Sasha’s room in the Devonshire Gardens hotel in Glasgow is the size of a small club. It also has a fully stocked mini-bar and a four poster bed. Sasha has just checked in – with his mate Sparrow and three girls from America called Zoe, Charity and Jennifer – and he’s showered and got changed. Now he’s sorting out his records. Meticulously he goes through the two boxes he has with him, putting the right records into the right sleeves, dumping to one side a dozen or so records that he definitely won’t need later. He is imagining his set at the Arches tonight. He works his way through the boxes, having a quiet drink, while Sparrow bounces around regaling me with his stories about the time he and Sasha shared a flat in Salford. Sparrow’s a live wire, one of Sasha’s oldest good luck charms.
At half past midnight a driver knocks on the door, and Sasha tells him he’ll be ready in five minutes. Twenty minutes later we’re heading out of the room, down the stairs and into a Shogun parked just up the road. Charity is handing out very minty mints. I’m carrying one of Sasha’s records. Tonight I am Sasha’s box boy.
At the front door, the Arches doesn’t look like much, but as we’re ushered along the corridors leading from the entrance to the far side, our walk takes us through crowds of excited people. Many of them call out and cheer as they spy Sasha surrounded by us, his scurrying entourage; ‘Sasha, hey Sash-aah!’ they shout. Their enthusiasm is infectious. Two thousand people are there, the main auditorium is packed and Sasha is the main attraction.
This is a new kind of pop stardom. For young dance music fans, DJ-ing is a route to ‘Top of the Pops’ as well as a lucrative career presiding over club dancefloors, gathering air miles and emptying mini bars. The profile of DJ’s has been boosted since Sasha’s early days by the recent success of recording artists with their roots in DJ-ing (like the Chemical Brothers, Fatboy Slim, Artful Dodger and Sonique for example). Radio One’s garage DJ’s the Dreem Teem have persuaded Kieron Dyer and Emile Heskey to celebrate their goals with a DJ mime, one hand over their left ear like a headphone and the other spinning a record on the deck. Toy manufacturers Mattel recently added a new male doll to their Barbie range to compete with Barbie’s ageing companion Ken; he’s DJ Guy Blaine, dressed in baggy trousers, a retro shirt and shades, with ‘headphone accessories’.
What happens behind nightclub doors on a Saturday night has come to shape culture at large. Clubland has provided a focus for ideas in music, design, fashion, and clubs have served as centres of community, capturing the imagination, drawing the crowds. The advertising industry are always keen to tune into what young people with disposable income are thinking, and there’s no clearer evidence of how dance culture has shaped the entertainment industry and the mainstream commercial world than the number of TV commercials which feature shots of DJ’s on the wheels of steel (including ads for Yellow Pages and Motorola mobiles); and even more spectacularly, the widespread use of club hits to soundtrack commercials, from Leftfield’s ‘Phat Planet’ on a Guinness ad, to Rhythmes Digitales helping to sell Sunny Delight. Then there are the peak-time TV trailers plugging holiday programmes using tunes by Basement Jaxx or Paul van Dyk; and sports programmes using music by the Chemical Brothers to spice up their highlights packages. The vocabulary of DJ-ing has also seeped out into the wider world. On a KFC commercial the breakdancing Colonel announces a ‘hot new remix’ of his Twister, whatever that is.
When we arrive at the stage with Sasha’s boxes of records, DJ’s Craig Richards and Lee Burridge are on, their decks illuminated by a bright green desk light. Either side of them are two semi spherical mirrorballs which send mini-spots of light spinning round the room. Next to the stage are two banks of speakers, on top of which giant floodlights punch beams into the crowd. Three or four yards from the decks crash barriers have been set up, and the crowd are right up against them. The bulk of the hall is swathed in blue and purple lights. The American girls pass Sasha their coats for safekeeping, Sparrow disappears, and Sasha starts sorting his vinyl again, taking records from each box and putting them in a pile behind the decks, smoking a cigarette. Just before 1.30 he appears at Craig Richards’s shoulder, ready to take over, and a big cheer goes up. This is the sharp end of DJ-ing, when the talking and preparations are over. Now it’s down to the DJ, his records, and the excitement, the energy contained in the room.
The likes of Sasha, Paul Van Dyk, Paul Oakenfold, Pete Tong, and Danny Tenaglia are big name DJ’s with their own devoted following, and the music magazines are filled with heated debates on their various qualities. Clubs like Home are only one part of a wide spectrum; every scene has its own stars and clubs; Trevor Nelson playing r&b, Top Buzz and Ratty playing hardcore anthems, Richard Searling doing his Northern Soul thing, and Paul Taylor with his massive ‘Retro’ rave nights. Not forgetting, of course, that you can always hire a mobile DJ for your sister’s fortieth or your step brother’s 21st, or any family wedding. But the conventional DJ who is thrown in for free when you hire a function room at a hotel or who brings along his own equipment still has trade secrets and great stories to tell.
At a big gig you get treated like royalty, like popstar. At ‘Cream’ someone will pick you up from the hotel, someone will carry your records from the car to the DJ booth, the doormen will be on hand to escort you. The first time I played at ‘Cream’ I was desperate for a drink, so I leaned over to the lighting guy and did what I normally do in the situation, gave him a tenner and asked him to get us both a drink. ‘Is your fridge empty”, he asked, pointing to a white cupboard behind me, under the ledge I’d put my record boxes on. This time the Budweiser was chilled.
You get the star treatment. You might have to stay up all night. You might arrive at a club and the promoter’s runner gets sent to see if you want any Class A drugs. You might lose a night’s sleep. You may end up at a party in some place you don’t know in a town you’ve never visited before. You might spend one early morning walking through Detroit with two girls whose names will always escape you. You might get back to a hotel at five in the morning and feel an inexplicable urge to rearrange the potted plants in the hotel foyer. There might be a bunch of you in the same hotel; it might be you and the Dope Smugglaz and Parks & Wilson. You could be the one who gets called by reception early in the morning; ‘I think your colleague Mr Wilson has lost a shoe.’
Some DJ’s are team players, some are egomaniacs. Some are moaners, some are geniuses. Most working DJ’s aren’t in the big league. Most DJ’s don’t have the luxury of making a good living purely from club work; many are students or work in record shops, but I know other DJ’s who have worked in jobs as gas fitters and telephone repairmen. I know one who is Head of English at an inner city comprehensive school. Later in the book we’ll meet a DJ who trained to be a lawyer, and another who left home at sixteen to become a member of the Institute of Grocers. We’ll hear tell of a policeman who played progressive house but for whom it all went horribly, horribly wrong.
In what follows we will be drawn to many of the big noise, big name DJ’s, because their story reflects the commercial power and influence of dance music today. But we’ll also take a look elsewhere because there’s still plenty of activity which is less about the money and more about the love of the music. There are hundreds of little DIY nights, under capitalised, a small room and a DJ and his or her mates. No-one’s making much money out of it, but it’s still a great night. The dancefloor may buckle, the DJ is maybe playing for a few drinks, a lift home, and the buzz.
The power, the fame, the corporate interests; it’s all a long way from clubland before acid house. In 1982 Paul Oakenfold was selling sweaters at Woodhouse, then got a job in the A&R epartment at Champion, then moved on to work for Profile, the New York hip hop label. In 1986 he was trying to help push Profile in Britain. In 1986 Pete Tong had been a DJ on the soul boy circuit in the South East of England, and a staff writer for Blues & Soul , but had started working at London Records and had just licensed ‘Love Can’t Turn Around’. For others, their rise through the ranks had barely started. In 1986 Fatboy Slim – then known as Norman Cook – had three top twenty hits in the jangly guitar group the Housemartins. Sasha in 1986 was working in a fish factory; it was 1988 before Sasha did what he calls his ‘first bit of proper DJ-ing’
Sasha’s debut on the decks was a night of Chicago house he hosted with his friend Piers who had also just taught Sasha how to skin-up. They had a few Chicago house compilations, but not much else; ‘I was playing some horrendous records,’ he recalls. It was in the back room of a student venue in Bangor, North Wales. It was trips over to the Hacienda from his home in North Wales which had opened Sasha’s ears and inspired him to get on the decks.
Certain kinds of records had all the right sounds to get into a Hacienda audience. The rhythm and the spaciness of acid house, the warmth of acid house, the slightly melancholic side of acid house seemed to exaggerate and feed the effects of the drug. The spooky noises and the break downs seemed made for the Hacienda, a cavernous old warehouse. The new sounds filled the room, and it was all a long way from the structure of the conventional rock song – or, for that matter, the classic soul song – no verse chorus, verse chorus. The enormity of this change is hard to appreciate now, but it required a shift in the way most people listened to music. House music embraced a new generation of computer technology, more and more boxes of computer trickery emitting the requisite throbbing beats, and subsonic squelching basslines; literally new noises, a new pallet. We had entered the digital era, and our lives were being played out to a new soundtrack.
Into the first few years of the twenty-first century and the instrumental tracks, subsonic basslines, bleeps and noises from the early techno pioneers are now normalised. Hard, mad sounds which might have once only been appreciated by New York art-rockers, or electronic music makers under the influence of LSD, are now high in the charts; ‘Phat Panet’ for example, or Azzido Da Bass ‘Doom’s Night’ would have sounded alien fifteen years ago. When instrumental dance music emerged, it was greeted like abstract art in the Sixties, with a similar grappling for points of reference, human interest, narrative. Now Mark Rothko is on your living room wall and ‘Plastic Dreams’ on your TV.
Sasha couldn’t get any regular gigs at the Hacienda, but it was away from Manchester that he made his name and got his big break, down to his own initiative with help from Gary McLarnan. Sasha had been playing at Shaboo in Blackpool but it had closed, and McLarnan was a photographer who’d been around most of the best dancefloors since the beginnings of acid house. Together they started a night called ‘Delight’ at Shelley’s in Longton in Stoke. Sasha soon came to understand the drive and intensity of a room full of e-heads. He’d arrive at the club at eight o’clock and there would already be a thousand people in the queue. By ten the club would be full of the sound of whistles and air horns. At the time Sasha was playing banging Italian-style piano anthems – Alison Limerick ‘Where Love Lives’, FPI Project ‘Rich in Paradise’ – stuff which he admits sounds cheesy now; ‘But it hadn’t been done before,’ he says; ‘and it had a real innocent energy.’
He’d get on the decks and he could feel the surging power of the crowd, the rush building; ‘The big thing for me was holding the crowd back; they’d be gagging to hear a record they knew, and as soon as they did the whole place would go mental; from that point onwards I had to completely go for it. I knew that as soon as I put that one record on, the airhorns would go off and that would be it, I’d have to completely hammer it.’
As the scene grew and other clubs opened and more DJ’s started playing, you began to realise that some nights were better than others, some DJ’s were more consistent, some more populist, some who were great technically but couldn’t work a crowd, some great at warm up, some pure peak time; some, as well, better than others. The atmosphere in a club is down to the music, the mix of people, perhaps even the drugs, but the most significant chemistry is the reaction between the music and the crowd; and the DJ is somewhere at the centre of it all, a catalyst. The significant chemistry of clubland isn’t the ecstasy doing strange things inside peoples’ brains. Ecstasy without music is a worthless thing; you’re just running round hugging trees and grinning at bus drivers. But a drug-free dancefloor still bounces, or buckles.
To get that right, to work those dancers, is the DJ’s dream. Once you’ve accepted that differences exist between DJ’s – that some might be more populist and peak time, or some more challenging, or some just plain uncommercial – and once you’ve witnessed the way the right guest DJ can prompt a queue round the corner and massive attention in the press, then you’re acknowledging that every DJ has a market value; hence the inflationary fees the DJ’s with the right reputations can pick up.
But the growth in the status of DJ’s from the early 1990’s onwards was also down to the fact that the music press and the record industry needs stars of some sort, figureheads, icons; club culture is no respecter of artists, but it needs something to sell, icons, a viable commodity. Rock music had its stars and their guitars, but the dance music makers were often studio-based individuals without major label support churning out one-off tracks with no desire to go out and play live. Techno pioneer Derrick May lives a thousand miles away and even if you could persuade him to turn up on ‘This Morning’ with Richard and Judy he wouldn’t win over the audience sitting there hitting keys and miming programming a computer. This lack of faces, or heroes, among the music makers created a a vacuum, and left the best DJ’s, then just making a name for themselves, perfectly placed to take centre stage. As author Matthew Collin explained in an interview for Channel Four’s ‘Chemical Generation’ documentary; ‘DJ’s have become the superstars because who else has there been to focus on’ You’ve got anonymous producers sitting in back rooms and they’re not Mr Gorgeous in any way. And then you’ve got the clubbers themselves; how can you turn them into a brand, you can’t. The DJ is the only human figure who can be taken and marketed. There was a need for a star and the DJ happened to be it.’ In December 1991 Sasha was Mixmag magazine’s cover star, with the words ‘Sasha the First Pin Up DJ”.
That first bit of front cover stardom ten years or so ago could have been the peak of Sasha’s career, but despite his slightly unfocussed attitudes to his work, he’s survived, and somehow still gives the impression that his best days lie ahead. In 1991 he’d already come a long way from a student rooms in Bangor, just as club culture has come a long way from dodgy rooms in damp basements, the first discotheques, and soundsystem parties. But he’d also got a long way to go; global stardom, celebrity collaborations, more front covers. He says he never had a career plan, but here he is, so much in demand, attracting so much devotion, putting one record on after another.
Now I’m looking out to see what he can see when he stands at the turntables; beyond the first few yards, the audience is just a tumult of raised hands, sweaty bodies, silhouettes, and darkness, and at the front staring faces pale with expectation. Someone is onstage with a microphone; ‘Glasgow, welcome the man called Sasha!’. The lights start strobing, the cheer is massive. Sasha puts on the first record; not some big, banging tune everyone knows, but a quiet, complicated record, just the gentle sounds of tablas. In our backstage area the American girls start to dance. Sparrow returns with armfuls of Miller Draft. Sasha’s drawing out the tension, introducing layers of sound over the rhythms. The beat starts to boom, boom; twisting basslines and snatches of melody bounce around the brick arches. Sasha barely registers the crowd’s presence; there are no theatrics. He caresses the records with loose, light movements, a touch on the cross fader, his hands gently flickering over the mixer. He’s building, building his set. Out front it’s pandemonium.
