The producer, DJ and Secretsundaze promoter shares his favourite tracks, from a Now That’s What I Call Music D-side to a French techno cut he tips for future classic status.
What’s the first record you ever bought?
Well I still have it and it was a rather strange cover version of ‘Summertime’ by the Fun Boy Three. Quite a strange, homoerotic cover, I hasten to add. Interesting as I bought this with my babysitter at Woolworths on Newmarket High Street. It was an odd choice but I think I made up for it with my second 7″which was Eric B and Rakim’s ‘Paid In Full’, seeing it on TOTP and buying it the next day.
The first time you remember hearing electronic music?
I was talking about this with my friend the other day – it was in my friend’s mum’s car in our school car park one afternoon. It was on the D-side of a Now That’s What I Call Music double cassette. We would have been 13. The D-sides or the second side of cassette 2 always had more interesting stuff on and it was the likes of Krush – ‘House Arrest’, Two Men, a Drum Machine and a Trumpet – ‘Tired of Getting Pushed Around’, M|A|R|R|S – ‘Pump Up The Volume’. That kind of stuff. I was like, ‘Shit! What the hell is this?’ and we were hooked! I remember two years later I was 15 and looked old enough to get into a rave and next thing I was in a sports centre with 4,000 people listening to hardcore and going to after-hours parties in fields and driving in convoys to find the location. Felt very lucky to experience what was a subculture at the time, not mainstream.
The last track of the night?
That’s an easy one – it would be the forthcoming Secretsundaze release by John Daly: ‘One More City’. It’s a classic end of night tune. Epic, triumphant and beautiful. It harks back to the pre-UR label Happy Records run by Mad Mike Banks from Detroit with soaring strings, strong in the mix keys and bags of atmosphere. Out on the 1st of July on 12″.
The soundtrack to a lazy Sunday afternoon?
That could be a beautiful, very lazy, dubby, hazy house track on much-lauded Swedish deep house label Svek called ‘Midsummer Night’ by Sunday Brunch. I bought this in my late teens and it still sounds amazing now.
09.54 PM
The Sunday Brunch track is great. Love that and all the early Persuader stuff on Svek. In all the deep house reissue madness Svek seem to have gotten overlooked which is a shame becuase it was such a great label.