Features
Here's where you can thumb through our huge yellowing archive of magazine features stretching back to the neolithic period: classic moments in dance music history, captured by the finest writers on the subject. We're adding new ones all the time so keep checking back.
Scott Hardkiss, who died recently, was one of a trio of ‘brothers’ whose production work helped establish a new San Francisco sound.
Hardkiss’ and his compatriots were responsible for plotting a new direction for the west coast. Dom Phillips remembers a unique DJ and producer.
I guess it was some time in 1991 when I first went to San Francisco, combining a holiday with a little work-related recreation in my job as assistant editor of a little British music magazine called Mixmag. A British exile called Jon Williams put me up on his couch in Haight-Ashbury. I’d never even met Williams – he was a friend...
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This is the big one, our favourites and yours, all the runners and riders from the last twelve months. The votes are in the ballet papers have been counted, this isn't Florida so a re-count won't be required. The judges decision is final. Get your Furtive 50 here.
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Andy Pemberton’s Mixmag article from June 1994 highlights an important turning point in the history of dance music. ‘Trip hop’, the genre whose emergence it pinpoints, is rarely spoken of today, because the musical ideas it brought into play were so momentous they quickly became just part of the furniture. The notion of hip hop without lyrics was a green light to producers worldwide to crack on without worrying about finding a convincing rapper – handy in the UK where we’d tired of bad imitations of the Bronx.
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Back in 1979 a little London club was the decadent birthplace of the ’80s. Most of the music and fashion we know from that decade had its roots in The Blitz.
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Simon Frith is a sociomusicologist, former rock critic and currently the Tovey Chair of music at Edinburgh University. He has written for everyone from The Village Voice to the Sunday Times, published numerous books and has been the chair of the judges for the Mercury Music Prize since it began in 1992. Here in his piece 'The Infinite Spaces Of Disco' he gives his opinion on the rise of disco.
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Yes, it's back again! The Furtive 50, our yearly recap of the year's bestest tracks as voted for by you, and an assortment of hipster's, blokes the wrong side of 40 and men with beards and a severly limited social life. Behold the results for 2011.
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Daniel Wang, in the sleevenotes to the Horse Meat Disco III compilation, evokes the ghosts of disco, from Andrew Holleran’s elegaic immortalisation of early 70s New York to the current queer disco explosion in clubs like Tape in Berlin and, of course, The Eagle in Vauxhall.
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Every year we get all our forum members and selected fave DJs to let us in on what has got them sonically excited over the past year. Here are the results from way back in 2008.
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Richard Smith outs the inside of a gay club in the mid '90s with a tale of drugs, music, sweat, boys and a shared experience encompassing everything that is good inside and bad outside.
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Back once again with the ill behaviour! The Furtive 50 returns.
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Back in 1992 in Mixmag Dom Phillips reported on the sound we now know as the roots of jungle and drum & bass.
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The first ever article in the British press about the new sound of Detroit. John McCready investigates.
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Live from Jellybean's Funhouse, where Richard Grabel checks out the new electro disco Saturday night fever.
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The Make Believe Ballroom in our minds twirls to the sparkling beams of the mirror ball. We tried to find out where it comes from and just how old it is (before you get too excited, nobody really knows). And on the way we discovered they were even used in insane asylums, though quite what the purpose might have been we can only speculate.
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In the next episode of Damon Fairclough's excellent mixtapes, we alight upon his paean to the KPM catalogue, all bound up in a severe bout of tonsilitis and a generous helping of the right drugs....
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Damon Fairclough returns once more with another fantastic episode in our unfolding Do Us A Tape series. This time, he focuses on the summer, all shimmer and rain, with accompanying music by ARP, Sun Ra, tUnE-yArDs, Theo Parrish and many others. It is, dare we say it, a literary and aural delight.
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100 Great Dance Records? That’s a debate that will never be resolved. But The Guardian’s wrong-headed attempt at it, provoked us into a response.
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It’s a four letter word, alright: W.O.R.K. In our occasional Do Us A Tape series, Damon Fairclough returns to run his rheumy eye over work-related songs, while simultaneously giving us an insight into the cheese counter at BHS, Glengarry Glen Ross and 1970s industrial relations. An original piece of writing for DJhistory.com.
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Damon Fairclough launches our new occasional series with a spiffing tale of crumbly sofas and industry in a Sheffield living room circa 1986.
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Every year our learned folks on the forum and a selection of our favourite DJ's and taste-makers from around the globe tell us what were their favourite tracks of the past twelve months. We crown a winner and then we post it up here so you can see everything that you missed in teh last year.
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The Shelter started as a Paradise Garage re-union party, soon the clubbers were calling themsleves the Shelter Family. Andy Thomas tells the story .
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