Today’s disc is really a series of discs (vinyl and CDs) and it is, as promised yesterday, all homegrown. So, as we’ve established, in the mid 1990s I was living in Leeds and DJing as one half of Daisy & Havoc. We had quite a bit of DJ work in the city and some paid guest slots further afield. Everybody knew at this time that one of the best ways to get more work and moved up the bill was to have a record or a remix that made your name. So, like pretty much everyone else in the game, we did work on some music of our own. I did more of the DJing so Daisy took the lead on this side of things, working with producers and friends to see where it would go.
One of the best pieces of music we were involved in making was probably the one on this 1995 Horizon album. I can’t actually remember who was behind this Leeds music project but you can see that both Dream FM (the pirate radio station we played on) and The Herb Garden (a club fanzine based in Leeds) have their names on the back of the album. The whole album is on this clip (our track Call It Booty starts at 6m 26s):
Some names in the track listing have been mentioned already this month (Richard Brown turned up on Day 23, for example) and luckily I do have the sleeve notes to help me out (written by Nick Robinson, my then editor at Record Mirror). Bands like Black Star Liner were pretty well known at the time locally and lots of Leeds clubs were part of various tracks (the jazz club Dig! in Dig! Alliance, Back 2 Basics DJ Ralph Lawson in Spikey and another local DJ Rob Tissera in S Factor). In my early Leeds years Rob was one of the DJs I heard most often (when he was a king of Italian piano house) but like many others he went off into faster house and trance (and is still there from what I can see, doing pretty well). He has a book out this year too (The Smiler – A DJ’s Life). One part of Glamorous Hooligan is probably the person from this selection who has gone on to the most success, if not particularly in music (Dean Cavanagh is a screenwriter, novelist and playwright who works regularly with Irvine Welsh).
Our track was a collaboration with Lex Loofah (Huddersfield’s John Gilpin, he was here on Day 23 as well) and I still really like the sound of it. We did play it in clubs (as you can tell from the state of our promo copy, below). I don’t remember the album getting much coverage or play generally though – Madchester we were not.
A year earlier we had produced a single of our own called Sit on my Bass (on our label Tool records). We made it with friends down in London (producer Nick Woolfson, then involved in the label Jamm Records with his partner at the time Lisa Sanchez, now a singer and musician). Our record (hear it here, and that’s neither of us talking at the start) wasn’t quite what we wanted it to be but we did make a video to go with it that was much more our thing. I can’t share it here as (a) it’s quite rude (various breasts, including mine, at least one dildo, not mine, lots of things being licked, mainly food) and (b) I only have a VHS copy of it now. It is on YouTube somewhere (someone else put it up ages ago) but I don’t know where. It was played regularly in the club Vague where we worked (quite a few regulars featured in the video) and we did have a lot of fun making it.
We sampled You Suck by Consolidated featuring the Yeastie Girlz for Sit on my Bass, from this record:
Thanks, no doubt, to our best London music friend at the time Simon Plaskett (a producer and press/promotions person), we did another remix for a record label called Slate (below, artist: Mothballs, track: Instinct of Self Preservation) but nothing much happened with that. I think our heart wasn’t really in the 4/4 beats by that point but Simon was a great supporter of ours and he got us gigs, reviewing jobs and lots of other things I have forgotten by now. He is still making music it would seem (heard his name on the radio recently, something to do with The Clash?).
Better, perhaps, than some of our house music, is the track we did for another Leeds project, 1995’s Saturday Sessions.
This project was put together by Ricardo Barker, Howard Taylor and Andy Wood and our track was called Sold (hear it here, spot the movie sample). You can tell it was a lot more influenced by our taste for Tricky, trip hop, beats and such (see yesterday and Day 22), plus Ricardo, or Ricky as we knew him then, is a really good keyboard player. He went into film and teaching as a career, more here. I spot another name I know on track one too (calling Nigel Lister, currently appearing with Ian McKellen in something serious).
I’m not the only one in our house with vinyl and CDs with something like their name on of course. My partner of over 25 years was making music too back when we met. He was part of a techno duo called Turbulent Force and they even had an album in 1995. It looks like this:
They played at the huge Tribal Gathering, had records released, had music played on the radio (by John Peel, for example, see here). Their music was put out by Emissions Audio Output (an Andy Weatherall label) and Sabrettes, a sister label to Weatherall’s Sabres of Paradise, run by Nina Walsh. They used other band names too (Primordial Soup, Pom E Granite, Shadow Company) and their music was pretty full-on techno, try this for size:
In the last few years he has made some quite different music under the name MarKived (find some of that here, one track even has a bit of our daughter, Heather’s voice on it too). It’s a family affair.
Back tomorrow with added jazz.
For the first intro post to this series go here.
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