Cacophonous Bling: Living On The Ceiling

That’s alright with me . . . The most difficult thing to do is to get started. There’s only so many mixes you can do while in lockdown. What I don't get, (or rather I do, because some people are dickheads), is the piss being taken out of those doing online sets. Don’t tune in if you don't want to. If you don’t like the idea of those who suddenly find their livelihood a lot more precarious than it was a week ago, and resent their appeals for money, don’t give them any. No one has a right to expect support, just as no one has any obligation to give it. However, if those who seek it have done anything, no matter how small, to deserve it, then why not? Something, however small, can be relatively cathartic. So under this period of lockdown, which hasn’t got as strict as it’s going to in the UK yet, I’m struggling to use my time wisely. I have to though. The Furlough arrangement, which is an initiative used by UK companies to pay workers 80% of their normal salary while waiting out this crisis, has been applied to me. So, like many others, I now have a couple of months where I am getting paid most of my salary, and able to enjoy more free time than I’ve had since being on the dole back in the early eighties, albeit with restricted movement. The pressure is on not to sit around all day, or get into a routine which involves starting your day with ‘Frasier’ and ‘Ramsey’s Kitchen Nightmares USA’, which, before you know it, has taken you up to 11am. Whole subgenres could be curated in that time:

I do love the debates, reflections that come up on Twitter, especially when they chime with what I think, or even with what I am thinking at the time of discovery. This is from Extinct Daemon aka He Valencia aka Aloiso Wilmoth.

“I've been thinking alot about the early tech house scene with DJs like Terry Francis and Craig Richards and how they essentially and or unintentionally spear headed tech house.

The way this style came about is amazing. So basically you got London in the late 90s early 2000s. everyone has been exposed to techno but these guys dig for specific and or play those techno records that are groovy and funky

It's super specific and then once they start producing you can hear the hybridization of UK garage / techno an attraction to smoother groovy house swing with techno sensibilities

This is one of the more beautiful things about DJ culture is people Literally accidentally create entire new styles and subgenres just from the act of curating and digging and playing a specific sonic palette

The natural evolution of that London tech house sound is like Germans with their whole perlon adjacent minimal stuff and then you have guys like binh, Evan Baggs, Nic Lutz, the Romanians etc

The curitorial nature of DJing is so important on a historical level and I often feel like people miss this within discourse from new gen

Was listening to Terry Francis mixes commuting around NYC and In his essential mix he literally opens with "Crustation - Flame (Borderline Insanity Dub Mix)" on paper this is "deep house" but in a stylistic nature it's tech house

A lot of the deep house and techno records they play I have heard in a completely different context. I find it quite beautiful that a person halfway around the world interprets these records differently. I think this is why I'm also a big fan of Call Super. He plays a lot of Detroit techno records that I’ve heard in a completely different way. Dude was mixes octave one classics into UK garage. It's interesting”.

And by some strange coincidence I was asked to compile a top ten of Wiggle tunes. Now I am no expert here, in spite of having been a regular at Wiggle for around four years. Memories are obviously very hazy: I was due to attend for the first time around Christmas 1995 or 1996. I was living in Paris at the time and was going to visit my mum at Christmas on Merseyside. The idea was that I would stop over in London en route. The Saturday night I would go to Wiggle with some friends: Jim, his then girlfriend and Hursty. Hursty used to live on the 19^th floor of a tower block in Camberwell. I think I arrived on the Friday and was all set for rampant hedonism all day and night Saturday. This was soon curtailed though when I woke up on the day in question only to have been clobbered by a vicious bout of the flu. It had come out of nowhere and completely floored me. I also has to buy Christmas presents, and the only things I could buy for my family were books on account of the fact that although I managed to drag myself up to the West End on Saturday afternoon, I couldn’t really operate out of an area wider than Charing Cross Road. So books it was (I remember my mum being uncharacteristically ungrateful on finding out what her present was). By Saturday night, and with everybody getting in the mood to go out, I was getting worse and resigning myself to staying in. I remember being absolutely gutted as everyone went off into the night at around 11pm. I was just as fed up when they all came back around 6-7am battered and happy. At which point I had to get up and, full of illness drag myself, and a large suitcase to oval tube to get to Euston and then on to Liverpool. I was fucked. I didn’t actually go to my forst Wiggle until the 13th December 1997, the same day as I went to watch Liverpool beat Crystal Palace 3-0. It was myself, John and Jim I think. We’d all been to the match, got home and decided to start proceedings early. Wiggle was at Happy Jaxx, under a railway arch by London Bridge. I suppose what I’m trying to say is that this was another formative clubbing experience for me (I do like to build context). From the moment we walked in to leaving maybe seven hours later: a great crowd, always someone approachable to buy beans off and often some weed as well. I’ve mentioned her before in another post but the girl with the scorpion tattoo from Ipswich sticks in my mind. The boys in charge were also very approachable and friendly. I’d bumped into Terry Francis a few months before, just after he had won the ‘Muzik Best New DJ’ award in a bar near Clapham North tube, just around the corner from were I was living at the time in Brixton. He didn’t know me at all, but was very friendly and got me a squeeze for the 414 later that night where he and some other Swag Records affiliates were playing . . . Prior to December 1997, there were also the Ericsson Parties. Four in all, I missed the first one, I was given tickets for the second by Deano at IQ Records on Lexington Street. I think I’ve gone over them before on these very pages so don't want to repeat myself (I’ve done that a lot already), but they were free because they were used as a promotional tool for Ericsson mobile. A clued up young marketing person saw the opportunities that Warehouse parties and MDMA consuming youngsters presented and decided to go full tilt with whatever budget he could lay his hands on. Notable for being one of Gemini’s few (I imagine) DJing gigs this side of the Atlantic.

More of this when my thoghts are ready. Meanwhile, here’s a very non-definitve Wiggle top ten. Loads more records were played regularly and to great effect, but some stick out more than others. Some of these may only have been played once, but I was there when they were and that moment is forever crystallised in the amber of my mind: