Freska All Stars - We Come To Rock

Wow. I remember when the Freskanova label started, the records sounded so sharp, fresh, fly, funky, of the moment. The Freestylers were on Freskanova (I think?). 1997. Big Beat. Hip hop and dance. It was some sort of UK interpretation of the cool kookiness of the Beastie Boys, melded with the reckless abandon of the UK clubbing scene.

I remember buying their first release, cat. no. FNT1, and thinking how lucky I was to have got in at the start of this label, and promising myself to buy everything they put out, a bit like Wall Of Sound. Their label was the mark of quality. Given that this is FNT5, their 5th release, I think I might have the first five twelves.

This reminds me of the end of my degree, the start of my PhD, running around Leeds trying to get DJ gigs, MCing, playing in clubs. Red Stripe. A brown Carhartt beany that I loved. A big brown leather jacket that I'd customised - I'd ripped out the lining as it was a bit cumbersome and snug, and cut another buttonhole into a lapel so that I could fasten it right up under my chin. In fact, that's it - this record reminds me of the smell of that brown leather jacket. 

In fact, maybe the brown leather jacket is more interesting to me than the record. I loved that jacket, it really pulled my look together.

Young Fathers Live - Manchester Academy, Saturday 28th March

So much has been written about Young Fathers that I didn't think I had anything else to add, but here we are, 3 days after the gig and still trying to figure out what the fuck happened.

I'm not going to pretend to be a huge fan - I've listened to everything they've released, but not obsessively, and the production sounds weird to me (more of that later). But like a lot of people, after seeing them at Glastonbury (no, via the TV, silly), I knew I had to see them live.

The scene was set with Nadine Shah supporting, who cranked out a muscular and groovy set of tunes, coming across like a Krautrock PJ Harvey - sexy, dark tunes you could dance to. And then, fashionably late to their own party, Young Fathers strolled on and cut loose. Pummelling dub bass. Chants - African chants, football terrace chants, playground chants. Slogans. Kinetic mayhem on stage, mayhem in my ears, mayhem in my brain. It's not an original thought to say that they don't sound like anything, because they sound like everything.

They are a gang, and not a totally friendly gang. There is a lot of extended eye contact, and it feels challenging. They have opened up the door to their world and allowed us to look in, and it's an ecstatic mess of writhing noise. We are tempted, but scared. They are outsiders, genuinely appearing not to give a fuck. Sonic attack is their best form of defence.

The songs obviously start and finish, but they sound as though they have been in motion for hours, settled into a groove, and we get to see a short excerpt of the peak of the composition. Daniel Barenboim in The Reith Lectures talked about a piece of classical music that was supposed to start "as though the music is already in motion, and you are climbing aboard a moving carousel", and this is what happens tonight. The songs, the noise, the emotion, all exist, constantly seething within the band, and a door is opened into them. The knot of microphone leads by the end of the gig is testament to the abandon and energy (have they never seen a cordless mic?)

In the same way, it feels as though we've been granted an audience with the band, rather than merely going to a gig. The whole thing is a celebration, a modern assembly or communion for a better world. It's a rave. There's a plea for a ceasefire in Palestine over a rupturing bass feedback loop. We are asked "are you still with us?" - mate, we have never been more with you, or anyone.

So going back to their recorded output, the weird (to my ears) production makes total sense - it's the sound of revolution that is already being fought and won, the feeling of being up all night and not being able to go to sleep. It's living iconoclasm, it's all your heroes being flayed alive and trampled on. I will never be the same again, and I will never see a gig like that again. The door has been opened.

Snoop Dogg "From Tha Chuuuch To Da Palace"

In DJing, as in life, you sometimes have to do stuff you don't want to do. What I wanted to do was play a set of music that I liked, that would make people happy, make people dance, make people have fun. If they thought I was a good DJ as a result of that, well, bonus, but my music tastes always tended towards the basic and the obvious. Actually, they were basic and obvious to me, in the sense that I mostly played records that people recognised, rather than trying to weave an intricate musical journey out of dirty electro, scratch weapons and chutzpah.

DJing at an intro level - as a weekly job in a small, cheap club - is a weird thing. You're playing records mostly to people who are, shall we say, in the process of throwing off their cares, and as a result can be a bit disinhibited. I remember being asked by a British Asian girl if I had "any Indian beats", which after a split second pause was followed up with "actually, look at you, of course you haven't". You can't please all of the people all of the time. 

But in an effort to please all of the people all of the time, I made a rule - if someone asked for the same record 2 weeks on the trot, I'd buy it and play it on the third week. That HAS to be how I ended up buying this, because it's not the sort of thing that I actually like. It's got all the elements in place for a great record - Snoop at peak dillywizzle shizzle bizzle, Neptunes on production (that's yer actual Pharrell Williams and Chad Hugo), languid rhymes about fourteen inch rims, puff and pass, and corn rows - but it just never really gels. Mind you, two years later, the Snoop and Neptunes released "Drop It Like It's Hot", a Certified Banger, and you can certainly hear elements of that track in here.

Do I ever remember playing it? No. Do I ever even think about it? No. Oh well. On, on, onto the next one.

The Smiths "Hatful Of Hollow"

I was never a rabid Smiths fan, which I have to say on reflection was a massive failing on my part. I've no idea why I wasn't. Maybe it was the earnestness, the honesty, the celebration of the everyday. I was way more of an escapist. It's odd that I only connect with these things about 30 years too late.

I remember This Charming Man being on a compilation tape that I had, and that I played it to death, but at some point I've undergone a Huxleyean conversion to the infinite, timeless greatness of The Smiths (perhaps through Morrissey's later solo work, of which I'm a huge fan). It also reminds me, inevitably, of the late great John Peel.

I've no idea when or where I bought this, or why I haven't played it every day since, but that's life.

Beastie Boys - "Check Your Head"

This was the album that cemented their place in all of our hearts. It's the sound of them growing up, finding themselves musically, and laying down the future direction for what they would do. It's the most live, organic-sounding album they did, and although they went back to more sample and loop-oriented tracks, it seems to me that this album enabled them to break free and listen to the music inside themselves.

And that, no doubt in common with millions of others, is what this album did to me too. It reminds me of a time in my life when "in my sleep I'll be thinkin' 'bout beats and gettin' on the mic and bustin' some treats". Yes, I was a slavish imitator of their white-boy rap styling, and as Superwack (I know, what was I thinking?), we were a bit of a low-budget copy, but damn, we rocked, hard, and didn't give a damn. Wearing an absurd oversize Carhartt work cap, 48" waist jeans and worn-out Vans. Carrying a spiral bound notebook and Bic Crystal pen for when inspiration struck - you can't properly write dope rhymes with anything but a Bic Crystal.

Essentially, this is the soundtrack to that part of my life when, in my mid-twenties, I was lucky enough to be able to do whatever I wanted, to please myself, to be idle and creative all at the same time. To me, this record is the soundtrack of an intelligent mind being taken off the hook and allowed to run riot. It's a reminder that nothing is an end in itself, and that everything is but one small point on a long journey. This record sounded like freedom then, and it still sounds like freedom now.

RIP Adam Yauch.

Oasis - 'Definitely Maybe'

It's odd, but sometimes music can evoke the strangest memories.

Everything that this record brings back has nothing to do with Oasis, and everything to do with me. Being a student, living in a shared house in Leeds, playing this record after excitedly buying it, and wondering if it was just me, or whether it really did sound like Status Quo with a bit more attitude. Would it be the second record I'd taken back on the basis of simply not being good enough (the first one was the debut Lionrock album, which I took back and theatrically demanded a refund for 'for just being shit').

I remember playing the whole album through, and then going back and trying to find the good bits, desperately dropping the needle on the record increasingly randomly, then just giving up.

Oasis have written some great songs, but have also released some crappy albums.

Sugarhill Gang - 'Rappers Delight'

There's no doubt that this record is an icon, but it's also a great example of how the line between iconic and ubiquitous is perilously thin.

Of you've only ever been a consumer of music, that's to say you've never made music or played records for money regularly, it's hard to convey the idea that even greatness can pall with repetition. There's no getting away from the fact that this record is 15 minutes of history in the making. The problem is, it's also the record that, if you're a DJ, you stick on when you need to go for a piss and keep people dancing at the same time. This record is both so ace and so long that you can start it playing, go for a piss, get a beer, return to the decks and still have plenty of time for a bit of wiki-wiki before dropping the next record, which if your playing the odds will either be Deelite's 'Groove is in the Heart' or Mantronix 'King of the Beats'.

One other personal horror I attach to this track is having experienced a karaoke version of it on a mate's stag do. I'm uneasy with karaoke at the best of times, but seeing a bunch of mates hammer this out, pissed, took the shine off it in the same way that a sheet of sandpaper takes the shine off, well, almost anything. Of course, my note-perfect rendition of Johnny Cash's 'Ring of Fire' earlier on that evening merely served to underline that a karaoke version of 'Rappers Delight' is, as the French foreign secretary said when asked what he thought of Eurodisney, 'a cultural Chernobyl'.

Mixed emotions, I guess.