With its cover of a dilated pupil, and a title that promised to give acid house the social and political context it deserved, Matthew Collin’s book 1997 Altered State was a landmark. Here was dance culture taken seriously, and by someone who had lived it. Matthew’s writing career started in Nottingham on the city’s Duck Call fanzine, but went into overdrive when he moved to London in 1988, keen to document the exploding dance scene using what he liked to call ‘participant observation’. As editor of i-D between 1991 and ’94, he used his magazine to document the rapidly evolving culture and the exciting musical splinters flying off it. (He also took a punt on a rookie writer named Broughton.) And he continued a lifelong devotion to the intersection of music and humanity with a series of incisive books – like Serbia Calling, which explored music as political resistance, or Rave On which detailed house culture’s global evolution. His latest, Dream Machines, is a rip-roaring story of electronic music told from a distinctly British perspective. This interview took place on the 30th anniversary of 1988’s Summer of Love.
Interviewed by Bill in London, 7.3.2018
What was happening for you in 1988? I moved to London in April 1988. I have to say that serendipity is real. I left for London the night after seeing Depeche Mode’s Music For The Masses tour in Sheffield and wanted to make it as a music journalist, and living in Nottingham that wasn’t possible then. Got the offer of cheap flat, in fact Sheryl Garratt’s former flat. Arrived at the right place at the right time. Not by plan. It was one of a train of events that sets you on a course for life over the next 30 years.
Had you been going to places like The Garage? Yeah, we were lucky in Notts because we had Graeme [Park] at the Garage and Jonathan [Woodliffe] at Rock City, who were pioneers in acid house/electronic dance music. They were playing these new imports from Chicago, Detroit and New York. But of course, there weren’t enough house and techno records to fill a whole night, so they’d be playing soul, hip hop, as well. You’d get a hip hop section for a couple of hours, and you’d get a house and techno section, and in the middle there’d be electronic soul records: that Easy Street or Prelude sound and that was the bridge between the two things. At that time we didn’t really see it as a new form of music, but part of the whole same thing. You don’t know any different. Certainly, it was very lucky that my local club was the club where a DJ was playing this new music and trying to push it.
From then, Graeme Park went on to the Haçienda, so we were lucky to have that connection, that different interpretation of things. In the Midlands, you’re not northern, you’re not southern, you’re not really anything, so you don’t have this attachment to north or south, you’re just happy to be going anywhere out of your city where there’s going to be something good going on. And hitchhiking to gigs before that. You’d hitchhike anywhere within a reasonable – or unreasonable distance – to hear what you wanted to hear. This all comes down to scarcity doesn’t it? It wasn’t easily accessible and it was scarce, so you had to make a reasonable effort to find it.
Moving to London in 1988, what was your trajectory of writing jobs and going out? I was lucky I had friends who were… well one friend, Sheryl Garratt, [writer and editor of The Face 1990-95], who I have to credit for everything. She was obviously well connected in club culture in London, and she knew John Godfrey [i-D editor 1988-90], who gave me my first job as an editor. So it was reasonably easy to get in anywhere you wanted to. Obviously you wanted to go to the most exciting places possible, which at that point were Shoom, Spectrum and Future in London and then I was lucky to have the Graeme Park connection, which opened up the whole Manchester thing as well.
Did it feel like something massive was going to happen? Was the change dramatic from 1987 to 1988? In 1987 all the music was already there: house, techno and garage, and pioneering DJs around the country were already playing it. But this was a set of sub-cultural styles, it was not a mass nationwide movement. I think the early months of 1988, as acid house exploded, it felt like the onset of a psychedelic trip. Sounds and feelings and colours intensified and there was this headlong rush that swept you up, up and away into the unknown. It did feel like a dramatic change and a break from what had gone on before. Those first few years from 1988 onwards really did feel like the highest of high times; the kind of times where anything was possible, although obviously ecstasy played a massive role in all that, of course.
I suppose that’s the part of the recipe that was missing in 1987 that became evident in 1988. Ecstasy was the accelerator. Ecstasy was the drug that bound people together. It didn’t create the music, but it did help to create this community around it. And it gave it that passionate intensity. Of course, there would have been an electronic dance music culture without it, but it definitely wouldn’t have happened in the same way.
What were the most exciting events of that year? The Nude and Hot nights at the Haçienda, Spectrum, Future at Heaven, The Trip at the Astoria. Everyone’s got their own story to tell and what it meant to them. And then seeing it begin to explode in my hometown as well, that made it clear that it wasn’t just going to be some metropolitan hipster scene; it was going to be a major phenomenon everywhere.
There was this amazing sense of liberation and freedom which was compounded by the sheer innovative power of this incredible new music, which was so full of energy and passion and excitement. It did feel like something special was happening, and you did feel like you were part of some sort of secret society, all joined together on this incredible journey. It wasn’t at all clear where it was going. It certainly wasn’t clear we’d be talking about it as an important movement in contemporary cultural history thirty years later. By the end of 1988, there were even some people suggesting it was already finished and they were looking for the next trend. It was still relatively small in terms of numbers in 1988, and then the orbital raves of 1989 just took it to another level entirely.
When you went back to Notts, is that when you really noticed the sea change? There was just this greater intensity in the air. People were wearing more colourful clothes. People weren’t going out to be looked at or to assert status, but to be involved. They were going to dance. They were going out to sweat. They were going out for the music, rather than any showing-off aspect of the culture, which really existed before. So the first time I saw it, I was like, ‘Bloody hell, the hometown’s got ecstatic!’ If it’s happening in Notts it’s going to happen everywhere else, and that’s exactly what happened.
In the Garage? Yeah, but I can’t remember if it was called the Garage or the Kool Kat at that stage. That was the central point because Graeme Park could mix, he’d been doing it for years already. He had the records and he knew what to do with them. At that point I think there was also still some scratching! There was this weird crossover point where you still had hip hop records being played, like Mantronix ‘King of the Beats’, Chubb Rock ‘Ya Bad Chubbs’, they were still being played in ’88 and ’89. You can hear tapes in the Haçienda where they’re playing Public Enemy. It wasn’t house music all night long. You had these weird atmospheric records which would be quite difficult to get away with nowadays, like ESP ‘It’s You’, which is a Haçienda classic but you listen to it now and it’s so sparse and emotional. You can’t hear it now as a club record. It wasn’t just the fact we were so out of it we’d dance to anything; it was a kind of searching for a sound. At one point, Jon Dasilva, who played the Hot nights was using BBC sound effects records to give his sets a different texture than no one else had. People were experimenting with how to put this music together because there was no template.
And the UK was quite late to start mixing records, too. In some ways that was a good thing. The way the culture developed, people needed a constantly evolving narrative. And a constant groove. The way the music was played before acid house wasn’t going to work at that point. There was so much energy. You’ve probably seen those clips from Quadrant Park in Liverpool on YouTube. That is the kind of acid house experience, the non-Balearic experience, instilled to its absolute essence. And anyone who’s been through the scene, seeing that will get emotional flashbacks. That is really how it felt every night you went out for a long period of time. That kind of intensity.
I remember weekends lasting from Thursday night to Monday lunchtime. Yes, but I don’t necessarily think the experience of this for someone who got into it in 1998 is any different from someone who got into it in ’92 or ’95 in qualitative terms, because you do have this absolute passionate love affair with the whole culture when you first feel it. So that could’ve been true in 1988 or ’92 or ’95, and probably it could happen in 2018 as well.
Did it change your life in any way? It completely altered the course of my life. Obviously other things go on in life that shape the way you develop and shape your interests, but the fact of moving to London in April 1988 set me on a course that shaped my entire social and professional environment for years to come, and I’m so thankful for it. It was an incredible experience and incredibly inspiring. And I don’t think I’m alone in this, but it wasn’t just going to parties, it was the whole culture that grew up around it which I was very lucky to be able to document and participate at the same time.
What’s the lasting legacy of acid house if there is one? It brought what were previously the pleasures of the bohemian elite to the whole of society. In practical terms it brought about changes in licensing laws, it changed city centres through fuelling a night time economy, and of course it normalised drug-taking. Its do-it-yourself ethos also enabled the democratisation of creativity, which has produced this huge and wonderful body of amazing music.
Did it change society? That’s really impossible to say because society is affected by so many other things.
What was its long-term impact on dance music. Acid house clubs, more or less, are still the template for the global dance music scene that we have today. From Shanghai to Cape Town, Sao Paolo to Moscow this is now a worldwide culture, and in some way it’s still rooted to what happened in the UK in 1988, as well as the music of Chicago, Detroit and New York. This set the pattern for global hedonism. That’s the lasting impact.
Are there things we’ve lost from those early years. We’ve lost our braincells and we’ve lost our hair [laughs]. Obviously, this thing about it happening for the first time means it can’t happen again for the first time.
In the thirty years leading up to 1988, we had rock’n’roll, mods, psychedelia, punk, jazz-funk and acid house. But thirty years after it there’s been no comparable youth explosions Why do you think that is? It’s really, really hard to say why not. It would be a subject for sociological study rather than me.
Does the internet have something to do with it? Nowadays all history exists simultaneously. Post-punk was a challenge to people to always create something new. And the same happened with acid house, the whole Chicago thing was a competition between a set of people, same with Detroit, same with jungle. We come from this time when the future was a kind of aspiration. We were socialised into looking for the new and expecting the new any time. We also came from a time of scarcity, so I had to hitch hike down to London to buy second-hand records from Record & Tape Exchange. It would be seen as ludicrous to do that now. This is the argument against these festivals with amazing line-ups, where you’re like a kid in a sweet shop. Scarcity and having to struggle to find something gives it more value.
Was there an anti-Thatcher element to acid house? I don’t know. We’re talking about this first year, it wasn’t even a full year, because really it was only when Spectrum and the Trip started, these bigger venues, that it actually became a phenomenon rather than a sub-cult.
Will it ever happen again? [laughs] Obviously nothing ever happens again the same way twice. Society has changed and it shapes cultural movements. In terms of a mass dance movement? Well, it’s now a global movement. I don’t think there can be anything like 1988 ever again, but that’s the same with all moments in history. I do think there’s something essentially primal in this need for humans to get together and celebrate and abandon their inhibitions and find some kind of transcendent bliss, if only for one night. It’s dreadful being nostalgic about 1988 because there were shitty things happening in 1988.
It was important, but enjoyment and pleasure doesn’t end for young people I think it’s massively detrimental to fetishise an object of the past and worship it like a god. It’s historical arrogance saying we had the best time ever. A guy at my FE college was always saying, ‘Oh, you should’ve been around in the ’60s; that would have been your time.’ I was always miffed about that. I’ve got 23 Skidoo and Cabaret Voltaire and Throbbing Gristle and Clock DVA; why do I need your ’60s!
I also worry about this iconography of the past, whether it puts a weight on people’s enjoyment of the present, when there’s old farts standing around saying it was such better back in the day. In the end all that matters is the present. 1988 was a remarkable year that changed a lot of things, certainly British youth culture, but it wasn’t the only important year in history, and it should be seen as some kind of date that’s written in stone and handed down by the gods.
Outside of the club scene, you’ve got to remember – and acid house was really quite a small thing compared to even a year later or five years later – life went on as normal. It was the late Thatcher era and it was pretty dreadful, but that all contributed to how the culture developed. And it developed in that way partly because of what we imported from the US and Ibiza, and it developed because of the socio cultural and political climate of the time.
But it did reinforce this post-punk idea of DIY. Anything is possible. You may fuck it up the first time you try it, but it’s great to try and it may lead to something amazing. All those first DJ records. Do you remember that article in i-D: British Underground Music, where they got together Tim Simenon, Coldcut, Mike Pickering, Graeme Park, which is where they first met. Pretty much all the people who went on to be some sort of luminary in UK dance music, and these guys were just trying it, basically. I don’t think they would say they knew what they were doing at the time, but that was the spirit of the time. That was the spirit of 1988.
His photos are famous – the defining record of the early acid house years. There’s Danny Rampling Christlike against a yellow sun at Shoom, the can’t-go-home crowd spilling out into the YMCA car park after The Trip at the Astoria, Paul Oakenfold DJing behind an impressive mullet at Future, sunrise by a lake in East Grinstead. There are baby faces, blissed-out smiles, straw hats, smileys, bubbles, and a lot more paisley than you thought possible. And those iconic images of the second Summer of Love are far from the whole story. Dave Swindells has an immense photographic archive of London clubbing from the mid-’80s right up to the present. As Nightlife Editor of London listings magazine Time Out, he had an access-all-areas pass to the whole after-dark city. You saw his work blown up to wall size in the 2019 Saatchi Gallery show Sweet Harmony: Rave Today, and now you can buy it for yourself in two books he’s produced, Ibiza ’89 and Acid House As It Happened. Looking back over his long career, Dave muses on the ups and downs of UK clubbing and the importance of documenting it all.
Frank Broughton: When it comes to clubbing in London I can’t think of a photographer who’s got a greater body of work spanning so many years and so many different scenes. Dave Swindells: Being able to go to all those things is such a privilege. At times I’ve amazed myself, ‘Oh my God, I’ve got pictures of that.’ Suddenly, last week, I found these pictures of Jah Shaka that I really didn’t think I had.
I was super lucky to be in a position where I could go to almost anything, you know. I could rock up and either blag my way in or do it by arrangement. To be able to go to Brazilian things, or a Bhangra night, a rock and roll thing, and feel I’ve got a right to be there, because somebody has either commissioned you or given you a job, which allows you access.
I would have liked to have lived more in the clubs that I was photographing. I would go along and take pictures and get into the vibe really quickly. But I often think, why didn’t I go to the afterparties? Why didn’t I go down to Clapham Common and see people on the Sunday?
Don’t be so hard on yourself. You didn’t go to the afterparties because you had to file a story. It was also about getting back to real life. I didn’t want to go on and on for 24 hours.
There’s so much creativity that goes into nightlife – the fashion, the decor, the music, the graphics, but it’s so ephemeral. It’s not even chip paper the next day. It’s just trashed. So it’s so important you’ve documented all of this. Yeah, because for so long, we felt like we were the bad boys of culture. You only ever heard bad news about club culture. Oh, it’s drugs, it’s people throwing up in the street. It took so long to get any respect. I think the first time I went on anything that felt as if there was some, what you might call ‘establishment recognition’, was going on a British Council event in the late ’90s, going to Israel with VJs and DJs. Because museums and galleries, they were like, ‘It’s just people having a party, isn’t it?’
Outside the Astoria after The Trip, 1988Shoom, 1988 at the Fitness Centre with Jaqui (or is it Louise?) Chantrell lost in the smokeShoom, 1988 – Simon Wilkinson, Steve Margrave, Sue, Mark ‘Spit’ Fenton and friend
So where would you bequeath your collection if you were to give it to the nation? I know of other photographers who gave their archive to universities. I suppose that’s a possibility. I did go and meet the V&A once, at the instigation of [Notting Hill Arts Club founder] David McHugh, because he had just done an event there. They were interested. But I think they felt, ‘What would we do with this?’
The Saatchi Gallery did that show on rave, which was quite brave of them at the time, and they did some very lively, sweaty events during it. There was that Leigh Bowery exhibition in the chapel in Fitzrovia. The V&A does collect some photographer’s work, and and they do recognise the cultural value of it. They did that Club To Catwalk show. And back in 1994 they did the Streetstyle show. But it’s only now you feel there’s a kind of recognition.
I guess because people started to understand what club culture has brought to the world. The New Romantics – even though everyone always disputes that name – that generation made a lot of music that went around the world. But for the most part, it didn’t feel like it was designed to dance to. It didn’t feel like it was part of the same equation as the music coming from New York and Chicago and Philadelphia.
But then London came of age. In the late ’80s a lot of DJs and producers started making music. And then we went on to create actual new musical forms. When jungle and drum and bass came through, UK garage, dubstep, all these things came out of London and the wider UK. That gave a different validity to what was happening in club culture.
And the fact that rave was such a mass culture thing. It was such a cultural movement. It wasn’t just a little bunch of trendies and bohemians in London, or Manchester. It really shifted things, and so many people were involved.
Tell me about Time Out. When did they realise that clubs were something to write about? I think it was about ’81 or ’82. It was the whole one-nighter thing that got them into it. I remember looking back through the Time Out archive for the 20 years’ anniversary [in 1989], looking for what had been written about in the late ’70s. They had done the occasional nightlife story, about different discos and rock clubs where people danced, but there wasn’t much there. Even though, obviously, really good things and underground things were happening. And definitely there was a massive reggae scene in London. That was hardly ever documented.
I joined in ’86. Nightlife Editor. And at that time, they weren’t doing a brilliant job of it because [Time Out rival] City Limits was definitely better. That was Sheryl Garrett and John Godfrey. They were definitely more tuned in. Lindsey Shapiro, who I took over from, did a good article on Dougie’s and some of the other reggae clubs around Hackney in about ’87. We listed those things, but I don’t think we went out looking for them. When I went for the job the question they asked was, ‘Would you get to a new club quicker than Leigh Bowery?’
I’d been about a year and a half doing pictures for i-D – ‘straight ups’ [the magazine’s pioneering street fashion portraits]. I was so lucky, the guy who had been doing it before kind of got tired of it. He went off to Ibiza and did a whole lot of clubbing for the next 15 years. So I was really lucky to walk in at the right moment. Dylan Jones was editor then. Alix Sharkey was there. And Caryn Franklin. So that’s what got me the job at Time Out.
Time Out played an important role because it had almost an academic view of London. It didn’t want to miss things. That was definitely part of the ethos. I feel now that it’s quite hard to find out about what’s going on because there isn’t an overview. Obviously Time Out wasn’t perfect and couldn’t be comprehensive. But it was really useful. You were trying to write for the general reader. But to a degree you can also tell people about things that were a little bit edgier, a little bit underground. And you could support things, like Dingwalls or Plastic People, you know, obviously, Fabric when it opened. There were so many good things. There really was an embarrassment of riches. We had a constant supply of potential news stories every week. There was never a shortage of things to write about.
Taking pictures in clubs was quite unusual, wasn’t it? When I started there were a few people who were regularly taking pictures, but not very many. There was Normski, there was Derek Ridgers. I always give due credit to Derek, he’s phenomenal. I love his pictures. There was Oliver Maxwell and one or two others. It wasn’t like later. I remember going to The End one night in 2006 and there was a bloody queue of people waiting to take a picture of the DJ. And, of course, now it’s totally a different vibe because of smartphones. There are probably some secret archives out there. Because people on different scenes definitely took pictures. Even if they took them with some throwaway 35 millimetre camera.
Where did you grow up? How do you get into all of this? I grew up near Bath and went to uni in Sheffield, but when I came to London, my brother Steve was already running clubs. He’d started in ’82. He did the Lift, and partnered with Kevin Millins who was doing the Pyramid to do Jungle and Bad and various other nights. It was great having somebody who’s already in the scene. He’d say, ‘Come down to Heaven and see what that’s like. Don’t be shy!’
The Lift was at Stallions, which was a brilliant little venue at the back of the Astoria. With a massive fish tank. I went there in ’83 and to a little warehouse thing that he did. I took a few pictures, and got lucky and they worked. It took quite a long time to get the feeling that I could do this.
I went to one of Steve’s parties at the Titanic, just off Berkeley Square. I think it closed in about ’85. One of those great lost venues. Anyhow, he did a party there in ’83, and it was great. I went into the loos, and the conversation was so fun and camp, and the people were so visual: wild outfits. I’d seen Derek Ridgers’ show The Kiss at the Photographers’ Gallery and I thought, wow, how brilliant to photograph situations like this. I love to capture people when they’re really having a good time. When it’s just the banter and they’re being themselves. But at that stage I wasn’t confident enough to approach people and start snapping.
I remember a lot of the gay clubs in New York wouldn’t allow cameras, because people might not want their image out there, they might be in the closet. I mean, to be honest, I’m amazed looking back because I took pictures in The Lift in ’84 and most people were really relaxed with it.
Did you ever did you ever get in trouble for taking pictures? Yeah, definitely. You always had to avoid snapping gangsters and wide-boys. If you walked into a central London house club in the late ’80s and early ’90s the first people you’d meet were usually dealers, and sometimes a whole line of them – no pun intended.
Or Twice As Nice, when it was at The End. There were so many characters there. So many Premiership footballers – though I wasn’t there the night the Beckhams went and did a bit of DJing – and no shortage of gangsters. I knew I’d have to ask people before I took their picture. I don’t want the grief. But it does dilute it somewhat if you go around saying, ‘Do you mind if I take a picture?’
Because you miss the moment. You can always go back. Or you can do what I sometimes used to do, which was to take one more picture than people really wanted you to. You can see them starting to glare at you.
Twice As Nice at The Colosseum, 1999 with percussion passion from TravisTwice As Nice at The End, 2000Twice As Nice at The End, 2000
Tell me more about acid house. That was the scene you dived most deeply into. I really felt a part of it. Even though I was about two months later than everyone else, that spring – I was a little bit late to the party. But nonetheless, I knew everyone involved. Nicky Holloway, Paul Oakenfold… Danny Rampling had done The Dos at the Zoo, The Dinosaur Do and all these things. So yeah, I did feel very much part of it. And I had felt very much a part of what was going on in ’85 and ’86, the warehouse thing. Because that was a really exciting time to discover London, and have a camera and be able to record it.
What was the first thing you went to that was part of what would become acid house Well I had had been to the Dinosaur Doo, and Johnnie Walker and Danny Rampling were saying ‘We’ve got some ideas, we’re going to do something, you’ll have to come down.’ And that was late ’87. At the same time there was this whole ‘flare groove’ thing going on, which brought fun and silliness and dressing up to the rare groove scene, in clubs like Discotheque at Busby’s.
The really interesting thing about ’88 was it started fast and got faster, all through the year. You know, it wasn’t only acid house and Balearic beats. At the start of ’88 there was so much energy suddenly, so much positive vibes. ‘We can do this!’ ‘Let’s make this better!’ And of course ’87 had been amazing for the scale and ambition of things – like the Westworld parties. They were the only thing that compared with the scale of what was going on in Ibiza. London was mostly small clubs, you know, except for Heaven. Not many other places were remotely organised and well-run and had decent sound systems. So those Westworld parties were incredible. Four and a half thousand people, and they did four or five parties. Then they did Wet World parties in swimming pools.
Westworld, 1987, setting the scale for raveWestworld, 1987
It’s funny looking at pictures from 1987 because a lot of people were really ambitious. There was a ghost train operating on the Astoria stage, there was Delirium with all sorts of adventures, a skate ramp, BMX bikes, a helter-skelter – they were doing all that in the Astoria.
So there were a lot of promoters who were really seizing the moment and trying to put on something that was a lot more of an event than just a little nightclub. The ambition that led to the raves was born in in warehouse parties. They just thought, ‘Let’s, scale this up. Let’s really try and do something.’
People knew how to find one-off venues, where to borrow a sound system. You could publicise it on pirate radio. It’s like you say, acid house was definitely not year zero. It was just that suddenly there’s this new thing that takes advantage of all this know-how. And of course, it was it was the availability of ecstasy. Which some of the club promoters were very much involved in.
Were you aware that that was the thing that kicked it off? You knew that it needed a prompt. And of course, a drug like that – that made people feel that liberated, was what kicked it off, yeah. What was gonna happen next was anybody’s guess. But of course, for someone like little old innocent me, who’d been to Taboo and seen half the dancefloor on ecstasy, because somebody had brought back a case from New York. I remember seeing it immediately: ‘OK, this is ecstasy. Right. Okay. Great.’
Leigh Bowery and friend on the floor at an ABC party, 1985
So Taboo was the first place you saw ecstasy in action? Yeah. Half the club was on it, including the DJs. And they were all jumping into a pile with Leigh Bowery at the bottom, because he’d fallen over spinning around with [dancer and BodyMap founder] David Holah on his shoulders, and then everyone jumped on, including the DJs. And the record’s going around. We’re like, wow, this is really the trendiest club in London. Look at it!
Amazing. And so, having seen that and experienced that, when I walked into The Future… Paul Oakenfold had told me, ‘Look, Dave, come down, have a look because it really is happening. Ibiza was fucking amazing and it’s about time we didn’t have just one style of music being played.’
And the Balearic thing had already been happening at warehouse parties in so many ways. You didn’t go to a warehouse party that played only funk music. Those parties were all about mixing it up. Apart from anything else, you could get 3,000 people into some of those places
The warehouse parties were generally more more than one room. Yeah, generally two or three floors, if you were lucky, if the space allowed it. So it certainly wasn’t year zero. This whole ecosystem was already in place. And this new music, which had really been around for two or three years. And consequently there were so many brilliant tunes, you know, some of them were a couple of years old already. But that didn’t matter.
Back then I did feel very much a part of it, and that gave me licence to go into the clubs and photograph there because I was trusted. I was familiar. You’ve been invited. And then I went to Rockley Sands, I arranged my book Acid House As It Happened in the order that I went to places.
You wrote one of the very first pieces about the scene, in Time Out in March ‘88. Which was quite coded about what was happening: talking about ‘ecstatic dancing’. Yeah, very rapidly we avoided mentioning ecstasy, but of course, as long as you took out the pictures of people gurning, most people didn’t know, they just thought wow, those people are having a really great time.
Ibiza 89 Amnesia pyramid
Tell me about Ibiza. Your Ibiza book is based on a single trip, isn’t it? Yeah, one week. With Alix Sharkey who wrote the article for 20/20 Magazine. The editor Don Atyeo gave us an open brief. We said we think we ought to go and do something on Ibiza, because it was so important to London last year. And he said, ‘Just go there and see what you find’. Which is a dream assignment. And this was partly because he’d been in Zaire. Don Atyeo was the only reporter who stayed in Zaire for the Rumble in the Jungle after George Foreman got injured in training. He didn’t have the money to go back to the UK. And so he stayed in Zaire for six weeks and got in with Ali.
Did you know where to go? Oh, we knew really. Our story was that that the clubs were going to have to have roofs put on them. This would be their last year open-air. It was a dream to go and take pictures of people having these crazy times with palm trees all around. We just thought, well, we’re gonna go to Amnesia with Boy George hosting the night because it was his birthday party. And we’ll see if we can go to Ku and then we’ll see what else is happening.
We’d been told there were these really good bars paying music along Las Salinas. In the end, the story is quite long. And I was so happy Alix allowed me to include it in the book. It’s a good counterpoint to the myth that everything was perfect. Because even back then I’m moaning about all these bloody Brits puking up and jumping into hotel swimming pools from the balconies. That started right in the beginning.
And the other thing was it was multi-generational. We went to Pacha and the whole family’s there, even grandma, just like they would be if you went to a reggae dance or a bhangra night. And that was really, really good.
And you’ve updated the book for this new edition. Yeah. It’s fun to put out the book again, there are some pictures that weren’t in the first one, and I also improved a few of the other shots.
Any other books in the pipeline? Yes. I’ve got two books I’m working on. But both of them are secret in terms of what we can mention.
Your pictures have had a busy life because there are so few others of the whole acid house time. At the time, the fact that I had pictures, and Oliver Maxwell had a few pictures, of Shoom meant it got all the attention. That’s a real factor, isn’t it? Of course, once things got written about, then the other clubs, like RIP, down at Clink Street, did get the props and the recognition. I mean, Shoom was a brilliant club. It had an incredible atmosphere. This crowd who were being incredibly nurturing of each other and, you know, a lot of them were only 16, 17. They were kids. They were bringing along teddy bears and all that. The whole vibe of Shoom was really amazing.
There was a newsletter, wasn’t there? with Jenni Rampling advising people on relationships and whether you should give up your job. I remember when I was offered ecstasy at the first night of Spectrum, you know, I was like, No, I want to take some pictures. And I knew how many people had already chucked in their jobs. And I also knew it’s 25 quid. I felt a bit of a wuss, but on the other hand, I took the pictures. I just did some cheeky halves that summer and that was about it. Because there’s no way I could have taken pictures otherwise. I met people later on who were really high while still taking pictures, but by then you had autofocus.
What did you miss that you wish you could go back and photograph? As far as the whole ’88 thing, there’s obviously ones I didn’t get to. I should have gone to Hedonism. I would definitely go back to that. Especially because so many of the black promoters in London were there. That’s where they got the revelation. The people who had heard this music on pirate radio. And thought, ‘What the fuck is that?’ Then when they heard it in a club, it suddenly made sense, on a proper sound system.
What are some of your greatest memories from that time? Dancing along to the ‘I Have a Dream’ speech in a club was amazing. Dancing to ‘Promised Land’ – hearing gospel house was incredible. And also ‘Yeke yeke’ another tune from that summer that often gets forgotten. That was all amazing. And obviously ‘Can You Feel It’.
I remember the first night of The Trip. They were really nervous: ‘Is it gonna be full?’ ‘Have we gone too big too early?’ You could lower the ceiling in The Astoria because it was such a huge venue. To start with they had it lowered. Then after only about two or three weeks they lifted up the ceiling and you can suddenly see from the bottom of the stage right up to the top of the room. It’s full of people going wild. ‘Wow, look at this energy rush!’ It really was phenomenal. And then there was too much energy in the room so it spilled out onto the street.
Those famous pictures of people partying outside. Was that happening every week? Every week I heard about it happening. And I wrote about it in Time Out because I wanted it to definitely happen again so I could photograph it for The Observer. And I was so happy because of course it’s a different deal altogether when it’s outside. And years later to see people like Fabio and Grooverider in the pictures. I didn’t know who they were at the time.
‘Can you feel it?’ Ecstatic energy spilling into the street after the Trip, 1988Fabio & Grooverider getting a taste for acid house at The Trip, 1988
Going down into the YMCA car park and people bashing on the top of cars. These poor people were just trying to drive home and suddenly 200 people are all jumping around, shouting ‘Can You Feel It!’ and ‘Acieeeeed,’ and all that stuff. One car drove up playing Public Enemy ‘Fight The Power’, and there was this feeling of rebellion, rebellion in the streets, people having an amazing time.
And the police were visible maybe about 100 yards away. We were outside the Dominion Theatre and there were only about two or three policemen, and I thought, what are they going to make of this? They’re gonna see a lot of people jumping around and think, Well, they’re having a good time. But they’re not actually causing any trouble.
And of course, later on, that all changed. This was the honeymoon period. For about four or five months. A few months down the line there were the first shock-horror stories. And it was basically the music press, the NME. Because they they were not holding back, they said there’s loads of drugs in there.
You must have been back to Ibiza plenty of times? I didn’t go back for 11 years. I eventually got back there in 2000. Everyone started telling me about these DC10 parties next to the airport, how people were saying, this reminds me of the old days when we didn’t have any roofs.
I guess we should touch on your little team at Time Out over the years. Sam Pow and Reetu Rupal I know well. Yeah, and Ben Bellman, who was with me for ten. Yeah. I was really lucky to have a lot of other people contributing, because there’s always more than one person can reasonably know about or find out about, or experience. So it was brilliant having having a bit of a crew.
Do you think there’s been a shape to club culture? A kind of historic curve or something? It became a popular culture surge. It happened first with acid house, then with ’90s rave culture, and then that spilled out into festival culture. So many festivals got established, which started basically as dance festivals. Who were finding legal ways of doing it after you had such a repressive situation.
Obviously, if acid house hadn’t happened, there was no way they were going to shift the licensing hours. That wasn’t even a thought. The only change in the licensing hours before that was to let wine bars open in the afternoon.
And so many people went out in the rave years, and so many of those people are still going out. It might only be once a month or once every six weeks or whatever, but they’re still up for it. And they’ll definitely go to festivals and one thing and another.
But the variety and sheer volume of nightlife changed. In the ’80s and ’90s you could go to little one-nighters every night of the week. People definitely still want to go out. But there’s nothing like the range of opportunity to experience club culture, seven days a week. There’s really great bars, and they’ve got brilliant music, but people are not paying five quid to go to a club on a Tuesday night.
And so many clubs have closed. Clubs like Plastic People, The Cross, Bagleys. When venues close it breaks your heart a little bit. Because of what happened in those places. And what could still have happened if they’d stayed open… Because every social space matters. But there’s a brutal economic reality – if you have property values and rent rates like London, there’s a limit to how much you can do before it just becomes uneconomic to run a club. To be honest, I’m amazed that somebody has put a reported £70million into Koko. And they seem to be making a go of it.
Even back in the day, for many of the clubs it wasn’t economic either. It was just passion. Like Ultimate B.A.S.E. at the Velvet Rooms, It was only a small venue and they had all their running costs, but they’d subsidise it to have big guest DJs. Felix Da Housecat would come along. They were so good. But of course, the reality of running a mid-week club night was it was always going to be a struggle to break even. I think a lot of people now would say, ‘God, what a slog to try and do that’. How many weekly club nights are there now? I don’t know. Not many.
What makes a great night? It’s a combination of so many little factors. You want brilliant music. But in the end it’s got to be the people who go. No party is happening without dancers who want to go there. And that’s why I always wanted to photograph the people who went to the party, not just the promoters and the DJs, and a couple of ace faces. It’s the people who make it happen. You can call it call-and-response, the relationship between the dancers and the DJ, or the music maker, or the live band, or whatever it is.
One of the things I really loved about doing the club section was, it was never just one type of thing. There’ve been so many different types of clubs we cover. Clubs can be a cabaret performance, they can be techno, or exclusively West African music… There’s so many different vibes and things that you can respond to and get into. So what makes a great club? In the end, the most important thing for me was always the vibe, the vibe that people created together.
Nightlife writer, DJ and gadabout Bruce Tantum is New York’s undisputed champion clubber. Sometime in the late ’70s, as the city’s infinite nightlife possibilities spread out in front of him, a friend advised him to either go to one club all the time, or to every club once. A born contrarian, Bruce resolved to do both. Since that decision he has rarely slept, his metabolism requiring little to sustain it beyond oddball twelve-inch disco dubs and vodka. His band Moot started with a 13-strong line-up supporting New Brunswick’s very own Celibate Sluts in a local parking lot. With their guitar-free, bassline-heavy no-wave stylings – and nine fewer musicians – they went on to span the ’80s, playing at Mudd Club, Danceteria and the Peppermint Lounge, and holding down a dependable Saturday slot at CBGB. DJing then took the strain and for the last 30 years it’s been a rare week in New York when Bruce doesn’t spin records in a dirty basement, or increasingly on air. He can look back fondly on a life lived on the dancefloor, with a memory of it all that would be encyclopaedic if it wasn’t so gloriously blurred. Time Out New York cottoned on to his unique clubland expertise in 1997 when it made him Clubs Editor, a role he inherited from the late Adam Goldstone (who caught the job description from my good self), and in which he spun golden letters for an illustrious 17 years. Despite never having written for publication before, Bruce emerged fully feathered as one of the most informed and entertaining writers on dance music, a skillset he now employs as Editor of DJmag USA. His brilliant seat-of-the-pants DJing makes him a favourite at Low Life which he plays on a roughly biennial basis, or whenever we can afford the gilded sweetmeats in his preposterous DJ rider.
interviewed 19.02.23 by Frank on ZOOM
Frank Broughton: I have a lazy mental shorthand for the Mudd Club as a parallel to London’s Blitz, because it was ground zero for so many creative people. I was reading Johnny Dynell’s interview recently because we finally posted it, and he calls Mudd Club the cradle of civilization. Was it? Bruce Tantum: It really was in a way. It wasn’t quite as much of a dress-up kind of place as the Blitz. What it was – it was one of the first, if not the first, instances of the down-and-dirty punk rock scene, and the no-wave scene, and the more artistic scene, all merging together. That had been happening at parties, but I don’t think there’d ever been a club that kind of formalised it.
And by the artistic scene, you mean the post-Warhol people. Like Basquiat – who actually DJed there. Yeah, not the fine art scene, more like the various strains of the underground art scene. All the new-wave filmmakers, and people in various visual arts. But at that point, I still felt like I was on the outside looking in, because I was still pretty new to New York.
Where did you grow up? In New Jersey, and where I grew up was very rural, a little village called Dutch Neck. We didn’t even have mail deliveries. We had a general store where you would have to pick up your mail. I remember it was a big deal when we got street addresses.
Was there a particular moment when you decided you had to move to the city? That started when I was five years old. Because where I grew up in Jersey was close enough that we would get the New York television stations. And so I would see on the news, crime and homelessness and the city’s turning to shit. And for some reason I was like, ‘That’s where I want to be!’ I always knew I would move to New York as soon as I had the chance.
I went to school at Rutgers University, which is about 30 miles from New York. And so 1976 to ’80, that’s when I started going out in New York, mostly to punk clubs. CBGB’s, Max’s [Kansas City], a bunch of other smaller places. But I was very much a New Jersey bridge-and-tunnel outsider at that point. Some of my friends had cars, but we usually took the train and we would just stay out till whatever time and then take the first train back in the morning. We were considered the art-punks of Rutgers. T-shirts, ripped-up jeans and Converse sneakers. But I mean, that’s kind of what everybody wore. First I moved to Hoboken, which is right across the river. But my whole social life at that point was already in New York.
Did the punk thing really feel like a movement? Or was it just disconnected bands? What did it feel like? Well, by the time I started going to these places, it was already ’76. And bands like The Ramones and Blondie were already pretty big. By the time I saw the Ramones I think they already had two albums out. Blondie had their first album.
What were the most memorable gigs of that period? I remember having some fun at Richard Hell and the Voidoids. A friend of mine was friends with the Misfits and they used to play Max’s all the time. Those were very fun shows because there would be a very strong element of danger. Like there’d be tables flying through the air. For somebody 18, 19 years’ old it was a blast.
In addition to the punk stuff, we were also occasionally coming out to discos as well. Even pre-’76 when I was in high school, we were going to the local New Jersey discos. My whole peer group was listening to Led Zeppelin and Yes, and for some reason, Foghat was really big in my school. But I was always drawn towards slightly weirder stuff, like Bowie and Roxy Music. And I was also one of the few of my friends that had a real thing for whatever disco, or proto disco, they were playing on the radio. At our local mall, Quaker Bridge Mall, there was a place called Duke’s, and they would actually have live bands playing cover versions of disco songs like [Dr Buzzard’s Savannah Band’s] ‘Cherchez La Femme’ and [Salsoul Orchestra’s] ‘Tangerine’.
Amazing! Live disco bands in your local mall. Yeah, and you could drink underage back then too, so we were like 16 years’ old and we’d go and get drinks and have a laugh.
And in New York you would go to disco clubs as well as punk gigs. I went to Studio 54 when I was still in college. This was after it had already closed the first time, so it had lost some of its allure. There was one night where we actually went straight from Mudd Club to Studio 54. Shockingly, we never had much of a problem getting in. Even though there were still huge crowds outside.
Well, that’s because of your innate coolness. I don’t know about that. I think they just went, ‘Look there’s some punks’.
What were the other places? I was going to Mudd Club a lot. I think the first iteration of Danceteria had opened, when it was on West 37th Street, I believe. That was great. We were still going to all the punk things as well, Peppermint lounge, and very soon, by 1981 I believe, Pyramid opened up. And that was a huge one for me. Because in ’82 or ’83, I actually moved into Manhattan, into the East Village. And Pyramid was essentially my local disco, my corner disco. And we were going there all the time.
I went to The Saint a few times. You supposedly had to be a member. But since we worked in what was their unofficial restaurant, they would let us slide in once in a while. I was working at 103 restaurant, which was right on the corner of Sixth Street and Second Avenue. And the building that kind of surrounded it was the Saint.
Of all the all the clubs I’ve heard described, The Saint just sounds astonishing, that whole theatricality. There are very few photos, was it as amazing as it sounds? Yeah, it was. I mean, it really was a full on planetarium. I don’t know how they did it. Because it was originally a Yiddish theatre. Then it was Fillmore East, and then I guess, around ’79 it became The Saint. Some of those other big discos were pretty full on as well. Studio 54, of course, but I think The Saint was more impressive because they really did pay attention to the theatrical aspect.
Yeah, programming the light show to the music, it was all coordinated. It was pretty amazing. But frankly, I was kind of happier going to places like Pyramid or the Mudd Club – with that dingy, falling apart kind of vibe.
Pyramid was where that alternative gender-fuck drag started. That was sort of a thing. It’s where RuPaul and Lady Bunny and a number of others got their start. Johnny Dynell DJed there for a while, Mark Oates, Sister Dimension. The management always wanted the DJs to play new wave. But the DJs wanted to play more disco and funk and soul, and then early house once that started. So it was like a mix of all those things, musically.
And then Area opened in 1983 and from what I know about it, it kind of formalised things. It was like, ‘Okay, this really works. People love this kind of clubbing life. Let’s put some money into doing a really amazing version. Yes. I do think they wanted to capitalise on that sort of uptown-downtown aesthetic. And they did it quite successfully for the maybe three and a half years that it was open.
People talk about the great mixing of people. Like Warhol coming down. Was he chatty? Was he hanging out? I never saw Warhol at Mudd Club. I saw him at Area a lot. Yeah, he would just be hanging out. Usually just standing against a wall
And happy to talk to anyone? Well, you could talk to him. He wasn’t going out of his way to talk to anybody. He would always have one or two of his assistants with him.
Who were some club characters we might not know of? I don’t know, umm, Baby Gregor. He was always one of the people in the dioramas at Area. He’s no longer with us. He was a Pyramid person. And one of the co-founders of Wigstock.
And he’d be in one of the glass cases at Area. He’d be in a glass case at Area. But so would a lot of people, a lot of that downtown underground art scene would eventually end up in a diorama.
Did you? No, no, no. I wasn’t well-connected enough yet to sit in a fucking terrarium for eight hours straight. They probably paid people I think.
It sounds like clubbing was a full-time way of life. You were going out of your way to visit different places. I was doing some of everything. Among my friends that was pretty much a normal thing. I mean, we’d just be out at clubs, easily, three, four nights a week, right? Not just out partying, but actually at clubs. My usual routine then was I’d go to Danceteria, which had cheaper drinks. Get kind of sloshed there. And then we had Area, where we knew the door people, so we’d get in really quick. And spend the rest of the night there.
What are some of the nights that stand out in your memory, blurred or not? I don’t have many specific stories. I really don’t have all that many. Because it is all like a blur. One time somebody gave me some advice: ‘You can do it one of two ways. Go to one club all the time. Or just go to every club once.’ And for some reason, I’ve tried to combine those two things. Every club all the time.
So as I say, it’s all a swirl. Basically, my whole life from from 1980 to 2000 is a big swirl.
My first night of Paradise Garage was very much an anomaly of a night though. It was in ’83, New Order playing there. It was right after ‘Blue Monday’ got big.
I was at the Saint once for Sylvester to play a short little disco set. And I believe it was Two Tons of Fun as backup singers. Though I might be hallucinating that.
So you’re out everywhere, and as as new things came into view, like hip hop, you were aware of them? Mudd Club was one of the first places that wasn’t a hip hop club that would play hip hop. And then right around that same time, first there was club Negril. Then the Roxy. We weren’t looking at it as a discovery. It was just the music that was swirling around.
How much were you aware of the earlier grassroots scene up in the Bronx, in Harlem? Yeah, we were aware of that. I was fascinated by hip hop as soon as I heard of its existence, which would have been sometime in the late ’70s. Sugarhill Gang songs and Kurtis Blow ‘The Breaks’ – all those songs were huge on New York radio. Everybody knew where hip hop was at that point. By the time they actually started playing it in the downtown clubs, I was pretty well versed.
There were linking people who connected hip hop to downtown weren’t there? Like [scenester] Fab Five Freddy, [videomaker] Michael Holman, [promoter] Ruza Blue, who did the Roxy, people like that. Yeah. And I think all of them were Mudd Club people as well.
Right. So it really was the cradle of civilization Yes. Yeah. Johnny was correct about that. It was the beginning of a strain of clubbing that carried New York nightlife through the ‘80s, right up until the dreaded Giuliani time. It kind of laid the basis for clubs that were very different but that still had some of the same methods – like The Roxy, like Area.
Who were the DJs you were aware of? Well, Justin Strauss and Johnny Dynell because they’re playing at Mudd. And I knew Anita Sarko, and Mark Kamins at Danceteria. And of course, everybody knew people like David Mancuso and Larry Levan. Then Tony Humphries over at Zanzibar. I don’t know if Tony had his Kiss FM radio show yet or not. But yeah, we knew the bigger DJs. But as great as they were, you didn’t really go to clubs specifically for the DJ, you went for the club. For most people DJing wasn’t really a thing. It wasn’t really a aspirational kind of career decision. Like at Danceteria, unless somebody told you, you wouldn’t even know where the DJ booth was. That was true of a lot of clubs. At the Pyramid, you were perched in this sort of crow’s nest about as far above the floor as you could get. Nobody could really see you.
What was your DJing debut? That was a little bit later, around 1987. Me and my friend Mickey Hohl used to do a party in this little bar called Chameleons which was on Sixth Street near Avenue A. It’s now Club Cummings, a little venue owned by Alan Cummings. We were playing basically disco and house. People hated it. House hadn’t really caught on yet in New York, I guess? And disco… it was too soon for a revival. People would get into fights with us. But we stuck with our guns and we eventually started getting a crowd and had fun.
We did a night called Home Shopping Club, where we would have little shows and give away cheap, shitty merchandise. House, disco, and electro, dancier new wave. A mix of stuff. And eventually we brought that party to the Pyramid. Early ’90s.
Just how lawless was the city when you first arrived? It was fully lawless. Yeah. I mean, there were like 3000 murders a year for one thing. So you could do whatever you want. There was very little police presence at that point. The restaurant where I worked at, one night somebody was shooting it up. So we had bullet holes in the window. You know, there was a lot of crime, there was a lot of homelessness. There still is a lot of homelessness.
That lawlessness brings freedom, though, doesn’t it? I always imagined that if I’d been there ten years earlier, it would have been even more amazing than the amazing time I had. Well you’ll always say that. I wish I had been there in the mid ’60s.
The late ’70s just sounds so much fun. Well you can see it, if you watch a movie like Downtown 81. Or any number of flicks from back then. There’s plenty of photographic documentation. And that is what it was like, that’s not an exaggeration. It was half bombed-out, people are shooting up all over. The trade-off is, you have 3000 murders a year – and you have $300 a month rent. You take the good with the bad. Actually, my first apartment was $300 a month, and I thought I was being ripped off because I had friends who had better places for $150 a month. Back then, even with the minimum wage being practically nothing, you didn’t have to work too hard to get your rent together.
So people were free to be who they wanted to be. You could do your art or your music, or just go out all the time. I mean, we really did party. I remember once we found an abandoned building, this would have been ’86, ’87. We found an open basement of a building. ‘Hey, this basement looks nice. Let’s do a party.’ I think there might have been some people living in the building, I don’t know.
There were all these little weird, like, not even after-hours. Some of them were like regular hours. There were places I didn’t even know the names of but like, basically, people would take a whole tenement building and turn it into a temporary after-hours club.
I was always amazed you and Adam [Goldstone] knew all these little speakeasies. That side of the culture was so established in New York, I remember going to that tiny place Brownies which was basically someone’s living room. There’d be people snorting lines off the table. But if you swore, if you said ‘shit’, Brownie, or one of his minions would come over and say ‘You be careful.’
They were like, ‘You know the rule! No profanities!’ Right. They were very strict about that.
It’s a good way of keeping people’s voices down, because you’re trying not to swear so you watch what you’re saying. There was another place called Frank’s, right on Second Street. between Second and First avenues. Classic sort of, knock on the door, the little thing opens up. And like, you have to say, I know Frankie, or something.
How were you making a living? What are you doing to pay the rent? Well, I worked at at 103 restaurant until about ’85. Then I started working at the Museum of Holography, which at that point was still museum-worthy. Before they started printing holograms on cereal boxes. That was a really easy job. And paid fairly well.
What clubs really established house in New York? There were already parties like House Nation and Wild Pitch, but I think The World was one of the first full-on house clubs. The World was a trip. Around 1990. That was another of my corner discos. It didn’t last very long. It was big, but it was incredibly decrepit, literally falling apart. Frankie Knuckles and David Morales were the residents. And that’s probably the first place I ever heard Frankie play. David Morales I’d heard one place or another before then. This was obviously well after the Warehouse, after Frankie had come back from Chicago. But I think The World was one of the first full-on house clubs in New York. House was being played everywhere. But there weren’t many clubs that were fully invested in it – yet. It was normal for people to mix house into their sets. It was unusual for there to be all-house nights.
Was that because of what drugs people were taking? Well, there were a lot of drugs, everywhere. But it wasn’t like everybody was doing ecstasy, like it was in the UK. It wasn’t like a full-on ecstasy-rave kind of thing. There was a variety pack of drugs.
I think that’s the difference. The UK had this sort of Year Zero for this new thing of house music plus ecstasy, whereas New York had more varied drug tastes. Yeah, we had much longer experience. I first did ecstasy in ’80, ’81 It was straight out of that club in Dallas, the Starck. Somebody had brought it up to New York – or Hoboken, ’cos I was still living in Hoboken at that point. And we actually, the first time – I hope none of my relatives ever read this – the first time we ever did MDMA, we injected it.
Oh my god. How come? I think somebody had advised us to do it that way.
How did that turn out? We had some classical music playing. And immediately the classical music in my mind turned into heavy industrial music. And I was floating in a universe of coloured bubbles. And then, after 15 minutes maybe, I settled down into a normal ecstasy experience.
So it was a kind of at-home thing, not at a club dancing? Yeah. The first time I ever did it was at home. I mean, yeah, I had already been doing ecstasy for a long time before the summer of love over there. For you guys.
Tell me about your band, Moot. I guess a band was the more obvious route to stardom than DJing back then. I think they were both highly unlikely. It was a band with some of my old Rutgers friends, formed in 1981. A minimalist pop band. We had a small degree of success. I mean, ‘success’ is being very relative. We had one 7-inch single come out, ‘Mavis’. But we played Danceteria, we played Peppermint Lounge. We opened for Toots and the Maytals once. Opened for the Bongos once somewhere. We played at Mudd Club once. This is in Mudd Club’s dying days I should add. For some reason Hilly Kristal took a liking to us and we would play headline slots on Saturday nights at CBGB’s. This is also after CBGB’s salad days, I should also add.
Too modest! Any chance of reformation? I’ve sold my bass guitar. I just sold it like a year ago. It’s been sitting in the corner of the place for 20 years without me touching it.
When did you start writing for magazines? That wasn’t until literally when I started at Time Out New York.
Seriously? Never before that? Yeah. You had bequeathed the job to Adam. And it was still a part time job at that point. But it was getting successful enough that they were expanding. And I think they gave Adam a choice. You can either start working full time, or you can get an assistant. And Adam being rather, you know, allergic to work, said I’ll do the assistant route. And he asked me.
At this point, I was working at a shop called Air Market, which sold Japanese stuff, like Hello Kitty kind of shit. So I said, Yeah, I’ll give it a shot. I went in, the job interview consisted of the managing editor asking me, ‘So you want a job?’ I said, ‘Yeah.’ She was like, ‘You’re hired.’ And then I started writing. And then immediately Adam stopped showing up.
Without any warning? He had some battle going on. We had had to cut a lot of the listings because there wasn’t space. There was one party and some friend of the editor was like, ‘Make sure you get that in once in a while.’ And Adam was like, ‘He can’t tell me what to do. Until he backs down. I’m not going to show up.’ So the full-time gig was thrust upon me. And I was there for 17 years.
How did you meet Adam in the first place? A party at Mickey Hohl’s house actually. Adam was already a known entity. He was Club Kid of the month in a magazine called Project X, which was basically the Disco 2000 fanzine. And he was friends with Colleen Murphy, DJ Cosmo, because they both went to NYU. And Colleen brought Adam to a party at Mickey’s House.
Disco 2000. That was the first club night I went to in New York. At Limelight, when techno was starting to be a thing. Limelight had a pretty interesting history. They opened way back in ’84. It was owned by a Canadian guy, Peter Gatien, who wore a pirate’s eyepatch.
He’d supposedly lost his eye playing hockey and used the insurance pay-out to buy his first nightclub. Yeah. There was a Limelight in London as well. Peter Gatien had two. In fact there had been a bunch of clubs called Limelight. There was a Limelight in New York beforehand, in the ’70s, that had nothing to do with Peter Gatien. The New York Limelight in a church opened in ’84, as a rock and roll club. well, different nights for every kind of music. But around ’89 or ’90 Disco 2000, which was Club Kid ground zero, was the big thing. That was actually kind of fun.
I remember at Disco 2000 they’d get regular clubbers to strip naked on stage as a competition. Was it Lady Bunny who compered? It was Larry Tee. He was an oddball figure in New York clubbing history. He produced RuPaul’s ‘Supermodel’. He produced a Lady Bunny song too. I think I’ve got that.
Peter Gatien would hire the Club Kids as freaks to spice up his clubs. With Michael Alig as the prime mover. [Alig was famously jailed for murdering his dealer Angel Melendez, as detailed in the book Disco Bloodbath] I used to go to a lot of the Outlaw parties. Michael Alig’s things. Michael Alig and his Club Kid minions. There was one in a McDonald’s, one at a subway platform. I think it was the First Avenue L train stop, if I recall correctly. Everybody got on the train. Up to Limelight, I think. There was one in a car park somewhere, I forget.
Did you go to the Sound Factory much? That was my home from home. I went to the Sound Factory some. I didn’t go a lot at that point. What years was that?
I started going probably ’91. Junior Vasquez’ era. I missed Frankie Knuckles there. Yeah, I saw Frankie there
What about Jackie 60. Did you ever play there? I never played at Jackie. Johnny didn’t have that many guests at Jackie 60.
There was always a performance, so DJing wasn’t the whole story. Yes. It was Johnny split up by various performances. Once in a while they would have other DJs. I know David Morales played there once or twice. I think Danny Tenaglia might have played a Jackie 60 night. But it was almost always Johnny Dynell. That was another of my real regular places when that was going on. I guess it would have been early ’90s.
I went to Jackie a few times. It was a Tuesday, wasn’t it? Yeah, Jackie 60 was Tuesday. But they had the whole place, the building Mother, which was originally called Bar Room 432 before Johnny and Chi-Chi [Valenti] took it over. They had parties of various sorts every night of the week: Meat, which was their gay, techno night. Aldo Hernandez was one of the DJs. They had Click and Drag, which was their sort of proto cyber night. Clit Club, a lesbian night. And one or two others. Yeah, that was a real locus of fun, that place, while it lasted.
I remember a redneck bar next door. Hogs and Heifers? That’s it. We’d often go there, get tanked up and then go to Jackie 60. That’s when the Meatpacking District was still the Meatpacking District. With actual meatpacking going on. And with the girls working the streets as well. They were all pretty flamboyant. And fun to talk to. That all went away, obviously. The Meatpacking District is a chi-chi upscale neighbourhood now.
We have to talk about Giuliani. Nowadays he’s known as Trump’s useless lawyer, but when he was mayor in the ’90s he was a real crusader against clubs. What was your experience of the whole Giuliani time? The first half of it was fine. I mean, he had a war on clubs, but the clubs were still there. He really had it out for the Peter Gatien empire, which was Limelight and Palladium and Club USA. Palladium was opened by Steve Rubell and I think Ian Schrager still as well [creators of Studio 54]. Palladium was a great place. That was another of my corner discos, but on a much grander scale than Pyramid.
Yes. Giuliani had a real thing out for clubs – for closing them down. He would get red in the face and sputtering when he talked about them. And one of his Deputy Mayors, Rudy Washington, famously said, I’m paraphrasing a bit here, but not much, ‘We’re going to close down every one of these little buckets of blood.’ And he did close a lot of them down. With the Cabaret Licence thing. He enforced this law from 1926 that had been ignored for half a century that said you couldn’t have dancing unless a bar had this particular licence.
And this was at a time when suddenly there were scores of smaller places opening up: bars adding turntables and putting on interesting music nights, like a Brazilian night or a drum and bass night. Right, this this little-used tool that he picked up on. He realised, hey, I can close places down with this. I was at a few bars, bars with turntables, that got closed down. They would come in like gangbusters, the Nightlife Taskforce. And there’d be like, 20 of them. They’d just come in and start shining flashlights in everybody’s faces asking for ID. Shut the place down.
Did that ever happen any way you were DJing? Not where I was DJing, but parties I was at. So that started the era where every venue that did have music that didn’t have a cabaret licence had to have those ‘No Dancing Allowed’ signs up on the wall.
I’ve got one somewhere, for posterity. Yeah, I should have saved a few. It got really petty. Then he was finally able to shut down the Gatien clubs and do some serious damage. Those got to be pretty dark days in New York clubbing. I remember doing the listings for Time Out New York around ’98 or ’99 and realising there’s not a single thing this whole week that I actually want to go to. It was a huge change. So Giuliani did a considerable amount of damage, then 9/11 happened, which also didn’t help things.
I remember, before he was mayor, on the day he got elected, all the police went crazy stopping cabs one night. Do you remember that? What was the rationale for that?
A show of force to express solidarity. I got stopped. I was in a cab with Fritz coming home from Supper Club. Oh, because you had a black fella with you.
I guess. They were literally doing roadblocks and looking into every cab. They got us out and we had to assume the position and everything, for no other reason. Giuliani was a nasty piece of work. The other thing I remember about him before he was mayor was when he led that police strike on the bridge. Whipping up a bunch of drunk off-duty cops. Yes, he was rabble rousing. And rabble rousing in a very overtly racist way. Yeah, he was just an asshole.
I guess like Trump, everyone in New York knew that he was an asshole for a long time before the rest of the world figured it out. Indeed. But one thing I should mention is that the crackdown on clubs started even before Giuliani. I really have to think of the Happy Land fire. At which 80-some people died. It was an illegal social club, that only had one exit. That was 1990. And that led the the fire department to come around and inspect every place.
Another thing that seemed to change in the ’90s, it just became a bit more mainstream. I remember when the Sound Factory reopened as the new Sound Factory around ’95. It was really above board, whereas before it had always felt like a big secret. Yeah. Well, all of New York was being gentrified. It was been getting much more expensive to live here. Yeah. which meant the clubbing demographic was far different than it had been in the ’70s or ’80s or even ’90s. It was a more mainstream kind of crowd? So the clubs were more mainstream.
And that whole gentrification process has accelerated. I mean, it took the East Village 25 years. I don’t want to call gentrification a natural process, but it happened naturally or at least gradually. And nowadays, it’s just like, boom overnight. They just put a luxury high rise in the middle of a poor neighbourhood. And then the gentrification flows out from there.
But the club scene is fairly strong right now. Even with the pandemic having happened and a few economic downturns over the years. I don’t want to say it’s the strongest it has been since pre-Giuliani days – it’s definitely not as creative and full of wild abandon as it used to be – but it’s pretty good right now. There are clubs like Good Room, and Nowadays? and a whole bunch of smaller places.
They’re outside Manhattan generally. I guess that’s the biggest change, isn’t it? Yes and I’m stuck in my rent stabilised apartment in the East Village where there’s basically no clubbing to be had. Mind you Nicolas Matar, who was the owner of Cielo, and co-owner of Output just opened a small venue in the Lower East Side, like 150 people. But yeah, it’s really strong. And they actually got rid of the cabaret laws. They’re not even a potential tool to be used.
That’s room for celebration. They haven’t been enforcing them since Giuliani left at the end of 2001, but now they’re not even a thing. And the thought of it being gone is good. Now there are smaller venues that never would have gotten a cabaret licence back in the old days, a place like Jupiter disco in Bushwick, or Black Flamingo in Williamsburg. These are legitimate small clubs with small dance floors, where they no longer have to put up the no dancing allowed signs. And they get decent DJs. Yeah. It’s pretty kind of fun right now. I don’t go out to clubs three or four times a week, like I used to, but I’m out once a week at least.
Murdered for his devoted reporting from the Amazon, Dom Phillips was a truth-seeker who wrote with both his head and his heart. Before he fell in love with Brazil, Birkenhead-born Dom had been editor of Mixmag through the rollercoaster years when dance music exploded in the UK and house music became big business. He originally went to Sao Paulo to finish writing his book, Superstar DJs Here We Go, which skewered the whole idea of superstar DJs and traced the rise and fall of several. At Mixmag he nurtured a generation of writers and photographers, and created a magazine that challenged as well as celebrated its subject. In 1999 Dom was one of the last people we interviewed for the original edition of Last Night a DJ Saved My Life, and his deep industry insight and behind-the-scenes perspective gave us plenty of glue to bring things together. His passion for the dancefloor, his sharp intelligence and his wry turn of phrase made him an important voice throughout. An amazing guy, we miss him.
When you started writing about dance music did you ever think it would become a global pop thing? No. When I first heard it I was living abroad and I came home because… it was on MTV and in little gay clubs. I heard it in a gay club in Australia, and I heard it on MTV in Denmark and I came home to find out more. This was in about ‘88. I moved to Bristol, and it was in blues clubs and there was one club called the Moon Club, which was in the dodgy part of town, St Paul‘s and you’d get a mixture of hip hop and house. I knew it was going to get bigger because I would play friends things like Soul II Soul and they’d hate it at first, then they’d finally get it. But I think there was a big gulf between growing up on rock and melody to these grooves. I didn’t grow up on soul. I grew up on indie. It took a long time to get it. I thought it’d be like punk; where you’d get a big band like the Clash…
A fad? Not a fad. Maybe as big as reggae.
Do you think it was inevitable? I think it was inevitable after the critical mass of the summers of love and the rave years. And the massive free advertising campaign on behalf of The Sun, which was very generous of them. Once the tabloids had written that 5,000 kids were dancing all night on drugs and having sex, 500,000 kids were asking, ‘Where’s the party?’ [laughter]. It was just so obvious. And after that it suddenly went BANG! I remember hearing ‘The Theme’ by Sabres of Paradise on the Chart Show. I think it was Bruno Brooks had to play the full length version and it was eight minutes; twice as long as everything else in the Radio One top forty. I thought that was pivotal moment. I thought, ‘Fucking hell’.
Is the DJ an outlaw? I think the thing with the DJ is that the DJ is a cultural outlaw, not necessarily a political outlaw. People get confused with dance music and how to categorise it; and where it fits. And the reason is that it doesn’t fit anywhere, because it never existed before. It’s a totally new thing since DJs came out in the ’60s with reggae. So the DJ is not an artist, but he is an artist. He’s not a promoter, but he is a promoter. He’s not a record company man, but he is. And he’s also part of the crowd. He’s an instigator who brings all these things together. Politically, I think they tend to be very very safe. They’re quite content to stay in with the record companies. They’re quite content to stay in the with the clubs, because it’s their business. It’s an interesting point that throughout dance music’s history it has always been ruthlessly opportunistic, entrepreneurial and capitalist. It’s always been about making money. In a way that was quite rebellious compared to the Red Wedge, PC thing you had before. In terms of the power a good DJ can bring. Turning a crowd into a throng. It is quite a powerful, weird role to play. So I guess they can be an outlaw in that sense. But more cultural, because they’re bringing all these things together into a new kind of creative expression. The idea of creating hotch-potches and putting them together. That’s what DJs do. And that’s quite radical. So, in that sense, yes!
Why do you think the DJ became such a superstar? Pressure. The incident that everyone refers to at Mixmag was when David Davies, who was editor at the time, put Sasha on the cover with the phrase: First DJ Pin Up. We were accused at the time of creating the idea of a DJ superstar. Firstly the idea that a magazine can create something is wrong anyway, because it can’t. It can push things that are already going. But the reason that was happening was because were were getting reports from Sasha at Shelley’s where people were queuing up to shake his hand and guys were getting him to kiss their girlfriends and things like this. Because emotionally he was connecting with people in a way on ecstasy. The way he was putting record together. The Whitney Houston acappella. He really was making people quite emotional. It was at that point that we had a star develop. And again it’s about the money. People saw how much Sasha could get paid, and how much a personality could help, I think some DJs went to push a personality and develop a distinctive thing of their own. Some DJs had a bit of personality that the magazines and media would push. I think in the case of Wall of Sound or Jon Carter I think they fairly blatantly played up the ‘We are the mad bastards’ Loaded mad fuckers to gain attention. I think a magazine like Mixmag was happy to play along at that point because needed stars. In the case of Sasha I don’t think he really wanted it and that was what was quite intriguing about it. But at the same time, once it was offered, he was quite intrigued and flattered and excited by the prospect. And ever since he’s constantly sat on that knife-edge. He loves it .He hates it. He’s a tortured artist. But there’s people cheering. Whatever.
The impression I got at the time was that he wasn’t happy about it. Oh, he always said he wasn’t happy about it. I think the reason he wasn’t comfortable about it was that all his mates used to phone him up and take the piss out of him. He’s quite a lad. When we did the Son Of God? cover, he really hated that. We actually had a wrestling match about it outside the Ministry of Sound.
Halo boys!
A wrestling match? Yeah, me and Sasha wrestled. We had this protracted argument for about an hour that people were trying to break up. It didn’t become a fight, but it became this magical wrestling match. ‘You shouldn’t have said that!’ ‘You should have co-operated with the photos!’ [laughter]
Was that the one with the halo? Yeah, the reason was he’d been a nightmare all day and wouldn’t do anything. I had to go down. At the end of the day, the photographer, exasperated, just said, ‘Go like that’ [clasps hands]. The pictures came in and Pembo [Andrew Pemberton] said, ‘Son of God’. So we did. It was more a case of necessity than we set out to do it.
How much did DJs becoming big have to do with record companies looking for new stars? It didn’t have very much to do with record companies. There aren’t very many of them that have made it successfully as artists are there? Some of them have gone and formed bands, but they tend to be the less successful ones. Mike Pickering with M People. He wasn’t really A-list. The big DJs – Carl Cox, Jeremy Healy, John Digweed, Sasha, Pete Tong – how many of them have made great records?
Well some of them have made commercially successful records. Jeremy Healy’s had a couple of top twenty hits. Yeah. Sells 6,000 in the first week [laughter]. Their big hits are compilation albums, which are all done on Pro-Tools anyway. They don’t even go near them.
That’s a terrible thing to say Dom! It’s absolutely true.
I know it is. And I hope you put it in your book! Sorry, to try and answer your question. I think one of the reasons DJs became stars was confusion in the audience. And one of the ways to give a night a badge of credibility was to put a name on it. I was involved in the first ever Mixmag night in Bristol. It was the first time Andrew Weatherall had come to town. Nobody had any idea who Andrew Weatherall was. Or what he played. Or what he stood for. But they did know that he was a DJ and he’d never been to town before so the whole city went out. It was rammed. It’s like a badge isn’t it? But then there are some DJs who are capable of magic, aren’t there? When it all connects, I don’t think there’s anywhere where you can have more fun on a Saturday night. If you’ve had one of those experiences with a great DJ, that’s been brilliant. You’ve seen Carl Cox, and you’re off your head, you’ve made loads of friends, you’re always gonna remember it. And you’re always gonna remember it was Carl Cox.
It might not even have been Carl Cox. He might have come at half ten and left! I’ve come out of a club convinced I’ve seen a great set by so-and-so and discovered years later it was by someone else. Frank Tope is a classic. I remember seeing Frank out one night at Debbie Does Dallas. Suitably refreshed. He was dancing wildly to a bootleg of ‘Stayin’ Alive’ that John Kelly was playing. An hour later, Jeremy Healy played the same record. And the same Frank walked off the floor in disgust. It’s so subjective. I hope this doesn’t sound like I’m taking the piss out of DJs… I don’t mean to.
(L-R) Photographer and Time Out Clubs Editor Dave Swindells, Time Out Clubs reporter Sam Pow, Dom Phillips, unknown
What were the most dramatic changes you saw in dance culture when you were at Mixmag? The first one was the rave scene blowing up and burning out in 1991. There was a big rave called Vision. It had 40,000 people. It was massive. And it was an utter disaster. It was deep in mud. It was when the complaints came in and the violence got really out of hand. Then you had all the cartoon records which seemed to be musically and creatively bankrupt. We were wrong. What was happening was the beginnings of jungle were being sown, and perhaps the tension of what was happening at those events contributed to that. I think around 1991 people started going to clubs to avoid ravers. Venus and those kind of places. Dress codes. Leather trousers. The music was slower, the whole thing was cooler.
I noticed when I came back in ’96, that it had really exploded and permeated the whole of our culture I think the biggest change – and people always say ’88 – was 1994 and ’95. A club called Vague had been described as handbag. You had that mixed-gay glamour thing. I remember when Renaissance opened that was quite pivotal moment. We went to the opening of Renaissance in Mansfield. In the middle of nowhere. Like the secrecy of trying to find a rave. Finding the club, and it was full of pillars, and girls dressed in satin. Chris Howe had done the decor. I remember going to Venus and the opening of Renaissance in the same night and thinking things are really changing. But that whole thing, handbag, glam, just went BANG! I guess you wanna trace it back to the Criminal Justice Act. Was that ’94? Suddenly you’d got Cream, Renaissance, Ministry, loads of others start popping up. The little Balearic network becomes this massive thing. At that point it was so accessible. It was easier than raving. It got to the point where everybody got greedy. Talk to any promoter about 1995 and they’ll tell you, ‘We made so much money’.
Damon Rochefort of Nomad, Dom and Frank Tope, backstage at the DMC mixing competition
I was looking through Mixmag last night, and in them, the promoters were whinging about how much money DJs were earning. It’s a supply and demand, free-market economy. You’ve got the Americans starting charging four or five grand and first class flights. So they priced themselves out of the market. They disappeared. It was the first time, I think, where DJs thought they could really make serious amounts of money. Some of them were going from making £500 a night, Sasha might have been getting share deals on the door that were taking him up to £1,800. And in 1994, for one gig that was a lot of money. And it just started to go from there. I think people, if you were top, were getting around £1,000 to £1,500 a gig. If you’re doing six gigs a week… And there were so many clubs coming up that you could do that.
I remember Dave Seaman telling me he was getting offered £1,500 to play a Tuesday and that was in ’95. I think we really started kicking off in ’96 with the backlash. I think in ’95 we were more enthusiastic. But, as with everything we did at Mixmag, we were really responding to the letters we were getting. A lot of feature ideas came from readers’ letters. It was like the ’80s before Black Friday. It was ridiculous. I’ve got very vague memories of that year to be honest. Its a bit if blur.
Did house finish off punk’s DIY aesthetic? I suppose, politically, it was because anyone could make a record and have a huge hit. The early bleep stuff, LFO and the like all crashing into the charts. No big deals, just pirate radio and stuff. And a lot of the jungle stuff now. So it is possible to make a living and you almost live completely outside the music business. I don’t think musically it had anything to do with punk because it’s always been quite musical and funky and that’s one thing punk wasn’t. There’s also a lot of hippie dreams in house music. A lot of people in the early days of acid house were hippies. I think it’s easier putting that on it.
But I don’t think it was conscious. The imagery they use; the smiley faces; the flowers, the day-glo colours. And also disco. Disco fantasies. That’s another set of dreams. It seems to me the disco fantasy, the gay utopia, the ghetto we live and everyone will be free before tonight. Dance music has a lot of different ideals and dreams compressed into it. I also think it’s a music that everyone puts their own agenda on. Everyone’s got their own agenda.
Is that DIY aspect still intact today? I think in the good clubs, the individual is as important as anyone else contributing to the club. If you go to a club, you are a star, as much as the DJ is. If you want to be. But there’s still so many records that seem to come out nowhere. This ‘Sweet Like Chocolate’. It’s gonna be a hit. I sent Stan over to get a copy, and he had to go to this fucking tower block in Old Street. What a great record. Record companies can’t keep up with it.
Do you think this is why they’ve forced groups like Prodigy into their rock template? Yeah, it’s for students isn’t it? Students would listen to Steel Pulse, but they wouldn’t listen to Jamaican reggae. The Bee Gees but not proper disco.
This is when the NME got involved wasn’t it? No I think Midi Circus, when they started doing this live thing. The Megadog.
But they were never cover artist… They put Orbital on the cover in ’94. Allan Lewis, who was then the publisher, told me at In The City, that they would put someone like Orbital on the cover and take a hit in sales, because it was good for credibility. We used to have similar philosophy in Mixmag.
You mean like putting Method Man on the cover? Yeah.
But they love Fatboy Slim! Fatboy Slim is a pop star. And there’s Zoe Ball. I do like his records, but I do agree that it’s student music.
But it’s like the Prodigy. It’s an illusion. They’re not really playing live. ‘But it’s not a cabaret, okay?’ (He’s paraphrasing Liam.) Because they get out there, and they just express themselves.
Are they the new rock and roll? Are they the Big Audio Dynamite of the ‘90s, mixing guitars and samplers? I always hated Big Audio Dynamite! I think bands like Prodigy, the Chemicals, Underworld very cleverly, have large elements of rock and roll in a way that rock audiences can understand them. Lots of clever stuff on top. The Prodigy have all this theatre stuff going on. It’s more akin to a heavy metal band. It’s almost like Kiss. It is a cabaret. They change costumes. They blow fire. You watch them and it’s a total performance where they act out certain roles. I don’t know whether they’re the new rock and roll or something else. What they do is more interesting. As far as I can work out rock and roll hasn’t changed for thirty years. It’s been exactly the same.
Except with bigger amplifiers. Yeah, with bigger amplifiers. There’s still good records though. I think a lot of rock people were really alienated by the glamour of it all. I remember Pembo really had a thing about it in 1994 and ’95. We are anti-rock! Rock kids are saddoes. Rock journalists are saddoes. They don’t know how to enjoy themselves.
Is this the same Pembo who is now editor of Q? Yeah, absolutely [lots of laughter]. Let me put it this way. There was a feeling at Mixmag that we were out to convert the world. Pitting ourselves against people from the rock magazines who we despised. We were flasher. We had a better time. We travelled five star. That kind of thing.
How much is club culture an essential defining part of young people’s identity? I don’t think so much now. If you’re 18 now, you might go see Daft Punk, you might go see the Chemicals, you might go see the New Radicals. It doesn’t really matter. That’s my perception. Up until a couple of years ago, though, I’d say it was a key defining point.
Has a decade of E culture left us more open, sharing like the evangelists said it would? Has it left us more sharing and more open? I think it has actually.
Do you think what it did was to show possibilities, because Terry Farley told us about his friends going from being plasterers to designers and A&R men and DJs and producers… I totally agree with that. I think for a lot of men, particularly from places like the north, where I’m from. There was a great article Damon Rochefort wrote on Donna Summer once. And he described this scene where he used to go to his local club in Cardiff. And there was an edge of carpet and only the girls were on the floor and the boys would gather around the edge. What dance music did was take those boys from the edge and integrate them on the dancefloor. They learned to enjoy themselves. And be a bit more like women. Feminise them a bit. I think what you said about Terry Farley’s friends changing jobs is very true as well. I don’t think I could have become a journalist if it wasn’t for dance music. I don’t have a degree. I think a lot of people were like that. A lot of people who make records, might have been in prison or whatever. Yet they’re able to produce incredible sounds from inside their heads. I don’t think Sasha would’ve been a pop star. Sasha would’ve worked in a clothes shop or something.
How much is dance music controlled by consumerism? No I think people are far too clever for that. I think people know what brands are and consume dance music the same as if they walk to Selfridges and buy Hugo Boss or Maharishi. They may choose to have a Cream logo etched into their hair, but it’s not because they’re brainwashed by Cream it’s because they’ve made a choice. And they’re happy to associate with that. I think it’s quite playful the way that’s done.
Have we reached the House Sucks stage? I think we were there just before Stardust. Stardust and ‘Needin‘ U‘ were quite important, because they were two classic house records. And had they only ever been released on independent labels by unknowns, would still be massive trainspotter records. That’s the point when it all got quite classy again. You know that Lucid trance stuff? Now that really sucks. I think last year was a bit of a pivotal year, because it brought us back from the brink of Cheese Hell.
Is it really a victory for dance music that dance acts can now play in American stadiums? It’s a really difficult question. It’s certainly a financial victory. It‘s probably a victory in terms of artists coming through, because it would help them. It‘s a shame it‘s had to fit into that template. It‘s not a perfect scenario, but again, I‘d rather it was the Chemical Brothers than Aerosmith.
Do you think it’s become so fragmented now that we will never get anything like punk or house again? I think the only thing you can be sure of is more surprises. Other than that I really don’t know.
What is the most lasting legacy of club culture? I think the thing we were talking about earlier, where boys can get on the dancefloor. Express themselves in a different way. The very uptight, guys, aren’t they? You‘re my best friend, but I can‘t tell you! It’s been really helpful in allowing men, in particular, to relax and relate to each other and women in many different ways. And also learning to appreciate women in non-sexual ways. I think it challenged rock’s dominance. It allowed a lot of people to listen to jazz, disco. It helped give people a better perspective on gay people. Racism, perhaps. I think it may even have made us better dressed.
How ridiculous did the DJs fees get? Utterly, utterly, utterly ridiculous. God knows where these people got the idea that they were worth anywhere near that much money. At least some of them had the grace to admit the whole thing was a fucking scam. Unfortunately, some of them took themselves seriously. The only way it was justified was in terms of them bringing in more money. A DJ would get paid four grand because the promoter was going to get 12 grand. But it was just greed. DJs get paid ludicrous amounts of money. I don’t think any of them are worth it [laughter].
Why not? Personally I think the guest DJ culture we have here has taken us two steps back in terms of DJing as an artform. I’d agree. I’d totally totally agree. A DJ should want to play four hours. How much better are the really big DJs than a bedroom DJ like Stan? How much better are they, really? Some of them are. Carl Cox is. He radiates enjoyment. He’s got presence. He can pump people up. He’s probably worth his money. And then there are one or two other ones, particularly the younger ones, who turn up, play a load of bog-standard hard-house records and bugger off again, having hoovered up half of Bolivia and groped the promoter’s girlfriend. These same people have the nerve to kick off, if anyone dared criticise them because they’re losing touch with all reality because they’d taken so much cocaine. I mean, that’s more than doctors get. If you’re getting more than quarter of a million pounds a year, you’re getting more than a surgeon.
It’s the skinny models argument, Dom. The really funny thing is how many of them never paid the taxman and got caught. How could they be so stupid? Switch it off for a second [he then tells a story of a massive ’90s DJ going on the front cover of Mixmag and asking Dom’s advice about whether to pay his tax bill].
The thing with Healy is he really did live that life. Definitely. Rock and roll, models, glamour. He hung out with Galliano. We did a feature in Mixmag about him playing at a fashion show in Paris and all the girls hanging round. Some people move in that fashiony world. They know stars. He certainly did.
How do you feel about someone taking someone else’s records, and yet still being considered an artist? I totally accept it.
There’s a Q this month in Muzik from Steven Wells saying DJs are wankers and they do nothing. Do you think there’s still a lot of misconceptions about what DJs actually do? I do. Give Steven Wells a big bag of tunes in the main room of Cream and say there you go mate. Show us how easy it is. It’s not easy. Of course it’s not. It’s difficult to understand what the art of DJing is because some of it is quite mystical. It’s about picking up on what the mood might be, and might possibly become. And trying to get it there, in the context of where you are and what you’re doing. There’s a great amount of sensitivity involved. And a really great DJ is totally capable of doing that. They’re totally capable of making a bad record sound okay, a good record sound great, and a great record sound fantastic. They can improve records by the context they put them in. And what they put around them. How they steer them. They can do all kinds of tricks. They can make people spontaneously cheer just for a little squelchy noise. Which is quite insane really. A little noise like wha-wha-wha and people go, ‘Yeeeaaah!’ You can have people clapping along to a cymbal, just by the way they’re bringing it in. When it’s done well it’s fantastic. If it’s done really well it can be quite transcendental. It’s very difficult to explain what the difference between a bad one and a good one is. When the DJ gets it right, it’s definitely artistry, I think. You obviously do. You’re writing a book! You’re a DJ aren’t you? What’s the difference between you and Louie Vega?
Er, dunno. He’s shorter. I think good DJs are not just chucking them on. They’re very thoughtful about it. What Frankie Knuckles tries to do is get inside the hearts and the minds of the people at the centre of the dancefloor. Try to hear things as if for the first time. How would I feel if I was hearing this for the first time? I think if you talk to the great DJs, they’re probably all quite thoughtful.
Is the DJ a filter? I think one of the bit mistakes of dance music was that album artists were going to be the saviour of it. And then what happened was you got the excellent mix series coming out: Mixmag Live, Global Underground, Journeys By DJ, United DJs of America. The records are going to sound better in their mix than on your turntable. There’s absolutely no point in buying those records. You‘re much better off buying a snapshot of their sound at a certain time.
Do you think that’s better than buying a Masters At Work original album, because it reflects who they are better? With the albums they’ve released so far, definitely! No, I do. Some of my favourite pieces of music are mixes and I play them again and again.
