Chapter 24
Ten Great Influences on Me
In This Chapter
Recognising what’s influenced me over the years
Accepting what’s made me stronger as a DJ
Losing faith, and gaining it back again
Your influences are very personal: look at the music you listen to, the people you meet and the places you go as key points in your career. With these influences, you should be able to make a map of how you developed as a DJ. This chapter describes my journey.
Renaissance: Disc 1
Renaissance –– Disc 1 was my introduction to real dance music. Until I heard this mix by Sasha and Digweed, I thought that dance music was the acid scene and pop acts such as Snap releasing repetitive, obvious music. Up until I heard this disc, all I listened to were rock bands like Van Halen and Aerosmith.
Individually, the tunes on the mix are powerful, well-made pieces of work, but the way Sasha and Digweed mixed them to create a 74-minute journey has always affected me. I think that the skill it involves is the reason I’ve always strived to create a seamless mix that has a start, a middle and an end – rather than just 20 tunes thrown together because they sound nice.
I’ve had a copy of this mix to hand ever since the day I first heard it. I had it on tape on my Walkman while mowing lawns, on a CD in the car when driving to college, on a MiniDisc in my pocket looking for a job and now on an iPhone strapped to my arm while I row at the gym.
Tonsillitis
An odd choice as an influence, I agree, but as I lay in bed, ill, for a week, falling in and out of consciousness, with only Radio 1 to keep me from a fevered delirium, I was able to hear music that I’d never heard before.
I’d never heard of a guy called Pete Tong, and at 6 o’clock on a Friday night when his show started, my eyes were opened to so many different genres of dance music. From trance, to drum and bass, to American house, I lay in bed, struggling to stay awake. I’d never listened to Radio 1 at weekends, so the Essential Selection, Trevor Nelson, Dave Pearce and the Essential Mix all opened my eyes to more than just the same Renaissance CD I’d been listening to over and over again.
What started off as an accident because I was too ill to stand up and change the station (or turn on the TV) ended up as a Friday night ritual: me, Pete Tong, a piece of paper and a tape recorder to take note of the best tunes.
La Luna: ‘To the Beat of the Drum’
The first time I went to a club I couldn’t dance, I had long hair and I wasn’t dressed very well. I spent most of the night feeling a bit lost, standing on the stairs while everyone else seemed to have fun. What I remember most is the very first piece of music I heard as I walked in: La Luna’s ‘To the Beat of the Drum’.
The piece of music was really simple, but seeing the reaction of the people in the club, feeling the bass drum vibrating through my body and hearing dance music at this volume, in this atmosphere, for the first time, unlocked something in me that left the Van Halen CDs unplayed for the next seven or eight years.
(A haircut and better clothes followed almost immediately.)
Ibiza 1996, Radio 1 Weekend
BBC Radio 1 has developed a tradition of broadcasting from Ibiza since 1995. This event became a solid part of Radio 1’s programming, but for me, the station has never done better than the 2-4 a.m. slot at Amnesia in July 1996. I can honestly say that the reason I became a DJ was because of the 90 minutes I could fit on tape of Sasha in the mix. So if you want to blame anyone, give him a call!
As far as a DJ set is concerned, this was a step forward from the Renaissance mix I’d heard over and over again. Because it was live, it was obvious that the set list was geared to working the crowd rather than appealing to a home listener on CD, and it showed me the magic of DJing: that DJing was about more than just playing other people’s records.
What sold this mix to me, and still gives me goose bumps when I listen to it, was when, at around the halfway point: after playing some really strong, energetic, pounding tunes, Sasha played ‘Inner City Life’ by Goldie. While still keeping the energy and the tempo of the mix at a similar level, Sasha was able to completely change the dynamic of the mix with just this one tune. It was like having a rest – without having a rest!
Bringing the power back into the mix using the snare beats of a tune called ‘Yummy’ by Agh was the turning point for the real power of the mix. The crowd went wild, and I can’t say I’ve heard a mix since that’s affected me as much.
The Tunnel Club, Glasgow
The Tunnel Club in Glasgow was like my home for six or seven years. It still exists now, in a slightly tamer version of its past, but it continues to hold incredible memories for me.
The three things I’ve taken away from that club are the smell of dry ice and Red Bull that blasted into your face as you entered the club, the constant quality of the DJs and the music they played every weekend, and most importantly, that I met my wife Julie there – dancing with friends on the other side of the floor.
Julie’s support, advice and ability to smile politely when I’m boring her with new music and new ways to mix from tune to tune has kept me striving to improve since the mid ’90s. Because it was due to the Tunnel that we met, I can hold the club responsible for my current happiness and position to write this book.
Jamiroquai: ‘Space Cowboy’
Jamiroquai’s ‘Space Cowboy’ was the first original tune I’d ever heard remixed into something better (in my eyes) than the original.
I didn’t know much about Jamiroquai, but I did know ‘Space Cowboy’ when they released it as a single. I thought it was okay but nothing special. Then David Morales gave the tune an overhaul. His remix of ‘Space Cowboy’ is always in my record box (mostly unplayed, unfortunately), and is always in my list of top ten favourite tunes.
When I listened to this track, it was the first time I’d been able to compare an original to a remix and understand the elements needed to change a song from a good original recording to a dance remix and have the structure and sounds that work perfectly on the dance floor.
(A slightly more recent example of another fantastic remix is ‘Breathe’ by Anna Nalick. Search the Internet for Blake Jarrell’s remix. It’s amazing and it never leaves my playlist.
Digital DJing
After CD DJing really took hold of the DJ market, like thousands of other DJs I moved towards this format and started leaving the dust covers on the turntables more and more. For me, this was always with a sad reluctance. I love what CD decks can do, and I love the fact that finding and remixing new music and burning it to CD ready to play on the night is so easy, but not using turntables to play the music left a real hole in my heart.
This all changed when I first used my turntables to control DJ software. Now I had the best of both worlds: the flexibility of having music available at the click of a mouse along with the tactile sense and the showmanship of using turntables to control the music instead of button clicks and CD trays.
I felt like a real DJ again. Each time I stepped into a DJ booth, instead of feeling apologetic for using CDs, I felt empowered and at one with the music I was playing. The combination of the strong historical foundation of turntables alongside the versatility, stability and creativity of using DJ software made me feel like I was coming home – no matter where the DJ booth was.
Alice DeeJay: ‘Better Off Alone’
Not all my influences have been positive ones.
I found this tune when it was just an instrumental by DJ Jurgen. It has a lovely little hook in it and sounds great. I played it a lot, and got a good response in the pubs and clubs whenever I played it.
The problem (to me) was when someone got hold of the tune and put a vocal over it, changing the dynamic sound of the track from something that was an interesting musical piece to commercial ‘cheese’. Because I preferred the original tune, I automatically disliked this vocal version: it managed to turn a good track that I liked to play into a bad track I hated playing.
Unfortunately, I was on my own. Everyone else loved it! So I still had to play it, because the places I worked at demanded a lot of commercial tracks on the playlist to offset any unknown, more underground tracks. (Ironically, the track was classed as underground before getting the vocal.)
This track, and several others to come, taught me that sometimes you have to play what the club and the clubbers want. Until you become a DJ with the renown and power of Deadmau5, Sasha or Oakenfold, you have to follow the club’s guidelines. At the beginning, DJing is all about keeping people happy and making enough money to eat. If I’d refused to play that track, I wouldn’t have been asked to return as the DJ; I knew that the right thing to do was to just keep playing the tune until the appeal wore off.
Delerium: ‘Silence’
In Chapter 4, I write about falling in love with the tune ‘Silence’ by Delerium, playing it as often as I could, and how it still means a lot to me when I listen to it. But I see this tune as a double-edged sword. I see this tune as the turning point in my DJing career, when it went a bit sour. This tune wasn’t directly responsible, but after ‘Silence’ was such a success, the market was flooded with records that were very simple, obvious, bland melodies with an attractive lady singing over them.
Obviously, people had released records of this sort for years before ‘Silence’, but the success of ‘Silence’ combined with the ease of making and distributing music over the Internet opened the gates for money-grabbers who figured they could release a weak record with vocals and make some money. Which they did. Not all of them were bad: some really good vocal tracks came out of this wave. But many producers missed the point that ‘Silence’ was such a big success because the music was really good and stood well on its own, but more importantly, Sarah McLachlan’s voice was haunting, unique and perfectly matched to the music and a club atmosphere.
Ultimately, this crossover commercialisation of the dance scene drove the good music away. The people who were buying these records started to go to the clubs that would normally play less commercial music, and they started to demand to hear what they knew. Club owners, reacting to a new voice and seeing the rise in profits with the new batch of clubbers, happily agreed. This move drove the music I loved playing deeper and deeper underground to the point where it was hard to get work playing it.
The problem with commercial trends is that by their very nature they change as people move from fad to fad. Eventually, as each new track sounded more like the old one, the novelty of this music wore off and the clubbers moved away to R&B and nu metal. This meant that the clubs that had abandoned their old music policy needed to readjust.
Some clubs started to play heavier and heavier music, let people into the clubs that they wouldn’t have in the past, or changed their music scene completely. This left music (and the club scene as a whole, as I saw it) in a state of flux, leaving me feeling concerned about my future as a DJ and about the music I loved to play. As it turned out, I shouldn’t have worried.
Sasha and Digweed, Miami 2002
My last key influential music moment in this chapter is the mix that Sasha and Digweed did in April 2002 at the Winter Music Conference in Miami, USA, as part of their Delta Heavy tour.
By the time I heard this mix in late 2003, I was spending more time teaching DJing than performing, because I wasn’t as in love with the music as I used to be. But I did still have a soft spot in my heart for Sasha and Digweed – I was still grateful to them for providing the reason I’d started to listen to dance music in the first place. A friend had this mix on his iPod, and I asked if I could have a copy, just to hear what was going on.
Two hours later, I realised that my assumptions and prejudices about music and how the dance scene had ended up after its hyper-commercialisation were wrong from a more global view. I felt like I was being musically reborn.
The mix was incredibly well thought out, and some of the tunes were amazing (the mix from Adam Dived’s ‘Headfirst’ to Solid Sessions’ ‘Janeiro’ almost blew the speakers in my car, I played it so loudly!). This mix was the key that marked my return to this music and to DJing – and is the reason why I wrote DJing for Dummies.