Category Archives: DJ Set

This set is a homage to what I call the True School. True School isn’t some trendy name I picked up from a magazine. It’s the kind of music I actually grew up dancing and listening to. Back in the early 80s electronic black dance music was a very specialist niche but it was the centre of my world which was based around my local club scene in Manchester. I was so deep into it that I never actually noticed the extra wagons attaching themselves. The journey so far has been very interesting but it seems there are so many trailers that have attached themselves to electronic black dance music that the weight seems to have moved – so the more commercial less underground styles which developed out of this very select (almost obscure now) style of music is being pulled in the opposite direction by even the neo-commercial rap industry now – who I’m sure (alot of them) are not really aware of the roots of where their music began.

When I was asked to do an old school acid house set I could have easily put another nail in the coffin of black dance music by playing some cheesy old pseudo rave shit that started to cash in on the early Chicago acid house scene. I actually watched the system of what was going on in the early house days from a safe distance in the “jungle”. I watched as certain DJs positioned themselves into places of importance as the pop trailer attached itself via the now trendy “Remix Producer” and helped the main music media to coin phrases. It seemed to me fragments of the morsels of funk they had extracted from past grooves were becoming the building blocks and templates for what you now call dance music. And then I watched as the next generations fed off these and created their own, even more refined, fragments. To me, it seems like they were blagged judging by the fact that there is so much interest in and releases of retro-analogue-backward-looking music right now.

So getting back to why I chose to do this set in this way, it was just mainly to remember where I came from and what were my main inspiration points which are really the first wagon on this train.