Day: August 9, 2003

Reynolds and Eden have both come across the mighty tWist.

Oh, yeah. Twist is a cool guy and a GREAT DJ. At the UKD 10th Birthday party his set was by common consensus the best. I’ve rarely seen a room go off the way he made the back room go during his set — the place just exploded. He was playing really class old skool and ragga jungle. It was just fantastic. And you can hear it! Here at Marc Dauncey’s excellent site! You can just about hear my shouting “Who’s the biggest DJ?” during one of the spinbacks. He’s definitely not a non-communicative autistic, quite the reverse, he’s a delightful and entertaining chap in person.

BTW you can download reggae mixes from me and John Eden there that seem to have gone down fairly well. (Over 400 mixes each so far!) Oh, and soon there’ll be a new mix up there from me which is a Tribute to Congo Natty mix, comprising some nice dancehall hits and a dubbed up mix of my fave Natty tunes, concluding with a Grievous Angel version of a famous dub tune. I’ll let you know when Marc has the link sorted out.

can’t help feeling that one of the reasons people like this record [Tackhead: Learning toCope with Cowardice] so much is down to their nostalgia for the time it came out? Which I don’t have as a johnny come lately…

Only to a degree. Yes, I still remember the wonder with which I heard tracks like Jerusalem on John Peel when it first came out. But then Ifeel the same way about things like Black Flag. But “Learning” sounds great today. I know cos I deliberately listened to the original vinyl again while re-reading John’s post, and I expected to hear what he described. But what I heard was different, and much better than I expected. Side one still sounds great, at least. I didn’t have “Mark Stewart” to hand at the time so I deliberately didn’t do a comparison. But in absolute terms, “Cowardice” still sounds great — and I suspect, from memory, that it sounds better than much late period Stewart. But Icould be wrong.

Oh yes, and Danny writes to inform me that “Sounds of The Universe” (the Soul Jazz shop) now have a massive stock of old Tackhead twelves and the like, and demands I leave immediately for an urgent appointment with a barber in Hoxton. Bah!

Well, it was bound to happen — the canonisation of On-U has been at an advanced state for some years (and rightly so) so a commercial product of that is not surprising. Though I wonder if their large stock is to do with not being able to shoft them… Still, John’s hairdresser is a mere two or three miles north of Hoxton, so who knows what barnet-related developments may occur…

Christ, I hate this new blogger interface, you can’t see whatyou did before!