We Are Proud Of Our Choices

Groove Column: On performance anxiety (December 2009)

• Saturday morning in London. I’m on a sofa bed in the flat of my friend Al Usher. Tonight we’re playing our first DJ set together as Partial Arts and despite our combined age of seventy-two years and hundreds of gigs under our belts we’re nervous as hell. As we play each other music, trying to get a handle on how things might work tonight, Al’s fourteen month old son Yann is babbling happily in his play-pen. Tender in years, he is curious about everything, scared of nothing.

• I dreamt last night that I was in the studio producing New Order and they were messing about, blocked, stuck. And I didn’t know what to do. It’s a cousin of a regular anxiety dream where I have to perform a concert and I don’t know the songs. Next Wednesday that dream could come true. I have to play keyboards for a webcast promoting Tracey Thorn’s forthcoming album. As producer I know the songs backwards and yet having to perform in front of people, even a few friendly ones, makes me feel physically sick. Only my love for the record and the knowledge that Tracey will be even more terrified made me say yes in the first place. Solidarity outweighs fear.

• As you do things repeatedly you imagine that repetition and familiarity will bring confidence and calm. That age and experience form a bullwark against anxiety. Tracey has performed at Glastonbury. I have DJed at Love Parade. Shouldn’t that give you license to be a little blasé? Not a bit of it. As you get older the stakes seem higher. I tell myself that fear is an index of giving a shit - scaring is caring - but that doesn’t make the frequent trips to the toilet any more enjoyable.

• I’ve just finished a mix CD for Kompakt. It is my third and yet it took me twice as long to make as the others combined. The knowledge that I have successfully accomplished it in the past is no comfort. Rather it makes the prospect of doing it again scarier. It’s as if I’ve completely forgotten how I achieved what I did before, as if that was another person. Will I live up to expectation? Can I pull it off again? When will someone tap me on the shoulder and say “Sorry, son. You’ve had your time. Grab your things and come with me”. When will the game be up?

Groove Column: On disco defiance (October 2009)

• In a restaurant in Beirut, Laila and Carma have ordered me a feast; Halloumi and figs, unpasteurised goats cheese, tabbouleh, saj with yogurt and thyme, more houmous than even my friend Simon (who would sell his soul for a mashed chick-pea) could eat. I’m here to play a great party called Cotton Candy. My generous hosts tell me some DJs are afraid to come here, put-off by the periodic instability of the Middle East. Stuffing another delicious piece of cheese into my mouth in the sunshine, I can’t think why.

• I was woken by an explosion at 8.30am. As I shook myself conscious I heard the rain sheeting down, realised “thunderstorm” and fell back to deep sleep. Laila had a different reaction; she remembered summer 2006 when Israeli air-strikes hit the airport (tourism is the major industry here and so destroying the airport a simple way to cause economic difficulty) and other civilian infrastructure in retaliation for Hezbollah missile attacks on northern Israel. Returning to bed was not an option.

• In the West we casually talk of “living in the moment” or “seizing the day” but our prosperity and security is such that we have little idea what “now” really means. The worst we have to fear is accident, sudden illness or economic downturn. Compare life in somewhere like Juarez, Mexico. One of the major drug-routes into the US, a brutal turf-war between the cartels and state law-enforcement agencies has resulted in the world’s highest murder-rate. When everyday life includes the threat of extortion or violence, just going out for a drink or a dance becomes a small stubborn act of defiance.

• Halfway through my set there last November, a light shone directly in my eyes. A balaclava’ed man with an automatic rifle was waving a torch at me to stop the music. There were a dozen others on the dancefloor, all similarly armed. The promoter quickly told me it was only police checking the age of the kids in attendance. They left after 20 minutes and I started the music again, heart beating half out of my chest (who needs coke when you have adrenalin?) The cheer was massive, the rest of the party amazing. A false alarm, but for a moment disco escapism never felt less of a luxury.

Groove Column: Twelve things I have learned from frequent air travel (August 2009)

• 1. That there are always people crying in airports. They are ignored because we think we know the reason for their tears.

• 2. That there are always nuns too.

• 3. That the nuns are not crying. (They are neither about to meet nor be separated from Jesus. Barring incident.)

• 4. That the Spanish love the sandwich for its ready-at-hand convenience but seem determined to eradicate any other potential it has for joy or nutrition.

• 5. That middle-aged German tourists always clap once their flight has landed safely. Whether this is out of politeness or relief is unclear. Maybe it's the latter, as they crowd the gangway and attempt to barge their way to the front of the plane paying no regard as to whether anyone ahead of them wants to leave their seat.

• 6. The ability to sit for 12 hours straight without moving (apart from to shift my weight from one buttock to the other).

• 7. That tiny Spanish swallows, like DJs, make their homes in the rough concrete buttresses of Ibiza airport. They arc and swoop, bickering in mid-air, tracing petulant little dog-fights amongst themselves, unwilling it seems to rest or to pause for even a moment. Again, like DJs.

• 8. That if you travel frequently enough, home becomes a moot point. You can learn to feel as content in a transit lounge with a coffee and a book as on your own sofa, sometimes more so.

• 9. That Fernweh (wanderlust) can be as powerful as Heimweh (homesickness); it’s possible to feel homesick for the road, for the liminal, for momentum, for borders, for trajectory for its own sake.

• 10. That everything you need to know about American foreign policy, xenophobia and empire can be gleaned by spending an hour in the non-residents queue in US Customs and Border Control, JFK.

• 11. That the opportunity cheaply and frequently to see the blue sky above rippling banks of cloud, always different, always beautiful; to float over patchworks of fields, deserts, ice-floes, steppes, rivers, glowing matrices of streetllights makes us the luckiest of generations on the planet.

• 12. That this can’t go on.

Groove Column: On being a "veteran" (April 2009)

• Welcome to Wales and the control room of Rockfield Studios. I’m here with Delphic, a young Manchester three-piece whose debut album I am producing. They are lovely, in awe of New Order although they weren't even born when Ceremony or Blue Monday were released. They revere Orbital too and ask me excitedly what it was like to hear their records at parties in 1991. I can't really remember how it felt, but I know exactly how I feel now. I feel old.

• When a review of “Piece Work” referred to me as a ‘veteran’ I sulked for days. In my head a veteran is someone old enough to have fought in a World War. I’m thirty-six. Of course I should have taken it for the compliment it is. Somehow, I seem to have been making records for fifteen years. Back in 1994 the sum total of my musical ambition was to have a 12” with my name on it in for sale in a record shop. Now I all I think about is how I can still be doing this when I’m pushing fifty? I want to be Thurston Moore, Kim Gordon, Thomas Fehlmann, Gudrun Gut, Wolfgang Voigt, Brian Eno - all of whose records I look forward to as eagerly as those of anyone their junior.

• Pop is one of the few professions where someone their thirties can possibly be considered ‘old’. This is in part a cultural hangover from the 1950s. Created for the newly-invented ‘teenager’ it has always valorised youth. And it’s a job that doesn’t often last long. You’re hot and then you’re not. Fashions and tastes change. These days a band signed to a major label is lucky to get their second album picked-up. If Delphic can turn their considerable talent into a career they will be one of a tiny minority in an industry which turns over, chews up and spits out new bands at a terrifying rate.

• There are second acts, though. Back in Rockfield we have a grey-haired visitor; the studio’s owner brings Dale Griffin, the drummer of Mott The Hoople, in to say hello. He tells us that the band have just sold out five nights at the Hammersmith Apollo, their first shows in thirty years. He seems slightly bewildered at the idea. The name of the David Bowie-penned single that made them famous? ‘All The Young Dudes’. Suddenly I don’t feel quite so old any more.

Groove Column: On the producer as monomaniac (June 2009)

• Last month Phil Spector was found guilty, after a second trial, of the murder of Lana Clarkson. The following day the Guardian’s Alexis Petridis asked whether “something inherent in the art of record production lends itself to, maybe even causes, deeply eccentric behaviour?” Spector, Brian Wilson, Joe Meek, Lee Perry, Martin Hannett; some of the greatest producers of the last 40 years run the gamut from eccentric to deeply troubled.

• Although you don’t have to be mad to work in a studio, a bit of obsessive-compulsive certainly helps. It’s a job that welcomes monomaniacs with the ability to lose themselves in a degree of repetition and detail that would send most people doolally. Hannett famously made Joy Division play 40 or more takes until he was happy and even sent Stephen Morris up onto the roof of a Rochdale studio in the freezing night to capture a drum sound he wanted; when taken to such extremes perfectionism can start to look like sadism.

• If the devilish pursuit of detail doesn’t get you the lifestyle might; working in artificial environments with no natural light (acousticians aren’t fond of glass) for longer hours than are good for anyone (90-100 hour working weeks aren’t uncommon). And some producers are as in love with the rock and roll dream as the worst of their charges; I've recently been regaled with tales of one (banned from many British studios for his extreme behaviour) so obliterated on a mid-session crack-binge that the band he was producing thought it would be funny to glue a witch's hat to his head.

• Headline-grabbing murder trials or drug habits aside, for the most part the listener remains blissfully ignorant of the mania involved, the sleep lost and the stress endured to get their records made. That sweat, effort and excess isn’t supposed to be there in the end result; it gets transmuted, leaving the music to appear fully-formed, effortless. It might take a toll on a few of the protagonists along the way. You don’t need to consider that. But when I hear the icy shimmer of Atmosphere’s pitch-shifted windchimes or the precision of Stephen Morris’ drumming on Shadowplay, I think of Hannett - junkie, perfectionist, alchemist, dead at forty-two - and I say thank you.

Groove Column: On being in the club (February 2009)

• I live three minutes from Berlin’s former "Haus der Einheit", a building with a quite a history. Once a Jewish department store, it was stolen from its owners and became the Hitler Youth's headquarters, and after partition, the seat of the East German Communist Party. Left to decay for years post-Unification, a new fate was revealed last autumn - to become a branch of the Soho House private members’ club.

• Friends’ reactions to this news were mixed - a couple gleefully said they would join as soon as they could. Another launched into a string of expletives, insisting that "getting away from those c***s was the reason I moved to Berlin in the first place". Although I'm sure the facilities will be nice, when it comes to clubbability I'm with Groucho Marx.

• It is easy to dislike a place that only lets in the rich, but before we get too self-satisfied let's remember that nightclubs have never been the most democratic of institutions. The domains of cliques and gangs, they tread a fine line between the two meanings of the verb ‘to discriminate’. Trying to keep out those who aren’t regulars, don't wear the right clothes, don't get the music or take the right drugs even if done with the best of intentions - creating an exciting other space for freaks and their friends - still tips easily into exclusivity. Even the biggest, most seemingly democratic places contain velvet ropes, backrooms, inner-sanctums, huts and caravans for workers, owners, friends and random people who think that to be there means to be somehow special. Élitism, even if it’s only against those who don’t possess the right subcultural capital, is still an -ism (if not one of the really nasty kinds).

• And just as some of us like to exclude, so many in turn perversely enjoy the challenge of overcoming that exclusion. I still remember the thrill of vying with club door staff as a kid, pleading to be let in. Succeeding was all the more delicious for the arbitrary callousness with which we were usually treated. Still we queue outside Bar 25 and Berghain in the rain craning our necks to get noticed by the door staff. But at least we don’t have to pay €1000 a year for the privilege.

Groove Column: On not meeting Leonard Cohen (December 2008)

• I am standing in the lobby of Brussels’ Royal Windsor Hotel when the lift-doors swish open and out walks Leonard Cohen. As he stands but three metres from me, quietly dapper in his tweed cap and hockey jacket, I fight an internal battle with myself - fan vs. over-polite Englishman - over whether to risk disturbing him by telling him how much I enjoyed his live show earlier this summer.

• Why the caution? Well, fame used to be the unfortunate by-product of being successful or good at something, not an end in itself. No matter how much you love what they do artists deserve a bit of peace when they’re not working. Occasionally being recognized for or complimented on your work is of course nice and unproblematic. But if it happens day-in and day-out it must get waring surely?

• Moreover, we are advised never to meet our heroes, for they will only disappoint us. We will see that they have feet of clay, or bad skin, or halitosis and no manners. In actual fact we are more likely to end up disappointed in ourselves. When one of my all-time pop heroes visited the club I was resident at in London, I was so nervous I hid in the dressing room until he left. Wus. Three years later I was introduced to him at an EMI Christmas party, my cowardice overpowered by champagne. He was a little haughty and my nervousness returned three-fold. I babbled incoherently, annoying him and embarrassing myself. Good work, Pearson.

• Even if the person in question is lovely, you can still bugger things up. I was sitting in a pub with Tracey Thorn when a random bloke came up to her to say hello. He then made the fatal error of trying to start a conversation. Desperate for something - anything - to say he blurted out “you know if you think about it, you’re responsible for Dido aren’t you?” At which point, the usually very polite bedsit-disco queen swore in dismay and he ran for the door. Three words - Curb Your Enthusiasm.

• To hell with it, I think. Leonard is by all accounts a gracious and charming man. I will offer a brief sentence of thanks and be on my way. I turn from the reception desk, heart in mouth, only to see Mr Cohen disappear out of the door, off to what I hope is a quiet, unmolested lunch.

Groove Column: On Sleevenotes (October 2008)

• So I’'m on the internet trying to discover which tracks on the new Bloc Party and Primal Scream albums were produced by my buddy Paul Epworth. And I can'’t, anywhere. Not on iTunes. Not on the bands’' websites. I just want to hear what Paul did, but I have no way of knowing except by ringing him or going to the shops and buying the CD which would ruin the point of the exercise and - wait a minute - the Bloc Party is download-only anyhow.

• Bugger.

• The download era has left the people behind the music - players, engineers, the backroom boys and girls - less visible than ever. Overworked, underpaid and now largely anonymous. This information could easily be encoded into every MP3 but most come without any kind of electronic booklet or credits at all. Compare movies where every single person who even wandered past the film studio gets their moment of glory at the close. As physical formats disappear, no academic, historian or nerdy fan will be able know where music was made, who banged what, who thanked whom, who designed the - now virtual - sleeve.

• “So what?” I hear you ask.

• Well, one of the slightly pathetic reasons why people make stuff is the hope that it will remain after they'’re gone, and in a tentative way, them with it. I’'m trusting the sum of my working life to evolving digital formats, hoping they can replicate themselves in an uncertain future, little packets of musical DNA leaping from fragile hard-disk platter to fragile hard-disk platter. Maybe the ease by which digital files can be copied means that some of them have a chance of surviving. But realistically, we can’'t be certain that anything humans make these days is going to last more than a few decades, apart from toxins and landfill.

• So instead I buy William Basinski’'s “"Disintegration Loops"”, an amazing suite of ambient records made from 25-year-old tape-loops discovered in a Brooklyn cupboard, that started to slough off their oxide coating as soon as they were played back, and were quickly re-recorded even as they fell apart. The music degrades and crumbles before our ears; art for our evanescent digital age, born of our hopes for posterity even as it demonstrates how foolish they are.

Groove Column: On collective joy (August 2008)

• So I kind of hate people. Well, that’s not strictly true. I hate about 95% of people. OK, hate’s too strong a verb. Dislike. Am impatient with. Have no time for. Not that I’m a bigot - I don’t dislike according to race, creed or sexuality. I’m an equal-opportunity misanthrope.

• I like the idea of “the people”. Politically, I am of the left. I believe in high tax, in looking after those that can’t help themselves, in the principles of democracy. It’s just that in practice people suck. It’s not their fault. Nature and nurture conspired to make them mostly useless. As long as we can agree to give each other a wide berth, we can all get along just fine.

• My anti-social tendencies make collective joy difficult. I love the movies but merrily I wish all kinds of cancerous misfortune on idiots that crunch their popcorn too loudly and talk through the film. Why didn’t I stay home with a DVD? I wanted to kill a couple who talked all the way through a Radiohead gig in Dublin last month. Why weren’t they standing rapt, in silent communion? (I’m allowed to sing along at the top of my voice of course, but I don’t want to hear you do it - you can’t sing in tune.) I love folk music - traditionally the music of the people - as long as it’s played by talented professionals. Amateurs in Arran sweaters keep your mouths shut.

• There is one cultural form which other people can’t spoil - quite the opposite; they are essential to the whole enterprise. Dancing. At its best en masse, with acid house people learned how to dance together in a new way, each respecting each other’s space and it’s not an exaggeration to say that I learned how to love other people by going to nightclubs.

• In Dortmund on Saturday I tested my love to the limit by seeing how I managed with 1.4 million of them. Cooler-than-thou friends had raised their eyebrows when I told them I was going to Love Parade, and to be honest I wasn’t quite sure how I was going to like it. But after ten minutes of watching crazy people dressed as nuns, or as gorillas or in the most appalling sportswear, dancing tirelessly, having the time of their lives, their enthusiasm undampened by the rain pummeling their heads, I had a massive grin on my face. Ridiculous but lovely. Sometimes people are great.

Groove Column: On speaking the language (June 2008)

• So I started Sprachschule again. While other DJs were drinking their mini-bars I sat in my hotel this weekend learning which prepositions are followed by the dative and which the accusative. I enjoyed it. But then, I am a nerd. I should have jumped at the chance to go back to school months ago. Why didn’t I?

• My usual answer to that question is to reel off a list of excuses about traveling and working a lot. I rarely admit the real reason that underpins most English-speaking peoples’ linguaphobia. Fear. Britain’s colonial past made English the must-have language of the Western world, and continues to let native speakers strut around as if we owned the place. Berlin’s Anglophone DJs and musicians are just the latest in a long line. But we harbour secret feelings of terror and inferiority when we hear just how well everyone else can speak our language too.

• There are other reasons for my reticence. I’ve spent my whole life avoiding things I’m not good at and trying to learn a language from scratch means giving up being subtle, intelligent or interesting to appear instead both stupid and boring, at least for a while. Wittgenstein said “the limits of my language mean the limits of my world”. At the moment my world is very cramped and comes to a stop just past the dry-cleaners.

• I feel slightly guilty admitting this, but there are also pleasures in ignorance, in not speaking the language. Taxi rides free of the burden of conversation; peace in a room full of chatter; media-babble becomes so much white noise; the news and its woes fall on others’ ears. If you can’t turn the world off exactly, you can turn it down a little.

• But you cut yourself off from much life and joy too. In a taxi to London’s City Airport yesterday my Bengali driver startled me by asking in perfect German how long I’d lived in Berlin. “Vier Jahren” I replied and the rest of the journey we talked about his former life in Frankfurt and his new one in England, partly in German and partly in English. Two immigrants chatting about their new homes in the language of both. Looks like I’ve already started talking to taxi drivers again after all. I rather liked it.

Groove Column: On music and memory (April 2008)

• In the UK there is a radio show called ‘Guilty Pleasures’, devoted to playing the tracks the you secretly like but are too embarrassed to admit to liking. It’s a way of ironising a love of pop that some people seem to want to renounce as they get older, for hipsters to tacitly admit that the music which burrows its way into one’s head - the greatest word in German is orvorm - which soundtracks the triumphs and disasters of our existence (and gives us more unalloyed joy in the process) is more often Barry White or Fleetwood Mac than it is Sonic Youth or Arthur Russell.

• Me, I’m all too happy to admit that the works of Britney Spears or Michael Jackson have given me more pure pleasure than Panda Bear or Minilogue ever will. Like many of us, I have measured out my life in dubious pop records. The first single I ever bought was not 'Love Will Tear Us Apart' or 'I Feel Love'. It was Ray Parker Junior’s theme from 'Ghostbusters'. I learned to play the piano with the help of Billy Joel’s Greatest Hits songbook (I can be persuaded to give you my version 'Just The Way You Are' if you ply me with enough booze). The biggest reaction to any record I can remember as a DJ was when I dropped Rod Stewart’s 'Do You Think I’m Sexy' at a wedding on a beach in Spain. Magic.

• Pop music - usually at its cheesiest and least cool - is one of the most powerful means by which we form and cement memory. Why is it that I can quote very little of any of the books I studied at University, but I can finish the lyric of Vanilla Ice’s 'Rollin' In My 5.0' - a record I do not own - without even thinking twice? More potent than Proust’s madeleine it can take you back, instantly, to any number of moments from your past. Play me Bryan Adams 'Run To You' and I am a small child on holiday, driving around Wales with my Mum and Dad, all of us singing our lungs out and as happy as I think I will ever get. Play me Status Quo’s frankly appalling 'Sweet Caroline' and I am at a school disco vying with my friend Dean for the attentions of the cutest girl in my class.

• Two weeks ago, I was at the funeral of my Grandma. As the eulogies were spoken, on a loop in my head were the old film comedians Laurel and Hardy singing 'The Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia', which was one of the few records my grandparents owned and one which had my sister and I and them laughing like drains every time we played it. At the reception afterwards my dad asked me if there was anything I wanted to take from the house to remember her by. I smiled and shook my head. Laurel and Hardy will do me just fine.

Groove Column: On ears (February 2008)

• It's early on a dirty Monday morning in Prenzluerberg, just me and my laptop; I can hear the January rain fall inexorably outside my bedroom window and the tippy-tap of my neighbour's high-heels as she wanders off to work. I can also hear a constant high-pitched whine, a fizziness which has set-up camp permanently in my head. I'm used to it now and I only really notice it first thing in the morning and when I go to bed. My tinnitus.

• It's a dirty little secret amongst DJs but I know very few who have not got some kind of permanent problem with their hearing. In the past year two friends have had episodes which have threatened their job altogether - emergency trips to audiologists and periods of enforced rest. I know DJs that can't get to sleep at night without the television or dishwasher on to distract them from the constant whine.

• Hearing damage comes in three flavours; tinnitus, the ringing in your ears that you get after a loud concert or club night, except it never goes away. Hyperacusis, where loud noises and sudden changes in volume become very painful. And hearing loss, where you become deaf to certain frequencies, like your grandma except 40 years too soon. Once you've damaged your ears there's very little you can do about it apart from try and take it a bit easier and prevent the damage from getting worse.

• I’ve been using earplugs for several years and I’m lucky in that I have no hearing loss, but last year I had an episode of hyperacusis after a couple of drunken gigs where i really blasted my ears and didn’t wear my plugs. The next two months were miserable; car brakes squealing, the banging of plates, even the rattle of my flat keys really hurt. For someone whose other job is sitting in studios listening to electric guitars and cymbals being hit it terrified me. I thought my career as a producer was over.

• It’s better again now, thank goodness, but I’m ‘fessing up to all this just to say if you’re spending lots of time (as you should be!) in loud clubs listening to deaf DJs playing great music, think about your ears from time to time. All clubs are loud enough to damage your hearing if you’re not careful. Buy and take plugs with you and make sure you wear them at least some of the time. There are cheap and effective wax and foam ones as well as amazing ones which are custom-moulded to the shape of your ear and actually often make the music in a too-loud club sound better. Give yourselves a rest at regular intervals. Let’s be careful out there.

Groove Column: The Supreme Overlord of Dance Decrees... (December 2007)

• So, I have elected myself Supreme Overlord of dance music for 2008. Well, benevolent dictator, at least. Here are my decrees.

• 1. All producers will take a vow of chastity for the first half of the year. Have six months off. Learn to paint or to knit. Take up bird watching. Do some voluntary work in an old people’s home. Make yourselves useful.

• 2. Further to decree 1, all producers will count the number of remixes completed and records released in 2007 and release a third as many in 2008. Work harder than you did last year, but throw away everything you think is not genuinely going to add something to the world.

• 3. No releases will be allowed that are generated entirely by laptop or plug-in. All records should contain at least one certified example of someone hitting something real with a stick, yelling into a microphone, wrapping strings around an object and strumming them. That kind of thing. Documentary proof, photos etc, will be required.

• 4. Vinyl promo is henceforth banned.

• 5. At least 500 copies of every release must be pressed on vinyl, preferably in an attractive colour sleeve (remember, you learned to paint at the start of the year).

• 6. Said vinyl will be made available to record shops 14 DAYS before any electronic download release is permitted.

• 7. No digital download service will be granted ANY preferential treatment, lead-in times, rights or exclusivity in distribution over any other. Further they will mandatorily provide all downloads at no less than 320mbit MP3, AIFF or WAV.

• 8. EPs are henceforth banned. Two tracks per single release and no more will be permitted.

• 9. No house or techno record shall exceed 122BPM in tempo, and, further, every other release must contain at least one track that is 118BPM or slower. There will be no exceptions.

• 10. All DJs will undertake to change tempo at least once and play at least 3 vocal tracks or disco records in every two hour set of music.

• 11. DJs will undertake to be courteous and name any track they are playing to any member of the public that wants to know.

• 12. The public will refrain from asking the DJ to play harder / faster / better or “a request for my friend, as it’s her birthday”.

• 13. The superimposition of live percussion (comprising congas, bongos, timbales etc.) or saxophone over DJ sets is punishable by death.