"The zippie movement has more positive energy and enthusiasm than anything else I've ever seen," confirmed Rose Roffe, a 69-year-old "Raving Granny" I met at the prime zippie nexus, Megatripolis. Cyberpunk critic Vivian Sobchak says zippies not only eschew the drippy technophobia of the original hippies but also avoid the "selfish, consumer-oriented and technologically dependent libertarianism" and "romantic, swashbuckling, irresponsible individualism" of cyberpunk.
Way Out West Only Love Original Club Mix Zippy
No American road trip is complete without a quirky side stop or two, and Wisconsin has some of the most memorable roadside attractions of them all. Check out these out-of-the-ordinary stops that will only expand your love of this state.
Her name is Claire d'Loon and she has a fabulous singing voice and a big stage presence (at 16-feet tall and 2,000 pounds). This lovely lady is the World's Largest Talking Loon, and while she only speaks in loon sounds, she's happy to oblige any tourists/paparazzi wanting a photo.
Casting around for a new way to produce a club track for my DJ sets, I came up with 'Guinea Pig' in 2008. I wrote the words and approached Julia Biel to sing them. Making her way on the London jazz scene, she came to my attention singing with Unity in 2004, whose beautiful 'Love in the Dead of Night' EP I'd released on Buzzin' Fly. Strung-out yet tender I love her singing on this. I also love the click of the drum-sticks. Counting tracks in with four clicks of the drum-sticks is a time-honoured tradition in rock but I thought it would sound fresh on the dancefloor in a booming house track.
Don't you think I'm so strongI can only take the pressure for so longTake your hang-ups and your prideAnd lock them all outsideBecause love is in the detailThe little things that my heart never fails to detectLike loneliness and regretWhat's keeping you from coming home?Every night, every day, what else can I say but 'Come home'?
Along with my remix of Me'Shell Ndegeocello's 'Earth' this ranks among my personal favourites. The frantic euphoria of the Lazy Dog remixes was spent and I was searching for a deeper but still melodic sound. It has a very sybaritic feel. I remember playing it back one afternoon in Neighbourhood - the club I opened with a couple of partners in west London in 2003 - to an empty dancefloor on the newly installed Funktion 1 sound system. There were very few F1 systems in London at the time, and I stood right in the axis of the sound and was completely transported - hats off to my long-time mastering engineer, Miles Showell, for another great cut. Not a peak-time mix, or a ground-breaking approach, but to me it just seems to work, and sometimes you have to be content with that.
I have always loved the gentle but tense harmonies of Mimi and Alan in Duluth band, Low. They are perhaps the least likely band you'd hear on a club mix, but after hearing 'Tonight' on their sixth album, 'Trust', I asked if I could remix it, and put Mimi's voice out there on the dancefloor in front of a new crowd. They were very open to the idea. On reflection I think I made the mix too smooth, and ironed out too much of the track's plaintive strength but her voice still gets me.
I put together my first mix compilation on Buzzin' Fly in early 2004, and recorded this track for it especially. Sampling the acapella vocal track 'As Yet Untitled' from the first Terence Trent D'Arby album I constructed a new backing track for it, re-editing parts of the vocals to fit, and renamed it 'A Stronger Man' after one of the lines in the lyric. I have powerful memories of playing this track at the newly launched Neighbourhood club in west London on the big Funktion 1 sound system we had installed. It sounded huge. Terence was happy to be involved but asked for me to use his new name - Sananda Maitreyer - on the credits.
Twenty years after my previous single - an interim filled with nine albums and countless singles with Tracey Thorn in Everything But The Girl - I made this. And how times had changed. After growing up influenced by folk and jazz, by the late nineties I had become immersed in electronic music and club culture. I had run out of ideas with words and had become fascinated by beat and ritual. As Everything But The Girl was wound down, I started a club night in west London with Jay Hannan called Lazy Dog. We wanted to play deep house records on a Sunday from 4pm to 11pm. At the time this was quite a radical thing to do. We would spend the week scouring the London dance music shops for the hottest releases and play them on the Sunday. Jay worked at Blackmarket which gave him an edge, but one week, short of good tunes and keen to have something to play at the weekend, I went into my home studio and recorded 'Lone Cat' in a few hours. I played it at Lazy Dog on the the Sunday and suddenly realised I had made a hot track. The vocal clips came from two hip-hop sources - 'Politix' by The Lone Catalysts (hence the title), and 'Set it Off' by Organized Noize, which I later had to have re-sung because of copyright issues. I played or programmed the rest. After the early reaction, I made fifty white labels to give to friends. A few weeks later I got a call from New York. Someone had seen a record with 'Watts' stamped on the label in the famous old downtown record shop, Dance Tracks. It was my track. My own white label had be bootlegged. Two thousand copies were in circulation. Paul Farris at Uptown Records in Soho said he had sold out of his order already. I contacted the distributor, struck a deal, and regained control of the track. It ended up becoming the first single on Buzzin' Fly.
Of all my Lazy Dog remixes, this remains my favourite. I always sense an elegance to the deep swing of the track that I largely take to be the result of Martin Ditcham's fantastic percussion playing. I'd asked for congas but he brought along African drums that has a similar but unique tone. They really add character to the rhythm part. I also love the simple harmonica that creeps in in the second verse. Makes me think of Stevie Wonder. We'd taken Lazy Dog on tour to America by this point and I have vivid memories of this going down a storm in Los Angeles at the ace Bossa Nova parties we played at the Fais Do-Do Club in Los Angeles. As far as I know this track was never release commercially, and was only ever serviced on promo to DJs.
It is hard to separate this remix from the scene that so inspired it. Lazy Dog, the club night I set up with Jay Hannan in west London in 1998, was - once it hit its strides in 2000 - a phenomenon that has rarely been bettered in all my years of DJing; an intense, euphoric, visceral party that hit the floor running every other Sunday at the ridiculously early hour of 4pm and ran headlong until 11pm in a tiny sweat-drenched basement on Notting Hill Gate. Jay had introduced a latin flavour to the party with the introduction of Grant Nelson's influential vocal mix of Negrocan's 'Cada Vez' in 2000, and my remix of Sade's 'By Your Side' picked up the baton and ran with it. The original is a slow simple ballad and much of my preparation involved chopping up the vocal performance and slowing down and speeding up sections of it to fit the 124bpm groove. The triple breakdown arrangment is decadent in the extreme, but the whole thing has a joyous gallop to it that still makes me picture those jubilant nights in Notting Hill. (The version pictured is the promo serviced by Virgin when the track was included on the mix compilation, Lazy Dog Vol. 2)
'Central Reservation' was Beth's follow-up to her acclaimed debut 'Trailer Park'. She asked me if I'd like to work on a couple of tracks with her. We recorded 'Stars All Seem To Weep' in my old home studio in north London, where I'd made most of Everything But The Girl's 'Walking Wounded'. She used to sit out on the steps to the basement with her notebook scribbling lyrics. We tried a few different approaches, and then one morning she came over and I played her the descending woozy synth chords that make up the heart of the track saying they would work with the melody she had written. She loved it straighaway. The track didn't take long to finish after that. The version I did of 'Central Reservation' was going to be the main version on the album, I think, but at the last minute Beth decided on including her original slow version, and renamed mine the 'Then Again Version' (which I never quite understood) and put it at the end. I was glad it got used though. After all the recordings at home were finished Andy Bradfield helped me mix both at The Townhouse.
Of all my early recordings, this is perhaps the one I am still proudest of. Precocious and nineteen, I managed to get Robert Wyatt's phone number and talked him into singing and playing on it with me. He played two takes of piano on 'Walter and John' and suggested keeping both, panned left and right. The stuttering interplay of the two parts is really lovely. His voice is so great too. He also played a little solo on 'A Girl in Winter'. If there is a naivety to the lyrics here there is also a great amount of heart. The guitar was a Gretsch 1963 Clipper that I bought from Potter's music shop in Richmond, Surrey. I still have it, and played it only the other night on my gigs at The Slaughtered Lamb. The muffled reverberating echo was provided by an Evans Echopet EP50. 2ff7e9595c
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