DJs in PJs Part 10

Sorry for the late upping of this one from yesterday mornings session. This week it was back to Matt McArthur, The Overtime Man to do the duties and my selections were (birthday boy last Friday) Roy Ayers with Masters At Work and because I'd heard it in that great Kode 9 & Burial mix this week, Erykah Badu.

Djs In Pjs Part 10 #Djsinpjs by The Overtime Man on Mixcloud

Juke / Footwork Mix

I thought I'd do a little Juke mix. I'm not saying its any good, but its a first attempt. No re-editing or sorting out afterwards, just a bit of transposing to make it (to my ears) sound a little less mental.

Taking The Fun Out Of Juke by Paul Riley on Mixcloud

Mary Anne Hobbs Leaving Radio One

Firstly, I hadn't really been checking if / what people had been downloading off here for a week or two because it seemed to me that I wasn't really put anything new or that interesting up and no-one was bothering listening to anything so it was a bit of a surprise that all the numbers had shot up, even some older stuff that had had no listens before. Maybe there is a bit more call for me to put stuff up than I realised, so I'll try to make up for the lack of recent activity now.

Now tonight marks the end of Mary Anne Hobbs show on Radio One. Don't get me wrong - I am a big fan and any criticisms I'm about to make must be balanced out with the fact that over the years she has introduced me to hundreds of great tracks I would never have heard anywhere else, especially in the years before the internet when I taped her show religiously.

I know her legacy will be for breaking dubstep to the masses and I guess that's definitely justified but to me there was a lot more to her shows than that - both for the better and worse. I don't really want this to be negative really so I'll keep this bit brief but, to me, she did have a few years lost in the wilderness after big beat died but before dark garage / dubstep came along. Some of the stuff she played and guests booked sort of from '99 to maybe even as late as '03 were either questionable (Sister Bliss and Faithless?) or instantly forgettable (hmmm..... nope, it's gone). 

Some of my favourite memories are the night Roni Size made a new track live out of samples listeners phoned in (I tell you, kids don't know they're born these days!), The Wall Of Sound birthday parties (I think 5th and 6th - certainly when Jon Carter just took over proceedings), how much Mary Anne would go all school-girly whenever Richard Fearless of Death In Vegas came in,  the night Suicide came back, the time she went on holiday and David Holmes and Portishead took over for a couple of weeks (this was when the show was still 4 nights a week), Steinski and Plus 1 back to back turntablism, the Tim Burgess set (if anyone has this mp3ed, drop me a note - its a classic in this household) but perhaps best of all - the fact you had to get the tracklists on Ceefax! (God, the kids these days etc etc...). I'm trying to think of mistakes / things going wrong / guests not showing up type tales but I must have forgotten anything like that over the years. 

So the mixes I have digitally (one day I will get round to sorting them tapes out before they disintegrate to nothing). 

Primal Scream : Although the Aphrodite 'Woman that rolls' sample was warmly familiar, I'd completely forgotten about "You are about to enter a big beat zone!" speech bit at the start of the mixes! Retrospectively, we are probably thankfully that this Scream Team mix didn't take us into a big beat zone at all, instead going for the all over the shop approach dropping jazz, reggae, kraut, punk. It dates a bit better than what I could guess would have been on the rest of the show - Fatboy Slim, Skint, Wall Of Sound etc.

Spiritulized : This is a live session, not the classic award winning Jason Pierce mix but I like the bits inbetween the session tracks, it gives a really good reminder of how good the Breezeblock was - pretty eclectic, a classic in there with brand new stuff and a mention of The Bluetones!

Bjork : One of the all time greats. I remember the night this went out thinking it was something very special and there was a lot of hype around it, Bjork playing childhood nursery rhyme favourites and Public Enemy.

Dr Octogan : I guess this must have been just before the show changed names to Experimental, a short little mental mix from Kool Keith

Kode 9 Presents Burial : A mix of tracks promoting the first lp. You've got to give her credit, once Mary Anne got onto dubstep, she got into it big time.

I think I will forever associate Mary Anne with just one word: "Mighty!" (she did seem to describe everyone as mighty for a good few years) but I think it needs taking back and applying to Mary Anne herself.

Songs of Praise 5.9.10

It’s me again, yes, how did you guess ’Cause last time you were really impressed as Betty Boo said. Tonight is a bit weird and wonderful, everything for dad rock to ‘dad, I’m worried our son is on drugs’ rock.

Del Close & John Brent - How to Speak Hip Introduction

Dan McCurdy - Drugs... and What Your Own Child Won't Tell You Introduction

Moondog - Theme And Variations

Dan McCurdy - Marijuana

Delia Derbyshire - Blue Veils and Golden Sands

Dan McCurdy - LSD

Delia Derbyshire - Tutankhamun's Egypt

Keith Fullerton Whitman - Variations for Oud & Synthesizer Side A (33 RPM)

Unknown - King Lear Speech

Delia Derbyshire - Planetarium

Del Close & John Brent - Basic Hip

Delia Derbyshire - Music of Spheres

Del Close & John Brent - The Loose Wig

Delia Derbyshire - Track 01

Delia Derbyshire - Delia's Theme

Anthony Newley & Delia Derbyshire - Moogies Bloogies

Delia Derbyshire with Barry Bermange - Dreams (Edit B)

The Beach Boys - Heroes And Villains (Intro)

The Beach Boys - Concert Intro

The Beach Boys - The Elements Part 1: Fire (Unknown Take)

Unknown - The Beatles Arrival in America

The Beatles - Tomorrow Never Knows (Take 1)

The Beatles - Dig It (Glyn Johns Version)

Captain Beefheart - Hard Workin' Man

Frank Zappa - The Gumbo Variation

Link Wray - Rumble

Severed Heads - Dead Eyes Open

Fad Gadget - Blind Eyes

Tuxedomoon - 59 To 1

Fad Gadget - Collapsing New People

Supermax - Lovemachine

Tom Vek - I Ain't Saying My Goodbyes

New Order - Ceremony (1st Version)

The B-52s - Follow Your Bliss         

Devo - Auto Modown

Lorez Alexandria - I'm Wishin'

Nancy Wilson - Ode To Billie Joe

Bobbie Gentry - Okolona River Bottom Band

Bobbie Gentry - Bugs

Led Zeppelin - Friends

The Minders - Hooray For Tuesday

The Zombies - Care Of Cell 44

Big Star - Nightime

Big Star - Thirteen

Nico - Afraid

Hank Williams - They'll Never Take Her Love From Me

Hank  Williams - Lost Highway

Neil Young - Birds

Willie Nelson - Blue Eyes Crying In The Rain

Songs Of Praise 5.9.10 With Paul Riley by Space Invader Radio on Mixcloud

DJs in PJs Part 9

Part One of the me being everywhere you turn weekend is the Saturday morning DjsInPjs session, this week hosted by Tim of TeaAndCakeRecords. Check the mix below and should you really care, my choices were Flying Lotus / Lil Wayne and Faith Evans which I put in as I think Matt No Requests (the man behind the edit) might need a laugh this weekend.

Djs In Pjs Part 9 #Djsinpjs by Teaandcakerecords on Mixcloud

Heads Up

Just a little warning if you want to avoid things involving me, that this weekend I seem to be all over the place a bit. Not only will I be putting in to djsinpjs on Saturday morning, on Sunday morning I'll have a one hour mix in The Black Athena show from Greece (I think my bit will be on from 12ish but check out the whole show, plus their Saturday show 11-1 here or actually on fm radio if you are in Athens which is about the coolest thing that has ever happened to me). Then Sunday evening its me again on Spaceinvader with a bit of a weird show - there isn't a disco record in sight but some early electronics, spoken word, rock and then its goes even more odd! Tune in 6-8pm on that one.

Pondering...

Last night I was having a brief chat with someone about why they love Jay Dee so much and two things struck me which I thought I wouldn't be able to express in 140 characters. Some might say, I don't really express myself when I have limitless space here but that's another story.

Anyway, as I say, it got me thinking about two things; firstly can I consciously remember the first time I heard my hero and secondly, this person said they didn't like to refer to genres anymore, everything was just music.

I think I'll start with the second point as it is probably easier for me to put down what I want to say on that one. I think if someone said "what kind of music do you like?" and I replied "all music "or "I like everything" it would clearly be a lie. I can't stand the commercial, watered down trance pop that currently seems to dominate the UK top 40. But even if I said "I don't like trance" would be wrong because I still enjoy the Goa stuff Oakenfold played around '93-'94 or the Germanic sound Sasha and Digweed played around the mid to later '90s. So although pigeonholing things and creating pointless sub-genres (glo-hop or something was the last daft thing I heard), I think somethings do need to be boxed off. Again, I am not clever or articulate enough to know what the element in the tracks that I do love are. How is it possible that, say Dizzee Rascal, can make some of the best, most innovative records of the last 10 years with his first album, yet have lost or replaced that 'thing' with his later work? And before anyone comments, I don't think the answer is always drugs.

So to the other point I wanted to discuss; when you first hear someone that goes on to be your hero, was a bolt of lightning striking you the very first time you heard it? This person had been a little bit like myself when it came  to their hero, Jay Dee, in that he claimed he like me had bought plenty of his productions and remixes throughout the '90s without realising that it was the same man who worked with so many of our favourite artists (at this point I will stop speaking for this person and these are now just my own thoughts again). I put this down to the fact I was just a teenager who knew nothing about everything so it took maybe 5 years (I guess I'd be around 17) before I realised that the producers and writers and remixers were on the whole, more important than necessarily buying for the artists name.

This then got me thinking about firstly who I consider my heroes and when I first heard them. The answers I kept coming back to were the obvious, legendary disco djs who pioneered house - Larry Levan, Ron Hardy, Francois Kevorkian, Frankie Knuckles etc etc. Through reading the Trainspotter column in Mixmag, the Desert Island Disco pages in Muzik and the Last Night A DJ Saved My Life book, I had actually read a lot more about these djs and the records before I had ever heard any of them - I think the only exception might have been Tom Moulton as the version I would have heard on the radio  of Andrea True Connection is just the first part of his mix. But anyway, perhaps not unsurprisingly but in the mid 90s getting into house music as a teenager in small town nowheresville, the only route to anything decent was through the radio and mix tapes - of which neither played any proto house.  I had heard rave and the Belgian hoover classics through my older brother in 91-92 but even that had already missed out 3 or 4 years of the history of house.

In '98 when there was some 'decade of acid house' retrospectives and compilations, I was able to first hear  Tears, French Kiss or Can You Feel It? and then Mixmag ran a feature on the most important records of all time and Frankie Knuckles had about 8 of the top 10 through various productions or remixes.

The first Larry Levan remix I heard was David Joseph (a couple of years before I later saw the footage and read the story of Greg Wilson on The Tube) and it really was mind-blowing. I guess though, it was cheating because I had this impression in my mind that I wanted it to live up to, I kind of knew what I was getting but it made me wonder how people who heard it back when it first came out felt.  For Ron Hardy it was kind of funny, as soon as I heard Let No Man Put Asunder, I was counting how many tracks I had which sampled it - there's plenty! 

Anyway, I've waffled on too long. I guess my point is that I knew too much before I first heard my heroes so it's not really fair to compare it with someone elses experiences. I might carry on this story another day if I get bored / inspired / argumentative...