instrument. Across the pond, Brandee Younger writes original music inspired by Ashby and Coltrane and has a background in classical music. Her last two albums have been released on Impulse, the same label that issued classic Alice Coltrane albums like ‘Ptah’, ‘The El Daoud’ and ‘Journey in Satchidananda’ in the 1970s.

The female voice is strong in contemporary spiritual jazz, with artists as diverse as Anna Butterss, Allysha Joy, Yazz Ahmed, Tamar Osborn, Nicole Mitchell, Nubya Garcia, Cassie Kinoshi and Chelsea Carmichael all making incredible music. One of the most distinctive and critically lauded is London-based composer Nala Sinephro. To date, she has released two stunning albums on Warp showcasing her ambient jazz compositions, where she plays modular synth, pedal harp, keyboards and piano. 

Remarking on the significant position women hold in the current scene Peterson is vocal in his praise. “Nala Sinephro has found a really great place. But then you’ve also got people like Jessica Lauren and quite a few of them that have ended up signing with International Anthem; Bex Burch, Ruth Goller, so yeah, it’s great. Oh, and Valentina Magaletti, she’s an amazing force, and she’s got that Italian thing going on.”

The other noticeable facet of contemporary spiritual jazz is the global nature of the sound. Whereas the ‘classic era’ of spiritual jazz was largely centred on the USA in terms of artists and labels, the current scene is truly international. In recent years, a vibrant and enthralling array of artists have emerged from Scandinavia that are giving spiritual jazz a refreshing spin, often infusing the sound with folk, psych and electronic textures. Names to check out include Teemu Åkerblom, Oiro Pena, Gustav Horneij’s Organic Pulse Ensemble and labels like We Jazz from Finland and Jazzaggression from Norway. 

Further south across mainland Europe, there is a rich and varied stable of musicians and composers who have, over the past decade or so, explored the creative possibilities that spiritual jazz can offer and have created a fascinating catalogue to discover. French outfit Florian Pellissier Quintet position themselves firmly in the mid-60s modal sound whereas The Selenites Band mix spiritual jazz with the Ethio jazz of Mulatu Astatke and the afrobeat of Fela Kuti to create a head-nodding, foot-shuffling brew. A more experimental take is the German outfit Bohren & Der Club Of Gore, who explore a doomy drone that lulls the listener into a liminal headspace akin to hypnagogia. 

Spiritual jazz below the equator is in a healthy place too and has been developing at pace over the past few years. The South African jazz scene is on fire right now with artists like drummer Asher Gamedze, bassist Herbie Tsoaeli and US-based saxophonist Linda Sikhakhane all representing that very particular South African flavour informed by its unique history.

Spiritual jazz’s vibration has also reached our antipodean cousins and given us some extraordinarily good music of late. Names to watch for include bands like Meganerie and The Circling Sun, both of whom stay relatively faithful to the modal elements that Nat Birchall and Muriel Grossmann adhere to. Even Brazil has got in on the action with superb albums in recent years from Thiago França and Guerrinha. 

Closer to home, the UK has long been a welcoming home for spiritual jazz. Indeed, as far back as 1990, acid jazz groups like the recently reformed Galliano and their then label mates K-Creative, both on Gilles Peterson’s iconic Talkin’ Loud label, sampled and interpolated spiritual jazz classics from Yusef Lateef, Pharoah Sanders and Archie Shepp into their tracks played to a club crowd. Bands such as Cinematic Orchestra and musicians like saxophonist Chris Bowden were similarly early out of the gate with their own take on spiritual jazz in the mid-to-late-90s and early-2000s. Bowden’s ‘Time Capsule’ album, released in 1996 on Soul Jazz Records, sounds incredibly prescient given the current popularity of spiritual jazz. The Cinematic Orchestra’s ‘Every Day’ album, released in 2002, meshed hip hop and heavy jazz and even featured singer Fontella Bass, herself considered spiritual jazz royalty through her marriage to trumpeter Lester Bowie of legendary free/spiritual jazz group, The Art Ensemble of Chicago. 

The proto-spiritual jazz revival by 90s British acts like Galliano and others is a thesis Gilles Peterson strongly subscribes to. “Whether it was [samples or references to] Cedric Im Brooks and Silent Force, or Archie Shepp with ‘Here Comes the Family’. Or whether it was ‘Hum-Allah-Hum-Allah-Hum-Allah’ by Pharaoh Sanders. Because again, here in the UK, it went through a process to get to where it eventually arrived at via all the trip hop, the acid jazz and nu jazz and all of that stuff. I do think Two Banks of Four was also really interesting, as a precursor to a lot of this, because they were coming out at the same time that groups like Cinematic Orchestra were coming through. Even the Cinematics, if you listen back to a lot of their early records and some of the influences that they had, they were in that kind of post-trip hop kind of soundtrack and spiritual jazz space.” 

These British acts of the 1990s were among the first to recognise the connection between spiritual jazz and club culture, a connection that is explicit today in the club playlists of DJs like Rebecca Vasmant, although she is quick to point out that one has to pick the moment to drop it in a club.

“If it’s in the right moment, in the right circumstance, with the right crowd that is open-minded and receptive,” she says. “If you’ve drawn them in enough for them to be able to handle anything they will. It’s kind of like a game. I always tend to have about 10 spiritual jazz records in my bag when I DJ, just in case the moment is right. I’ve had a situation, during a fairly housey-style night, when I feel like people are waiting for jazz. I’ve got that vibe, so I’m just going to do it. So I’ve gone in, and it was like, stop, start. Completely changed the vibe. And everybody was banging on the roof, shouting, ‘Here we fucking go!’ to spiritual jazz. At three in the morning. It was ridiculous. And the club owner came up and said: ‘What the fuck is actually going on? People are banging on the roof to jazz. I’ve never seen anybody do that to this stuff.’”

The current spiritual jazz sound of the UK is incredibly rich with talent, populated in large part by a post-acid house generation who mix and blend myriad styles of music and culture to create a dazzling and colourful scene that includes electronica, ambient, hip hop, dub, spoken word and much more. There is an astonishing array of skill and flair in the current UK scene that includes groups like Graham Costello’s Strata, Ari Tsugi and Azamiah, who all hail from Scotland. Trumpeter Yazz Ahmed’s Middle Eastern vibe, Tony Burkhill’s Work Money Death modal jazz project, The Forgotten Fairground, the Kevin Figes Quartet, Tenderlonious, Greg Foat…

America remains the temporal and spiritual (ahem) home of spiritual jazz and the pre-eminent label showcasing this vast sound gallery is International Anthem, celebrating its tenth anniversary this year. For Peterson, International Anthem is a key platform in developing and spreading the sound.

“It’s exciting because I think people are gravitating towards the anti-algorithm. It’s about as far away from being able to find the AI version of it because the rules are difficult to repeat. Labels like International Anthem have done brilliantly using the community and the performance space. They’ve found a formula that’s worked in elevating these fringe artists – so to speak – into a kind of marketable community that people want to be a part of.

“Artists that have grown out of International Anthem, some of them have been plucked by the majors. So then that creates tension because we all get offers and we want to grow. But groups like Irreversible Entanglements and Makaya McRaven, Angel Bat Dawid, and the late Jaimie Branch – it’s amazing that they are prominent names in contemporary jazz and improvised music now.”

The spiritual jazz journey started by African American musicians in the 1960s soundtracked the civil rights struggle and Vietnam. It continues today, often addressing global and universal themes – this time from Black, white, Latino and Asian artists. All united in sound. All united in spirit. It’s a spirit that precedes jazz itself. It was there at the beginning, and it will be there at the end. Call it humanity, call it art, call it God, call it whatever you want. After all, the word spiritual means ‘relating to or affecting the human spirit or soul as opposed to material or physical things’. 

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This article first appeared in issue six of Disco Pogo.

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Viewed from one angle, Manuel Göttsching’s timeless masterpiece ‘E2-E4’ appears to be electronic music’s ‘Waiting for Godot’. Across its mesmeric 58 minutes, nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes… What it’s not is awful. Simply based around two chords, Göttsching weaved a magical, hypnotic spell that has enchanted DJs and producers – including Larry Levan, Carl Craig, James Murphy and latterly Alex Kassian – since its release in 1984. Ben Cardew seeks to unravel the track’s enduring mystery and hears that it was “a sort of initiation of techno in an ambient way”…

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Does perfection exist in electronic music? If so, it probably sounds like ‘E2-E4’: 58 minutes of peerless electronic flight from Ash Ra Tempel guitarist Manuel Göttsching, recorded in 1981 and released three years later, becoming an improbable New York disco classic, an ambient landmark and even a house hit.

Simply put, is there anything you could improve in ‘E2-E4’? Any way you could make its 58 sublime minutes of majestic melody and subtle rhythmic pulses any warmer, more welcoming or more ecstatic? The song’s fans include Larry Levan, the legendary Paradise Garage DJ who apparently wanted ‘E2-E4’ played at his funeral; Richard Branson, who claimed Göttsching could “make a fortune” with the record; Carl Craig, who remade ‘E2-E4’ in the 90s; Scott Grooves, who recorded a live band cover in 2018; and LCD Soundsystem’s James Murphy, who borrowed the record’s artwork, to Göttsching’s evident displeasure.

Even Göttsching himself, who died in December 2022, seemed to realise he had hit upon something special. Talking of ‘E2-E4’’s recording, which took place in one studio session, to Red Bull Music Academy in 2018, he explained: “I didn’t change anything afterwards. I didn’t do any overdubs. I didn’t do any edits. I didn’t change anything, not even equalising or something like that. I just left it as it was. I was a bit surprised, actually, when I finished and then I said: ‘Oops. What was this?’ I listened to it and thought: ‘This is quite perfect.’”

Perfect. Yes. But also deeply strange: ‘E2-E4’ is all things to all men, an infinite variety hidden within the song’s almost comically limited two-chord base. For a long time ‘E2-E4’, made by a German producer in midwinter, was best known as the basis for ‘Sueño Latino’, a Mediterranean dream of a summer house hit, made by a quartet of Italian producers under the same name. For New York clubbers in the 80s, ‘E2-E4’ was an underground disco anthem, despite having little recognisable beat. For British ravers in the late-80s, ‘E2-E4’ was a chill out classic, as spun by The Orb’s Alex Paterson and the KLF’s Jimmy Cauty, mixing in sound effects and field recordings as the record weaved its endless web.

Carl Craig, who remade ‘E2-E4’ as Paperclip People’s ‘Remake’ in 1994, first came across the song in 1988, when Alton Miller played it at the Music Institute in Detroit. “When I heard it, I thought that it was incredible, it just really blew my mind, the possibilities of what it was doing, that it felt like a dance track, but it wasn’t, you know, hard,” he says.

The record’s latest admirer is Alex Kassian, a producer, DJ and artist from Kyoto, now based in Berlin, who recently re-worked ‘E2-E4’ as ‘E2–E4 - A Reference to E2–E4 By Manuel Göttsching’, throwing in a dubbed-out house remix by UK reggae legend Mad Professor on the B-side for good measure.

“I think ‘E2-E4’ is somehow in everyone’s DNA who’s involved in the realm of dance music, as a DJ, producer, promoter, label manager or simply music collector,” Kassian says. “It’s one of those releases that has helped electronic music develop into many different forms that we get to experience today. From Paradise Garage to Panorama Bar and most venues that existed in our time. Is there a more important record in the history of dance music?” 

And yet ‘E2-E4’ came from extremely humble roots. Göttsching was the guitar player in Krautrock mainstays Ash Ra Tempel – a band once compared to the “James Brown band on acid” - from 1971 until the group split in 1976. He made his solo debut in 1975 with ‘Inventions for Electric Guitar’, an album initially subtitled ‘Ash Ra Tempel VI’ such was its closeness to the day job.

Soon, though, Göttsching’s tastes started to change. “The next step after ‘Inventions’ was that I didn’t want guitar sounds – I always want something new,” Göttsching told RBMA. “I do [something] only once and when I’m happy with it, I don’t want to repeat it. I started composing for keyboards and that was my next solo album, ‘New Age of Earth’ [credited initially to Ash Ra Tempel on release in 1976, later changed to Ashra] which gave me a worldwide contract with Virgin Records in England.”

This was the environment that led to the creation of ‘E2-E4’. Göttsching, so the story goes, had just returned from a tour with his fellow Ash Ra Tempel graduate Klaus Schulze and was feeling in a creative mood. And so, on the evening of 12 December 1981, Göttsching headed to his Berlin home studio for a private concert, making music just for himself, which would also give him something to listen to during a flight he was due to take to Hamburg the following day.

“I wanted to play and so I did it in the same way I did many sessions in my studio before; I had many recordings of 30 minutes,” Göttsching told RBMA. “Sometimes, it’s only ten minutes and something was happening and I stopped it. This one just worked for one hour.” (Carl Craig says that he was told ‘E2-E4’ was written as part of a series of compositions for German public radio, although there’s nothing to verify this.)

Perhaps this incredibly casual approach explains ‘E2-E4’’s almost offhand genius. To a casual listener it might sound as if nothing really changes in its 58 glorious minutes. But underlying this drift is a flurry of subtle activity. You can pick any two-minute section of ‘E2-E4’ and it won’t be dramatically different to the next. But it will be distinct. Perhaps the most obvious development is the sprawling, cosmic and perfectly judged guitar solo that plays over the second half of the record. But there are also subtle electronic currents that surface, little pings, echoes and effects, a synth part that pokes its head up for a few minutes, like it was always there, just resting.

The record is also home to some incredibly intricate rhythmical tricks. “If I try to go to sleep listening to the track, I can’t, because there’s maybe two or three different time signatures happening at the same time,” says Craig. “There’s all these counter-rhythms that are happening, because it’s not just straight four/four. And, of course, the build-up of the track, it goes from being piano, but it never gets to be in fortissimo.”

Kassian thinks that ‘E2-E4’ might reflect Göttsching’s life in late-1981. “People who write melodies often write a reflection of what they’re living through at that point in their life and it makes me wonder about all of that,” he says, “I was recently in touch with his girlfriend at the time called Rosie and she had told me she was in the room when he recorded ‘E2-E4’ at their studio, called ‘Studio ROMA’ (from two first letters of their first names). Personally, I get the feeling that he was thriving in total freedom and flourishing with creativity from this record.” 

Göttsching knew he had made something special. But despite label boss Richard Branson’s warm welcome, ‘E2-E4’ remained unreleased until 1984, when it came out on Klaus Schulze’s InTeam label. The delay was, at least in part, a technical one. “At this time, all major album releases still took place on vinyl,” Göttsching explained to 15 Questions. “20 minutes per side were considered the limit and pressing plants and labels would routinely reject a work if it exceeded that – or accept it with reluctance only because it compromised dynamics. Clearly, these were not exactly the best preconditions for 60 minutes of ‘E2-E4’.”

Initially, ‘E2-E4’ had a cold welcome from critics. “The first German critique called it complete ‘muzak’ and said that I’d missed every development in electronic music and I didn’t know anything,” Göttsching told The Guardian in 2013.

Luckily, the song had other supporters, notably Larry Levan, the totemic New York DJ who was resident at the Paradise Garage from 1977 to 1987. (On Göttsching’s own website, he describes Levan as “the one who made Manuel’s ‘E2-E4’ famous all over the world”.) Levan was known for his outré music choices and fierce determination to break tracks, even if they initially cleared the floor. He was also, according to Justin Strauss, a New York DJ, remixer and producer since the early 1980s, “the major DJ of New York”. So, as Strauss said in 2023, where Levan went, other DJs would follow.

Craig says legendary Chicago DJ Ron Hardy regularly played ‘E2-E4’, while in Detroit Derrick May and Alton Miller were notable fans. By the time Sueño Latino came knocking on Göttsching’s door in the late-1980s, the album was a cult hit among the electronic world. “When I found out ‘E2-E4’ was played in clubs, I couldn’t imagine people dancing to it,” Göttsching told The Guardian. “There’s not a strong bass drum and the rhythm is very subtle. I took ideas from dance music but my composing goes more into the minimalist style of Steve Reich, Philip Glass. It could be played with an orchestra.”

To RBMA Göttsching spoke of ‘E2-E4’’s “floating” feeling – and it is perhaps this very fluidity that makes the music so adaptable, with the song’s impact like being tumbled in a cosmic spin cycle, the two underlying chords providing the suggestion of an anchor.

“The essence of the loop is integral to any piece of dance music. If you can listen to a loop for 30 minutes without getting bored, then you might be sitting on a decent idea,” says Kassian. “The power of switching great chords opens up a world of possibilities melodically. And even for those who aren’t super inclined in melody, it becomes such an easy loop to work with.” 

Craig says that ‘E2-E4’ helped teach producers in New York, Chicago and Detroit how to stretch out an idea. “Taking this theme and stretching it out in a dance world happened with James Brown. So, when James would have Part One and Part Two on a track or on a seven-inch single, it might be a seven-minute track and he splits it up into two pieces. And ‘E2-E4’ kind of did that,” he says. 

But Craig believes the lineage of ‘E2-E4’ stretches back even further. “It goes back to even music that’s centuries old,” Craig says. “It’s just that with using electronics, you’re able to do things with the texture of the sound that keeps it interesting, in comparison to the symphony, where it seems that, at the time, for the music to work, that if it was too repetitive, people would probably get bored and start throwing shit at you.”

Kassian says he wasn’t intimidated by the prospect of covering such an iconic work of electronic music. “Maybe because I didn’t write it with the intention of releasing it,” he explains. “It was more of a way to personally honour Manuel Göttsching for giving us those two holy chords and all the other countless beautiful pieces he wrote. It was just a small love letter to say thank you to him.”

In fact, he describes Göttsching’s work as “inviting” rather than intimidating. “Did you ever imagine what a jazz pianist would do with the two chords and how they would wonder and come to resolution?” he says. “That’s something I would personally like to hear; for someone to wander off beyond those two chords and explore the infinite possibilities of melodies and then land on the original chords.”

The ongoing, slow-burn success of ‘E2-E4’ – which was re-issued in 2016 to mark its 35th anniversary – would give Göttsching a fame that went beyond Ash Ra Tempel and he continued releasing music and playing gigs up to the end of his life. Hans-Joachim Roedelius, a fellow icon of German music, played with Göttsching in Berlin in 2021. “He was pioneering like me within that era of the development of new popular music in Germany,” he says. “‘E2-E4’ was a sort of initiation of techno in an ambient way.”

Listeners have long thought of ‘E2-E4’ as vaguely mysterious: how on earth did this one-take synth experiment by a former Ash Ra Tempel guitarist become a Paradise Garage classic, an ambient landmark and a house hit? It seems so unlikely, on the face of it. 

And yet, perhaps there is no mystery here. Maybe the fact that ‘E2-E4’ was made for no one, means that it was perfect for everyone, a universal moment of musical beauty that will outlast us all. Maybe everyone finds what they want – or perhaps what they need – in the song. A Latino club hit from a German producer? Sure. A New York disco anthem with little recognisable beat? Yeah, why not? Just ask and ‘E2-E4’ will deliver.

“For me it’s about the melodies, the sounds, the playing and the equipment used,” concludes Paul Byrne, who runs Test Pressing, which released Kassian’s ‘E2-E4’ cover. “It’s rumoured (getting geeky) that one machine he used was a Pearl Syncussion synth for all the bleeps and stuff which makes all kinds of metallic pangs and bleeps. Couple that with his guitar playing and the lovely melodies and you’ve really got something special. Then couple that with an iconic sleeve, the chess move title and the piece being 58 minutes long and it’s going down in history.” 

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This article first appeared in issue six of Disco Pogo.

In 2010, Sean Johnston and Andrew Weatherall came together to start a night that many of the latter’s acolytes would argue is the equal of anything the much-missed musical renegade achieved elsewhere. A Love From Outer Space continues to be a fitting celebration of Weatherall and Johnston’s vision: a club with joy, magic and love at its core. Ahead of celebrations marking the night’s 15th birthday, Johnston reflects upon his memorable apprenticeship, telling Jim Butler: “Andrew didn’t leave a map, but he did leave a very strong compass bearing for me…”

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Sat in the basement of a closed Social in London’s West End on a sunny September Friday afternoon, Sean Johnston is attempting to explain the enduring popularity of A Love From Outer Space, the post-acid house club night he established with his erstwhile partner, Andrew Weatherall, in 2010. Despite being primarily attended by those closer to receiving their bus pass than being asked for ID at the bar, the always affable Johnston is adamant that the dancers in their forties, fifties, sixties, and even older, are not trying to relive some colourful or hedonistic misspent youth.

“No, it’s not like going to a retro ‘Back To ’89’ night,” he says in-between taking sips of his can of water (“we live in interesting times” he surmises). “I think there’s the music, good times, drugs, community… I think people want to be part of a gang don’t they? It’s like religion. People want to be part of something. There’s worse things, it’s better than going to, oh, I don’t know, maybe it’s not better than going to an IKEA or something on a Saturday afternoon. I don’t know, it’s very life-affirming and people get a lot of joy out of it.”

Anyone that has attended one of ALFOS’ irregular, peripatetic nights will instantly recognise what Johnston is talking about. The joy in the room is palpable; in fact, it’s more than joy. When Weatherall took the title from the A.R. Kane song of the same name, he unsurprisingly chose well, the transcendence that is almost unfailingly achieved is, without being too soppy, akin to love. Initially, this wasn’t something that Johnston recognised; he talks about being too absorbed in the technicalities of mixing “to the point of being almost oblivious to the local environment”. However, in time, this state of mind became familiar.

“I joked to my wife that regardless of where we were physically, mentally ALFOS always felt like the same place,” he explains. “I feel completely immersed in the music, in sync with the crowd. Time seems to warp and mixing feels instinctive. I’m not overthinking the technical details – everything just flows. I can feel the crowd’s energy and respond naturally, making spontaneous transitions that just feel right. There’s a deep sense of connection and I lose all self-consciousness, just being in the moment.” 

It’s quite a feeling, he says, when the lights come on at the end of the night and he’s confronted with a sea of smiling, sweating faces. He’s not looking for justification or even acknowledgement, but regardless, it’s a beautiful sensation.

“Andrew talked about it being a gnostic ritual,” he smiles. “That was maybe part of his, you know… he also said it’s just a fucking disco, but what became apparent was that it was much more than just a fucking disco. As to what it actually is, is open to interpretation, but it certainly means an awful lot to a lot of people. It makes people happy – it makes me happy.”

Although Sean Johnston seems content to have left the cosmic rhetoric to his much-missed friend, he’s happy to concede that music has always been in his blood. In the 70s, his dad was in a band, Rinky Dink & The Crystal Set, whose sole claim to fame, he says, was that they lived in the squat in Beck Road, Hackney, that was later frequented by Chris & Cosey. 

When Johnston was young his dad left the family home in Yorkshire in “fairly ignominious circumstances” and came down south. Subsequently, despite being a massive music fan – he recounts the classic teenage rite of passage listening to John Peel under the covers at night – his mum, quite understandably, tried to dissuade him from a career in music. “If I expressed any interest in playing the piano or playing the guitar her stock response was: ‘No way, you’ll turn out like your father.’ It was forbidden arcane knowledge for me.”

Eventually, the musical pull (“I come from this Northern, alternative, Factory Records, post-punk, Adrian Sherwood, Tackhead background”) proved hard to resist. After time spent at Hull University as its social secretary and his first forays into DJing upstairs at the city’s Welly Club – while Steve ‘Fila Brazillia’ Cobby and Dave ‘Porky’ Brennand played downstairs (fact fans: his first break came via Roland Gift’s sister Ragna who ran the club) – he moved to London in 1988 and got a job as a junior booking agent, where one of his first clients were the Inspiral Carpets. “As a result, I met Noel Gallagher because he was their guitar technician.” 

He also got to know arch enabler Jeff Barrett, who having left Creation had set up his own PR company, Capersville. Johnston was soon a frequent visitor to Capersville’s Farringdon HQ because they did the Inspirals’ press. “Jeff liked me,” he recalls, “because he could see I was a music fanatic. He took me under his wing a bit, introduced me to a few people.”

Indeed, it was Barrett who first formally introduced Johnston and Weatherall. “I was in the office to discuss some Inspirals bullshit and he said he was meeting Andrew Weatherall for lunch; he asked me if I wanted to come. We just hit it off, similar sense of humour, similar taste in music.” 

The pair’s first informal meeting had already happened. Not long after moving down to the capital, Johnston attended a house party in Clapham where Weatherall was DJing. Having been mildly disappointed by what he’d heard in some London clubs like The Wag (“They’d be playing LL Cool J ‘I’m Bad’ and all the old Maceo & The Macks stuff; it didn’t excite me that much”), he was pleased to see Weatherall play the likes of “William Orbit, Adrian Sherwood and Chris & Cosey”.

“All of this stuff that I heard Andrew play at this house party was stuff that I knew – or wanted to know. In my youthful arrogance I thought I was the only one who knew about these records. I thought a lot of London clubs were boring and then Andrew came along and I thought: ‘Hang on a minute, maybe it’s not boring.’”

As the 80s became the 90s, Johnston complemented his booking agent work with more and more DJ slots, “anywhere I could snaffle a gig”. This could be at the Rock Garden in Covent Garden playing music between bands or warming up for Danny Rampling, Darren Emerson and Weatherall. He started to dabble in production with some mates and took a demo tape of his techno productions to Weatherall’s office in Dean Street, “above the strip club”. Weatherall liked what he heard and put out Flash Faction’s ‘Repoman’ on his Sabres Of Paradise label. Johnston was a regular at Sabresonic and their friendship was further cemented when having been “ejected from the booking agency and moved into merchandise” he accompanied Sabres on tour doing their merch.

“It was a fun job,” he laughs. “It was a good job to have peak 90s. We did merch for everybody: Oasis, The Chemical Brothers, Manic Street Preachers, Ocean Colour Scene… Going on tour with Sabres Of Paradise is when we started to become proper mates.”

By the end of the decade, however, Johnston had ceased DJing, stopped the tour merch and had decided he was going to be a mountaineer. 

“I really got into it in an obsessive way,” he recalls. “I started on a climbing wall in Shepherd’s Bush and ended up on the north face of the Alps. It’s like doing drugs, scaring the shit out of yourself. It’s a proper game of edge-playing. The mental aspect was really quite appealing because you could really frighten yourself.”

He remembers one climb in the Chamonix Valley in particular. “It was the only time where I thought any wrong move and I could be dead. I guess it’s like being in a war or something. It’s character building. I don’t know if I could do it now.”

His mountaineering years coincided with moving into a massive flat in Shoreditch by the railway bridge on Kingsland Road. A light industrial unit that had been converted into flats it was, he laughs, party central. “Shoreditch was like living in a mad village,” he remembers. “For a period of three years I don’t think I left the area.” 

One of his flatmates, Lizzie Walker, started stepping out with Weatherall. One day towards the end of the 00s, Weatherall came round “in a flap”. He was meant to be doing a gig in Brighton, but his driver had let him down. Now holding down a steady job in tech recruitment – which he does to this day – Johnston had a company car; he offered to drive. 

By this point, he’d stopped climbing because his “shoulders were fucked” and was hanging out on Bill Brewster’s DJHistory Forum, where he immersed himself in all things Daniele Baldelli and the cosmic sound proffered by the cult Italian DJ. He started making mix CDs for his own amusement. When Weatherall got into the car and asked what they could listen to on the drive down to the coast, all Johnston had were the mix CDs he’d made of this slower cosmic stuff. Weatherall liked what he heard and the seed for what would become A Love From Outer Space was planted. 

When their friend Nathan Gregory Wilkins became the booker at The Drop, a small venue beneath a pub in Stoke Newington, a year or so later and asked him if he wanted to do a night there the idea of a club promising to be an ‘oasis of slowness in a world of increasing velocity’ became a reality.

So it came to pass that on a Thursday night in late-May 2010, ALFOS launched. The intention of never knowingly exceeding 122bpm was laid bare in the choice of the first record played. Richard Wahnfried’s ‘Time Actor’ is a proto-electro 12-minute treatise on time (narrated by Arthur Brown of Crazy World fame) recorded in 1979.

“It’s one of the Krautrock guys (the alter ego of Klaus Schulze of Tangerine Dream and Ash Ra Tempel),” says Johnston in his laconic northern twang. “Really slow. Less than 100bpm. It’s fucking bonkers, one of the craziest records you’ll ever hear.”

The first event was well-attended. There were a lot of off-duty DJs and faces there interested – as ever – in what Weatherall was going to do now. “There was a certain amount of curiosity involved,” Johnston explains. “But it struck a chord because it went against the grain. This was the time of minimal; 130-135bpm. We weren’t sure if people would go with it. But they did. It appealed to a lot of older heads and girls because it wasn’t just boys-y techno. The appeal was wide-ranging.”

It wasn’t just the crowd that got off on the music and the vibe emanating from the night, Weatherall did too. Although he never explicitly told Johnston he was bored of playing “boompty boompty” music whilst trekking around Europe’s mega clubs, “I do think he felt as though he had painted himself into a little bit of a corner”.

“When ALFOS came along he said to me: ‘I feel like I did when I was playing at Shoom. I feel like I can play whatever I want and there’s no expectation.’ I think the open-endedness appealed to him.”

Fun was baked into the night from the outset. Johnston openly admits his relationship with Weatherall began – like so many – from the point-of-view as a fanboy, but when asked what he thinks he brought specifically to the night he suggests he helped inject some fun into proceedings.

“I gave him permission to play things that he might not have otherwise,” he notes. “For example, that Todd Terje remix of M’s ‘Pop Muzik’; I played that at The Drop once and the look he gave me, there was an archly-raised eyebrow, but then he saw the scenes of absolute carnage and chaos. He started playing it himself, so I think it gave him permission to take himself a little less seriously than he might have done. We did have a laugh, we really did.”

The weight of that last remark is, unsurprisingly, dripping with sadness. When Weatherall suddenly, unexpectedly died (on more than one occasion Johnston refers to his friend’s passing as “when Andrew got off”), everything changed. An ALFOS was scheduled for later that week at their now regular London home of Phonox. Johnston had to be persuaded to play (“Of course I did”), but upon reflection he’s glad he did.

“It was hard work,” he notes. “I was just crying through most of it. I would play things and it would just set me off and then I’d pull my shit together. I had a listen to the mix the other day actually and in the circumstances it wasn’t bad. I poured my heart into it. Yeah, it was a love letter to my friend. But it was fucking weird.”

Weird was followed by surreal. Whether or not the ALFOS right after Weatherall ‘got off’ could have been the final staging – he admits he was conflicted – was rendered moot by Covid. The enforced hiatus not only gave Johnston breathing space, but his online Emergency Broadcasts (five, six - sometimes more - hours of ALFOS goodness) also provided support to the community. Even today, people still thank him for those transmissions.

“When I’m in the supermarket, people I’ve never seen before come up to me and say: ‘Are you Sean? I just wanted to say thank you for doing those shows in lockdown.’”

And as for persisting, does he ever wonder what Weatherall would have wanted him to do?

“My gut feeling is that he would have liked me to continue,” he responds. “If our roles were reversed I would have certainly wanted him to continue. In the end it wasn’t a decision for either him or me, it was for the community. And that was a resounding ‘carry on, please’.”

The increased importance of ALFOS in the last five years – the joyous annual coming together at Convenanza, the Phonox shows and gigs around the country – will culminate in 2025 with the release of the first A Love From Outer Space compilation album. An abridged version of the night itself – 75 minutes as opposed to six hours – it’s nonetheless an ecstatic rendering of the ALFOS aesthetic. Featuring a raft of exclusive cuts, including the Neville Watson remix of The Blow Monkeys’ ‘Save Me’ that Weatherall used to play at early editions and Popular Tyre’s ‘Feel Like a Lazer Beam’, alongside some staunch ALFOS anthems like Cisco Cisco’s ‘If You Want Me’ (Jay Shepheard Remix) and Class B Band’s ‘Repli-can’, it’s summed up by Johnston thus: “It’s where we’ve come from, where we’re going – that kind of thing.”

As to where Johnston himself is going he admits he feels like Worzel Gummidge at times with the multiple heads he has to sport. “I’ve got a DJ head, a dad head and I’ve got a production head. I have to swap my heads around. Oh, and the job head.”

His productions and remixes as The Summerisle Six, featuring Andy Bell, Jo Bartlett and Duncan Grey, among others (check out the Balearic supergroup’s ‘This is Something’ for proof that a Waterboys-style dance track is always a good idea) and Hardway Bros keep astounding. His production talents are evidence of his furtive imagination: “Music is just a currency of ideas,” he responds. “If you’ve got an idea with the technology that’s available today the bar to entry is a lot lower than it was when I started.”

It’s A Love From Outer Space though where he’s most appreciated. Although he admits at age 58 (he looks a decade younger at least, mind), he can’t carry on forever, there are still plenty of ALFOS conversations to be had. “It’s a thread that I’m still pulling and it’s a thread that can still be pulled. If it reaches a point where I feel like I’m flogging a dead horse, then… but the open-endedness was kind of the genius of it really. We can pretty much – to a degree: no country and western – but most musical styles are woven into the picture.”

We? A slip of the tongue or a recognition that the night is still inextricably part of his friend’s legacy?

“No, it’s not a slip of the tongue. The night was something that we carved out together, along with the crowd. Consequently, I very much view ALFOS as a collective venture.”

Pleasingly, the ten years the pair played together – what Johnston refers to as a “proper apprenticeship” – have left him prepared for future excursions.

“I’ve said this before,” he concludes. “Andrew didn’t leave a map, but he did leave a very strong compass bearing for me. In a way, the many sets we DJed together seemed like a dialogue between us about what the ALFOS aesthetic should be. He left me well-schooled and oriented to follow the path.” 

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This article first appeared in issue six of Disco Pogo.

‍The story of Justice is both colourful and full of suspense. With a revolving cast featuring the likes of Daft Punk, Britney Spears, Justin Timberlake, N.E.R.D., MGMT, Justin Bieber and the publication that proceeded this magazine, there’s never a dull moment in the world of Gaspard Augé and Xavier de Rosnay. It’s a world where Justice make noise funky and has seen the duo scoop two Grammys. Craig McLean heads to the south of France and witnesses more drama – rain stops play – and learns that the pair’s new album, ‘Hyperdrama’ sums up the duo perfectly. “To be overly euphoric, overly sad or epic when it needs to be.” And action…

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In a recording studio in Oxfordshire and a practice space in Glasgow, two artists are reflecting on the rough justice they were served, early in their respective careers, by remixes of their music by a pair of (then) unknown Frenchmen.

“I have a funny relationship with that song,” says James Ford, former member of Simian, then of offshoot duo Simian Mobile Disco, and now producer of note to Depeche Mode, Pet Shop Boys, Blur, Beth Gibbons and Arctic Monkeys. “Even through the early Simian Mobile Disco days, we were a bit churlish about it – we didn’t play it because we didn’t feel ownership over it and we’d cringe when we heard it. Now I’m much more philosophical. But I’ve definitely had a love/hate relationship with it.”

That song, bien sûr, is ‘Never Be Alone’ and the ongoing afterlife it enjoys as a radical 2003 rerub retitled ‘We Are Your Friends’. In its original incarnation it was the lead single from Manchester indie band Simian’s 2002 second album (also called ‘We Are Your Friends’, the shared name arising from the chorus lyric in ‘Never Be Alone’). As a promotional wheeze by their French record label Source, ‘Never Be Alone’ was offered up as remix fodder to any amateur who fancied having a go. The best, as adjudged by the members of Simian, would bag a B-side slot on a subsequent “special release” in France. 

“Maybe to be belligerent, as we were at the time, we picked a noise, drone-y version as the winner, and thought no more about it,” remembers Ford. As for the runner-up… “I remember thinking it was quite different, it was interesting, but I didn’t particularly love it!” he admits with a laugh. “I remember saying at the time it was like MIDI jazz or something, and I think that phrase got back to the guys.”

Then, a few months later, an email from Paris to Simian’s studio in east London’s Hackney Road: “One of those remixes, we want to put it out on this other label, is that OK?” With a nonplussed shrug, Simian said yes, “but didn’t really think much about that either! And, over various iterations, being put out on different labels, it became That Song”.

“And looking back,” adds the musician-turned-super-producer, the pair of Parisian graphic designers-turned-musicians responsible for that MIDI jazz also-ran “did a better job of producing that song and that particular lyric than we did with the actual [whole] song. The fact that they had the limitations and could only use the strongest bit of the song is great – it’s what makes it so direct and simple and powerful.”

Meanwhile, up in Scotland, Alex Kapranos is also reflecting about those same iconoclastic graphic designers. “What I really loved about them is the lack of respect,” he says. 

By the time the Frenchmen came into the orbit of Kapranos’ band Franz Ferdinand, they had given up the day jobs and become Justice: remixers-for-hire. Cheeky ones, at that. “That’s exactly what I was gonna say!” continues Bob Hardy, following on from his bandmate’s observation. “To have the audacity to do what they did to our song!”

The frontman and the bassist with Franz Ferdinand are thinking back to their early days. Exploding just as Simian were imploding, the Glasgow band enjoyed a suite of #fire dance remixes at the outset of their existence: Hot Chip and Daft Punk each took out 2003 single ‘Take Me Out’; Erol Alkan did what he wanted to ‘Do You Want To’ (2005) and The Avalanches did anything but fade out ‘Fade Together’ (2006). All, though, played roughly within the rules of the remix game. 

“Daft Punk’s was a super-reverent remix,” says Kapranos. “They basically kept the structure of our song more or less the same, souped up the bass a little bit, and just thought: ‘This works as a song, let’s not mess with it too much.’”

“Then when the Justice one arrived in our mailbox,” says Hardy of their remix of Franz Ferdinand’s ‘The Fallen’ (2006), “it was such a departure from that [by] this other French duo. Just brilliant.”

“The way they chopped up what we’d given them to make that!” says Kapranos, marvelling, still. “It basically made it sound like I could rap, ha ha!”

“It was shameless!” beams Hardy. “It makes me smile thinking about it.” The band’s joy, he adds, is there in the official title Franz Ferdinand gave to the remix of ‘The Fallen’. “We called it ‘Ruined by Justice.’”

In a dimly lit hotel room in Marseille, that self-same ‘other French duo’, Gaspard Augé and Xavier de Rosnay, are lounging side by side on a bed, sipping lager, puffing vapes and rueing a festival ruined by weather. Two decades on from those game-changing remixes that both noised up a pair of British guitar bands and helped catalyse their own career, Justice are still forging a path – genre-bending, ear-splitting, shit-kicking, fist-punching, two-Grammys-winning, no-f’s-giving – that consistently, brilliantly, busts the boundaries of what we will call vaguely (très vaguement) rock’n’rave.

But four months into the tour in support of their fourth studio album, ‘Hyperdrama’, an all-star, all-vibes set that features, for the first time, “name” guest vocalists (Tame Impala’s Kevin Parker, Miguel, Thundercat, Connan Mockasin), Justice have hit a speed-bump. Well, a giant, Marshall stack-deep puddle. But when it’s over seven years since you last released a studio album and when this tour stretches well into 2025, there’s no point in stressing over a single cancelled gig.

Justice were booked to headline today’s opening instalment of the four-day Delta event, held on the waterfront of the French port city. But for hours now, here at the fag-end of summer, it’s been raining chats et chiens, a cacophonous electrical thunderstorm rolling into Marseille from the Mediterranean and turning the streets into murky brown rivers, the sky into a lightshow worthy of The Chemical Brothers and the festival site into a life-threatening bog.

“We had a safe place in the tour bus. But it was hell on earth,” says Augé of a main stage on top of which rainwater had pooled like a reservoir, threatening to burst through onto their equipment. Cue the organisers’ decision to pull the plug on today’s festival. “Everything was ready, the guys had been sweating since five in the morning,” he adds of their 40-strong road crew. “So, it’s a bit disappointing, but what can you do?” Sip, puff, shrug. Rain may have stopped play, but it hasn’t stopped the indoor wearing of sunglasses radiating 70s chic and ineffable French cool. 

Travelling here to the south of France for a no-show was bad enough for the Paris-based Augé. It’s worse for de Rosnay: he’s flown in from his home in Sweden. It is, then, a frustrated, wearied but hospitable pair who, despite today’s cancellation, honour their interview commitments this evening.

To be fair, there’s time to kill. A few hours from now, around 3am, the pair have to climb on their tour bus and drive through the night all the way back up through France. Destination: Normandy. Purpose: a week-long, full-production “residency”, by which they mean running repairs to a tour that began at the twin-weekend Coachella in early spring – two headline gigs, one and two weeks ahead of the release of ‘Hyperdrama’, Justice’s fifth year appearing in the Californian desert – then continued through Mexico, Europe, Glastonbury, London’s Field Day and North America. Reasoning: “We’re gonna tour for at least one more year,” says de Rosnay. “So, it’s trying to prepare for the future and also assess what we’ve done so far, see what we can fix.”

So, mid-tour, Justice and their crew get all their gear in a big shed and set up “like we’re doing a show” says de Rosnay, 42, by some margin the more voluble half of Justice, “and then we sit down. Part of it is working on the music: practising, seeing how we can change the sounds we make so we can play them on keyboards. The other thing is writing [out] all the lights, everything that’s happening on stage”.

As the man intimated, those shows will continue for many months hence, including two gigs at London’s Alexandra Palace in February 2025. By then, their live spectacular will be so big – or, just, so determined to go its own way – that a regular tour of UK arenas would be, well, a miscarriage of Justice. 

“We aren’t doing it the smartest way to make money,” acknowledges de Rosnay. “The production we build costs a lot to operate. When we had American management on the previous tour, they looked at the books and were like: ‘Are you stupid? Touring is supposed to make you money, not to make you poorer!’ But at the same time, we are always believers that money isn’t a good driver. We try to make things as good as possible and then find ways not to be ruined.”

One gig that reportedly got away would have been the biggest of their career: the Paris Olympics. I tell the pair that I heard from two sources that the organisers of the Closing Ceremony first asked Daft Punk to perform. After they declined, the organisers asked Justice. And after Justice declined, they asked Phoenix, who said yes. 

“No!” exclaims de Rosnay.

They were never asked?

“Let’s talk about another topic!”

Would they have liked to?

“Yeah, it’s a great opportunity and it’s cool. But whatever it is, it’s always good to make things on your own terms. And that [Ceremony] was great, Phoenix were cool.”

The same question is put to Justice’s manager, Pedro Winter. A hallowed figure within French music, he also managed Daft Punk and founded Ed Banger. It’s the discerning label that, in June 2003, with its second release, introduced the world to ‘Never Be Alone’, as it was still called, credited to Justice vs. Simian.

“We had discussions to do something for the Closing Ceremony,” reveals Winter. “But it was too complicated. The band were performing in New York at the time. So, it was more a schedule thing. Both the Paris Olympics and Justice wanted to do something, but the moons were not aligned. So, that’s sad. I would have loved them to have performed along with Phoenix and all those guys. But at the end of the day the Justice sound was all around in the stadium,” he notes, referring to a handful of Justice tracks – ‘Genesis’, ‘Love S.O.S.’ and ‘Hyperdrama’s blissed-out closer, Thundercat collaboration ‘The End’ – that rocked the Stade de France as the athletes paraded and the Olympic torch was ultimately handed over to Snoop Dogg and Billie Eilish on Long Beach, California, the opening soundtrack of Los Angeles 2028.

As the French music industry veteran who first released music by Justice, Winter is a crucial figure in their origin story. Equally, he’s better placed than most to contextualise their unique place within the music scene broadly known, by we rosbifs and probably by anyone outside Paris’ 18th arrondissement – the home of Ed Banger and of the Justice studio situated within de Rosnay’s home – as the French Touch. That is, Justice’s ability to tap into rock dynamics and presentation, not least in their album art and their immediately identifiable “cross” logo.

“Firstly, it’s coming from their culture – Gaspard and Xavier are definitely more rock- and prog rock-influenced artists than electronic,” says Winter. “They don’t care about Detroit and Chicago. They like it, but they don’t know the history and they don’t belong to it. They don’t have the knowledge compared to Daft Punk, who is a pure dance-heritage band. Justice is definitely more rock-orientated. 

“You feel it in the way they are, the way they sound, and of course in the way they grab the attention of the audience with the big Marshall amps and the energy onstage. This is why probably Vampire Weekend [indie] fans and old metalheads like me go: ‘Woah, we can dance to a band which is as noisy as Metallica.’ It’s in their DNA.”

Prior to forming Justice, Augé and de Rosnay had indeed played in rock bands, “so we had written tracks but nothing was ever released”, says de Rosnay. Then came that record label competition to remix some British indie band.

“At the time, we didn’t have computers so we made ‘We Are Your Friends’ without them,” says de Rosnay, nodding to those “limitations” that Ford flagged. “The sampler we used was an Akai S2000, so there wasn’t enough space. We had to pick only the chorus. We didn’t even listen to the full track, just the stems on a CD because, at the time, there were no transfers… We also took the first sound of the track because it was short enough. So, our remix is basically the keyboard sound, drums, vocals, the sound we sampled and bass. If we wanted to add more, we couldn’t.”

“But a fun fact is that James hated our remix,” says a smiling Augé, 45, before confirming that, yes indeed, Justice did hear his “feedback” that “he felt it was sounding like MIDI-jazz”. 

“I take full responsibility!” laughs Ford when I, in turn, “feedback” this comment. “I wouldn’t say I hated it, that’s maybe a little strong. But I maybe didn’t focus on it like I should have. And I definitely didn’t recognise it for the song it would become. Which, considering that’s essentially now my job most of the time, is one of those classic A&R ‘didn’t sign U2’ moments!”

Winter, though, had his ears screwed on.

“We met Pedro when he started Ed Banger, he’d only put out one record at the time,” recalls de Rosnay. Over dinner, they played him the two tracks they’d completed: a pair of remixes, one of them the Simian track, the other the electro-funky ‘Steamulation’, credited to Justice vs. Gambit. “We were like: ‘We only made these, but we can make more.’ He was like: ‘I like ‘Never Be Alone’.’ We were like: ‘Are you sure? The other one sounds much better to us.’ Pedro was like: ‘No, I want to put this one out.’ And he was right. But it didn’t immediately work. It started becoming something maybe one year later.”

As it happens, that journey was aided by the House of Disco Pogo. As de Rosnay points out: “Another fun fact – the first licensing of ‘Never Be Alone’ was on a CD of Jockey Slut,” he says of Volume 12 of ‘Disco Pogo for Punks in Pumps’, given away with the November 2003 edition of the magazine. “That was the first time we ever licensed a track in our lives.”

That same year, Erol Alkan received a CDR from Winter, three tracks comprising the initial releases on Ed Banger. The third of those was an unmastered version of ‘We Are Your Friends’, albeit “it was just called something like ‘Simian Justice Remix’,” Alkan recalls. 

“And immediately I was drawn to it,” says the DJ who, at the time, was the London club underground’s tastemaker-in-chief, courtesy of his Monday night sweatbox Trash. “It had immediate classic impact from the opening bars. It reminded me of a corner of dance music which I really loved, which was then mainly inhabited by someone like Jacques Lu Cont. It married a lot of the electronic influences that I was really into and were also a big part of Trash.”

He immediately played it out at Trash, and kept playing it out, there and during his regular sets at Bugged Out!. “To be honest, that original Simian track wasn’t well known. So, this felt like an original track, and it built up interest whenever I played it.” When he asked Winter who the creators were, the answer came back: “They’re two kids from Paris, you should meet them.”

As it happened, the excitement went both ways. “Erol was a huge deal for us when we started. When we heard his [booking] agent was interested in [signing] us,” says de Rosnay of Martje Kremers at Decked Out! (the agency founded by the people behind Bugged Out!, Jockey Slut and this very magazine), “we were like: ‘Of course! The same management as Daft Punk and the same agent as Erol? Why not? Let’s do it!’”

That said, “when we signed to Ed Banger, we had no idea we’d make music for a living. Gaspard and I were both graphic designers; at the time, I was graduating from school. It was only in 2005 or 06 that we decided we could give it a try full-time. When we started we had no idea what we were doing. We built it up brick by brick.”

Those bricks came in the form of commissions to apply their particular French touch to songs by myriad established artists who were themselves no slouches on the dancefloor. These included ‘She Wants To Move’ by N.E.R.D. (2004), ‘Blood On Our Hands’ by Death From Above 1979 (2005), ‘NY Excuse’ by Soulwax (2005) and, eventually, MGMT’s ‘Electric Feel’ (2008), for which Justice won the Grammy for Best Remixed Recording, Non-Classical. 

In those first few years, “I was really pushing them to do remixes,” says Winter, “and every time they were putting their hands into something, they were making it better. This is what they did with Franz Ferdinand, with Fatboy Slim (2005’s ‘Don’t Let the Man Get You Down’), with Britney Spears (2005’s ‘Me Against the Music’, which also featured Madonna), with Justin Timberlake (2007’s ‘LoveStoned’).”

That veritable production-line of remixes – we haven’t even mentioned the sixth one they did in 2005 alone, for Mystery Jets’ ‘You Can’t Fool Me Dennis’ – was, considers Winter, “the best way for them to get their sound, get their signature and, at the end of the day, get the Justice touch. And it arrived so quick. I met them in 2003, and within three or four years, they did 20 or 30 remixes”.

Touring, too, was important to that development.

“Because of having a British agent very early in Justice,” says de Rosnay, “we were playing more in Europe and Asia than France.” Plus, they had those forebears to follow. “Daft Punk especially, and Air, they really opened the door of the concept of being a French musician – it was like being an international musician. So, as it was happening to us, we were very happy and excited, but it didn’t look abnormal [because] we saw these examples.”

Meanwhile, Winter’s other managerial charges “were really, really supportive. Daft Punk were giving advice, and they spent some time in the studio [with Justice]. The vibe was super-nice and really [viewing them] as small [sic] brothers”.

“I had a very protective style with Daft Punk,” continues Winter, “and of course I tried to do the same with Justice. Not grabbing everything at the same time, not saying yes too fast. We took our time. At every level, what I learned with Daft Punk was useful to help create Justice.”

Or, as Alkan positions them, Justice back then were a band single handedly progressing “the marriage of Motörhead and electronica” with “a “fiercer, brasher music… Between 2004 and 2006, whenever I had a new Justice remix to play at Trash, I could feel the anticipation and energy before I even played it. Because I knew it was going to work. And I knew that everyone on the floor would understand it and react to it – and in some ways, even know who it was, without knowing who it was.”

Eventually, in June 2007, came a ferociously funky debut album titled, depending on your keyboard capabilities, ‘†’, or ‘Cross’, or ‘Justice’. The band characterised it as an “opera-disco” album, its appearance trailed by their dancefloor-igniting, Michael Jackson-channelling single ‘D.A.N.C.E.’. 

The doors, though, had already been blown off in September 2005 by the album’s long-lead first release. After those proof-of-concept remixes, the fat and fuzzy riffology of ‘Waters of Nazareth’ was Justice’s debut single. In Winter’s estimation: “That was a statement, a sonic statement: ‘This is who we are, this is how we’re going to make noise funky.’ And also it was a way for them to break the Daft Punk legacy: ‘OK, we’re going to sound our [own] way.’”

That sound, of course, inevitably, was a bricolage of ideas – just ones that hadn’t necessarily been jammed together before. “That’s the important thing about Justice,” says Alkan. “When you listen back to a lot of those productions, they are indebted to a vast array of influences. There’s a glitch aspect which you could hear in Aphex Twin, Planet Mu records and Mr. Oizo especially. Then there’s also a pop aspect with the hooks. And then the energy is completely lifted from a rock aesthetic.”

As is their visual flair. These one-time graphic designers are huge fans of the sleeve art of Hipgnosis, the legendary, London-based 60s and 70s design studio responsible for the covers of multiple canonical rock LPs. Says de Rosnay: “They made something with Led Zeppelin that we used as a template – to make a record cover where you don’t have the name of the band or the record, the tracklist, just an image.”

Fourteen years after Justice began using their own immediately recognisable logo, with the “t” in their name shaped like that cross – a cipher they’ve rolled out across all their album sleeves and their merch – Justin Bieber decided he’d use something similar in the depiction of the name of his new album. The title of that 2021 record? ‘Justice’. A legal letter from the band Justice to Team Bieber requested that the Canadian superstar cease and desist his use of “Justice” in tandem with the “cross”, a “Mark” that had been trademarked by Justice. 

“Let’s set the record straight,” says de Rosnay, a twinkle surely lurking behind those 70s shades, when BieberGate is mentioned. “He’s always been a very big inspiration for us, both as a musical artist but also as a visionary.”

“A fashion icon,” murmurs Augé.

Turning (slightly) serious, de Rosnay says that “we can’t fully disclose the type of exchange [of legal communiques], but everything was so blatant that there wasn’t much to say”.

Did Bieber have to pay them money?

De Rosnay: “No.”

So, did Justice get justice?

De Rosnay: “It’s something we can’t discuss, unfortunately.” 

Augé: “It’s a very American way…”

De Rosnay: “Not [necessarily] American, but one thing that really annoyed us [is] when you think that, because you have money, you can do whatever you want… All of this [legal complaint] was just for us to make a point that, no, it’s not because you have money that you are the king of the world and you can do whatever… At least we’re going to make it a bit of a pain in the ass. But hey, it happens. Everybody who knew, knew. It doesn’t matter.”

If Justin Bieber asked Justice to remix one of his tracks, and the track was good, would they do it?

“You are saying two things in a sentence that are incompatible,” de Rosnay replies, poker-faced. “I’m not going to say what.”

This year, on ‘Hyperdrama’, the cross is front and centre again, this time as a transparent sarcophagus, its corporeal contents evoking a see-through anatomical body where, as de Rosnay says, “you see the innards and everything”.

“We thought let’s do the cross like this because this image sums up this album, but also all the music we’ve done so far in a very simple and straightforward way. It’s a blend of something dirty that we don’t really want to touch but is cool to look at through something that is clean. The digital versus the organic instrument… It was just the most simple image we could come up with that described our music so accurately.”

The title, too, tells us where they’re at. Kinda.

“I just like the way it looks,” states Gaspard Augé, fed up explaining what it means several months after the album’s release, “how it resonates with the record.”

“‘Hyperdrama’ is a good sum-up of the music as we like to hear and make it: as exaggerated as possible in every sense,” expands de Rosnay. “To be overly euphoric, overly sad or epic when it needs to be.”

It also, ultimately, speaks to where Justice find themselves this evening, this moment, in this interview after the gig that never was. In Marseille, at the bottom of France, anticipating their Normandy “residency” reboot and readying for their next phase of international touring. Glastonbury, they say, was “a good one” – a rave endorsement from a conversationally understated pair who save everything “exaggerated” for the studio and stage. But they promise that their upcoming shows, including the London stop next February, will be – pardon my French – fucking off-the-scale.

“Right now, ‘Hyperdrama’ means to us a good time, and it’s a good time for this record to come out,” concludes Xavier de Rosnay. “We’ve been here long enough that we see a new generation of people coming to the shows and listening to the record – exactly the same way that, when we met, we were digging for records and finding bands that started in the 80s.” 

This fortysomething pair of intuitive pals have, quite happily, “now entered this vintage zone. But at the same time we still have one foot in the contemporary world. I could be wrong, but the new audiences are still seeing a band from today, and not a band that’s been doing the same thing for 20 years”.

This, then, is Justice for now… and Justice for all.  

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This article first appeared in issue six of Disco Pogo.

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Co-founder Johnno Burgess digs deep to recall his 30 personal highlights…

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Over the summer of 1994, Jockey Slut editors Paul Benney and Johnno Burgess threw six small parties in Manchester called Disco Pogo, the first outing for the name. The owners of Manchester’s Sankeys Soap club – Andrew Spiro and Rupert Campbell – were sufficiently impressed that they offered up their Friday nights to them from 25 November 1994. Declining the offer of terming the night Okey Dokey, Benney and Burgess settled on Bugged Out! (the superfluous exclamation point coming from the initial design by Barney Doodlebug), and they wondered whether the night would make it to that Christmas… 

30 years later, it’s one of the UK’s most enduring club nights with early appearances from The Chemical Brothers and Daft Punk and a who’s who of Detroit and Chicago DJs passing through its doors. They’ve stared into the depths of huge money pits with events in Ibiza (and the less glamorous Prestatyn) but have made it to the present day thanks to mega rave ups in old IKEAs and a former newspaper printing press, plus shindigs on Brighton beach. 

LFO and Autechre get the party started (1994)

For our opening night (25 November 1994) we were lucky enough to inherit two fitting live acts who were already booked on the date at Sankeys Soap, LFO and Autechre, the former about to appear on the cover of Jockey Slut. So, our first night sold out. After a period of being under half empty, we sold out again in March – with Richie Hawtin – and the night finally became established. 

The Chemical Brothers (1994 – present)

Our first club promotions in the summer of 1994 featured our student friends who were then on the crest of a wave with the track ‘Chemical Beats’. Then known as The Dust Brothers, Tom Rowlands and Ed Simons have since played for us nearly two dozen times at The Haçienda (a sold-out live show), Sankeys, fabric, various festival stages, two of our Weekenders in Bognor Regis and Vauxhall clubs Fire and Area. They even brought their club night Glint to our short-lived Heaven residency (choosing the 500-capacity Soundshaft for its intimacy). They would often road-test their new tracks; we were lucky enough to witness ‘Galvanise’ for the first time at Sankeys, watch ‘Go’ tear strips off London’s Area and at their first Printworks show in 2017 they experimented with several tracks that would end up on ‘No Geography’. 

Carl Cox weekender (1995)

In 1995, Carl Cox was huge on the rave circuit but keen to play smaller clubs. Not because his popularity was waning, he was just hip to where the wind was blowing. We were also booking the Saturday at Sankeys at the time, so we offered Carl a weekender. It was one of the most packed nights in that first year with an incendiary fizz throughout - the anticipation that Cox was going to play, the buzz in the queue and then the madness that ensued when he fully delivered made for a primal atmosphere; it was the Hardfloor mix of Mory Kante’s ‘Yeke Yeke’ that took the roof off (to use that well-worn phrase). He came back six months later to headline New Year’s Eve. 

Carl Craig swaps shirts (1995)

Across 1994 and 1995, we were a willing magnet for Detroit and Chicago DJs with D. Wynn, Derrick May, Cajmere, Derrick Carter, Boo Williams, Glenn Underground and Juan Atkins making the trip to the once desolate Ancoats area that one of them described as “more fucked-up than Detroit”. But it took a little while to land Carl Craig. In the mid-90s he was a producer of note but less known as a DJ; this didn’t stop the trainspotters coming out in droves when he finally graced the club, some bringing vinyl for him to sign at the end of his set (69’s ‘Desire’ was an anthem in our first year). One regular, who worked in Vinyl Exchange, went a step further and proposed they swap shirts like footballers, which Craig gamely did. 

Daft Punk (1995 – 2000)

In October 1995, Daft Punk wrapped their studio equipment in towels, put them in suitcases and made their way to Bugged Out! to play live, airing ‘Da Funk’, ‘Alive’ and some other early tracks. They returned in 1997, ‘Homework’ done, with a decks and FX set-up and then again the following year for our 4th birthday. They had initially turned the invite down to appear at this celebration but the week before asked if they could join the line-up. As we’d already gone over budget they played for expenses only and we even got a Thomas Bangalter live set thrown into the deal. There was no social media back then and the internet seldom used, so the only way we could let people know that Daft Punk and Thomas Bangalter had been added to the bill was to go around Liverpool fly-postering the news on top of our existing posters. In 1999, they were billed to play one of our Ibiza shows but had to make a swift exit to go and make ‘One More Time’ (their manager and a friend of Jeff Mills – both French – stepped in instead; people still think they saw Daft Punk that night). To make up for that cancellation they played our first night at fabric later that year (again for expenses). Business was certainly done very differently in the 90s. 

Green Velvet ready, prepare to flash! (1996)

After hearing from the likes of Derrick Carter what an incredible DJ Curtis Jones was we were desperate to get him over to Manchester; not least because he ran two labels that were cornerstones of our club – Cajual and Relief. Once he’d played Sankeys, however – and found he shared our kooky sense of humour – he became one of our regulars. After ‘Flash’ became a thunderous part of our nights we invited him to perform live and in anticipation of him playing the track, gave out 500 fun cameras on the door for the crowd to hold aloft and, well, flash at the appropriate moment. Another sign of those times: cameras were a most peculiar thing to see in clubs. 

Dave Clarke & Justin Robertson, The Courtyard (1998 – 2002)

Nation in Liverpool was the 4,500-capacity, three-roomed venue Cream used weekly at the peak of the super clubs. When Sankeys shut in 1998 we were offered a monthly Friday all-nighter slot which we were hesitant to take; moving from 800 a week to 4,500 was a real hike in capacity and we worried we’d lose our more underground following. With that in mind, we didn’t really change the programming too much, just made sure there was a bigger headliner and we had a third room to play with to extend the music policy further into breaks and hip hop. We put the train times for homeward travel after 6am across the North on the flyer and people came in their droves. We had five successful years there and the heart of the club for most of that time was the Courtyard. This was the 1,000 capacity room Justin Robertson and Dave Clarke helmed. Regulars (some we termed the Courtyard Kids) would pile down the front and not leave for the other rooms all night. Robertson played the techno du jour – artists like Smith & Selway, Umek and the heavier side of house from Josh Wink and Danny Tenaglia. Clarke banged the hell out of it for 90 minutes, sometimes having a nap on the sofa backstage before taking to the decks. He pre-empted where techno was about to go too when I left the club with ‘Emerge’ Fischerspooner scrawled on a slip of paper at the end of one of his sets. 

The first Creamfields (1998)

Hosting our first festival tent at the inaugural Creamfields event in 1998, we wanted to do something different with the visuals, a world away from the none-more-90s psychedelic fractal bollocks. So, we enlisted a team who were still using old film which they manually fed into projectors for a more visceral approach which would match the rough techno and drum’n’bass. They nailed the brief so well; if you entered the tent during Doc Scott’s set you were met with films of riot footage from the 70s and 80s, with the loved-up ravers facing mobs hurling Molotov cocktails at them.

Armand Van Helden hits No. 1 (1999)

The late-90s saw underground artists turn pop stars and in 1999, it was the turn of Armand Van Helden who had come to prominence with dark house tracks like ‘Witch Doktor’. He headlined the main room of Liverpool in 1999, the weekend he was to hit the number one slot in the charts with the immeasurably more commercial ‘You Don’t Know Me’. When it’s shard-like strings and Duane Harden vocal burst out of the speakers the crowd erupted in unfettered joy. The slogan we had running down one side of the wall – ‘It’s Just A Big Disco’, a piss-take of Gatecrasher’s ‘We Will Always Be With You – never felt so apt.

‍Amnesia Saturdays, Ibiza (1999)

In 1999, Ibiza was soundtracked by ATB ‘9pm (Till I Come)’ and populated with fluffy bras to match the vapid music. So, perhaps it was not the right year to bring Bugged Out! to the island. As Ibiza virgins we didn’t realise the Saturday night we’d been granted by Amnesia, was the “changeover” day for Brits, so we looked out on a huge club that was pretty full of locals and isle workers who hadn’t paid to get in. We brought Jeff Mills to Ibiza for the first time (prompting Muzik magazine to write ‘Jeff Mills in Ibiza? Who cares’ as he didn’t really fit in with the Judge Jules-ification of the region). After playing an incredible set that featured an early play of ‘Knights of the Jaguar’ Mills went to sit in the VIP with Sven Väth whose Cocoon would become the runaway techno success in ensuing years while we left with empty pockets.

Bugged Out! Weekender (2000)

Our first large scale event was called ‘a spiritual success’ by the NME due to the poor attendance, but buoyed by a crowd determined to have a good time. In conjunction with SJM and the sorely-missed Chris York, we pulled together a line-up that featured Underworld, Roni Size’s Reprazent, Green Velvet, Richie Hawtin, Carl Craig and pretty much everyone we could convince to join us for a weekend at a Pontins in north Wales. It was blighted by poor weather resulting in snail-pace train journeys (it took nine hours to get from London!) and late marketing; if social media had existed in 2000, we would have sold out but as it was we had to rely on posters across the North West, flyers and what press we could get. There were many highlights though, including Mr Scruff playing all Sunday afternoon in the pub, a pre-fame Doves playing live, Harvey headlining the Electric Chair room (at one point a customer fell through the ceiling having got somewhat lost) and – due to the sales – being able to get down the front to see the whites of Karl Hyde’s eyes when Underworld headlined. 

Erol Alkan’s first appearance (2001)

After interviewing Erol for Jockey Slut about his club night Trash I went to his house in Tufnell Park to – quaint as this now sounds – put together a CD of new tracks for The Avalanches (which we posted to Australia). Playing me his latest bootlegs – and a bunch of dance tracks he liked – I asked Erol if he wanted to fill in for David Holmes that Friday as he had pulled out of his slot at our fabric residency. Seeing Erol helm Room 3 that night was to witness a sea change that would flush the more boring prog house bores from clubs the following year. Looking like one of the Ramones and breaking rules he wasn’t aware existed Erol was a revelation and the room was bouncing after only a few tracks. We offered him a residency on the spot… 

Jon Carter playing ‘My Sweet Lord’ in Liverpool (2001)

Indelibly stamped on the memories of all who were there, the very night George Harrison died Jon Carter ended another of his riotous, super eclectic sets in the Annexe at Nation, with ‘My Sweet Lord’ prompting tears in the local security guards and staff lining up to thank him for marking the sad occasion of one of their own gone far too soon. As a side note, not only was it unusual to hear a track like this coming out of a Function One sound system in 2001, but it’s surfeit of choral hallelujahs sounded incredible on pingers.

Miss Kittin & The Hacker at International Deejay Gigolo’s night (2001)

Like all influential live moments, they are never as busy as people remember. When we landed the Gigolo showcase – featuring DJ Hell and Miss Kittin & The Hacker –  electroclash was still very much a cult thing; Nag Nag Nag and Body Rockers wouldn’t start in London until the following year. But despite the room in Heaven being half-full the audience was captivated and left changed. At a time when London had been bored to death by a cul-de-sac of ‘tribal’ drums and DJs who wore expensive jumpers your Gran would appreciate, we needed a shot in the arm. Miss Kittin plunged that syringe, emerging on stage head to toe in white swaddling bands which she peeled off during the first song to reveal a black cat suit. The Hacker, her studious foil, soundtracked this with ‘Stock Exchange’ and ‘Frank Sinatra’. Laughing at the death of Ol’ Blue Eyes in a three-minute pop song? It wasn’t John Digweed playing an endless load of ‘epic house’ now was it? 

New Year’s Day All-Dayers (2002 - 2023)

In 2001, we started a Sunday afternoon club called Bugged Out: Chilled Out at Heavenly’s new pub in Islington. The top half of the pub where I DJed - mainly playing lost 80s pop classics and yacht rock – attracted sozzled ravers who had left fabric, gone to an afterparty and ended up clearly needing some lost 80s pop classics and yacht rock. We started a New Year’s Day all-dayer on January 1, 2002, that ended up running for over 20 years. It moved to the Old Queens Head in 2008 for over 12 hours of mayhem with a regular audience that made unlikely peak-time anthems out of Toto’s ‘Africa’ and John Farnham’s ‘You’re the Voice’. 

The Avalanches at Sankeys (2003)

A mutant night of music with a line-up of two parts. The Avalanches DJ core of Robbie Chater and Dexter Fabay played a set of very on-trend mash ups (a Queen track into a Dr Dre tune, incredibly exciting at the time when in the hands of a DMC champ like Dexter). They were followed by Chicago DJ Heather whose pure jackin’ house was full of fire and energy and totally at odds with what had gone before. 

Mylo live at the 10th birthday (2004)

On the verge of becoming a huge festival headliner Mylo agreed to play in the relatively small confines of The End’s main room. Mylo had become a good friend of the club and without our knowledge used the screen behind him to beam pictures of the promoters in various states of disrepair he’d taken at afterparties into the venue…

Ivan Smagghe’s ‘Suck My Deck’ (2004)

We first heard Smagghe playing a free party in Shoreditch in 2003, along with Ewan Pearson, and our minds were blown. It was the period when electroclash begat electro-house and it sounded super fresh, with Kompakt records more to the fore than International Deejay Gigolos. A former record shop staffer Smagghe would also drop dark, deep-cut curveballs; he was the perfect choice to mix our new CD series ‘Suck My Deck’ gracing the cover looking none-more-Gallic smoking a fag. It still perfectly captures the sound of London in 2004. 

Erol Alkan’s ‘Bugged In’ Selection (2005)

When we started the ‘Bugged Out/Bugged In’ compilations (with one CD mixed and clubby; the other for home listening), Erol took the brief for ‘Bugged In’ to another level of ravishing chill-out. He weaved 60s-sounding tracks with actual songs from late in that decade, alongside outliers from Gonzales and Campag Velocet. It leant into the bizarre when the epic boogie of Imagination’s ‘Just An Illusion’ met the repetitious lament of impLOG’s prog jazz ‘Holland Tunnel Drive’. This found fans beyond the usual club compilations; it was a huge fave on the Arctic Monkeys tour bus that year and Erol still adds to an ever-mutating version on his SoundCloud. 

Tiga’s ‘Sexor’ launch (2006)

DJs curating club nights has been a common theme for many years, but it was still a new idea when we handed Tiga the keys to our night at The End to shape the launch of his debut album, ‘Sexor’. He chose friends 2manydjs and Trevor Jackson to join him in the booth, but the masterstroke was asking a band that soundtracked his salad days as a raver to play live. Altern 8 took to the stage in their old dust masks and warfare suits even bringing their 90s MC to chat over the frantic beats. Three chaps down the front who went on to form Klaxons later that year were taking notes… 

Field Day (2007-2019)

Bugged Out! were the last to join the Field Day collective put together by Marcus Weedon and Tom Baker of Eat Your Own Ears. We were to add leftfield dance that matched the current climate of the new festival, which was heavy on bands and unorthodox artists. Year one was at the peak of Ed Banger’s influence, though we later weaved through post-dubstep and the advent of garage-influenced acts like Disclosure and Julio Bashmore, coming back around to techno when we finally parted ways with the event in 2019. ‍

Justice at the closing of The End (2009)

Bugged Out! hosted the penultimate Saturday night before The End closed, the West End venue where we’d held our parties since 2002. For such a momentous occasion the hottest act of the time agreed to DJ. Justice had a crowd waiting from 6pm (one sporting a ‘cross’ tattoo on his shin) and when they arrived it felt like taking two pop stars past the queue with a deafening roar (despite the fact the ones still outside were unlikely to witness their incendiary set). A fitting send-off. 

Tiga warehouse rave (2009)

During the period following the closure of The End we became adept at using the warehouse circuit of car parks to put on nights. The appeal was essentially back to basics clubbing, a red light, a strobe and a basement affair. And sweat. When we held an event on Scrutton Street for Tiga it could’ve left us legally challenged. It was so hot and sweaty that perspiration was running down the walls over plug sockets and it soon started to rain down on the crowd potentially ruining clothing. We initially covered the mixer and decks with a large piece of cardboard to try and protect it as a stop gap. I then ran to a nearby pub – The Old Blue Last – to ask if they had a couple of umbrellas we could borrow. I spent most of Tiga’s set holding a brolly over the electrics worrying that someone was going to get electrocuted, most likely myself. Old raver Tiga was thrilled with the authenticity of the scenario.

XOYO opening night (2010)

Though it still makes me shudder, the opening night of Shoreditch’s XOYO was memorable for all the wrong reasons. The Wednesday before our Saturday was supposed to be the opening night, but it was cancelled because the venue wasn’t ready. By the Saturday the council had signed it off as fit for purpose and the doors opened on Bugged Out!’s new regular home. All was going well but as headliners Simian Mobile Disco put their first track on a fuse blew, the sound went off and the emergency lighting came on. With the club full we were scrambling around in a panic, surely a fuse can just be replaced? It turned out it was a major fuse from the 1960s that was in the adjacent building and not accessible until Monday morning. Hundreds of dejected clubbers left the building followed by us with our tails between our legs… 

Bugged Out! on the London Eye (2013)

As part of Red Bull’s Revolutions in Sound event the brand gave us wings with our own pod on the London Eye which they had filled with a club night from the last 25 years of London; each had a mini rave as it rotated around once. The pods held 25 lucky competition winners and we had Green Velvet on the way up and Erol Alkan on the way down (playing ‘Waterloo Sunset’ as we finally docked). 

Bugged Out! Weekenders (2012-2016)

Some 12 years after our event at Pontins we revived the weekender idea at the much better Butlin’s site in Bognor Regis. There is something magical about being able to bob from venue to venue – giddy from the blinking arcade machines – in the knowledge that you have a bed you can slink off to at the end of the night before resuming the party the following day. It’s a festival without tents, customers cocooned from the outside world for three days with Papa Johns and Burger King for sustenance. Over five years, we saw Disclosure play live before they went supernova, headline DJ sets from The Chemical Brothers and Four Tet and Kerri Chandler playing in the Sports Bar with decks on pool tables. Frankie Knuckles closed the 2013 edition and I set off the confetti cannon as the bass first dropped on his ‘Your Love’. He had been nervous before playing but other DJs on the bill calmed him, with the likes of Mala and Zed Bias asking to be introduced so they could pay their respects for his mighty influence. 

Erol Alkan’s 10-hour set (2013)

Erol’s Easter Thursday sets at Fire in Vauxhall started off clocking out at five hours in 2009, with a couple of guests joining him. By 2010, he’d jumped up to seven hours playing alone in the main room with the first couple of hours at a double digit bpm and lit by candlelight. The nine-hour set was supposed to be the final one, partly because of the hours the club operated in (it re-opened after we finished as an all-dayer). But by 2013, Erol went for the full ten as we opened earlier at 9pm and concluded at 7am. As he’d given up alcohol by that point he didn’t pee for the whole set – another point to be applauded.

Residents James Holroyd, Rob Bright, Fall Forward (1994 - present)

The future’s Bright, the future’s Holroyd… James Holroyd, friend turned resident and a perfect choice of wingman. In 1994, techno was a pretty banging affair, but Jim always played a much deeper and considered set before the guest took over with sometimes up to three hours of alluring music that enticed all on to the dancefloor. He was the first to play 51 Days ‘Paper Moon’ at Bugged Out! which sums up his vibe. He always impressed the guests too with Carl Cox asking him to carry on playing (eating into his own set time) and The Chemical Brothers inviting him to go on their first proper tour with them – he’s still their tour DJ 30 years later. Rob Bright helmed room two when it opened in November 1995, with a smaller space where he could make ‘Metronomic Underground’ by Stereolab a regular anthem. When he took over the 1,000 capacity Courtyard in Liverpool he played Kate Bush and The Fall early doors, just so he could hear their music loud on a huge sound system. Over the last 10 years Fall Forward has been resident. He entered the DJ competition at the 2012 Weekender (he didn’t win, the runner up was Hannah Wants who went on to be huge!) but his versatility has seen him able to play after huge acts like The Chems and before Fatboy Slim, play alongside Bicep in Barcelona (where we hired body builders instead of dancers) and always rocking our New Year’s Day all-dayers. 

Mega raves: Printworks and Drumsheds (2017 - present)

The landscape for London clubs has changed over the last seven years since Printworks ushered in an era of event clubbing and daytime raving. Balls of brass were needed to fill a diary full of 5,000 capacity events that finished when clubs usually opened,  but with the line-ups stacked with headliners they became unmissable, all housed inside the old Daily Mail printing press – so at least some good finally came out of it. When Printworks closed the next step was three times bigger and housed in an old IKEA; Drumsheds is where we are holding our 30th anniversary party with The Chemical Brothers again top of the pile. 

Bugged Out! - On The Beach (2024)

We are sometimes offered stages to host that we just can’t turn down. Brighton beach has been known for huge events since Fatboy Slim’s free party in 2002 attracted 250,000 to dance on the pebbles. On The Beach holds 240,000 less than that but is a lot less hectic. We programmed a date in July with Underworld headlining and the sun shone from morning until ‘Born Slippy’ inevitably closed proceedings (with hundreds of Brightonian’s watching gratis from the pier). 

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Before Underworld, The Chems, Leftfield, even Orbital, there was 808 State. Formed in the white heat of Manchester’s late-80s acid house revolution, the innovative and always shifting alliance of forward-thinking DJs and producers, established musicians and agent provocateurs led to some of Britain’s best dancefloor sounds. Looking back over their almost 40-year career, founding member Graham Massey recalls a journey of incredible highs and devastating lows to long-time fan Luke Bainbridge. “I’m still very proud of all that music,” he proclaims...

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They were the first British acid house group, born out of acid jams made by a loose collective of revolving members on a hodge podge of equipment in basements. An unlikely Bash Street Kids gang of ground-breaking innovators who took acid house from the warehouses and nightclubs on to ‘Top of the Pops’ and into unsuspecting living rooms across Britain. Their biggest hit, ‘Pacific’, one of the seminal early British house records, still sounds unique, fresh and timeless today, as does much of their extensive back catalogue and their cultural importance and influence as early electronic innovators is often criminally underrated.

But along with the highs, 808 State have experienced some pretty devastating lows, particularly in recent years, which have left founding member Graham Massey as the only remaining member of the band and keeper of the 808 flame: a position he’s still getting his head around. “I feel things really personally and to me there’s a lot of scars in there,” he says. “There’s been death, there’s been prison, there’s been mysterious disappearances… those things loom large in my personal view.”

Now 64, Massey is a true leftfield musical polymath, a counterculture icon with a fascinating 50-year musical journey that encompasses prog rock, punk, post-punk, jazz, electro, hip hop, psych-rock, acid house, and pretty much any other leftfield genre. He thinks his forays into musical rebellion might have started when he was denied the chance to learn an instrument as a teenager by the music department at Burnage High School in the early-70s. He smiles: “I just thought: “Fuck you! If I can’t have an instrument, I’ll have ALL the instruments.” 

He joined his first band as a teenager, a short-lived Gong-influenced band called Aqua, who soon split into two bands, Crispy Ambulance and Biting Tongues, both of whom ended up signing to Factory Records. Massey was the youngest member of Biting Tongues and it was a huge learning experience for him. “There was some amazing talent in that band.” The singer worked for a publisher in London and used his contacts to get them gigs including The ICA and Seven Dials Club and as a Factory artist he had a free pass to The Haçienda when it opened in 1982.

By the mid-80s, his life revolved around what would later become Manchester’s Northern Quarter, enrolling on a production course at the recently opened School of Sound Recording and running a café opposite the influential record shop Eastern Bloc. “It was quite a music café,” he recalls.
“I used to DJ and John Peel would come in when he was in town - people would bring in demos for him.”

Then owned by an anarchic co-operative, Eastern Bloc was one of the first shops to sell acid house and was a magnet for young Mancunian DJs and musicians. One of Massey’s regular customers was one of Eastern Bloc’s owners, a larger-than-life character called Martin Price: “He used to come in for a butty and we just got chatting.”

Through Price, Massey met various young musicians and rappers that hung around Eastern Bloc, including Gerald Simpson (A Guy Called Gerald), Nicholas Lockett (who went on to become the rapper MC Tunes), hip hop outfit Shure-4 and two young whippersnapper DJs, Darren Partington and Andy Barker, from Ancoats who called themselves The Spinmasters. This loose collective came together and made a record under the name Hit Squad Mcr, each contributing a track. Apart from Massey, who was in his mid-20s and Price, who was in his early-30s, the rest were teenagers. Although a lot of the record was more hip hop-based, some of those involved, especially Simpson, Massey and Price, were being increasingly influenced by the imported acid house that was beginning to be played at The Haçienda, Stuffed Olives and on Stu Allan’s radio show on Key 103. 

“When I met Gerald, he was well ahead,” says Massey. “He was just so into music, he walked around with headphones on the whole time and just made music. He’s not changed all these years later. You went to his house and he had everything set up in the attic with these massive bass bin speakers made from chipboard and bits of wardrobes and things. His mum used to bring us pizza.”

When they did a gig to promote the Hit Squad Mcr record at the Boardwalk, Massey, Simpson and Price did an acid jam at the end. He still has the tape from that gig, with the jam credited to the Thermo Kings. When they went into SSR to record some more early acid jams, he wrote on the cassette State 808. They were then booked for an early warehouse rave and the name was printed wrongly as 808 State, but the embryonic group decided that sounded better and stuck with it.

At the time, things were quite loose and fluid. Nobody had a record deal and there weren’t really any set line-ups. Simpson would play with 808 State, but Massey would also often accompany him for A Guy Galled Gerald gigs, like the infamously chaotic gig at Victoria Baths which was broadcast on Tony Wilson’s ‘Other Side of Midnight’ show. 

“Gerald got booked for that and I just bumped into him in town and it’s like: ‘I’m doing this thing you wanna come down and help me out?’”

Through his Eastern Bloc contacts, Martin Price managed to convince Nine Mile Distribution to advance 808 State £500 to make a record, by telling them they were Britain’s first acid house group, which was pretty much true and the trio of Simpson, Massey and Price recorded ‘Newbuild’ over a weekend. Named after a housing project that Price and his Eastern Bloc partners were involved with in Bolton, ‘Newbuild’ was raw and futuristic, and some of the tracks, like the incredible ‘Flow Coma’ still sound like nothing else today.

What did Graham think of the record when it was finished? “I liked the density of it. But that was also its biggest criticism at the time, that it was too many things, as it’s not as stripped-back as some of the US stuff, whose beauty lies in it being primitive and stripped-back. It never got played in The Haçienda because it would just sound wrong in there, as it’s too thick and too polyrhythmic. It didn’t fit into the acid house scene and wasn’t embraced by anyone other than John Peel. He started playing it, which meant it got wider distribution and ended up in the record shops in places like Cornwall, where Aphex (Twin) got hold of it early on.” ‘Newbuild’ was hugely influential to the then teenage Richard D James, and a decade later he would reissue it on his own label Rephlex, along with a compilation, ‘Prebuild’, of very early 808 recordings and all-night jams, including the recording of that first Boardwalk gig as Thermo Kings. If you want to hear the roots of 808, ‘Newbuild’ and ‘Prebuild’ are the best place to start.

Impressed by ‘Newbuild’, John Peel invited 808 State to record a Peel session for him. 808 knew New Order had recorded a Peel Session in their own studio, rather than traipse to London and use the BBC studio like every other band had to and decided they wanted to do the same. “John Peel was like: ‘Yeah, I think we can do it’. And we just started.” By the time the BBC came back and said actually they wouldn’t allow 808 to record up north, the band had already come up with the bones of what would be the breakthrough hit. 

‘Pacific’ got its first plays at The Thunderdome (a notoriously rough club in north Manchester that even Shaun Ryder once told me was a bit “moody” for his liking) where the Spinmasters were now residents. They would play the early version of ‘Pacific’ off cassette, to a huge reaction. The band also handed out a few white labels. “I remember me and Gerald taking it to Stu Allan’s radio show on a Sunday night and to The Haçienda, so Jon Dasilva had it early,” says Massey. “It had a good six months of its own life before Gary Davies heard it in Ibiza and he started playing it on Radio One in the daytime. It wasn’t even a single, it was on the album! It just got all these nudges all the time like John Peel playing it, then he [Gary Davies] put rockets under it.”

In the six months to a year that it took for ‘Pacific’ to take flight, Simpson was increasingly focused on his own music. He had a huge hit with ‘Voodoo Ray’ and had just released his debut album ‘Hot Lemonade’. Simpson was always something of a lone wolf, so it was inevitable he would ultimately end up as a solo artist. He went on to release the ground breaking ‘Black Street Technology’ and carve out a fascinating 30-year career of his own.

After Simpson left, Price suggested to Massey that they bring in The Spinmasters to augment the 808 line-up. The Spinmasters had been DJing since they were 11, getting their first DJ gig at the Salvation Army in Ancoats when they were 13, wearing matching grey and maroon Adidas tracksuits. One of their early residencies was a rough boozer in Ancoats where the decks were placed on top of the chest freezer behind the bar. Every time a customer ordered a burger, The Spinmasters had to lift their decks up so bar staff could rummage in the freezer and pull out a frozen burger. Not something DJs get asked to do at the Warehouse Project nowadays.

Darren and Andy jumped at the chance to join 808 State, completing what would become the group’s most successful line-up. They also brought an extra element to 808, as they were at the heart of the early warehouse scene in Manchester, helping Andrew’s older brother Eric, an iconic figure on the scene, to put on early raves.

“I didn’t like it when it was badged the ‘Second Summer of Love’ and associated with Woodstock and hippies and all that,” Partington later told me. “I hated that. For me it had fuck all to do with hippies. Me, Andy and Eric spending Saturday afternoon sweeping out a warehouse in the city centre, then installing a generator so we can have a huge party and have it right off that night – what the fuck has that got to do with middle class hippies? Fuck the hippies – they had nothing on acid house.”

Shortly after the Spinmasters joined, 808 were offered a Tuesday night slot on the influential Manchester community radio station Sunset Radio. “Initially all four of us went and did it,” says Massey, “but it quickly became evident that those two [Spinmasters] as a double act were just brilliant, they had a kind of natural exuberance going on.”

The 808 Radio Show completely captured the zeitgeist, the raw energy and euphoria of the era and the underground house scene. It was a smash hit in and around Manchester, so much so that people would schedule their midweek around it, having house parties around the radio. The Spinmasters would play the latest releases and imports, which you couldn’t hear anywhere else and were hard to get hold of, so everyone taped the show and they would also do ‘shout outs’ to whoever phoned in. The only problem with Sunset was the signal area was so small, people on the outskirts of Manchester struggled to receive it. As a 15-year-old in Rochdale, north Manchester, I bought a huge T-shaped aerial from Tandy that covered most of my bedroom wall so I could get the 808 State show. Tapes of the show were shared at school and in record shops and Massey says they would sometimes hear tapes of the show on tour abroad, in cool clothes shops or record stores in Barcelona or New York. I’ve still got my tapes of the show and listened to them so much back then, I can still recall the quirky adverts like the one for Stolen From Ivor: ‘They’re in the Arndale, nice and handy, next to Argos, opposite Tandy...’ The 808 Show was our Hot Mix Dance Party and the Spinmasters were our Hot Mix 5.

How did the Spinmasters joining change the dynamic and musical direction of 808 State? “Well, you have to think of the characters,” says Massey. “Martin could be any one of five people on any given day. He was a big character, when he walked into the room he could dominate a whole room of people with ideas and it can be a million miles an hour… but Darren’s not far behind. Darren would also be a hyper billion ideas an hour. Andrew was always a lot quieter, but as a duo those two as The Spinmasters also had their own inner dynamic. Andrew had a stubbornness as well, when he decided on something he’s going to stick to it. Then there was me in the middle trying to deal with everything.” 

But the dynamic worked, as the new line-up went in and recorded ‘Quadrastate’, the follow-up to ‘Newbuild’, six tracks and less than half-an-hour long, including the first released version of ‘Pacific’.

The journalist and co-founder of ZTT, Paul Morley, had missed 808’s early releases, but when he saw them performing a track with MC Tunes called ‘Dance Yourself to Death’ on Snub TV he was intrigued. He arranged to get the train to Manchester to meet them and discuss signing them to the label he’d started with Trevor Horn in 1983, which had already had huge success with Frankie Goes to Hollywood, Art of Noise and Grace Jones. 

“He wasn’t aware of ‘Quadrastate’ or ‘Newbuild’,” says Massey, “and he came up and discovered there was the radio show, the record shop and the studio and it was like a perfect storm you know? It’s like: ‘Oh, this is very attractive, isn’t it?’

“Trevor Horn was really excited about what we were doing, because it was somewhat in parallel with what he was doing – making kind of records out of noise you know, making collages and using the latest production stuff.”

ZTT re-released ‘Pacific’ and it ended up reaching the Top 10 and everything changed for 808. “I quit my job as a roofer and suddenly we were on ‘Top of the Pops’,” Barker told me back in 2012, still in slight disbelief. “My mam said: ‘What are you lot doing on ‘Top of the Pops’!?” 

Did Massey have any idea ‘Pacific’ would have such a long life?

“Oh no, not at all!”

‘Pacific’ has now long been a key part of the soundtrack to the lives of a generation, way beyond the dancefloor. A song that, 36 years on, people still choose for their funerals and weddings. 

“It’s hard to say what makes it have an emotional impact like that. I remember when trying to make that record at the back of my mind was ‘Open Your Eyes’ by Marshall Jefferson and the way when you dropped that record the atmosphere in the club literally became humid. Sometimes those chemicals in your body change to music and it was like chasing down that feeling of euphoria in a tropical situation.”

The band then quickly recorded the ‘90’ album, which is a brilliantly vivid snapshot of the British house scene in 1989/90. Most of ‘90’ has aged remarkably well, for a record that is now 35 years old in a genre that likes to pride itself on reinvention. Much of the press were still wary of acid house at the time, but The Guardian declared that with ‘90’, 808 had ‘mapped out the future of club music, utilising techno, ambient and rock...’ The NME gave it 10 out of 10.

808 had started work on their next album ‘ex:el’ in Revolution studio in Cheadle Hulme, a quiet commuter suburb of Stockport, when they got a phone call from Iceland. 

“I was like: ‘Is it Björk?!’ and it was!” Björk told Massey she’d been listening to ‘Newbuild’ and ‘Quadrastate’ on tour with the Sugarcubes and was interested in working with 808 on her first solo album. They were due to appear on ‘The Word’ with MC Tunes, so Björk came down to the recording. “She had this boom box with a cassette of some of the tunes from ‘Debut’ like ‘The Anchor Song’ and ‘Violently Happy’ but done with a brass band and no vocals. She was like: ‘This is where I’m up to and I want to go electronic.’

Massey ended up inviting her up to Revolution to guest on the new 808 album. 

“She did it in two days. She went off in the rain to write lyrics wandering round Cheadle Hulme.”

Massey and Björk really hit it off and used to send each other tapes of music. “I’m a complete jazz nut and she was a complete jazz nut and had worked in a record shop in Reykjavik. Her depth of musical knowledge was huge so there was a lot of bonding over things like Brazilian music and artists like Deodato.”

Björk even wrote a song about their musical pen pal relationship called ‘Headphones’ (with the opening lyrics ‘Genius to fall asleep to your tape last night’), that she dedicated to Massey on her second solo album ‘Post’. He also co-wrote ‘Army of Me’ and ‘Modern Things’ on ‘Post’.

‘ex:el’ featured Björk and Bernard Sumner from New Order, as 808 set the template for electronic bands to feature guest vocalists that many other outfits like The Chemical Brothers would later adopt to great success. ‘Leo Leo’ from ‘ex:el’ could almost be an early proto-Chemical Brothers track. The album also boasted two Top 10 singles, ‘Cubik’ and ‘In Yer Face’, the two most bonkers hit singles that year. After ‘ex:el’ was released, 808 State then sold out the 10,000 capacity G-Mex, then the big hometown gig for Manchester. 

The band had also signed to Tommy Boy in the US and were all set to embark on their first US tour, when at 7pm the evening before the rest of the band got a call from Martin Price to say he wasn’t going. Shocked, the other three went round to his house to try and talk him round, but Price was adamant. Massey, Barker and Partington decided there was no way they were going to blow out the US tour and got on the plane to America the next morning without him. Price then left the band. He started a short-lived electronic outfit called Switzerland, then did some production work including the brilliant debut single by Rochdale rappers Kaliphz, ‘Vibe Da Joint’, but then disappeared off the radar.

808’s fourth album, 1993’s ‘Gorgeous’, included guest vocals from Ian McCulloch and an unexpected reworking of UB40’s ‘One in 10’. On the ‘Gorgeous’ tour, they took Moby around the UK tour as their support. Massey put him up at his house, took him to The Haçienda and introduced him to Tony Wilson. “Almost no place in the world has influenced me more musically than Manchester,” Moby told the crowd at the Mancunian date of his ‘Play’ 20th anniversary tour recently. “Going to The Haçienda with Tony Wilson and Graham from 808 State… I thought I was going to spend my whole life as a tutor at community college and then I’m hanging out with these legends…”

Their last record for ZTT, 1996’s ‘Don Solaris’, featured guest vocals from M. Doughty from New York’s Soul Coughing, Louise Rhodes from Lamb and James Dean Bradfield from Manic Street Preachers. Their sixth album, ‘Outpost Transmission’, in 2002, included guest appearances from Simon Lord (Simian), Guy Garvey (Elbow) and Alabama 3, and although they didn’t know it at the time, it would be the last 808 album for nearly two decades. 

After 2002, came a long, not necessarily planned, hiatus from the studio. 808 State continued to perform live sporadically, but also had their own projects on the go. Partington and Barker DJed regularly and also had day jobs, while Massey embraced his more leftfield musical tendencies with various side projects, including Toolshed, Massonix and Sisters of Transistors, the UK’s ‘Premier Ladies Combo Organ Quartet’. He also played with Paddy Steer’s Homelife.

Then, a decade ago, the 808 wheels began to come off. In July 2014, Partington was arrested after being found in possession of heroin and crack cocaine. By then he and Barker were living different lives; the childhood mates were not as close as they used to be, so Barker and Massey weren’t even aware of the court case looming over Partington. The first they knew was a news story in the Manchester Evening News in January 2015, saying Partington had been jailed for 18 months. In court, Partington’s lawyer said that after he had run up a drugs bill ‘on tick’ his dealer had pressurised him with threats against him and his family into working for him.

Partington had become the de facto frontman of 808 in the 00s, still playing percussion but also prowling the front of the stage as an MC, whipping up the crowd, so his departure meant another new chapter and rethink for the band. Massey and Barker continued to perform as 808 State, with additional musicians, and did a 30th-anniversary tour at the end of 2018. As a duo, they then recorded the first 808 album for 17 years, ‘Transmission Suite’, named after the historic abandoned Granada Studios, where they set up their own studio and recorded it, which was released in 2019. Unfortunately, Covid affected the promotion and subsequent touring in support of ‘Transmission Suite’.

Then in 2021, to the shock of everyone, 808 State announced on social media that Barker had tragically passed away after a brief illness. He was a hugely loved member of 808 and tributes flooded in for him from the dance music community. His sad passing left Massey as the sole remaining member of 808 State.

“The optimism of a new album was quickly sandbanked with the pandemic. My partner’s cancer care during Covid, followed by the complete shock of Andrew’s sudden passing has left a bit of an existential re-evaluation of what I do for a living. I don’t take the luxury of music creation for granted. It can seem a trivial pursuit in times of death, illness and political unrest – who needs some more electronic music on the pile? But I want to believe I can add to the music that saves me in the dark times. I want to stay open to that.”

How does he view the future for 808? It must be discombobulating to suddenly look around and find he’s the only one left at the party, the sole remaining member and gatekeeper? 

“There is a kind of responsibility to the legacy,” he says. “I’m still very proud of all that music and I want it to get across to different generations. I’ve been heavily involved in digitising and reorganising the back catalogue.”

A lot of the 808 back catalogue still sounds fresh and hasn’t dated nearly as much as the music of their 90s peers. “I think other bands played by the dancefloor rules more than us, which has given it [808’s back catalogue] a longer life. It’s got more substance because it comes from a British subculture tradition and hasn’t really dated as much as some of the others.”

As for the future, 808 State are about to play a big hometown gig to celebrate the 35th anniversary of ‘90’, which involves playing the album in full, then a second set of favourites and emerging new 808 music with an augmented band. Massey is also starting to think about beginning work on a new 808 album, although the fact that he’s the only member left doesn’t mean it will be an indulgent jazz-psych-rock album. 

“I know how to put my 808 hat on!” he jokes.

For Massey, the best way he can honour the legacy of his former bandmates is by making sure the music of 808 State stays alive and keeps reaching new generations of fans. “That’s one of the things I love about doing festivals. You might get a bunch of 808 shirts in the front row but you’re playing to a whole set of new people of different age groups. My main mission with 808 State is, as always, to push technology to share something loud and beautiful. It’s intergenerational… it’s not dusty old music.”   

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This article first appeared in issue six of Disco Pogo.

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‍Sade are no ordinary band. American hip hop royalty always knew this, as did the Balearic boys and girls vibing outside Café del Mar. New York’s house mafia understood the soulful  sophistication inherent in their music and for a generation of Black British youth they were the living embodiment of their dreams and aspirations. The band (and they’ve always been a band), fronted by the glamorous Sade Adu, have also been one of the most misunderstood acts of recent times. As they celebrate the 40th anniversary of their debut album (and with new music in the offing), Joe Muggs delves deep into their history, their legacy and discovers how they’ve influenced a raft of modern-day musicians…

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Sade began on the dancefloor. “We used to go to Le Beat Route on a Friday night,” remembers house legend and old school soulboy Terry Farley, “and Sade herself was always there as one of the club kids – I didn’t know her, but everyone recognised her, she was the coolest girl, the one that all the girls I knew wanted to be. Then we found out she was in a band, and someone went: ‘Oh, they’re playing at The Wag.’ They did a showcase upstairs at The Wag, in the window where Bowie did his video (the ‘Blue Jean’ clip shot by Julien Temple). There she was, looking amazing, dressed in fringed jacket, halfway between California and what soul girls were wearing in London. I think she represented where London was going in that era. A lot of stars came out of that club, but she was by far the coolest.”

Le Beat Route is significant here. The Soho dive was almost as much of a nexus for the New Romantic generation as The Blitz club – but although pre-fame Wham! and Spandau Ballet were regulars (it’s namechecked in Spandau’s debut ‘Chant No. 1’), the music played by DJs like Steve Lewis and Rusty Egan was heavyweight and underground. A look back at the playlists of 1979-82 shows a smattering of jazz-funk and rockabilly, but the overwhelming majority was cutting-edge dance music: stacks of Ze Records, Arthur Russell, François K, early rap, Trouble Funk – stuff that could still tear up a discerning party now. 

The attitudes and fashion may have been aspirational, the poses arch, but this was a serious dance club for serious dancers, multicultural and musically voracious and open-minded. It’s notable that as well as the pop stars in the making, future underground movers and shakers like Farley, Mark Moore and fabric founder Keith Reilly were also regulars there.

All of this is worth noting because from the moment in 1982, when they formed out of the ashes of Pride, the jazz-funk band Sade Adu was backing singer for, Sade were seen very differently in different quarters. As ‘Diamond Life’ shot them to global success in 1984, to large sections of both the mainstream and alternative culture they became a watchword for background music for the yuppie era: the words ‘wine bar’ and ‘coffee table’ were thrown around as pejoratives, the implication being that the music was somehow facile. 

But plenty of people knew that despite the subtlety, it was anything but shallow. “The first time I saw Sade was the first time she was on ‘Top of the Pops’,” remembers Marc Mac of 4hero. “I watched it with my whole family, huddled around a small portable TV as we did in those days. She made an impact because first off you just didn’t hear that kind of soul-jazz anywhere on TV or commercial radio at that time. It was like lovers rock only without a reggae groove dominating. And secondly, I really noticed how she owned the stage, just so cool and in charge without imposing.”

Not many spotted that lovers rock connection at the time, but the fact that it was undoubtedly there in the sound is crucial to how they would grow and endure – despite none of Sade having grown up around Caribbean sound system culture. Sade herself was born Helen Folasade Adu in Nigeria but raised from the age of four by her white mother and grandparents in Essex. Of the rest of the band, Stuart Matthewman and Paul Denman are both from Hull, with Andrew Hale the only Londoner. But the scene that they had all gravitated to in London’s West End was radically inclusive, innovative and anything but gentrified – Adu had, after all, lived in a squatted fire station at the time they started, their sound forged in hard touring in a Transit van. By 1982, some of the rougher edges of post-punk and electro-pop might have been sanded off, but the experimentalism and a cross-cultural fusion were still there, as was a sense of dub-wise space in the music – they were just geared towards virtuosity and accomplishment with the high tech excitement of hip hop, electro and glossy soul from the US.

Immediate precursors on the same scene like Funkapolitan and Animal Nightlife were also multicultural bands drawing on similar sets of influences, but Sade nailed it in no small part because they brought a very special understatement to proceedings, both emotionally and sonically. 

“Their sound was about perfection,” says Trevor Jackson. “Sonic and compositional perfection. They were leaps and bounds ahead of anyone else of that New Romantic generation, it wasn’t that kind of Trevor Horn grandiose perfection and it wasn’t that slightly zany Compass Point art-rock inventiveness. It was a soulful perfection and that’s stayed with them ever since.” 

Colleen ‘Cosmo’ Murphy says only Roxy Music’s ‘Avalon’ at the time compared to the first two albums’ ability to “get the best out of my crappy little all-in-one Hi-Fi as a kid!” Though a full generation younger, Errol Anderson of the Touching Bass collective echoes this. “They were such a tight band, too,” he says. “The grooves were simple, but a lot of musicians will say the hardest thing is to make something that is simple but will work to keep you locked in. That’s some genius level stuff there.” 

And Adu’s voice and poetic delivery locked in tight with this. As Katy B puts it: “Her voice is a rich, deep alto instrument, so different to the big power ballad singers of the 80s and 90s, with their whistle notes and belting bridges but it’s just as powerful and potent emotionally.”

And of course, this level of accomplishment resonated with American audiences, and particularly Black American audiences. The ‘quiet storm’ radio format dedicated to sultry and sophisticated sounds had been growing from the mid-70s as a niche for slow, sensuous, “grown folks” music, and when ‘Diamond Life’ broke out it was really finding its feet and connecting to a new 80s set of musical production values and sense of social aspiration. Like the late Frankie Beverley of Maze, Sade steadily became a staple of “the cook-out”, the emblematic intergenerational gathering place of Black America. Many didn’t even realise that Sade were not American but injecting a dose of British deadpan melancholy into their cultural fabric. 

“When Culture Club, Yazoo and Depeche Mode broke through on MTV,” says the pop writer and scholar Craig Seymour, “it briefly felt that bunch of kids from The Blitz was going to dominate US pop – but then that seemed to die away to be replaced by heavy metal or whatever. Then Sade came from nowhere, sort of from the same scene, but not erupting into the pop world in the same way. Instead, she was slowly absorbed into the R’n’B landscape via the quiet storm thing, and actually ended up being the biggest-selling and longest-lasting of all of those groups. Because of the nature of the quiet storm format, when the second album came out the hits from the first one were still being played and then both rolled over when the third came and you just had this kind of environment of Sade in R’n’B. The music was just there, it was omnipresent, it was something that your parents, your auntie, whoever would be playing.”

With that mega success, Sade did lose some of their hipness with the jazz-dance and soul club scene they’d emerged from in the UK. “As a dyed-in-the-wool soulboy in the 80s,” says DJ and A&R Ross Allen, “it was more about Loose Ends and stuff like that, Sade we’d think of as a pop act. Not to say we didn’t like them, it would always be ‘oh yeah, nice tune’, but it sort of wasn’t our world.” 

Gilles Peterson concurs: “They’d kind of gone out of our sphere, purely because they’d gone so massive – we just weren’t paying attention.” But they were finding their way into international clubland nonetheless. Trevor Fung, the man who more than anyone can be credited with bringing Brit DJs to Ibiza and the Balearic vibe to Britain, smiles: “I really don’t know much about their influence… other than their music was played daily outside the Café del Mar from 1984. It was huge in helping to create the Balearic vibe.” He’s not wrong – check out tapes of the legendary Alfredo playing in Amnesia that same year and literally every other tune is a track from ‘Diamond Life’.

This continued through the first flush of fame: second album ‘Promise’ followed in very short order, continuing very much where ‘Diamond Life’ left off, and likewise found its way into people’s lives via barbecues and Mediterranean bars. But for its successor, the band started the pattern of leveraging their immense success to allow them to take their own sweet time on their records, as such it took three years to make ‘Stronger Than Pride’. A large section of its recording was in Spain and when it emerged it was clear they had entered into a feedback loop with the dreamy decadence of the beachside milieu where they were appreciated: without adopting any obvious dance production gimmickry they locked their syncopations into steadier rhythm patterns, and the 12-inch mixes of ‘Paradise’ and ‘Turn My Back on You’ in particular were given club rotation and sound archetypally Balearic now. 

Now the Sade dynamic was fully set in motion. In the four, then eight, then ten years it took to make each subsequent album, the band’s existing catalogue was out in the world not just omnipresent as pop but influencing various subcultures via specific routes – and the band in turn was taking all that subculture in. Anyone who’s worked with them without exception will emphasise first that Sade is a band, with a sound that comes from the interface of the four permanent members and second that those band members have all maintained their taste for the current, the funky and the experimental as strongly as when they first began soaking up Brazilian bossa nova, New York electro, post-punk dub and so on. 

As new generation keyboard wizard Joe Armon-Jones states, it all adds up. “You can always hear the sound of a Sade tune, even before the vocals begin it has a sound,” he points out. “Very unique and hard to describe but if you know, you know.”

So it was that 1992’s ‘Love Deluxe’ and 2000’s ‘Lover’s Rock’ were able to smuggle ever more radicalism into the mainstream. Remixes by Mad Professor and Massive Attack made very clear this was UK music (“Sade’s mood and spirit is made for reggae,” says Mad Professor, “and she is one of the first artists that I’ve remixed that actually called me when she heard the remix to say she loved it!”). As Craig Seymour says: “‘Lover’s Rock’ especially had a lot of the kind of strange, trip hop feel that, say, Massive Attack had never quite managed to get through to US audiences. And a lot of listeners just didn’t get it at first – but because it was Sade, because they automatically got played on quiet storm, R’n’B radio, through that repetition people came to accept it.” 

UK soul singer Joel Culpepper remembers putting on his mum’s copy of ‘Love Deluxe’ for the first time, reaching ‘Pearls’, “and just going ‘woah’, like, OK, a British soul singer can do this? Those mad arrangements, the intensity of the subject matter, the way it’s so poetic, it was a total eye-opener”. 

It’s no coincidence that the haunting Debussy-ish strings of ‘Pearls’ was sampled by artists as diverse as madcap Japanese experimentalists Asa-Chang & Junray, grime don Kano and master of soulful tear-out jungle D’Cruze. Indeed, if there was one place Sade’s influence on the UK underground remained constant it was through jungle and drum’n’bass: from D’Cruze and Wax Doctor onward, junglists naturally understood what The 2 Bears’ Raf Rundell calls “that mad combination of comfort, sophistication and dread that’s always present in Sade”, and sampled the living daylights out of them. 

The other route to the heart of clubland was through American house. Again, this was down to the sheer stateside ubiquity of Sade, particularly in the Black community: it would have been weird if Sade wasn’t folded into the fabric of house music. No less than Ron Trent describes Sade as “so important, a force of nature, they definitely brought more colours to the musical spectrum!” The band was also beloved in New York with Junior Vasquez spinning Sade at the Sound Factory. Mid-90s bootlegs like Phillip Damien’s take on ‘Pearls’ and Kenny Larkin’s extraordinary breakbeat-charged remake of ‘Give it Up’ (retitled ‘Surrender Your Love’) became DJ staples, helping map out a particularly soulful, sophisticated territory which would be explored for decades to come. Just look at the roll-call of artists who’ve re-edited ‘Stronger Than Pride’ alone – Karizma, Kaytranada, Alex Nut, Quentin Harris, DJ Duke. It’s an astonishing roll-call of talent and there are dozens more Sade flips by DJ Spinna, Matrixxman, Miguel Migs, Late Nite Tuff Guy, Danny Krivit, on it goes… even now, at the time of writing in autumn 2024, a 2003 bootleg of ‘Somebody Already Broke my Heart’ (apparently by Julius Papp), has caught on again as a festival favourite and is changing hands for upwards of £200.

Despite all that, through the 90s there was a lingering sense, in the UK at least, that Sade weren’t particularly cool. Either, as Gilles Peterson and Ross Allen described, they were perfectly well-regarded but essentially ignored by diggers for obscurity, or they were outright slandered by those for whom a rock press hangover or more-alternative-than-thou attitude drove an inverted snobbery against the smooth, “dinner party” vibe. 

That began to change, though, as millennials came of age. A generation who had few presuppositions but knew Sade from oldies radio, their parents’ records, through a vague understanding that their US faves from Missy to Beyoncé, D’Angelo to Jay-Z loved them, or newly discovering them on YouTube, saw them very differently. By the end of the 00s, the likes of The xx and James Blake were overtly channelling not the smooth soul side, but the fragility, experimentalism and darkness. 

Raf Rundell is a little older than a milliennial but up until this point had been working a “cushy music industry job”. However, when that role was lost and desperation was setting in, salvation came in an unlikely form. “I was on the dole. I’d just come back from the job centre, thinking ‘ahhh what am I going to do?’ I rolled a joint, put on ‘Diamond Life’, and ‘How Am I Going to Make a Living’ came on. ‘Right!’ I thought…” 

His cover version – which with Joe Goddard adding production would become the first ever 2 Bears recording – perfectly captures how Sade was being heard anew. Obviously Rundell’s naive vocal is a million miles from Adu’s velvet croon, but by laying bare the directness, poetry and irresistible hooks of the tune, and by harking back to the digital reggae, electro and post-punk of the early 80s, he made explicit the elements that were latent in Sade’s music. Arriving in 2010 it was perfectly timed to pre-empt what Rundell calls “those cool kids at NTS radio who would play Sade”, as well as coinciding with Sade themselves reminding everyone of their creative relevance with the ‘Soldier of Love’ album.

However, some people didn’t need to be reminded. As in America, for a large proportion of Black Britons, and especially Black women, Sade had been a staple – and Adu a role model – all along and the music and admiration passed down generations. Going back to the early-80s, Marc Mac remembers “being Black and having two sisters, Sade’s classy style had a positive influence on them and all of us, it lifted us up with the elegant look and sound”. SHERELLE, who as well as being a DJ is a scholar of photography and who used her studies to focus on how Black women are presented in the public gaze sums it up thus: “It’s a beautiful thing to see such a talented Black woman capture so many hearts – so much so that my mum and sister would dance around our living room watching VH1 singing ‘Kiss of Life’ and ‘The Sweetest Taboo’. She represents what soul the UK has to offer.” 

And for British singers, that sense of a legacy that’s been consistently passed down seems to go tenfold. Speak to just about any vocalist in the vicinity of soul or R’n’B and the sense of inheritance is palpable. To Kele Le Roc, Sade is: “The voice of a generation – she came across as grown and classy when on adult reflection she was probably very young herself but that just goes to show how sophisticated she was! Young artists can 100% learn from that.” 

For Terri Walker, “Sade is the peace that you understand, know and feel when you’ve arrived at your desired destination as an artist. I’ve always loved her voice and style but since becoming the artist I love and respect myself, I see and hear her more than ever”. To rising star Jaz Karis, she loves the production and everything the band creates: “The freedom to the music... the way she carries herself as she performs, it all inspires me to create music that moves people.” And for Katy B: “She could be your sister or your mother, the warm, soft timbre of her voice soothing you, passing on her wisdom – healing your broken heart with tender stories of how she has been there before.”

We are really feeling that now: in the past decade, that shared inspiration has become ever more obvious as a new UK soul-jazz generation grows in confidence. Jaz Karis, Cleo Sol, Jorja Smith, Yazmin Lacey (who regularly covers ‘The Sweetest Taboo’ live), Ego Ella May, Katy B in her latter grown-folks manifestation, even male voices like Children of Zeus, Joel Culpepper, Maverick Sabre and Michael Kiwanuka carry on the tradition not just of Sade’s style and sophistication, but of a very particular British way of combining influences – Latin, African, Caribbean, American, modernist and traditional – with great subtlety but real power. 

Sade are, of course, still a band, and still recording: Adu has a solo track, ‘Young Lion’, dedicated to her Trans son, on the upcoming ‘TRAA’ compilation, and more music is being hinted at. And they are still very much plugged into new sounds. Tales abound of them showing this hunger for the new – most notably Ross Allen getting recruited by Andrew Hale during a small gig at The Social in 2010 to DJ a Sade aftershow, turning up expecting a polite, corporate major label affair, and finding himself having to play ‘til 7am on a Wednesday morning as Adu and her friends kept the dancefloor going. But even if they were to stop today, their influence is woven deep into modern music, not just via sound but in how to be defiantly themselves. 

4hero’s Marc Mac recounts being inspired by a Sony A&R saying Sade were the only band they were completely hands off with and Joe Armon-Jones says: “The time and care taken around releases is incredibly inspiring to me.” Something that echoes through Ezra Collective, Nubya Garcia and the rest of the scene he’s a keystone in. 

Most of all, though, Sade show musicians how to live in a constantly shifting world of hybridity and be truly themselves. “I like to think,” says Errol Anderson of Touching Bass, “that if young people listen to Sade they’ll be able to respect and understand just how many worlds were colliding in the music that they were making and hopefully then they can appreciate some of the artists that have been influenced by her and them and hopefully follow through and see how that DNA reaches us, because all those chromosomes are still there, man!”

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This article first appeared in issue six of Disco Pogo.

It’s only a couple of months into 2025 and it’s already proving a brutal year for the musical community. Yesterday, I woke up to the news we had lost the great Roy Ayers. But as the artists that came to prominence in the glory days of the 70s inevitably age and the years take their toll perhaps its best to save our (sweet) tears for the moment and instead celebrate the legacy of these titans who’ve given us so much joy.

The things that unites so many of the recently lost legends is the sense of continuity – rock music thrives off the myth of revolution, that the world is tipped on its axis by Elvis or the Beatles on Ed Sullivan or Happy Mondays and Stone Roses appearing on the same episode of ‘Top of the Pops’. But the music of people like Roy Ayers and Gwen McCrae can have the same resonance and meaning to dancers who’ve discovered their music on a dancefloor at any point in the last 50 years. Artists who always rewarded anyone prepared to search back into their catalogues or take a chance on a random record fair find.

In the 1980s, Roy Ayers was already one of the definitive artists of the jazz funk era and was still making vital music in that electrified boogie period. Like so many other young clubbers who’d caught the bug with an early love of hip hop and electro, rare groove and acid jazz sent me digging back through his jazz funk classics: ‘Running Away’, ‘Love Will Bring Us Back Together’, the magic of ‘Everybody Loves the Sunshine’, his sought-after productions for his own Uno Melodic label. I can still remember seeing a copy of his early holy grail ‘He’s Coming’ on the wall of Music & Video Exchange in Camden. £35? Cheap at twice the price for an album that contains the frantic gospel funk of ‘He’s a Superstar’ and the timeless spaced-out hypnotic slink of ‘We Live in Brooklyn, Baby’, both regularly  poured into our ears at Gilles Peterson and Patrick Forge’s Sunday afternoon sessions at Dingwalls. Even as a pretty skint kid obviously I bought it on sight.

As we moved into the 90s, acid jazz’s revivalism and a steady stream of hip hop samples meant the legendary vibraphone player’s career had a new lease of life and he continued to be a firm fixture on the UK’s club and festival circuit. I first saw him in real life blowing collective minds on Glastonbury’s Jazz World stage (now West Holts) in 1993. Throughout the 90s and into the new century collaborations with Masters At Work and London’s BBE label kept his music  as vital as ever.

Gwen McCrae was also a firm favourite with the soul boy crew thanks to early-80s  dancefloor hits ‘Keep the Fires Burning’ and ‘Funky Sensation’, before her earlier albums were unearthed by DJs who turned tracks such as 1974’s ‘90% Of Me Is You’ and of course ‘All This Love That I’m Givin’’ from 1979, into huge favourites on the rare groove scene. ‘All This Love…’ in particular is that rare thing; an old record where the production hits such a sweet spot that it sounds current in every era and circumstance no matter how many times you hear it, from warehouse parties in the 80s to weddings and birthdays now, it’s never ever too much.

Angie Stone’s untimely death in a car crash made me rush back to another timeless favourite. ‘Wish I Didn’t Miss You’ is an all-time soulful favourite, but its appeal is the bittersweet demolition of a faithless boyfriend rather than a utopian plea to put your hands in the air. Maybe it took her loss to realise we’d taken this three-times Grammy-nominated artist for granted. As founder of the original early female rap The Sequence she was a contemporary of Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five, going onto write and sing with artists such as Mantronix and Malcolm McClaren amongst many others, before working on her then partner D’Angelo’s now classic debut ‘Brown Sugar’ in 1994.

Roberta Flack’s career stretched from the 60s to the present day, with her ‘First Take’ a peerless debut album. Like Ayers, McCrae and Stone, she crossed decades and depending on your age or inclination, your favourites might be her angelic rendition of ‘The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face’, or her work with Donny Hathaway. She was still riding the cutting edge into the late-80s, when Steve Silk Hurley’s remix of ‘Uh-Uh Ooh-Ooh Look Out (Here It Comes)’ became an anthem of the orbital rave era. One of the greatest, smoothest, interpreters of song ever and someone whose music, like everyone else mentioned here, will live on long after all of us have gone.

As Ayers himself put it so well, ‘Life is Just a Moment’. 

In a world where everyone is always shouting about their achievements, Andy Williams - AKA Yam Who? - was a brilliantly understated presence, his music like a gentle thread of quality running through house, disco, funk and more.

It is perhaps appropriate, then, that I can’t quite remember where I first heard Williams’ work. It was probably in 1999, when his superlative deep disco house duo Fuzz Against Junk released their spectral cover of Talking Heads’ ‘Born Under Punches’, the DJ Harvey remix proving a wonky house anthem. As for Yam Who?, my introduction may have been Williams’ 2004 remix of Amp Fiddler’s ‘Dreamin’’, where he gently nudged the already pretty relaxed original song into even more nebulous territory, creating a laidback disco / house classic.

The point is, when you start to look into Williams’ recorded history he was everywhere. As Yam Who? he released a number of brilliant solo singles - I particularly recommend the New Sector Movement remix of Yam Who? and Noel McCoy’s ‘Summertime’ - and remixed everyone from Herbie Hancock to Rodney P. As Qwestlife, with Tom Laroye, Williams released a series of gilded disco house records for Defected’s Glitterbox label; as Yambee! Williams hooked up with fellow soul adventurer Ashley Beedle; and so on. 

Williams also found time, somehow, to launch highly influential labels like ISM Records, Black Riot and Midnight Riot Recordings, which Mixmag in 2017 voted one of its most influential disco labels of the last decade. 

You can get an idea of Williams’ musical tastes from these artists: funk, soul, disco and house being found throughout his catalogue. But he was never limited to these genres and you will find broken beat, jazz, electro and more when you start to explore his incredible recorded history.

If you’re only joining the dots between these disparate points today, it’s no surprise. Williams wasn’t one to shout his head off about his achievements and you will find only a handful of interviews with him online, in one of which he seems more concerned with talking about the return of New York disco band Odyssey, who he had signed to ISM.

I only ever knew Williams through his music. But it is no surprise to see such warm tributes from the likes of HiFi Sean, who called him “one of the most gentle soft lovely and kind men I have had the pleasure to know”; and Colleen ‘Cosmo’ Murphy who said he was “a joy to work with in the studio and an all around great and hilarious person”. The same words keep on coming up on Instagram, where Faith Fanzine broke the news of his death: “lovely”, “kind”, “warm”.

We all adore a musical superstar: those brash, arrogant characters who seem born to a life of fame and adventure. But I also love the opposite: the dedicated producers and music fans who are always there, always working, still in love with the sound after all these years. These people are the cogs that make the musical world go round and they are vital.

Andy Williams was one of these. If you’ve listened to dance music over the last three decades I can pretty much guarantee you have some of his work in your collection. You may not even know it. Dig it out, though, and have a listen, be it solo work, remixes, production, and you will be enchanted. Because Yam Who? never failed. 

From beautiful Italian disco to the Godfather of House by way of ethereal trance and Balearic ludicrousness – not to mention flirtations with some of music’s greatest divas (and Patsy Kensit), the Pet Shop Boys have always been simpatico with the simple pleasures of the dancefloor. Following the release of their career-defining pop hits collection, ‘Smash’, über-fan Balearic Mike chooses his 20 best moments of dancefloor brilliance, while Hifi Sean, Erol Alkan, The Blessed Madonna and more chime in with their faves. What have we done to deserve them?

The Pet Shop Boys may be enjoying their fifth decade in the global pop charts, but their music has always been deeply rooted in the underground club sounds of the times. Their mini-LP ‘Disco’ was the first record I ever bought which had the bpm of each track on the sleeve. Initially that influence was the electro disco and Hi-NRG music of London’s gay clubs, music like Bobby ‘O’, Italo-disco, or the mixes of François Kevorkian and Shep Pettibone. 

Over the decades they’ve fully immersed themselves in the sounds of the exciting house music that came out of Chicago and Detroit, and also embraced the electrifying sounds of house in all its myriad forms: Balearic Beats, acid, deep, Italo, rave, techno and trance. 

Having their finger on the pulse of clubland, they’ve continually worked with a range of exciting dance music producers and remixers, and currently co-produce their records with Stuart Price, aka Jacques Lu Cont of Les Rhythmes Digitales fame and now James Ford previously of Simian Mobile Disco.

What follows is a selection of my favourite PSB-dancefloor moments – the tracks I’ve played most in various clubs, festivals, beach bars and boat parties over the years. 

‘Love Comes Quickly’ (Dance Mix/Shep Pettibone Remix) 1986

Written one night when, according to Neil in the sleevenotes to ‘Please: Further Listening’, they were in their “beautiful Italian disco mood”. They did the 12-inch ‘Dance Mix’ with Stephen Hague with a view to making it sound even more Italian disco, “very electro, the middle-range sequencer part holding everything together, and also incredibly beautiful. We loved the handclaps fluttering from side to side, which we’d loved since that Sharon Redd record ‘Never Gonna Give You Up’.” Shep Pettibone turned in a tough, New York electro disco-style remix on the US 12-inch which was also on the ‘Disco’ mini-LP,  while the ‘Dance Mix’ on the UK 12-inch was even pressed to look like an Italian Fuzz Dance / Alexander Robotnick import 12-inch with a large picture label. Both versions are dancefloor perfection.

‘Paninaro’ (Italian Remix) 1986

Originally released as the B-side to ‘Suburbia’, but then remixed by Neil and Chris with David Jacob as the ‘Italian Mix’, as it was only released in Italy. This superb version also appeared on the ‘Disco’ Mini-LP for those of us who couldn’t get the Italian import. A driving Italo disco-style beast of a track famous for Chris’ wonderful spoken word vocal. The Paninari were an Italian fashion cult. “I like the fact that all the trendies in Milan loathed the Paninari because ‘they liked Wham! and Duran Duran and Madonna’. We thought: ‘How fabulous – so do we.’” said Neil.

‘I Want To Wake Up’ (Breakdown Mix [Shep Pettibone]) 1987/2001

One of the most beautiful songs from ‘Please’ was produced with New York legend Shep Pettibone. This version was unreleased until the ‘Please: Further Listening’ CD in 2001. Going for a “more atmospheric” version, it’s two minutes before we get any percussion, and a further 90 seconds before a kick drum. It's even more dramatic for it. In ‘Please: Further Listening’’s sleevenotes they openly admit that “the ‘oooo-oooo-ooo-ooo-ooo’s are a complete New Order rip-off, from ‘Everything’s Gone Green’, I think”. 

‘Left to My Own Devices’ (The Disco Mix [Robin Hancock, Stephen Lipson, Trevor Horn]) 1988

Pet Shop Boys team up with Trevor Horn – why didn’t they think of this before? With an orchestra, they conspire to produce a disco epic, and not satisfied with the epic album version, they decide to make an EVEN MORE EPIC 11-minute ‘Disco Mix’. Does exactly what it says on the tin, as they say.

‘I Want A Dog’ (Frankie Knuckles Introspective Version) 1988

Formerly on the B-side of ‘Rent’, I always think of this song as the PSB equivalent to Soft Cell’s ‘Bedsitter’. At what 4am afterparty did Neil and Chris have the brainwave to ask the Godfather of House, Mr Frankie Knuckles to remix the song about owning a Chihuahua? The hi-hats fizz and sizzle, the bassline throbs, the strings stab, the piano adds jazzy sophistication, and Neil really doesn’t want a cat!

‘It’s Alright’ (DJ International Remixes - Tyree remix) 1989

At the time Neil and Chris took some flak from the dance music press for this cover version of Sterling Void’s house classic, rather forgetting that house music has both Black and gay roots. It’s also worth pointing out that by including it on their ‘Introspective’ LP and having a top five UK hit single with it, Sterling Void probably earned more from this version than their own release. As well as that, the boys also commissioned these superb DJ International Remixes for a stand-alone UK 12-inch release. On the B-side Sterling Void remix their own track, but it’s the Tyree Cooper remix on the A-side that steals the show, a superb acid house instrumental version, complete with those pianos and backing vocals from operatic soprano Sally Bradshaw and Trevor Horn regular Tessa Niles. Total banger!

‘So Hard’ (Morales Red Zone Mix) 1990

So hard to pick a favourite. The KLF provided a superb version for the UK remix 12-inch, but ole David Morales takes the prize with one of his dark, dramatic Red Zone remixes. Absolute house music perfection with definite techno leanings. For some reason only on the German release or a US promo 12-inch.

‘Being Boring’ (Marshall Jefferson ‘Being Remixed’ Mix) 1990

A near perfect mix of heartachingly beautiful lyrics, and a deep Chicago house rhythm track, courtesy of Marshall Jefferson’s superb remix. Written after the tragic death of one of Neil’s friends from Newcastle to AIDS. The lyric remembers the parties they held and takes its title from the Zelda Fitzgerald quote they used as an invitation, that she was never bored because she was never boring. This line is one of the greatest lyrics ever written and slays me every time: ‘I never dreamt that I would get to be, The creature I was always meant to be.’ And the sleeve is both beautiful, and funny. Replacing the title with ‘Being Remixed’ is just so Pet Shop Boys. To quote Chris Lowe: “If something looks good … it usually is.” This is.

Electronic: ‘Getting Away With It’ (Greg Wilson Re-Edit) 1990/2012/2018

Neil is invited up to Manchester to work with Bernard Sumner on his supposed solo LP, but doesn’t want to go alone, so drags Chris along. After many visits to The Haçienda, and Johnny Marr joining the fray, the project morphs into Electronic, and this slice of dance pop perfection was the first record released. Re-edited into a modern dance classic by Greg Wilson in 2012, just in time for all those Croatian boat parties. It didn’t get an official release until ‘Credit To The Edit Vol.3’ in 2018.

‘Can You Forgive Her?’ (Rollo Remix/Dub) 1993

Neil and Chris actually turned up to the LuvDup night Hell at the Number 1 Club in Manchester around the time ‘Can You Forgive Her?’ was released. Adrian LuvDup got them to sign his promos! Rollo bases the mix around an edited loop of possibly the funniest line ever written – ‘Because you dance to disco and you don't like rock’ – and the track properly rocks. The dub might just work better than the vocal, but I love both.

‘Young Offender’ (Jam & Spoon Trip-o-Matic Fairytale Remix) 1994

On the fourth and final single from the ‘Very’ LP, Jam & Spoon turn in two utterly transcendent remixes of ‘Young Offender’. They were having something of a moment, back in a time before trance music was shit. This mix is one of the reasons trance wasn’t shit. It’s awash with beautiful, ethereal synth pads and squelchy riffs, over a skittering, twitchy and delicate breakbeat. It’s when trance was subtle and gentle. Neil has stated this was the best remix they ever commissioned.

‘The Way It Used to Be’ (Left Of Love Dub [Xenomania & PSB]) 2009

From the 2009 album ‘Yes’, recorded with the songwriting behemoth behind Girls Aloud’s success Xenomania. The album is a pop masterclass, with a promo only US 12-inch and bonus CD version called ‘Etc.’ including six dub versions and a bonus track. This is the standout (although there are many), transforming one of the best songs on the album into a slice of Scandinavian cosmic disco in the vein of Lindstrøm or Prins Thomas. An absolute beauty of a track.

‘Inner Sanctum’ (Carl Craig c2 Juiced RMX) 2016

The trance-like original mix (which has definite nods to Jam & Spoon’s remix of ‘Age Of Love’ and Energy 52’s ‘Café Del Mar’) gets stripped back to the bare bones in this firm but fair rework from the Detroit techno legend. As tough and minimal as the Boys get and aimed firmly at the dancefloor of Berghain.

Their most Balearic moments…

‘Domino Dancing’ (Disco Mix) 1988

The most Balearic track the boys had released up to this point, arriving in September 1988, with that massive Euro-disco synth line fused with the Latin hip hop production of Lewis Martineé (Expose ‘Tell Me Why’) conjuring an atmosphere of dancing in an open-air disco. It’s got Spanish guitars for that ‘La Isla Bonita’ vibe, and the video is also ludicrously Balearic. Chris pretends to DJ, without moving his arms.

Eighth Wonder: ‘I’m Not Scared’ (Disco Mix) 1988

Written and recorded on the same night as ‘Love Comes Quickly’ while Chris and Neil were in their ‘beautiful Italian disco mood’, this stunning version was the first to be released, and although the Boys would record a version for the ‘Introspective’ LP, this 12-inch Disco Mix from Chris and Neil is Balearic perfection, complete with über-Balearic Spanish guitars and breathy French spoken word part. Viva Europe! Given a new lease of life by DJ Harvey a few years ago, who revived it and made it an anthem at his Mercury Rising parties at Pikes in Ibiza, also including it on the compilation of the same name.

Dusty Springfield: ‘Nothing Has Been Proved’ (Dance Mix [Marshall Jefferson]) 1989

Marshall Jefferson turns one of their most gorgeous songs – a sultry, atmospheric ballad detailing the story of the Profumo Affair and written for the movie ‘Scandal’ – into a perfect 1989 Balearic dancefloor classic that sat beautifully amongst the Soul II Soul beats, Daisy Age hip hop, and mellow Italian house sounds dominating the clubs that summer. Getting Dusty Springfield, already a pop star and part of the swinging London scene at the time the scandal broke, to sing it was a stroke of genius, especially the way she gently breathes the lyric ‘please please me’s number one’. 

Liza Minnelli: ‘If There Was Love’ ('Results' LP) 1989

Liza’s ‘Results’ album is a bit of a  lost classic among PSB fans, the orchestral arrangements of Minnelli singing ‘Rent’ and ‘Tonight Is Forever’ simply breath taking. On this number though Chris and Neil do what they often do best, writing a heartachingly gorgeous song over a driving, Italo disco-style backing track. A rubbery sequenced bass part propels the track along, driven by insistent handclaps, bleepy synth parts and soaring strings and pianos. And that voice. A heavenly disco odyssey, and criminal that it wasn’t considered for a single release.

‘We All Feel Better In The Dark’ (After Hours Climax Mix [Brothers In Rhythm]) 1990

On the flip of the ‘Being Boring’ remix is one of my favourite PSB B-sides, with excellent remixes from Brothers In Rhythm. Although I do love the original version of this track with its nice use of a vocal sample from Tramaine’s ‘Fall Down’, these are certainly more playable DJ wise. It’s a haunting, mid-tempo Balearic shuffler, with a beautiful ambient mix as well. Both gorgeous versions, but I do wish they’d left Chris Lowe’s rap in. 

‘Invisible’ (Vocal or Instrumental mixes) 2011

One of the highlights of one of my favourite PSB albums, the über-Balearic sounding ‘Elysium’ LP from 2011. The record’s softer, warmer sound harks back to 1990s ‘Behaviour’ in places, and there are several tracks I could have picked, but this haunting, elegiac hymn to the aging process is simply gorgeous. Not strictly dancefloor material – I’m selecting this as my ‘sunset’ at the Café del Mar moment record. It’s an atmospheric mix of soothing electronica, gentle, lapping percussion, and beautiful piano chords. On the double vinyl version, you also get the instrumental version for DJs not brave enough for the vocal, but why would anyone not want to hear Neil’s vocal?

‘Love Comes Quickly’ (Blank & Jones remix) 2003

Back to the beginning, and how do you improve on perfection? Well, I don’t think you can improve, but here Blank & Jones opt for a radical reinterpretation. B&J divide the Balearic communities’ opinion somewhat – perhaps it’s a distrust of their trace roots? Who knows? But on this remix, only available on the bonus disc edition of the ‘Pop Art’ compilation, there is absolutely no equivocation, they absolutely knock this remix out of the park, turning Neil and Chris’ ‘beautiful Italian disco’ record into a Balearic sunrise/sunset classic. It’s all haunting synth washes, Spanish guitars, and gentle, sparse percussion. ‘Just when you least expect it, just what you least expect’.

DJ Culture

Erol Alkan: ‘Love Comes Quickly’

“One of the most striking features of ‘Love Comes Quickly’ is its atmosphere. It connects immediately, and in doing so you are locked into this quite unique soundscape, one which touches across a variety of genres or styles. This is even before the lyric speaks directly at you, and you recognise and relate to every word. It’s often described as Balearic and I’d agree, it’s definitely an area of that sound I understand, and it’s the PSB song or single I keep going back to. I think this is a high compliment and is probably down to this record leaving a mark on a pre-teenage me which has never left.”

Abigail Ward (Ghost Assembly): Left To My Own Devices (Disco Mix)

“I had not long turned 11 when this was released. I was completely swept away by the drama and mystery of the song. The track was a precious and deeply enigmatic world I could escape into – a cinematic alternate reality I really needed at the time. I was very taken with Neil's famous line: 'Che Guevara and Debussy to a disco beat.' I assumed Che Guevara was an exotic dance, like the tango or foxtrot. It wasn't until I heard the epic Disco Mix that I realised Che was just some bloke 'drinking tea'. The 'party animal' Neil mentions is believed to be the writer Jon Savage. I once saw the Pet Shop Boys strolling down King Street in Manchester. It started to rain so Neil put a large umbrella up and Chris leaned in. It was like a video. I was thrilled beyond words.” 

The Blessed Madonna: Being Boring (Marshall Jefferson Remix)

“Pet Shop Boys have always managed to tread that very-tricky-to-balance line between perfect pop – being at times very literary – and then it also being real, honest-to-God, dance music. That's the Holy Grail if you can do that and I will spend the rest of my life trying to do that. This truly is a remix because it doesn't break the backbone of the original. It just recontextualizes it a little bit and makes it more DJ friendly. There are certain records that must be deserved of the moment. You have to kind of earn getting into that emotional space with a room. This is one of them for sure.

“I always loved the lines: ‘But I thought in spite of my dreams’/‘You’d be sitting somewhere here with me.’ Now aged 45, I understand it – and the gravity of it – in a way that I wasn't capable of before and it's a testament to Neil's genius. I'm in my 32nd year in dance music and I've done every job you can do, from being a mixtape vendor to the door girl, to the DJ, to the promoter, to whatever. I've done all those jobs and as you age in this world, people start to pass away and there are people who were so fundamental to my life at various points. I still feel myself picking up the telephone to call my dad and tell him something and he's not here, right? He's just not. And that is magnified in the lives of gay men who lived through the 1980s and 1990s and survived and lived with the AIDS crisis. But that sense of my life has changed so much. And I did finally get to be the creature that I am today.”

Severino (Horse Meat Disco): Eighth Wonder: ‘I’m Not Scared’ (Disco Mix)

“The first track I heard was ‘Paninaro’ when I was in my mid-teens. Obviously, I was in Italy and the song was everywhere, but my favourite track is ‘I’m Not Scared’ which I heard on Deejay TV - a sort of Italian MTV - and this song was super famous. I loved her sexy attitude. I bought it in my hometown Mantova in the north of Italy and on the dancefloor I loved its sensual vibe. The long version is kind of trippy. It also has my favourite lyric of theirs: ‘If I was you, if I was you, I wouldn't treat me the way you do.’ Or I could choose: ‘A-A-Armani!’”

Hifi Sean: Dusty Springfield: Nothing Has Been Proved (Marshall Jefferson Mix)

“I just love the fact these two likely gushed in big gay heaven getting to work with Dusty Fucking Springfield. I mean big rainbow flag exploding unicorn KUDOS! I have played this many times in chilled poolside sets and a fond memory was Shoreditch House round the pool on an insanely hot day last year and everyone was swooning away to it. I have always been obsessed with the gorgeous keyboard pad sound. They always had the best pad patches. I could gush over every synth Chris uses. His live set up from the 80s/90s was like every synth little old me could not afford.” 

Left to his own devices 

One DJ ignores our list and chooses his own...

Michael Mayer:
I Don't Know What You Want But I Can't Give It Anymore (The Morales Remix)

“In 1999, I had largely lost interest in US house music as there were a gazillion more interesting things happening in my backyard. But then David Morales delivered one of his best works ever for my favourite band. Actually, both mixes are amazing... the majestic Vocal mix and the tripped-out Dub mix. The Morales mix was huge at our Total Confusion parties here in Cologne. It's a perfect example of the late-night music we used to play there. I'm now calling three copies my own, the white label EMI sent me and two finished copies, acquired at the Kompakt record store. 

“A few years later, I accidentally poured a full glass of gin and tonic over David Morales' shirt at a MIDEM party in Cannes. It was dark, David was sitting on a tiny stool, I had a bad head cold that narrowed down my field of vision and I was super nervous as I was about to play after another house music icon, DJ Pierre. David, if you read this: My sincere apologies... send over the dry cleaner's bill anytime.”

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This article first appeared in issue four of Disco Pogo. Which you can buy here.

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House music was born in Chicago in the 1980s. And it was to the Windy City that all eyes – and ears – turned to once again a decade later when the bastard offspring of Frankie Knuckles, Ron Hardy et al began making waves across the city and beyond. This is the story of Chicago’s second wave of house producers – Cajmere, Derrick Carter, DJ Sneak, and co. As one of the scene’s key players, Boo Williams, tells Ben Cardew: “It was like a new way to start this thing all over again…”

For dance music fans in the 1990s, the names of two US cities were burned into collective hearts: Detroit and Chicago, the twin pillars of innovation, funk and soulful party starting. Detroit meant techno: The Belleville Three, Jeff Mills and titanic noise, while Chicago meant house and in particular the second wave of Chicago producers like DJ Sneak, Cajmere, Boo Williams, Ron Trent, Roy Davis Jr., Felix Da Housecat, Paul Johnson and Glenn Underground, who came barrelling out of the Windy City in the early-90s, bringing a tough, grinding groove to the soulful disco house template established by first-wave producers and DJs like Ron Hardy, Armando, Lil Louis and Frankie Knuckles.

Chicago house music had long been warmly received in the UK: Farley “Jackmaster” Funk and Steve “Silk” Hurley both scored ‘Top of the Pops’-bothering chart hits in 1986 and ‘87, while the acid house scene played out to a soundtrack that was heavy on Chicago. But Chicago’s second wave arguably had a greater impact on international dance music than its first. Sneak, Cajmere et al might not have equalled the mainstream chart success of their successors – although there were the odd hits, like Paul Johnson’s inescapable ‘Get Get Down’ – but they found a rabid audience in Britain, in clubs like Manchester’s Bugged Out!, Leeds’ Back To Basics and London’s Ministry of Sound, while British DJs like Luke Solomon, Huggy and Basement Jaxx took the new Chicago sound and ran with it. 

In Germany Ian Pooley and DJ Tonka brought Teutonic funk to the new-wave Chicago groove; in the Netherlands Djax-Up-Beats label gave Chicago producers a welcome home; and in Paris Daft Punk were intently keyed into Chicago, with their debut album ‘Homework’ almost a homage to the new Chicago sound. That classic French Touch idea of filtered disco samples and swinging beats? Pure Chicago second wave.

The influence of second-wave Chicago continues today. Brilliant though they are, early Chicago house hits like Farley “Jackmaster” Funk’s ‘Love Can’t Turn Around’ are simply too ponderous for most modern dancefloors. But a DJ Sneak disco number – all street-wise swagger and irresistible groove – will have no problem sending a 2023 party into filtered overdrive, while Beyoncé’s chart-topping ‘Renaissance’ album reads like a homage to second-wave Chicago, with Cajmere, Luke Solomon and Chicago-born DJ Honey Dijon among the production credits. In many ways, second-wave Chicago is underground house music today, for those who don’t want to take up the deep house noodle or pledge their allegiance to New York garage; it’s house music in two-day old clothes, that hasn’t cleaned its teeth, a little rough and ready, maybe, but always ready to charm, with its battered heart on its sleeve.

What makes this success even more impressive is that Chicago, at the start of the 1990s, was in steep decline as a house music force, enduring slow strangulation at the hands of various musical, cultural and economic factors, including labels’ shady business deals, a lack of club spaces and the inexorable rise of hip hop.

“The people who were purveying that kind of dishonest business practice, continued to practice their business,” says DJ Heather, the Brooklyn-born DJ who made a name for herself in the 1990s as one of Chicago’s best DJs. These nefarious economic practices were not exactly uncommon among the labels who helped birth the first wave of Chicago house music, with more than a dozen artists suing Trax Records in October 2022 over alleged unpaid royalties. “Subsequently it was like the open secret,” Heather continues, “well, this person isn’t so awesome. But I will go ahead and sign with them because this is an option for me. And then over time, it just kind of got dead.”

Ron Trent, the Chicago DJ and producer who launched the key second-wave label Prescription in 1993, says that many important early house producers had left the Windy City by the start of the 1990s. “You had so many of the pioneers who had moved on with their careers in the industry and not really having a presence in Chicago,” he says. “Around the same time, Frankie (Knuckles) and David Morales had established (New York house label) Def Mix; and the stores and the industry here are also changing over. There’s this new wave of house music being really pushed for by New York as a matter of practice, New York Underground.”

“Hip hop took kids out of the house scene when the radio stations went off air in February and March of 1989,” Chicago DJ Derrick Carter explained to journalist Frank Broughton in 1995. “I was working at Importes, Etc. (a legendary local record store) and someone ran into the store and said: ‘I was just listening to the radio and WBMX is off the air!’ The whole store went quiet. We knew we were making money off house being big on the radio. Out of the store alone, we could sell 1,500 to 2,000 copies of a big local record. In those days you could sell 5,000 locally. Now kids are happy to sell 1,500 to 2,000 in total.”

But as the house music baton passed, temporarily, to New York, a new wave of Chicago DJs, producers and labels were waiting in the wings. “What was starting to come to the forefront was this younger, suburban rave scene,” Trent explains. “We’re talking about Derrick Carter, Mark Farina, Spencer Kincy (aka Gemini) and those who got influenced by Cajmere.” DJ Heather says that the new influx of DJs felt like a genuine new wave of house music. “Absolutely,” she says. “But also, very much aware of the common thread. Those waves were pushed up against each other. So, it was like a natural progression.”

Cajmere, aka Curtis Jones, aka Green Velvet, was a hugely important figure for this new wave, after returning to Chicago from California in 1991. “Cajmere and I were really tight – like, very, very tight, come-over-and-eat-dinner-with-my-family type of tight,” says Trent. “He was really honing in on his sound, which was totally different. He had his own thing… When he came back [from California] he had a big desire to make music, and Hula & Fingers offered him the platform to do so.”

Hula & K. Fingers, an R’n’B/house production duo from Illinois with credits for Jazzy Jeff & The Fresh Prince and Kool Moe Dee, may not have made the same global impact as other Chicago house artists. But Trent says that the duo and their Clubhouse Records label were incredibly important in the second wave of Chicago house, releasing early records by Cajmere, Lidell Townsell and Trent himself. “They set up a studio and had equipment and all that kind of stuff,” he says. “I kind of joined the team and so did Cajmere and that’s when we started really cutting our teeth.”

One of those early Cajmere records on Clubhouse would prove pivotal in the Chicago house renaissance: the bubbling, quaking, kill-a-dancefloor-to-this-day, sing-along 1992 classic ‘Percolator’. “[‘Percolator’] was a track that everybody could play,” DJ Sneak told The Chicago Reader in 2012. “Not just the ghetto South Side kids, not just Bad Boy Bill on the radio – everybody came for that record.”

“‘Percolator’ became huge,” Trent explains. “He [Cajmere] had a good thing going, he created his own label, Cajual, and had his distribution happening. And so when Chez (Damier) and I decided to start with Prescription, our distribution was through Cajual Records.”

Cajual Records made its debut in 1992 and immediately hit pay dirt with yet another second-wave Chicago classic: Cajmere and Dajae’s ‘Brighter Days’, a brilliantly catchy house number that combined a soulful vocal with a rock-hard bass drum thump, a combination that would later typify the Cajual sound. It reached number two on Billboard’s Hot Dance Music/Club Play Chart. 

Early releases on the label were dominated by Cajmere – although Derrick Carter made his Cajual debut in 1992, with Ron Trent following in 1993 – but the label (and its harder sub-label Relief) would eventually welcome a who’s who of the new Chicago scene, releasing records by Spencer Kincy, DJ Sneak, Paul Johnson, Boo Williams, Glenn Underground, Gene Farris and Johnny Fiasco. In 1994, when Cajual released its ground-breaking compilation The New Chicago House Sound, no one was going to argue with its audacious title.

“Before Cajual was Djax (Up-Beats). I think I made my first record on Djax… But when Cajmere started doing Cajual records, it brought back that home feeling, a little bit,” Boo Williams explains. “It was like a new way to start this thing all over again, which inspired other labels to basically do the same thing. And it carried on going, started getting bigger and everybody started getting into producing then.”

Cajmere, Williams explains, brought a lot of artists together. “A lot of artists were doing stuff on Djax over there in Holland. When Cajmere started doing it, it was like we didn’t have to go over there to do music. Back home, here in Chicago, it all just branched out and started this new brand of music.”

In a 1995 interview with Jockey Slut, Cajmere said that Cajual “started a rejuvenation of house in Chicago”. “The Cajual thing, it made it seem like a real thing, it wasn’t just a couple of releases and then, you know, other labels started to take off too,” he said. Other important local labels in the second wave of Chicago house included Prescription, Sneak’s Defiant and Felix da Housecat’s (Belgium-based) Radikal Fear, while internationally Germany’s Force Inc, Canada’s 83 West and London’s Classic – a collaboration between Derrick Carter and UK DJ Luke Solomon – kept the Chicago flag flying.

The music these new producers were making was recognisably Chicago, bearing big disco influences, a soulful force and a marked musicality. But it was different, too: tougher, more no nonsense, deep, but unafraid of getting ugly.

“I wouldn’t say ‘aggressive’,” DJ Heather explains. “I would just say, an upfront style, where it was a combination of quote unquote ‘jackin’’ sounds but it could have elements of techno, of gospel, all these other things, industrial records, all these samples and layers coming together in a really raw form. Because, also, technology is changing, people are either able to get gear themselves or share pieces, save up for it, to experiment, that kind of thing; using stuff that is supposed to do one thing but making the best out of the mistakes to get the sounds that sound like another.”

Later second-wave Chicago classics include The Innocent (aka Derrick Carter)’s swaggering horn classic, ‘Theme From Blue Cucaracha’; DJ Sneak’s pitch-perfect filter disco number ‘You Can’t Hide From Your Bud’, Gemini’s bleepy, sleepy ‘Day Dreaming’, Paul Johnson’s itchingly addictive ‘Get Get Down’ and Roy Davis Jr.’s heavenly ‘Gabriel’, with Peven Everett.

Outside of Chicago, ears were pricking up. ‘Percolator’ and ‘Brighter Days’ were both big club hits in the UK, as was Green Velvet’s 1993 track ‘The Preacher Man’; DJ Sneak’s ‘Disco Erotica’, taken from his 1994 ‘Moon Doggy’ EP, was a dancefloor bomb; and Ron Trent and Chez Damier’s 1995 song ‘Morning Factory’ (a cross between deep house and Chicago soul) was hailed as a classic. By 1994, when Bugged Out! opened its doors in Manchester, the second wave of Chicago DJs were regular visitors to the UK.

“The first time I went to London, I played the Ministry of Sound. I never forget that man, because it blew my mind to go over there,” says Williams, of a trip he identifies as being in “94 - 95”. “When you get to the party and see all these people who knew me. It’s like, they knew! It’s like they just walk up to me the same way: ‘Hey, how are you doing Boo?’ It’s kind of crazy.”

“The second-wave kids had already heard – and were reading in magazines – about how house music was making an impact,” Sneak told The Chicago Reader. “They knew that door was already open, that the groundwork was already laid by all the pioneers. Between 1990 and ‘94, a lot of Chicago producers actually moved out of Chicago, went to Europe, went to New York, all these places, and were already spreading the word even harder. So, in ‘93, ‘94, ‘95, all these younger producers were like: ‘Now is the time.’”

Trent also mentions playing Ministry of Sound, which had opened in south London in 1991, inspired by New York’s Paradise Garage. “When I was coming over, Ministry of Sound had opened not too long ago. I played Ministry of Sound several times actually. It had one of the best systems. Larry (Levan) before he died had kind of christened it,” Trent says. “That was a very memorable moment for me: hearing music on the sound system, the reaction, the night, you know?”

Other nights were rather more varied during Trent’s first trips to the UK. “We had some other very forgettable parties. But that was more the flavour of it than some of the other aspects. Because when we were coming over, certain things hadn’t been developed. We were pioneering something of a new sound. And so we’re talking about younger promoters, promoters who don’t necessarily have the big money and that kind of thing. It wasn’t fully industrialised yet. So, the sound system may be OK. The turnout may be OK. We were literally tilling the soil,” he says.

Luke Solomon, who did as much as anyone to help share the new Chicago sound in the UK, says that it took a while to catch fire. “I think Derrick Carter was a phenomenon that actually paved the way and potentially opened a lot of doors for the second generation,” he says. “We often put on all of these DJs very early at Space (a midweek house club in London’s Bar Rumba from 1995-2002) to smaller crowds and even struggled to fill the clubs – but I think as the labels around these artists started to grow it in turn boosted their profiles. 

“Predominantly this was Relief, Cajual, Prescription – all of which came out of the same hub. I think these labels really resonated as an alternative to the NYC sound that was dominating and the attention from NYC to Chicago in the UK started to shift. And then it just became an alternative fandom thing that we are so good at in the UK.”

Williams says UK parties were “a little bit different but it’s just about the same”. “That was like, man, this music has really influenced people!” he adds. “When I first started going over there I know there were other producers in Chicago, going over before me and all that. But when I started going over there, that’s when it really started getting good. Because around ‘94/‘95, that’s when house music to me was at its peak. Because it was fresh, everybody had a fresh mind, with that raw sound.”

Chicago’s music, Williams says, “influenced a lot of people”. But it was a two-way relationship: Luke Solomon met Derrick Carter when DJing in Chicago and the two became inseparable, setting up Classic Recordings to bridge the transatlantic divide, releasing music from UK house producers including Matthew Herbert and Nail, as well as Chicagoans like Derrick Carter, DJ Sneak and Gemini. 

Manchester’s Paper Recordings, set up in 1993 by a group of Haçienda workers, specialised in deep, disco-influenced house music that was very Northern English but also released music from the likes of Derrick Carter and Ian Pooley, while 20/20 Vision (created by Back To Basics resident Ralph Lawson), Nuphonic and Glasgow Underground Recordings helped to hold up a distorted mirror to the new Chicago sound, their music proving hugely popular with US DJs.

Solomon says that “the dots began to join and a transatlantic community began to form” between DJs and producers in the UK and the US. “There was a close-knit world of friendships between a few key people in the UK that built the bridges,” he says. “Ralph Lawson and Huggy, (Back To Basics promoter) Dave Beer and the Leeds crew were heavily supporting Chicago DJs – alongside me and Kenny (Hawkes, his partner in Space). It soon transpired that Chicago humour and the love of ‘having a lovely time’ was something that we shared with our Chicago counterparts.”

In France, meanwhile, a youthful Daft Punk were paying attention. As well as a Chicago house roll call on ‘Homework’ track ‘Teachers’, the duo’s Radio One 1997 Essential Mix and 1999 Essential Selection were packed with second-wave Chicago talent, including songs by Paul Johnson, Roy Davis Jr., Cajmere and Green Velvet. DJ Sneak remixed Daft Punk’s 1997 single ‘Burnin’’ and collaborated with the duo on ‘Digital Love’, while Daft Punk covered Sneak’s ‘You Can’t Hide From Your Bud’ on their 1997 Daftendirektour tour. Paul Johnson recorded for Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo’s Crydamoure label and Roy Davis. Jr released ‘Rock Shock’ on Thomas Bangalter’s Roulé, the two Chicago producers among a small group of foreigners to record for the Daft Punk imprints.

More importantly, the Daft Punk sound – particularly on their early records, with their filtered disco samples, punchy, swinging drums, melodic bass and simple vocal hooks – borrowed heavily from Chicago’s second wave. Daft Punk’s considerable success in turn sparked off a wave of imitators, both in France and worldwide, creating a slew of commercially successful house music that borrowed from Chicago via Paris. Global hits like Stardust’s ‘Music Sounds Better With You’ (the work of Bangalter plus Alan Braxe and Benjamin Diamond), Modjo’s ‘Lady (Hear Me Tonight)’, Pete Heller’s ‘Big Love’ and (less amusingly) Phats & Small’s ‘Turn Around’ meant that by the turn of the millennium, a diluted take on second wave Chicago house was one of the biggest sounds in pop music. (And, yes, New York’s Todd Terry and Louie Vega certainly played a role in inventing filter disco – but it was popularised by DJ Sneak.)

Alan Braxe, who became a key figure in the French Touch, says that Cajmere was an important inspiration. “To put it simply, it is the very strong emotional charge expressed in a very stripped-down way that makes this music very attractive,” he says. “This approach is very radical; everything goes to the essentials: emotion and energy.”

Overall, Chicago producers are happy with the global response to their music. “It makes you feel appreciated,” Williams says. “Because, I mean, you guys on the other side of the globe, and the way you took on the music… At first I didn’t think that people over there were serious because I thought you had your own brand of music. So, I was like: ‘OK, we’re on this side of the pond. And you’re on that side of the pond.’ And this sound somehow travelled all the way over there and influenced a nation of people to come together. It’s just amazing.” 

Trent, meanwhile, remembers the young Daft Punk coming to one of his parties. “When I moved to New York I had a space here that I opened up and I was doing events. It was called USG or Urban Sound Gallery,” he says. “One of my guys, he recounts when he first came to my place, they (Daft Punk) were freaking out and sitting around, soaking it all in. And we had no idea that these guys were soaking it all in so they can create this body of work that they’re doing.”

Not that this bothered him. “I have no problems with anybody getting inspired and then paying homage to what they were inspired by,” he says. “I think that’s great. A lot of people didn’t do that. And that’s where the industry gets fucked, if you will, because people don’t create the storyline, the narrative and the history. It’s always about me.”

Trent says he wasn’t surprised that Chicago’s second wave of house took off in Europe because Chicago had always been open to music from outside the US. “We had a desire to be in other markets that had been the basis of how we educated ourselves in music; the things that we appreciated, the music videos, the music we were collecting, especially on the Italo disco tip,” he says. “So those [European] markets were not markets that weren’t familiar to us.”

Added to this is the fact that Chicago was very much a party town, something that resonated in decadent Europe. “You lived for the weekend,” says Williams. “Chicago was like a party capital of music. So, every week, people go to school, go to work, do whatever they have to do. But no matter what was going on, you had to live for the weekend.”

In 2001 Daft Punk’s second album, ‘Discovery’, signalled a shift away from the Chicago house-isms of their debut and it wasn’t long before European dance music started to look to newer, more rock-influenced, forms of inspiration, resulting in electroclash and the Justice-inspired wave of Ed Banger (and ‘ead banging) house. Meanwhile in Chicago, the accelerated tempos and ultra-repetition of ghetto booty house eventually morphed into footwork, a style of music that owes a debt to classic Chicago house (and in particular Cajmere’s ‘Percolator’) without exactly recreating it.

But second-wave Chicago house never went away. Derrick Carter, Felix Da Housecat, DJ Sneak and Cajmere continue to be some of the world’s most in-demand DJs; Ron Trent’s 2022 album ‘What Do the Stars Say to You’ was widely hailed as one of the best of the year; Cajual celebrated the 30th anniversary of ‘Brighter Days’ in 2022 with a set of new remixes; and Boo Williams released an excellent new album, ‘Depths of Life’ earlier this year. And then, of course, there’s Beyoncé’s multi-million selling ‘Renaissance’ album and accompanying tour, which have helped to bring the Chicago sound to vast new audiences.

Luke Solomon says that ‘Renaissance’ was heavily inspired by Chicago house. “Primarily because of Honey Dijon and myself’s connection with Andrew Makadsi (Beyonce’s creative director),” he explains. “I think Beyoncé absorbed a lot of the history and music we were sharing, which was not just Chicago, also NYC and Detroit,” he says. “It was amazing to hear our DNA in that album – which naturally had a lot of its roots in Chicago.”

“I am just happy that I was born here, in Chicago,” Williams concludes, “because that seemed to be at the right place at the right time for everything – musically and everything. I was happy to be a part of it, man, and I’m happy to see that we’re starting to really grab this thing and hold on to it. It comes from ten people to 100 people to 1,000 people, or 10,000 to 100,000 people. And the list keeps going on and on, every year can be bigger. Because it really is something special.” 

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This article first appeared in issue four of Disco Pogo. Which you can buy here.

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Whether it’s been a need to constantly create and destroy or the low boredom threshold of an artist’s perspective, Robert Hood remains one of techno’s most evolutionary and revolutionary voices of the past 30 years. His Floorplan project, now augmented by his daughter Lyric, is another demonstration of his deft sonic body swerves. Ahead of a new Floorplan album this summer, Hood explains his shape-shifting ways to Jonas Stone, and details why his partnership with his daughter has given him a new lease of creative life. “This is an invitation to eternal salvation,” he notes…

Over the course of his three-decade-plus career, Robert Hood has evolved and grown into one of techno’s most unique and consistently shape-shifting artists. His beginnings as a producer were fuelled by Public Enemy’s Bomb Squad production team and the Art of Noise’s sampling ethos – when he was the hip house man with a message Robert Noise. He was then propelled front stage as an MC hype man alongside Underground Resistance’s Jeff Mills and Mike Banks’ early live shows.

Early productions as The Vision or as part of the inter-planetary X-101 series (alongside Banks and Mills) and the subsequent harder-edged aliases he adopted for his Hard Wax label (Dr. Kevorkian, The Mathematic Assassins, Missing Channel) raised his profile, but it’s as the inventor and master of minimalism that he is often most revered. 

Yet, whilst 1994 was bookended by minimal techno’s twin blueprint monoliths, the game-changing ‘Minimal Nation’ (Axis) and the reductive masterpiece ‘Internal Empire’ (Tresor), Hood has continued to resolutely disrupt and change. The following year witnessed the birth of his jazz-infused electronic output with ‘Nighttime World Volume 1’ on Patrick Pulsinger and Erdem Tunakan’s Cheap Records, spawning two subsequent editions (so far). His fedora-wearing ‘jazz head’ has more recently led to a live performance for French TV’s ‘Variations’ series alongside saxophonist/afrobeat legend Femi Kuti in 2019. 

As well as the myriad productions under his own name or his conceptual alien ‘Monobox’ voyages we also, inevitably, arrive at the dancefloor juggernaut that is the gospel house, spiritually-voiced Floorplan. Now operating as a duo alongside daughter Lyric (Hood is all about family) the pair have interlaced dancefloor euphoria with an ‘Almighty’ message (Hood is an ordained minister) to devastating effect. Following a string of albums littered with triumphant cuts, the pair are set to release new album ‘The Master’s Plan’ on Classic this summer. Once again, Robert Hood’s constant studio flux continues to show that he will not be put in a box. 

Graduating from Detroit’s Cooley High in 1983, Hood began to notice a change in the Seven Mile urban landscape he traversed on a daily basis. Whilst kicking about “as a fly on the wall” at day-time parties in his school friend’s basements and trying to emulate gangster’s dance ‘The Jit’ to the strains of new wave, ‘progressive’, funk and disco acts, Hood noticed a darker presence filtering into inner city life. 

“We were just regular school kids, growing up in Detroit,” he recalls. “We were just listening to music and going to the school dance. I was into art. I was an artistic, creative kid. And just trying to navigate Detroit. We always had gang activity in and around Detroit with the Seven Mile Dogs, the DKs and the Erol Flynns but when crack came along, the level of organised crime in the Black community just took giant steps.”

Before that, Hood observed that most people led normal, everyday working-class lives around the chaos but now the chaos had permeated into everyday normality. “Everybody was living the American dream, so to speak. Most of us had mothers and fathers, a two-car garage, three-bedroom home. And everything was normal. But with the advent of crack cocaine the family structure began to fall apart. And there were a lot of school shootings.

“Looking back on it now, it was traumatic, what it did to our mindset. What that means is, we have to escape from here. It was dangerous before at times and in certain neighbourhoods. Now the danger is pretty much everywhere. Music and art and sports – that’s always an escape for Black kids. Yeah, of course, there’s college and higher education but sometimes, you know, in most Black neighbourhoods, and especially in the projects in
the ghetto, you really can’t see that. All you can really see is you either selling crack cocaine, or becoming a basketball player or a football player, which was a far-off dream. So how do you get out became the question. That was our escapism. That became the idea.”

The daily Midnight Funk Association Show on WJLB provided one such outlet for Hood to escape the everyday drama, as he then started to train as a commercial graphic artist (his father was also an illustrator as well as a jazz musician) at Crockett Tech Centre.   

“Our escapism was Electrifying Mojo,” Hood says. “He was very important for us as dreamers and artistic, creative people. And not just the creative people but for the entire city. Because everybody in the city of Detroit listened to Electrifying Mojo at 10 o’clock every night. That was just something you did. It was like a ritual. It was like going to church.” 

Whilst Charles Johnson’s alias ‘landed the mothership’ every night, Robert Hood was beginning to build his own musical vehicle. In 2008, his third ‘Hood Music’ EP on N.E.W.S. captured the moment: ‘And Then We Planned Our Escape’.

Hood’s work as a graphic artist led to him creating the artwork for Members Of The House album ‘Keep Believin’’ which featured session musician Mike Banks. When Banks teamed up with local DJ Jeff Mills aka ‘The Wizard’ and formed Underground Resistance, Hood’s musical curiosity was already well tuned into the fledgling sounds of Detroit Techno (or as he remembers ‘Metroplex’ or ‘Transmat’ music before the term had stuck) and he began to see these new electronic sounds as a way to express his artistic leanings. 

Falling closer into the UR orbit as a kind of office gofer (day-to-day label operations involved everything from mailing out records and writing press releases to answering the phone) Hood began to piece together a small studio set up with pawn shopped gear and a 909 bought from Drexciya’s Gerald Donald. Whilst his Robert Noise alias had fused Public Enemy-style disruption with his love of futuristic production sounds, 1991’s ‘Gyroscopic’ EP (UR) as The Vision saw him fully connect with the new techno party. Tracks such as the acid-drenched ‘Liberation Radio’ found Hood literally tweaking the dial for his musical freedom. Yet whilst UR’s militant boot camp of early abrasive releases were beginning to catch fire in Europe’s rave scene, Hood recalls the germs of creating something at the time that was to later help galvanise his own unique voice. 

“I remember Jeff and Mike being in the other room, they were probably counting records or T-shirts or something. I made this long track, probably 10-15 minutes long. It sounded like something that would be played on WJZZ (Detroit’s jazz station) where you could hear artists like Michael Franks, Jean-Luc Ponty, George Benson and even Larry Heard. They were like: ‘You started to get something going’. So, I can see the evolution. And I’ve always wanted to do something aside from normal dancefloor beats just to expand my potential, shifting from one thing to another. That’s just my nature.”

With Hood experimenting with new musical realms that were to fully fledge in the next few years he created the hard-hitting Hard Wax label in 1992, which he saw as a UR offshoot in the same vein as Wu Tang Clan’s side projects ‘Sunz of Man’ and Killarmy. Unleashing a slew of aliases such as Dr. Kevorkian, Missing Channel (with Claude Young), The Vision and even Jeff Mills’ ‘H-Bomb’, he saw the label sound as a contorted take on rave music.

“I remember being in pretty close contact with Lenny Dee,” (from New York’s Industrial Strength). “His raw distorted kicks in production I loved, but at the same time I was sick of rave music. I wanted to give my sort of twisted take on that music. But with a Detroit state of mind and with a Chicago state of mind. I was experimenting at the time, I was just learning my way and trying new things and probably had too many aliases. It wasn’t until H+M, the first Axis record, with the track ‘Sleep Chamber’, where I found my voice.”

With Mills relocating to New York, playing blistering techno sets at the Limelight, Hood chose to “remain grounded” in Detroit whilst the pair maintained close contact, planting the seeds of a new, more conceptual form of techno that was to germinate under Mills’ new Axis imprint. 

“We had a lot of discussions that went on for hours. We went through this period where we would almost be battling each other for the entire weekend. We probably started Friday and be calling each other every 15-20 minutes. ‘Hey, listen to this. Wow, listen to this’, you know, just bouncing back and forth and having discussions about the state of techno and where it’s headed and how can we steer it this way? Where do we need to take it?”

Out of these discussions came ideas for Hood’s seminal take on a new form of reductive techno with the landmark album ‘Minimal Nation’. Originally released as a single blue label test press, Mills’ feedback from playing a lacquer at the Limelight caused them to re-think and expand the project to a double-pack. “He said people were dancing to it. And then, all of a sudden, people formed a circle and there were some guys breakdancing to it. It had this kind of tribal effect on people.”

Whilst Hood had reduced a track to its key components and focused his production on the main hook, he extended the break in the same manner as early hip hop DJs like DJ Kool Herc, whilst emulating the ‘Jit’ dance he copied from high school in the 80s. Yet there remained layers of rhythms within rhythms and a certain intricacy to the simplicity. 

“It was still super cerebral. There’s a picture inside of a picture behind the picture,” Hood elaborates. “If you listen closely, it’s almost hypnotic. It causes you to listen. Hey, there’s another rhythm hidden in there! And, hey, maybe there’s even a third rhythm that’s starting to come to the forefront. But then you listen again, it’s back to that first rhythm.” And with that, Hood had found his elusive sound. “It was just like the essence of Detroit but in a new way. It was sort of like Juan Atkins’ ‘Cosmic Cars’. I now have my cosmic car. This is my vehicle, my spaceship I can get into and take a departure from Detroit and from this planet.” As Mike Banks remarked more recently in 2018 during a Red Bull Music Academy talk: “To me Rob Hood really defined himself on Axis 007. That’s when I knew Rob had it.” 

‘Minimal Nation’, its follow up ‘Internal Empire’ and the ‘Moveable Parts’ EPs on his own M-Plant label became the very definition of ‘minimal techno’ (Richie Hawtin even named his new label ‘Minus’ after the track from ‘Internal Empire’). Yet Hood’s unique blueprint seemed to bear little resemblance to the sound of ‘minimal’ that was to sweep across Ibiza and the world’s dancefloors a decade later. Whilst Hood’s stripped back production had a grime and funk that gave his tracks a human connection, the flood of subsequent ‘minimal’ productions appeared to, on the most part, be little more than mathematical exercises that followed a collective algorithmic formula or even worse, a melodic tech-house dirge. Regardless, Hood had long since changed tack as his listless artistic muse had already tapped into his family’s jazz background.

During Axis Records’ formative years, Hood had been making tracks for a new collaborative project with Jeff Mills that was to be ‘Every Dog Has Its Day’. “We were supposed to do an album that was just listening music, nothing to do with the dancefloor. I had already made maybe five or six tracks, but Jeff would change his mind from day-to-day. He would take one idea one day and then completely scrap the whole project the next day.” As Mills was to later develop ‘Every Dog’ into a long running solo project, Hood was to take these tracks and deliver another series that was to not only redefine his sound but also reshape the definition of techno.

Released on Austria’s Cheap Records in 1995, Hood’s ‘Nighttime World Volume 1’ was amongst the first techno releases to incorporate the world of jazz on its electronic sleeve. Whilst ‘Electric Nigger Pt.1’ is built around a raw, throbbing techno motif and ‘Untitled’ remains a minimal masterpiece in its own right, its tracks such as the opening swing of ‘Behind This Door’, the jazz drum rolls of ‘Nighttime World’ and perhaps most notably, the introspective melancholy of the piano-led ‘The Colour of Skin’ that really set the album on a unique trajectory. 

“My father was an artist and a jazz musician,” (Hood’s father died when he was only six years old) he explains. “I wanted to display my musical side. But I wasn’t really a traditional musician like my father. But that sort of fusion between jazz and funk was always there. That was driving me. Being a fan of Earth, Wind and Fire, being a fan of Stevie Wonder and all of that being fused with Thomas Dolby’s ideas. I wanted to display that side. And not just make a commodity. Ok, I know how to make techno records now. I don’t want to just start making a product. I want to keep making art.”

There was no physical legacy of his father’s jazz career as a trumpet player. As a live performer there were no known recordings in existence, until Hood made a revelatory recent discovery. His uncle who had owned a record store and was manager of Detroit’s Motown Museum, bequeathed him his entire vinyl collection three years ago. 

“Upon his passing, he left me probably over 3,000 records. These records, I remember just looking at and not being able to touch when they were all at my grandmother’s house. Among those records, I happened to find inside of one of the sleeves, a record that my father recorded. It was jazz funk. Sort of like fusion. It is very old. It’s a test pressing actually and is very obscure.” The discovery of this long-lost rendition of a Parliament/Funkadelic record by Ed Hood and the Lovers was indeed a jaw-dropping moment for Hood himself, something akin to finding his own musical Holy Grail. “Yeah. I’m looking at it right now!” he beams.

Hood’s ‘Funky Souls’ EP on M-Plant offshoot Drama in 1996 yet again hinted at a new house-influenced string to his artist bow. Released under the moniker Floorplan, the hypnotic disco-house track garnered a cult underground following, leading Amsterdam’s Rush Hour to re-issue it in 2010. When Hood re-booted M-Plant in 2009, following a family relocation to Alabama, the idea of picking up his house alias began to resurface with fresh influences coming from his involvement with his local church community. Whilst 2011’s ‘We Magnify His Name’ from the ‘Sanctified’ EP was the first Floorplan release to openly bring gospel music to the fore it was ‘Never Grow Old’ that first aired on Floorplan’s 2013 debut album ‘Paradise’ that was to blow the church roof off. When, 12 months later, Hood elevated the kick drum and Aretha Franklin sample with his ‘Re-plant’ version, the gospel house monster delivered such dancefloor euphoria that Boiler Room would later, describe it as the ‘techno anthem of the decade’. 

Whilst Hood’s inspiration for ‘Never Grow Old’ had involved divine intervention from an awakening dream, causing a fevered 3am run to the studio to capture it, his next move as Floorplan involved a less likely source. When touring Japan with the Red Bull Music Academy, Hood took daughter Lyric to a Q&A panel with Tom Tom Club’s husband and wife duo, Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth. “I saw the dynamic of the relationship between Chris and Tina. In their partnership. And I said, wouldn’t it be interesting if Lyric joined me for Floorplan. I’ve got a gifted talent sitting right next to me all the time. It just dawned on me the possibilities and the potential of where that could go.” After talking it through with his wife, some eight years down the line, Lyric Hood is very much an integral part of the musical floor plan.

Whilst Floorplan has been given a new dynamic, Lyric’s solo releases, such as the pounding techno of ‘11.11’ on her debut solo ‘Nineteen’ EP to the jackin’ house groove of ‘Let Me Tell U’ from ‘Woman-Hood Chapter 1’, have proved her production credentials. Unsurprisingly, she initially felt pressure to live up to her father’s name, but their partnership has flourished since he invited his daughter – then 18 – to DJ in the middle of his set at Detroit’s Movement Festival in 2014. “When I first did Movement,” she recalls, “my dad asked me what music I would like to incorporate into his live set and I mentioned Katy Perry and Martin Garrix. I was young! Since then, I have always loved sampling from new and older artists as well as DJing with new and older music. By us working together so closely, it has caused our sound to expand and flourish. Iron sharpens iron, as my dad would say.” 

And as her father will attest, she remains pivotal to the band’s evolution. “Floorplan would definitely not be where we are heading had it not been for Lyric. Her music sensibilities have really changed my ideas about what Detroit house could be. She’s taught me to really pay attention to the details. Of course, I was teaching her and now she is the student teaching the teacher.”

As a firm festival crowd favourite, the DJ pair have travelled the world ‘preaching’ their own firebrand of disco, house and gospel. After numerous single releases with Classic, they now prepare to unveil their fourth studio album, ‘The Master’s Plan’, with the hand of God still very much prevalent. Tracks such as the ‘What A Friend We Have in Jesus’, ‘Taking on Holy’ featuring Honey Dijon, the Dames Brown collaboration ‘Give Us Your Light’ and ‘Help Is On The Way’ with gospel singer Lowell Pye all elevate the Hoods’ continued message from the DJ pulpit. 

“This is an invitation to eternal salvation,” explains Hood of the album’s title. “At some point this natural, earthly body, the shell that we live in, is going to deteriorate. And we’re going to pass away at some point, but we don’t have to, we don’t have to die. That’s what ‘Never Grow Old’ means. ‘The Master’s Plan’ is expanding on that precept that where we’re going, those who believe, are never going to grow old and will never die.”

Hood remains one of techno’s consistent innovators. Just when you think you have him pinned down as the doyen of minimal techno, he delivers otherworldly electronics as Monobox (see 2021’s ‘Regenerate’ album) or afrobeat, jazz-infused electronics with Femi Kuti on last year’s live album, ‘Variations’. His standing as the minimal master has never been in dispute – a decade ago .Cent magazine dispatched Andrew Weatherall to interview him for their ‘minimalism’ issue – and his restless funky-soul continues to wander endlessly. 

“I wanted to do a minimal music. Yeah, I wanted to have it stripped down,” he recalls of ‘Minimal Nation’’s birth. “I wanted to take it back to its truest essence. I thought that rave music was just overdone. I never wanted to be an artist that follows a certain style. I want to create a whole new style. That’s one of the reasons why I got into music. I want to carve out a path and not follow but lead and create something new.”

Does this come back full-circle to UR’s mantra of music being a sonic ‘revolution for change’? “Yeah, always for change,” he finishes. “Always for revolution. Always for being disruptive and for being rebellious. Always walking the path of a progressive artist. That’s still paramount. First and foremost. The only difference now is with God’s vision.” 

A vision with rhythm. 

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Cosmic disco king Hans-Peter Lindstrøm is master of all he surveys. Which, right now, is the idyllic Norwegian hamlet of Holmsbu with its snow-drenched vistas and chilly fjord. The perfect spot then for Ben Cardew to discover the secrets behind his pulsating, melancholic melodies. “It is really hard for me to make something that is really simple,” Lindstrøm explains…

Disco music typically conjures up images of warmth: of packed New York clubs, vast string orchestras playing shoulder to shoulder and sweat trickling down the back of bright satin shirts. The music of cosmic disco pioneer Hans-Peter Lindstrøm, however, has always been different. 

The Norwegian producer’s work isn’t cold by any means. But it conjures up images of space – both in the cosmic and temporal sense – abstraction and elegance, a combination that makes a lot of sense when flying into Oslo’s Gardermoen Airport, the plane dipping its wings over vast swathes of empty space, covered enigmatically by the early onset of night.

In person, this sense of vague abstraction - of dance music once removed - makes sense too. Lindstrøm is tall, handsome and ever so slightly scruffy, his years only betrayed by a slight shock of white in his three-day beard. 

Despite spending two decades at the forefront of dance music - his breakthrough single ‘I Feel Space’ was released in 2005, after making his debut as Slow Supreme in 2000 – Hans-Peter is the kind of person you can imagine owning, rather than attending, Studio 54 back in its 70s heyday, a music fan too modest to push his way past the club’s typically serpentine queue. He gave up DJing 20 years ago and only occasionally plays live, avoiding night clubs in favour of hunkering down in the studio. 

We meet Lindstrøm in Oslo, where he has lived since 1999, on a bracing February day. The weather hovers somewhere around four degrees and there is a sharp wind gusting off the Oslofjord. “Are you feeling cold?” he asks, with a knowing grin, as we jump into his sleek and yet ecologically sound Volkswagen ID.4. “It’s not like this in the UK.”

Indeed, it is not. The winter has brought the most snow that the Norwegian capital has seen in years but by the time we arrive, heavy rain has largely seen it off, leaving treacherous swathes of ice. All the same, you can see people on the Oslo underground in full ski gear as they head off to the slopes on the outside of town.

Lindstrøm drives us to the small seaport village of Holmsbu, where he has recently installed his studio, a world away from the bustle of the Norwegian capital. He mentions that he is thinking of moving to Holmsbu permanently, from his current home in Oslo, now that his children are getting older. It would, he explains, be a perfect place to concentrate on his music.

In summer, the village (population 309, although it seems bigger) looks gorgeous – wooden buildings stretch along the waterfront, nestled among what look like Christmas trees, a vision of Norwegian solace. In winter, though, Holmsbu is even more beautiful. Lindstrøm shows us some photos he took a few weeks before, of the light radiating fuzzy wellness off snow-laden trees and the sun crashing dramatically into the fjord. It looks utterly idyllic; the kind of place a children’s author might invent to illustrate a tale of Santa’s teenage helpers.

It appears the apposite location for Lindstrøm to have his studio, two rooms artfully piled to the ceiling with vintage synths and drum machines. Everywhere you look there is electronic music history: a LinnDrum here; a Vocoder there, a Moog over there, all so beautifully dusted it feels almost sacrilegious to look at them. Here, in Holmsbu, we surely find the reflection of Lindstrøm’s heart-rending melodies, his gorgeous sonic architecture, his acute sense of space, of disco stretched out and unfolded? 

Like the true artist he is, Lindstrøm doesn’t necessarily agree, pointing out that he has made most of this music in Oslo, only producing one remix since moving his studio to Holmsbu.

“When I made some of those long tracks that I have been recognised for, like the half-hour track ‘Where You Go I Go Too’ (which opens his classic 2008 debut album of the same name) I was still in the city, in a small apartment,” he says, with a shy-sounding laugh. “Then again, I grew up in an apartment that is very similar to here (near Stavanger, Norway’s third largest city), with a house by the sea, with lots of space. When we were kids, we were running around, there were no fences, nobody said we couldn’t go there.

“I guess one of the reasons that I did this [move to Holmsbu] is to find out if the environment affects the music in a good or a bad way,” he adds. “I really enjoy being here, this view is very different from the city. I believe that if I am happy then maybe the music is changed by that. If I am happy here, maybe the music will be better or the sound will be better.”

If the environment doesn’t necessarily influence his sound, what about the idea that there is something very Norwegian about his music? Can it really be a coincidence that so many of the greatest cosmic disco producers of the last two decades – from Prins Thomas to Todd Terje to Bjørn Torske – call Norway home?

“That’s hard for me to judge,” he replies, after a thoughtful pause. “Some people say the [Norwegian] sound is melancholic and it’s cold, synths and stuff. You can find that in other countries. But I am sure the weather and climate and everything does affect our music.”

Fans of that delicious Lindstrøm melancholy will find a lot to love in his most recent album, 2023’s ‘Everyone Else Is a Stranger’. The name, sadly, means nothing, its enigmatic title basically a placeholder. The new record has been described as a call back to Lindstrøm’s earlier work, notably his debut album, thanks to its elongated space disco grooves, coming after the largely beat-free, elliptical hardware jams of 2019’s ‘On a Clear Day I Can See You Forever’, an album birthed in an Art Centre commission that felt like it was birthed in an Art Centre commission. And that’s not a slight.

But is ‘Everyone Else…’ merely a return to type? The album might restore the dancefloor friendly uplift of his earlier work – ‘Syreen’ and ‘The Rind’ have a particular raw disco energy, while the imperial key changes on ‘Nightswim’ could send a club crowd nuts – but the tone is slightly different, more chaotic and improvised, more human than cosmic.

Lindstrøm agrees. “It’s really important for me to challenge myself and to do something different every time. With my new album, of last year, it’s kind of like a return to some of the sounds that I was doing previously. But, with ‘Everyone Else Is a Stranger’, it was new for me to make that kind of music again. It felt right to do it like that. It’s the same in a way but it’s different. I couldn’t possibly make the music that I made in 2005 and 2006 now, because I am thinking differently. And I know that I couldn’t have made ‘Everyone Else Is a Stranger’ in 2005. If there are similarities in the music, maybe that’s the Lindstrøm factor.”

He’s right, of course. Lindstrøm’s music, always feels perfectly Lindstrøm (Lindstrømian, maybe? Lindstrømish?), whether he is composing sturdily melancholic dancefloor bombs, like ‘I Feel Space’, forging bombastic monuments to prog (2012’s ‘Six Cups of Rebel’, an album he once compared to Lou Reed’s legendarily abstruse ‘Metal Machine Music’) or penning perfect Motown pop music with Christabelle (on the 2010 album ‘No One Is Cool’).

Key to this Lindstrøm factor is his focus on chords and melody. ‘I Feel Space’, for example, is marked by a delicious central riff – a big fucking Alpine sweep of a melody, like skiing on heart break – and ‘Everyone Else Is a Stranger” has a couple of melodious gems, from the serpentine melancholy of ‘Nightswim’ to the title track’s classical trembling, like disco for funerals.

It turns out that Lindstrøm’s affection for melody runs deep, reflecting a youth spent in choirs, folk, country and heavy metal groups in his native Stavanger, rather than gallivanting around Oslo’s night clubs.

“I started in this gospel choir when I was 12, maybe, playing piano. And it is all about chords and chord changes and not about reading sheet music,” he explains. “When I started getting into electronic music, trying to understand what it was all about, it was in the late-90s, kind of late, actually. I was 26, 27 and I didn’t understand why it was so focused on the bass and often just one note. Everything was very monotone, all about repetition and build ups and stuff.” 

He thumps the chair’s arm for emphasis as he talks. “It was so different to the music I had been exposed to,” he continues, “pop music from the 80s and the music I played in my band, the rock music. And I decided to try to bring in some of the chords and the melodies. After a while I discovered that in the early disco days there were a lot of chords, a lot of orchestrated [parts].”

Lindstrøm is no dance snob or disco purist – he says he has a great deal of respect for people who make music with little to no formal instruction – but the simple loop and rhythm-based approach of much dance music was never for him. “A lot of the DJs trying to make music didn’t come from a musical background, at least in Oslo,” he says. “They didn’t use chords or melodies like I wanted to do.”

“I still think like that!” he adds. The chair is getting quite a thumping now, as he warms to his theme. “It is really hard for me to make something that is really simple, to make a song with just one chord progression.” 

Indeed, the title track of “Everyone Else Is a Stranger”, which closes the album in a dramatic, elegiac fashion, sounds like it could belong in the gospel choir where a teenage Lindstrøm honed his skills. He seems pleased with the comparison. “I am pretty sure there has been a lot of church music in the back of my head, since I grew up in that kind of environment,” he says. 

“Many of the Norwegian psalms are based on Norwegian folk music,” he continues. “Church music has a focus on chords because it is played on the church organ. And what it can do is change chords and build up. And that is, in a way, what I am doing on that track. The chords are building and building then starting over again. It is a Shepard tone (an auditory illusion of a tone that appears to continually ascend in pitch). I wanted to have the feeling of building and building, without it stopping.”

For all that God is – allegedly – a DJ, Norwegian psalms are far from the typical influences of a successful electronic music producer. While driving to Holmsbu, Lindstrøm, now 51, noted that he rarely goes out these days although he’s starting to get the itch again. How about kitchen dancing? Does he like to cut loose at home when no one is around?

He laughs. “Sometimes when I get excited when I am making music, I do some dancing,” he says, a glint in his eye. “And also, sometimes I close the door and go into the next room and imagine there is a club in there and I am outside and listening. Does it sound good?”

Does he worry though, that he is missing out on something by not hearing electronic music in the clubs, by being one step removed from the DJs and dancing. He thinks about it for a while before replying. 

“If I were a DJ, I would probably have more of the tools to make music that would work perfectly in a club,” he says. “If you are a DJ, you have to listen to a lot of music and pick music that is not your own. You get exposed to it by playing it in different clubs. ‘This sounds good. This is a good build up or this is a good kick drum.’ Or whatever. But it is maybe a good thing that I am not exposed to that DJ culture… Maybe I am freer to do all kinds of stuff.”

“With this album,” he adds, referring to ‘Everyone Else Is a Stranger’, “I was trying to make music that hopefully some of the more experimental DJs or eclectic DJs will play in clubs. But I got feedback from a friend who is a DJ, who told me that: ‘I really love your new album. But it is impossible to play it out!” And he laughs heartily.

That’s their loss of course – but ours too. Lindstrøm’s music may not be made for clubs; but the day there is no room on our dancefloors for the escalating key-change rush of ‘Syreen’, the woozy opening melody of ‘Nightswim’ or the celestial build of ‘Everyone Else Is a Stranger’ is the day clubbing gets boxed in and boring.

As we leave Holmsbu the sun is setting over the fjord, sending a fiery reflection over Lindstrøm’s front room like a cosmic disco ball in the sky. Whatever DJs might think about the elegant quirks of his new album, it looks like the gods of disco are smiling on Lindstrøm. As long as humans have ears and hearts have emotions, you know he is going to be just fine. 

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This article first appeared in issue 5 of Disco Pogo. Which you can buy here.

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DJ duo Jonnie Wilkes and Keith McIvor have never had much truck with convention. Anyone that attended their long-standing Optimo night or has caught one of their DJ sets would recognise that. But it’s not just clubbing customs the pair pay little heed to. Matters of time are also regarded with admirable flexibility. So as Optimo celebrate their 25th birthday in their 27th year, John Burgess hears about their remarkable run of Sunday night parties and how they’ve kept the Optimo story going since. “There always was a lot of oddballs that went to our night” they reveal…

Released in February this year ‘Optimo 25’ is a compilation that marks 25 birthdays since the primo alternative Sunday club was born. Except it’s two years late so should, in truth, be called ‘Optimo 27’, a birth year when many rock luminaries – Hendrix, Joplin, Morrison and co - checked out and which Kurt Cobain’s mother called “the stupid club” when her son joined it. Yet despite having an old habit for playing ‘Duelling Banjos’ from the film ‘Deliverance’ Optimo (Espacio) – to give it its full name – was a club that was always fun, but anything but stupid. 

From 30 November 1997, it ran every Sunday at Glasgow’s Sub Club; a platform for bands and a different kind of club music in a city that had become pedestrian with bloke-heavy house and techno clubs. Their alternative option attracted alternative people and the night stayed beautiful for its decade-plus tenure. Despite ending in 2010 the two DJs and operators – Jonnie Wilkes and Keith McIvor – had established the Optimo spirit and carried it forward as a touring entity and at festivals. 

Prior to a trip to Asia, Wilkes and McIvor joined us to discuss the club’s history and influence and the event side of their work (their Optimo music releases and multiple label offshoots is a whole other story entirely) which includes their newest project, the 500-strong outdoor shindig Watching Trees. 

In 1997 you started Optimo because the club scene was boring. 25 years on how does the scene feel now? 

Keith: “I think it’s very mixed. There’s a lot of great things going on. There will always be things about the scene we don’t like, a commercial side, business side, the focus on social media… I have a lot of friends who say it was so much better back in the day. It wasn’t, it was just different. Sound systems are better now, clubs are safer places to be, young people’s knowledge of music is amazing, they are very open-minded. The age range is different. We do a night in Glasgow every two months; four months ago someone came up and said: ‘I’m so excited to be here - it’s my 18th birthday’. Then, half-an-hour later this guy came up: ‘I’m so excited to be here it’s - my 70th birthday!’ You wouldn’t have had that back in the day.”     

Jonnie: “When Keith refers to the ‘better back in the day’ lot – I imagine most of them are talking about the late-80s/early-90s when house and techno was brand new and like he says it was just ‘new’ and they were young! I’d say a sentimental yearning for a time like that in one’s life is natural, but it doesn’t mean it was better and it didn’t stay that good. By 1997, when we started the club – we were definitely a bit bored with what was going on.”

‍Keith: “In 1997 things had got pretty dull: the musical soundtrack, the lack of diversity, it was the dawn of the superstar DJ, big beat was happening and not landing here, drum’n’bass was an exciting new movement, but it never really landed in Glasgow. People wanted something different. Two friends of mine were doing a Sunday night at the Sub Club and I’d be an occasional guest DJ. They went on holiday to Barcelona, thought it was amazing and moved there. So, the Sunday was suddenly available. The owner asked me if I was interested in taking it over to try something different.”

Jonnie, where were you DJing at the time?

Jonnie: “I was DJing at a weekly party called My Machines at the Art School in Glasgow which was a fairly straight ahead house and techno night. I had a background in art (I’d studied at Glasgow School of Art), and I liked making things. So, when Keith approached me and told me about the kind of idea he had, I saw an opportunity where I could do both the things I loved and not separate my playing records and being an artist. On the musical side, getting out of that hole I was in as a DJ felt very liberating. To play what we liked but play it in a way that it worked in a club was the challenge and it remains the challenge.”

Did you do the artwork and that side of things?

Jonnie: “Well, yeah. Between us we just did pretty much everything that needed to be done to run the weekly club.”  

Keith: “We’d go round putting up the posters ourselves. We were often being chased by the police as it was illegal. We couldn’t even put the name of the Sub Club on it as they’d get fined. We’d put slogans on instead and people would be like: ‘What is this?’ It captured people’s imaginations.”

Did you set out to change the perception of what club music was and could be?

Keith: “Very much so. My sister was living in New York at the time and I was going over a lot and became very obsessed with the 80s downtown scene where the hip hop and graffiti scenes had collided with the punk, no wave and disco scenes and it felt all very open. I was going out to see lots of bands at this time, not DJs, so we were trying to bring live music into clubs. There were probably ravers who had never seen a live band before. Or a gig-going audience who didn’t usually go clubbing, so we were trying to bring these disparate strands together. There’d never been a drum kit set up in the Sub Club ever.”

Similar clubs like Trash in London were happening at the time too with resident DJs and bands…

Keith: “We had no idea. I didn’t start using the internet until around 2000, so it was then we could find out what other like-minded people were doing. Ivan Smagghe and his crew (Kill The DJ) in France discovered us and they started inviting us over. That’s how it really blew up for
us as they asked us to do a mix (‘How to Kill The DJ Pt 2’, released in 2004).”

Jonnie: “I felt we were closer to what they were doing than some of the London clubs.”

Keith: “No disrespect to Erol, who we love, but we were decidedly not indie. We were anti-indie in a weird way. It was band-orientated but not indie. We were playing Stooges as a band but not Placebo or whatever.”

Jonnie: “Because we had a very diverse crowd that looked different too. The house and techno purists would be quick to lump us in with fashionable London nights that were more focused on fashion than the music.”

Keith: “I had a lot of flak as I’d run Pure for a long time and it had been quite pioneering, bringing over Jeff Mills to the UK for the first time, so a lot of people thought I was a traitor to techno for playing Joy Division in the hallowed Sub Club. When I first started DJing in 1987, people often came up and said: ‘Why are you playing this drum machine shit?’. When we started Optimo people got angry we weren’t playing ‘drum machine shit’! That fuelled me even further.”

Whenever I met you guys, Erol Alkan, Andrew Weatherall you all looked alternative unlike, say, John Digweed in a nice jumper. There was a spirit about you.

Jonnie: “Expression feels vital to me. Asserting some sort of unique identity and hopefully establishing a sense of autonomy through what you do, what you play, what you say, what you wear. There always was a lot of oddballs that went to our night which was brilliant and it was great fun to always be around these people.”

Keith: “That’s key – it was fun. Fun had gone missing. You can be deadly serious about music but still want to have fun.”

Apart from the time you did an aural 9/11 tribute. What happened there?

Keith: “Ok, so it was the Sunday after 9/11. I felt I had to mark what had happened as everyone had been in such a weird head space all week, watching all the coverage relentlessly, so I put this two-minute sound collage together to try to reflect what we’d been through. So, there was Jimi Hendrix playing ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ with a line from ‘O Superman’: ‘Here come the planes’ et cetera, et cetera. I came off from playing and this guy just started on me: ‘How dare you disrespect the dead?’ and started punching me. People were very emotional and he took it completely the wrong way. It was about the only violent incident we had in 12-and-a-half years of doing the club.”

Is there a space for political statements like that in clubs? Or are they about escapism?

Keith: “They’re both. They’re for escaping the shit realities of every day but also a space for reflection. We are political people so it’s something Optimo does do. We raise money for food banks in our local community for example, but we don’t virtue signal about it.”

Jonnie: “It’s just about being who you are and if you feel compelled to give some space to something important to you, amplify a voice that needs to be heard then why the fuck not? But yeah, it’s personal whether or not you do it. I can’t speak for other DJs but if you can be yourself while being a DJ you’re going to be a better DJ anyhow. It feeds into the way you play, what you want to use that space for.”

What planning went into Optimo every Sunday?

Keith: “It would literally take up our whole week. We wanted every Optimo night to be unique. We’d have crazy concepts, have projections and find new content all the time. I’d spend days thinking about the music for the following week. We’d find ways to engage using posters which we’d put up around the city.”

Jonnie: “On a Tuesday, when we’d recovered, Keith would phone me and say: ‘We’ve got this band on live’ or ‘Why don’t we decorate the club like this or like that?’ for the night. I can work to a brief, so it was something new to do every week and I kind of liked that. We’d maybe run a poster campaign around something we’d been chatting or having a laugh about at the afterparty the previous week. It was cool to actually have a presence in the streets around Glasgow. Posters in shop doorways, in all the pubs and cafés, on hoardings and bill poster sites. The stuff was all litho printed back then, no digital printing so it was a lot of messing about with plates, film, cash deals with the printer to get the stuff run on time. We’d get the flyers and posters turned around quick, get out round the town, book the lights, any backline for the bands and cobble it together on the hop.”

Keith: “I don’t think the amount of energy dissipated as the years went on, but I could sense if we continued it might. That’s why the club stopped after 12-and-a-half years because we were away so much and the club needed energy putting into it for it to be amazing. We were DJing all weekend and were tired. We sensed it might slide, so the only way was to end it.”

Jonnie: “I was more reluctant to let go of it. I found the change a bit terrifying. Then when we announced the last six parties, it became a reality and easier to cope with. But aye, the anticipation of this thing terminating brought up a lot of feelings and I was very reflective over what we’d had for so long, how far we’d come and how it was about to end. 650 parties.”

Keith: “It had taken about a year-and-a-half for the club to take off, but then it was sold out every week and it got very frenzied as we reached the end. People lived for Sunday nights. One guy, Darren, had actually been at the club more often than I had. It became intrinsic to their lives so it may have also been a relief for them when we decided to stop. Within six weeks of it finishing I knew about 20 people who had moved to London. It was like: ‘Thank fuck, now we can get on with our lives’.”

What’s your fondest memory from the final night?

Keith: “We arrived about an hour before and there was a queue of what looked like 1,500 people and the club takes 600. Everyone started applauding as we walked up which was emotional. We’d bought another sound system in for the night too and half way through the night we turned it on so there was this massive volume boost and people lost their minds. A lot of people were crying at the end of the final night. It was emotional realising many of these people you’d seen every week you probably weren’t going to see again. People who were part of this community and then this community has stopped. Some I’ve never seen again since.”

Jonnie: “I remember more about the penultimate one. The last one is a blur – apart from the sight of that massive queue going round the block outside when we arrived and the cheer that went up. I know there’s a seven-hour recording of it doing the rounds, but I’ve never listened to and probably won’t ever. Another memory is the stillness at the end of the night and thinking: ‘Well, it’s done now.’ I definitely did grieve for it for a time, but I began to enjoy the time I had during the week and I had a young family to take care of, so in many respects it was a relief. You see the afterparties that would happen after the Sunday were deranged and – to my shame – I embraced them like nobody’s business. Jaysus, that was the thing that saved me – not partying anymore until Monday night!”

By the time you’d finished you’d toured enough for people to know what Optimo was outside of the club. After playing for hours in a club how do you approach a 75-minute festival set?

Keith: “That’s something that’s changed. Ten years ago 20% of our annual gigs were festivals and now it’s more like 60-70%. I like playing at festivals: that short, sharp shock. It’s a different way of playing.”

Jonnie: “I’d never been to a festival until I started playing at them.”

Keith: “When we do club gigs a lot of people come up to say they first saw us at such-and-such festival.”

Jonnie: “It’s been brilliant exposure for us and you usually get an early night too.”

‍You started your own festival Watching Trees in 2022. What prompted you to do it?

Jonnie: “We wanted to take some of our ideas of what a party outdoors can be and do that in the spirit of Optimo. We met Wil from Ransom Note and he’d had some experience of what’s involved with site plans and infrastructure et cetera and then in 2022 we did something really great in the Forest of Dean over a weekend.”

Keith: “When you take profit out of the equation you look at it in a different way. Sadly, we lost the location so we couldn’t do it last year. We have found an amazing location for this year and are doing a one-day 24-hour event.”

Jonnie: “We sensed there was an awful lot of people wanting us to do the second one and when we found this new site we put it on sale on Friday without a line-up and it’s sold out. It’s where we want to be. The alternative to that is being in that festival industry situation…”

Keith: “Where you have to book X, Y and Z and tick off the boxes. I hate the phrase a musical journey, but it will be that; it won’t be a full-on rave for 24 hours. We can’t have high volume at 5am so it’ll change at that point and then come back stronger later.” 

Did the idea come out of lockdown. Did you find that a creative period?

Keith: “Absolutely. We had to be creative as we had to hustle with ideas to try and generate some income. Weirdly before lockdown I wanted to take a year out to work on some creative projects and then it was forced on me. But then I ended up not doing the things I thought I wanted to do. A lot of the talk about Watching Trees did come out of that. There was a lot of utopian thinking during that time, things can be different to how it was before and we tried to carry some of that into Watching Trees.”

Jonnie: “In lockdown I really liked being outside more and working with my hands again. I have a little garden and a workshop. Building things and seeing nature in a different way for the first time in my life. Then with Watching Trees we found ourselves outside building stages, composting toilets et cetera by hand, spending all day outside and pulling an event together in the countryside. It was a brilliant experience for me, an important one.”

How could you make the 25 years compilation definitive?

Keith: “You couldn’t. Dan who runs Above Board asked us if we’d do it and we felt we couldn’t do a ‘Greatest Hits’ of Optimo, because if you came to the club in 1998 your greatest hits would be completely different to someone who came later on. The track ‘Optimo’ (by Liquid Liquid) is on there and that’s a track we have played consistently. We wanted a reflection of what an Optimo set might be, so the first hour is music we love that isn’t necessarily to dance to when the volume of the night is lower. Side One reflects that. Then Side Two and onwards are tracks we love that hopefully reflect the ethos of what we may play.”

Jonnie: “We had a list of hundreds and we had to see what came back that we could license.”

Keith: “It took over two years which is why it’s come out in our 27th year.”

It would be definitive if ‘Duelling Banjos’ was on it. When did you last play that?

Keith: “I used to love playing it, every time we’d play it for the first two minutes everyone
would be looking at you like: ‘What the fuck?’ Without fail it would always go off by the end. The Sub Club told us to stop playing it because there were so many smashed glasses.” 

‍

This article was originally published in issue 5 of Disco Pogo magazine.

The early-90s were a golden age for techno innovation. Slam’s ‘Positive Education’ is certainly compelling aural evidence. Not bad for a track whose genesis took a mere 30 minutes…

‍Origins

By 1993, Slam (Stuart McMillan and Orde Meikle) were firmly established as the faces of Glasgow’s post-acid house dance scene. As DJs, their explosive sets at The Sub Club (also home to the city’s other feted duo, Harri and Domenic) were already the stuff of legend. This status was further burnished with the release of their first single, ‘Eterna’ in 1991 and the label which issued it alongside subsequent tracks by One Dove and Rejuvination, Soma, of which they were co-founders, with Jim Muotune and Glenn Gibbons (Rejuvination) and Dave Clarke. In 1992, Slam and Rejuvination recorded a one-off track, ‘Seduced’ as G7. As 1993 dawned, McMillan and Meikle were desperate to get back in the studio…

Stuart: “At this point we shared the studio with Jim and Glenn. They were our engineers – we still worked with engineers at this point – and also the co-founders of Soma. It was a kind of collective: the four of us and Dave [Clarke] and a guy called Nigel Hirst. We built the studio in Nigel’s basement. We literally ran Soma from there.” 

Stuart: “All these ideas had been building up and we were itching to get in the studio. The basis of the track came together in about half-an-hour. You would know the track as ‘Positive Education’ from that 30-minute recording. I think we sampled a Todd Terry kick drum. Everything was sequenced through a Ensoniq EPS sampler.”

Orde: “It had 12 seconds of sampling time. That’s all we had to work with.”

Stuart: “It would worryingly crash every fucking 10 minutes. That was running everything. Then we had the idea for the hook. Which was run through a Jupiter 6.”

Orde: “My favourite, well, our favourite keyboard.”