You might remember that back in December Mr. Joseph Stannard of the The Outer Church (not to mention The Wire and lots of other goodly works) kindly invited me to DJ at one of his regular live events, where I warmed up the pews for excellent live turns by Silver Pyre and Kemper Norton. I took the liberty of recording my set and the resulting mixtape became one of my most popular, receiving almost as many hits as that smutty one I did, but not quite, because this is Britain after all.
What you might not remember is that a few months previously I had also contributed to The Outer Church blog’s regular series of guest mixes. It was around the time that ‘Ghosts Of Bush’ was first gathering attention and given the nocturnal nature of that album it was decided that a mixtape designed for consumption in the small hours would be just the ticket. Despite it’s trim forty-odd-minute length, the resulting ‘Foggy Nightshift Mix’ was a labour of love two days in the making, as I agonised over the track selection (indeed at least three hours were spent unsucessfully trying to shoehorn Shut Up And Dance’s ‘Autobiography of a Crackhead’ in somewhere). But I have to say I was very proud of the results and am pleased to announce it’s now been uploaded to The Outer Church’s Mixcloud page, where it can be enjoyed along with many other fine guest spots by the likes of Time Attendant, The Geography Trip and more. The original post on The Outer Church site featuring my own detailed track-by-track commentary (containing one swear word and a couple of minor grammatical errors) can be found here. I’m not going to insist that you read it while listening, I’ll merely posit the suggestion and leave it up to you to decide:
Finally, to right a wrong and because they made some of the truly incredible dance music I’ve ever come across, I’ll let Shut Up And Dance have the last word:
Described by the writer Gary Mulholland as ‘F**k-the-man brave’ and possessing a social conscience that saw them tear the roof off at an early Resonance FM benefit gig for a fraction of what they would normally ask (‘we wouldn’t have taken more if you’d had it’, they said), Smiley and PJ truly are heroes of the hardcore scene. Having never indulged in crack myself (rather more-ish, so I’m told), I can only speculate as to what needing a fix might involve, but I love the panicky, itchy and claustrophobic feel of this track. In my original notes when I was preparing tracks for this mixtape, I remember putting something down about it sounding like a junkie being chased through an alleyway by the spirit of a disapproving Gregorian choir, something I should probably have kept to myself. They also took a completely insane hardcore re-interpretation of ‘Walking in Memphis’ to number two in the UK charts without asking permission, then reputedly instructed Mark Cohen’s indignant legal team to ‘f**k off’. Despite near-ruinous legal proceedings they never stopped putting out tracks and to this day they’re still out there ‘ripping up shows’, as they might put it. They made some pretty weird jungle too:
PJ and Smiley – I salute you!
Robin The Fog 