For a change, today’s disc is one I did buy when it came out (which was in 1992). There were a couple of good independent record shops in Leeds at the time and we did use them but I think I probably bought this one in HMV (maybe for £2.99 – they can’t all be expensive imports). This was in our early days of (unpaid) DJing on the pirate radio station Dream FM, before we had any club work, and we both had pretty badly paid jobs (if they were paid at all) for a small local (radical) magazine. I don’t know if I even knew what this record was when we bought it but maybe it was just an impulse buy. In 1992 the original rave/house scene was busy splintering into many different parts – one strong direction was towards music with a trance element to it and today’s track is representative of that. Although we liked the gentle Flute On Arrival mix, the mix we played most was the Sonic Departure mix by Youth (someone with a long CV in all kinds of music, more on that particular mix later). The record was on Youth’s label (Butterfly Records) and his name might have persuaded us to give the record a shot in the first place. YouTube has some of the other mixes but the Sonic Departure one was impossible to find online so the audio is uploaded here for now. Have a listen – it’s really good.
The production for this track was by Simon Posford (who uses other names, Hallucinogen most often it seems) and it featured M.C. Kinky (Caron Geary) on vocals (also a co-writer along with Dennis Kiwanuka, says Discogs). Earlier, in 1989, M.C. Kinky had written and rapped vocals for Everything Starts with an 'E' as part of the band E-Zee Possee (listen to that track here). Due to all its talk of E/ecstasy that track was another one banned on Radio 1 to begin with (we have had a few of those this month) but it was rereleased later and got into the charts. I still have it on a triple album by E-Zee Possee called The Bone Dance:
A wee side note here: More Protein was the record label that put out E-Zee Possee material and it was started by Jeremy Healy and Boy George. When, some years later, Daisy & I were asked to DJ at a More Protein club night in central London we were quite excited. It was one of those disappointing experiences unfortunately (not a great event, trendy but no atmosphere, Boy George barely said hello…). I had such strong memories of seeing him on TV with early Culture Club and had been looking forward to meeting him. I quite liked some of their music – this 1983 record in particular (I still have it):
But back to 1992. The censors must have been busy back then because lots of tracks mentioned e or ecstasy around this time (The Shamen’s daft and infamous Ebeneezer Goode came out the same year, went to number 1). In fact today’s record by Flight reminds me very much of Moby’s Next is the E (also from 1992, vocals by Nicole Zaray). A lot of people found Moby much later in 1999 via his downtempo album Play but he had been a star of the rave world long before that (1991’s Go was huge). I don’t remember this detail from the time but his track Next is the E was apparently released under the name I Feel It in the UK because of the drug reference in the original title. We had that record (I Feel It )and played it a lot on the radio (the Synthe Mix was the one for us, so good, hear it here).
Because our radio shows were 9pm-midnight on weekdays (Monday and Wednesday, I think) we tended to start with uptempo house music and gradually take the pace down as the shows progressed. Without the pressure of the dancefloor (DJs can be very competitive over who fills the dancefloor best) radio DJing was really relaxed and enjoyable and we played loads of music on Dream FM that we never played in clubs (too risky – especially when so many guys were wanting to tell you just how crap ‘girl’ DJs were before you even got started). From this great distance I realise we probably should have just taken more risks in clubs but at the time it didn’t feel possible, our positions were often riskier enough as it was.
But back in 1992-3, Flight fitted perfectly into our radio show – somewhere in the middle as the nights wound down towards midnight. We knew that on Monday evenings, in particular, many of the listeners would be in the same condition as us after long weekends (i.e., feeling a little delicate, probably very tired after little or no sleep, not keen on being back in the weekly grind) and so we had that in our minds at all times. A good proportion of the listeners were in the local jail too so chilled tunes were helpful for them as well (they wrote and told us so – actual letters, on paper, hard to imagine now). The reason we picked the Youth mix to play was a lot to do with the spoken vocal at the start of the track, a pilot speaking to passengers but with some deviations from the usual script (“we will be abandoning our conventional flight path and heading towards our various individual destinations...”). There is no detail about that spoken part of the track (was it recorded specially, sampled from somewhere else) and back then we had no google to help us check so if anyone knows I’d be interested to find out. Even back in 1992 my relationship with flying (in planes) was on dodgy ground. I’d had at least one panic attack on a plane (after quite enjoying it previously) and so listening to a record about flying was preferable to actually checking in, boarding, taking off etc.
Anyway, never mind the anxiety, back tomorrow with added royalty (but don’t worry, not the Windsors).
For the first intro post to this series go here.
No comments:
Post a Comment