1. Scott Hardkiss

1. Scott Hardkiss

I’ve written almost 7000 self-indulgent words in 19 posts about DJs now. And I’ve had 20 days to think about what I was going to write about Scott Hardkiss. I’m still stuck. 

It’s very difficult to explain why he’s at the top of this list, even though I knew from the beginning he’d be there. There are a lot of things that other DJs did better. I had great nights dancing to Scott’s sets, but only a couple of them, and in my case they weren’t episodes of hedonistic lore. He was not the charismatic host, or the technical wizard, or the influential pioneer. But he was the musician.

By which I mean, as a DJ, Scott Hardkiss was a true musician, and the simple things that a DJ does -- buying and selecting records, ordering and mixing them – were actually part of a coherent creative vision, and when he played, the whole of the music became dramatically more than the sum of the parts. I can’t really say that about anyone else on this list.

Now please allow me to backtrack. I don’t think this matters. Most great DJs are not trying to compose with the turntables, and those who stake the claim, or have had others stake it for them, are almost always terrible, terrible trance DJs whose idea of a creative vision is playing three records that sound exactly alike simultaneously.

But Scott was not one of them. He was a musician, and his mixes were music: beautiful, ascendant, funky, percussive, warm, psychedelic, dubby … completely original music. The closest sonic analogue would probably be Andrew Weatherall’s era-defining productions for Primal Scream and One Dove – two of my very favourite albums. That Scott could improvise something so beautiful as a live DJ with other people’s records and some simple sound effects still blows my mind.

Oddly, his own studio productions only occasionally got to that place. But when he’d put them in his DJ sets they would take flight. That is not something I’ve seen before or since, and it’s a pretty good indication that Scott Hardkiss was truly one of a kind.

http://www.mixcloud.com/ohm_r/scott-hardkiss-live-room-zero-sidea/

2. Daniel Ormondroyd and Jonathan Nowell (FC Kahuna)

2. Daniel Ormondroyd and Jonathan Nowell (FC Kahuna)

March, 1996, in the basement of Partners’ wine bar in Fitzrovia, London. It’s 12.45 a.m., and the punters are *in the mood*. This is clubbing’s magic hour, when every song sounds like the start of something big, and every stranger on the dancefloor is a potential new best mate. But something unorthodox is happening. The music has stopped. The lights have been put on. Is it the police? A fire? The crowd – maybe 100 sweaty bodies in this tiny setting -- begin an optimistic cheer, willing this interruption to be declared benign. Suddenly Dan Kahuna, still on his knees behind the DJs’ table, turns and smiles at the crowd, and holds a disconnected power cord aloft for their inspection. The cheer of the night goes up as he plugs it back in and the EQ on the mixer blinks into life.

Spring, 2003, the ‘legendary’ Fillmore Auditorium in San Francisco. Jon Kahuna is seamlessly mixing records to a milling, uninterested crowd as the warm-up act to Primal Scream. As he clears another perfect mix, I am stunned to realize that he’s doing it without any monitors, with the only sound coming from the PA 50 meters away and suspended high above the ballroom floor. “How the hell are you doing that?” I ask in disbelief, knowing that the delay should have made mixing impossible. “It’s no problem,” he responds. A disappointed shrug, an extra moment’s eye contact, and a nod to the empty CD case that had been holding their recent mix album, Another Fine Mess, now spinning away on its own and inventing the modern American EDM ‘DJ.’ Faking it, and hating it.

Dan and Jon were the hosts of the best club night I’ve ever attended, and that meant they headlined some of the best nights of my life, so they were always in pole position for this countdown. But that undersells them. The Big Kahuna Burger Co. was magic because of them – their fingerprints and personalities were all over everything from the music to the DJ lineups to the till by the door (into which they would regularly dig to buy you a drink or give you change for other needs). And no matter how big the guest star, they were always the best DJs of the night, full of surprises and clever mixes and pogo-inducing, hug-a-stranger selections at the denouement.

And they could play away, too – clips from their Glastonbury set almost made me weep with envy, and when I brought them to San Francisco to play a totally foreign deep/tech house club to kids who didn’t know them, they played the best set I’ve ever heard and left the crowd buzzing like a live wire.

I’m not sure what the anecdotes at the start of this post say about them. Maybe it’s about the progression from delightful amateurism to cynical professionalism, but I don’t think so. I think it’s about their understanding for their job as DJs, and their respect for the music and the opportunity for connection. Do it right, and you can make magic out of chaos. Leave it in the hands of the ‘professionals’, and you might as well be playing a recording. In every setting they maintained an instinctive spirit of camaraderie with their audience and a zero tolerance policy for all the other bullshit. They always knew what was important, the way the music and the moment can be made electric, and they delivered on that potential better than any DJs I’ve ever seen.

http://www.mixcloud.com/jesseblack/live-at-melon-5-october-2002/

3. Charlotte the Baroness

3. Charlotte the Baroness

You're supposed to make them dance.

I know I've added a lot of other criteria to the DJ checklist over the course of this top 20, but what's important to 99% of the people who ever go to a club? Whether the DJ got them dancing. By that measure, Charlotte the Baroness is the best I've ever seen, and it's not even close.

Charlotte has only one setting. Which is not to say that she plays only one kind of music -she can be mad eclectic - or can handle only one kind of crowd. But when she gets back there, it's GO, and you can keep your ready steady for some other party.

She can start it - I've seen her fill more empty dance floors than any other DJ. She can finish it, having wrung the last drops of Sunday morning sweat out of the legendary EndUp in San Francisco for years. And she can keep it going in between, her relentless enthusiasm for the 125bpm machine funk doing more than all the nefarious powders in SoMA to keep the floor filled after 3am. She never claimed to be taking anyone on a 'journey' even though some of her music is well out there. The journey was the dance ... and if you needed time for reflection, someone else would happily take your spot on the dancefloor.

She stitches west coast breakbeats and house together like drums were the very fabric of the air. She works the mixer like a personal trainer whipping a sleepy client into shape. Her records tumble across walking bass and sizzle with acid energy. She came from Chicago but claimed her throne in San Frandisco, the perfect Barony for the perfect, shock-haired, 6-foot, rail-thin portrait of underground dance hedonism. She was a star among the people of the night and she lived it right alongside them. Most of all, she never forgets why they were there: to lose it on the dancefloor. That is the name of the game, and there is only one Baroness.

https://soundcloud.com/charlotte-kaufman

4. Thomas Bullock

4. Thomas Bullock

You may have noticed that I like DJs who aren’t averse to a bit of rock music now and then. Hey, it’s in the blood. But there are electronic music Djs who like rock music, and then there’s Thomas Bullock.

Thomas wasn’t one of those DJs who would drop in a rock or funk anthem to get the crowd fired up. And he didn’t just play dance records that had rock dynamics. I’m convinced that he actually heard electronic music and guitar music exactly the same way, so that when he played the distinction disappeared. What you felt was the impact of the records, the body-moving midsection, the gut-punching bass, and the shimmering, psychedelic treble. House, funk, rock, disco … records were records, they were his kind of records, they all rocked, and you could dance all night to them.

The sense that Thomas was doing something alchemically rock and roll was of course amplified by the fact that he seemed totally fucking nuts. Along with (15) Tim Love Lee and (19) DJ Harvey he had emerged from the extended Tonka Hi-Fi collective in England and emigrated to the United States, apparently with a manifesto to grow improbable beards and poison the minds of America’s young with musical and behavioural decadence. In San Francisco he was a founding member of the Wicked Sound System, and as they moved deeper into pure house music over time, he remained the wild card, relocating to New York but regular returning like a bandit in the night, his presence on a Wicked bill enough to get the house kids murmuring about a ‘big one’.

This sense of the dramatic was something he had in common with Harvey and Love Lee, but unlike his comrades, he seemed to be going beyond performance and inventing something new, and this made his sets impossibly exciting. I think he understood this himself, and that’s why he went off to do rock music with A.R.E. Weapons. That didn’t work – they were terrible – and maybe the full promise of his DJ sets was left unrealized. But for those who were there, the promise was more than enough.

http://artonair.org/show/dj-thomas-of-rub-n-tug

5. Mark Rae

5. Mark Rae 

I have no idea what it’s like for any of these DJs, how they see what they do, what the process is like, where their heads are at when they’re in the mix. Maybe, maybe, it’s all a great big struggle for Mark Rae, maybe it's blood, sweat and trainwrecks polished off through hours of laborious practice. But man, he sure makes it look easy.

And I mean all of it. The selecting – he seems to have an unending wellspring of records that are perfect Mark Rae records, records no one else would have recognized as funky or thought to insert into his sets. The sequencing – planned or improvised, I’ve never seen a DJ quite as good with call-and-response mixing. He makes the records talk to each other. And the trickery – the scratching, the cutting, the surprise stops and segues, he’s clearly a natural with it.

The first time I saw him play live, I was genuinely surprised by how light on his feet he seemed back there, totally into what he was doing but not betraying any need for concentration or effort, just bouncing through clever mixing and scratching and anthemic drops like a kid doing cartwheels on a playground. I’ve had my share of DJ heroes (you may have noticed), but I don’t think I’ve ever been jealous of a DJ other than Mark Rae. He’s the natural.

https://soundcloud.com/mark-rae/rae-radio-mix

6. Jon Carter

6. Jon Carter 

Despite the catholic tastes advocated throughout this list, I think eclecticism is a minefield for a DJ. If you’re actually trying to offer your audience something new as a DJ, throwing together a couple of unrelated genres is not the way to do it. Most people already have lots of different kinds of music in their collections – a DJ has to try to make connections between the records s/he plays, and turn a collection into a party.

Jon Carter made his name as a part of a movement (the one that had its spiritual centre in the Heavenly Social) that dared to tackle this dangerous eclecticism head-on, and mostly got away with it. But even more than his contemporaries (Chemical Brothers, Death in Vegas, etc), he really managed to contribute something through the simple act of connecting different genres. It’s not clear that the line connecting house music, hip hop, dancehall, and rock and roll had ever been drawn, or that there was any audience asking for this to be done. But he heard something there, and he tried it.

Of course he had the chops to make it work. At the time Jon Carter seemed to me to be an uncommonly confident DJ, and in a scene that was instinctively self-deprecating, he was unashamed to be good at mixing records. Having the skills to cut and paste live made his experiments go down easier, and soon enough the white indie and techno kids, me included, were looking at ragga chat in a whole new light. His collection became our party.

In 1996 Heavenly had him do the second ‘Live at the Social’ mix album, a sequel to the Chemicals’ opening volume. He had already made his reputation at the club, but the mix raised the stakes for the whole scene: this was a party collage that was totally unique. Funkier than Coldcut, more dexterous than the Chemicals, rougher than tough, it announced the arrival (proper) of a new scene in dance music.

Jon Carter went on to bigger things as a big-room house DJ – with his talent, there was probably no avoiding it. He could play someone else’s party, for sure, but he was never better than when he was starting his own.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nzep0GOpC8U

7. Kevin Jenkins

7. Kevin Jenkins

Like I said, it’s personal. It’s always personal. But especially this one. The best kind of mentor never gives you any advice. The best kind of inspiration doesn’t come and go. The true superheroes never change costume.

Kevin was in charge of the best party in San Francisco, the Bulletproof Boat Party. The parties were a huge success, except when they were a total disaster. They guaranteed total musical nirvana under the Golden Gate Bridge and excruciating hour-long waits for the toilet. The wharf before launch was the most beautiful gathering of beautiful people your beautiful imagination can imagine, and at docking time (4 hours later? 4 years later?) we emerged as horrifying make-up-streaked zombies from the planet Afterpartysomeoneplease. Often one of my 20 favourite DJs was playing each of three decks. I still dream about the Bulletproof Boat Parties, and when I say dream, I don’t mean daydream, I mean I have regular, recurring, weird-as-shit dreams centered on one of the most important things in my subconscious universe: drifting out on the bay with Kevin at the helm.

And make no mistake: though it was founded by his partners Gail and Eddie, by 1998 Kevin Jenkins *was* Bulletproof, and even after he left to go back to England, whatever magic remained in those parties was his magic. He always played the third deck, outside under the sunset and the stars, boogie and indie and hip hop and 150% anthems you never thought they’d play at a club. I once told my dear friend and DJ partner Pete that if I got to play outside on the boat, I’d close my set by throwing my record bag into the Bay. Kevin called my bluff.

In the midst of all the chaos that consumed those parties, Kevin never blanched. Forged tickets making the rounds. GHB overdoses at sea. Having to hire a totally different boat at the last minute. Kevin steered a steady course through it all, and then he played ‘Step On’ and ‘Return of the Mack’ and The Zombies and Bill Withers while they did a laser show on the side of Alcatraz and you thought, hey, this guy’s got this shit *under control.*

Of course Kevin invited me to play the outside deck. And of course there were 40mph winds and of course I insisted on trying to beatmatch my whole set with the tone arm hopping like the lid on a boiling pot. No problem. Kevin duct-taped a baffle of 12” record sleeves around the turntables so I could do my thing. Not that he would have bothered with beat matching himself, but hey, it was my party, too. We could do that.

Running a massive party attended by capricious lawbreakers is a living for an expat of questionable immigration status, but it wasn’t an easy one. Everybody wanted a favour from Kevin, and he took them all in stride. But nobody told him what to play on the outside deck. Out there he was Bombadil, The Master, and no windstorm or bad vibe had caught him yet.

He had to go back to England in the end, and he’s in demand there, too, doing groovy edits of soulful 70s obscurities under the name Ole Smokey and previously helping to anchor the Big Chill, Lattitude and Garden Festivals. He’s not bothered about Dance Music with capital letters anymore, not that he ever really was. Kevin didn’t blow in the wind: he held the rudder, and that was the lesson.

http://www.mixcloud.com/Ole_Smokey/all-back-to-mine-mix-for-sean-rowleys-joy-of-music-radio-show-on-bbc-kent/

https://soundcloud.com/ole-smokey