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

8. They Also Served

8. They also served

5+ DJs who aren’t on this list because I’ve never seen them, but really I’d like to:

The Unabombers (the mid-point between my London and SF loves was in … Manchester); Sound Pellegrino Thermal Team (the link below was the first truly great DJ mix I’d heard in years); Filthy Dukes (their unreleased ‘A Nation of Shopkeepers Vol 2´ was a staple ‘round ours – and I’d still kill to get my hands on a copy of that ‘Sailors’ record they play!); DJ Sneak or any of his French Acolytes; Q-Burns Abstract Message (his Invisible Airways show is still my favourite source for new dance music these days).

https://www.mixcloud.com/12Sundays/the-unabombers-live-at-12sundays-february-3rd-2008/

https://www.mixcloud.com/soundpellegrino/thermal-team-its-raining-crystals-from-the-future/

https://www.mixcloud.com/filthydukes/kill-em-all-radio-show-episode-3-filthy-dukes-stopmakingme-jan-11/

https://www.mixcloud.com/DJSneak/

http://www.mixcloud.com/QBurnsAbstractMessage/

-------

4 great DJs and world-changing musicians who will not appear on this list for reasons I can’t quite put my finger on:

Justin Robertson (anything the others can do he can do better); Andrew Weatherall (the one all the others want to be); The Chemical Brothers (the only ones who still need no introduction...)

https://www.mixcloud.com/justinrobertson/justin-robertson-tigersushi-promo-mix-august-2011-glitch-free/

https://www.mixcloud.com/TheRansomNote/andrew-weatherall-a-love-from-outer-space-electric-elephant-mix-rn-exclusive/

http://soundcloud.com/everybodywantstobethedj/the-chemical-brothers

9. Headman

9. Headman

Allow me to draw a Venn diagramme. (Because when you think about club culture, I know it makes you want to call a management consultant). It’s further down. If you don’t feel like looking, it’s three overlapping circles with the words ‘funky’, ‘energetic’, and ‘atmospheric’ in them. Simple enough to picture.

Club music basically happens in the intersections. Most popular house and hip-hop happens between energetic and funky; most techno between energetic and atmospheric; most of the underground alternatives (deep house, breakbeat, tech house etc) between atmospheric and funky. This is a very simplistic picture, but let’s face it, dance music is not theoretical physics.

Surprisingly little happens right in the middle. It might be the hard-to-reach sweet spot; it might be a dangerous no-man’s land; maybe it’s both. Whatever the reason, most DJs and producers don’t go there. In the mid-90s, the Chemical Brothers and their immediate descendants invented something that fit in the middle, built on swinging rhythms, heavy attack and spooky/dreamy noises. Within a few years the chancers, by way of copying Fatboy Slim, had stripped the atmosphere out of it and gotten silly. Equilibrium was restored and trance (between energetic and atmospheric, with a large helping of horseshit) took command of dance music.

But some experimentation continued, and by the mid-oughts, a new group of producers and DJs had found the middle again. Headman was by no means the leading figure in this movement (which shall remain nameless), but he certainly made a lot of its most interesting records. He was also the DJ who brought it live into my increasingly domesticated life, like a missionary to the savages, reminding me that the Big Night Out really could be just as much fun as it used to be.

The club was beneath the restaurant Marie Laveau in Stockholm, just a few blocks from our apartment, and Lisa and I went because we could, a rare night on the town with no expectations on the table. A sympathetic opening DJ found that sweet spot and took us there, and by midnight there was a 4-1 dancer/people-watcher ratio, which, if you’ve ever been out in Stockholm, was shocking enough. Headman did the rest.

The light show went dark and the word ‘Headman’ strobed onto a wall of TV monitors. The attack started with the first record, energy levels that seemed completely unsustainable, but his set bounced along on bass and drums that made the dancefloor feel like an indoor wave pool. The atmospherics came from the mix – his sequencing and invisible transitions sealing off the room like a space capsule. Two, three hours passed and it seemed that no one present even had a thought of leaving the dancefloor. The heat grew intense. Articles of clothing started to pile up in the corner and sweat was everywhere (again, this is Stockholm we’re talking about, where going 45 minutes without fixing your hair in the bathroom counts as hedonism).

I don’t remember leaving. Maybe part of me never did: the passing of time being what it is, I expect it will end up being the last night out of that kind that I ever have. A fond farewell.

http://www.headman.org/?cat=6

10. Nickodemus

10. Nickodemus

What is the DJ’s job, anyway? Play good records. Mix them together so that you add something to the listener’s experience. Don’t be a dick.

This third point cannot be emphasized enough. Why are so many DJs such arrogant idiots? OK, that is a question that doesn’t really need an answer. The real question is whether people realize how much difference it makes when the DJ is a nice person.

In rock music and other performance- and projection- based art, this doesn’t matter. In fact, being an asshole is often a clever approach to becoming a rock star. But DJs have a different job. They are our hosts, which means they should acknowledge that we are there and part of the event. They have to make us dance, which means more than just playing funky music, it means putting us at ease. Dancing doesn’t come easy for most people! A DJ that projects arrogance and elitism only makes it harder.

Which brings me to Nick. Don’t get me wrong: Nickodemus is a fantastic DJ. He is technically skilled, having cut his teeth in downtown Manhattan and Brooklyn alongside world-class DJs and accompanying musicians. (For anyone who might be following this whole list, Nickodemus was a partner in the Organic Grooves nights with Number 20, Sasha Crnobjna.) He has found the funk in a hundred musics from a hundred countries. He has an amazing sense for progression, and his Turntables on the Hudson nights, which took place in the belly and catacombs of a rusted-out steamboat moored on the Hudson River called The Frying Pan, were unmatched in their ability to take partygoers on a journey from a low-energy mingle to an ecstatic celebration.

But just as important as his DJing is Nick’s personality. Everyone who knows him thinks that he’s one of the nicest guys ever; more importantly, the hundreds of people who don’t know him but attend his parties can see that just as clearly. He projects it from behind the decks: not just entertaining but making eye contact, smiling, encouraging, wondering if his guests are enjoying themselves. Invariably: they are.

http://soundcloud.com/turntablesonthehudson/nickodemus-live-thelift

11. Mark Farina

11. Mark Farina

Mark Farina is a great house DJ. This is as close to a fact as you’ll find in this countdown: he’s been doing it longer, and better, and to the acclaim of more people who know, than just about anyone. From London … to Chicago … to LA, as the song goes. If it’s been done on turntables with house records, it’s been done by Mark Farina.

And yet, in a strange twist of fate, those of us who, really, really, love Mark Farina’s DJing don’t want him to play house music. We want ‘Mushroom Jazz’. That was the name he gave to his mixtape/CD compilation series, his legendary Monday night residency in San Francisco, and more importantly to his invention of a new way of DJing.

It was a simple idea: instead of playing hip-hop records like hip-hop DJs do, with short, sharp mixes between songs punctuated by scratching and live ‘sampling’ with the cross-fader, Mark would play hip hop records like house records, drawing out the groove, emphasizing repetition and playing 2 and 3 records together in extended blends.

Simple, but, er… HARD. For one: hip hop records are not made like that. They don’t offer extended sections of isolated rhythm, so you either have to be really good at using two copies of the record to extend the groove, or you have to have an instrumental verison of the track. This latter option presents a different danger: instrumental versions of hip-hop tracks are terribly boring. As musically brilliant as much hip-hop production is, it’s almost always designed to profile the rap, and as such it never goes anywhere. Those little motifs just can’t stand on their own.

But Mark Farina can make them stand, jump, pirouette, and run a marathon. His Mushroom Jazz sessions were both entrancing and utterly compelling. They required a DJ willing and able to be constantly in the mix, creating something new from raw materials and never losing control over the direction of the music. The club became a phenomenon (on Monday nights!) – a place where you had the legitimate sense that new ground was being broken. The groove was positively enormous, and he would spike it with extended vocals from Craig Mack or De La or the J5 and we would dance for hours at the edge of the dancefloor, shaking our heads at the unbelievable brio, sure we were watching our generation’s Dizzy Gillespie cut loose.

http://soundcloud.com/djmarkfarina/mushroom-jazz-24-mix-tape-side

12. Romanowski

12. Romanowski

When I got to San Francisco I quickly decided that Romanowski was my guy. He played clubs, for sure, but he also kept turning up as the DJ at the kind of loft/warehouse/art gallery scene that made me feel like I needed surgery for artificial coolness implants. And Roman was cooler than even that school: crate-diggin’ at the back, louche, skinhead and lanky in a wifebeater and baggy jeans, seemingly oblivious to the ecstatic creativity bobbing and weaving with his every cut and blend.

There were a lot of these parties in San Francisco before internet money fucked everything up, and each seemed to outdo the previous. It was my mission in life, at 25, not to miss any of them. The best of them all was in a converted space – I suppose somebody actually lived there? – above a petrol station in the south of market district. By the time I got there at the unfeasibly early hour of 11pm Roman already had them in full sway. Getting from one side of the … apartment? Art gallery? Squat? … to the other was a 20-minute journey through a forest of elbows, but eventually the whole place became one big dancefloor, so wiggle room became less important. I was parked next to the keg of beer, and in what can only be described as a singularity, Romanowski’s explosive deployment of ‘Funky Kingston’ coincided with the beer running out and the heat levels in the joint reaching intolerability.

I was desperate for three things: 1. Air. 2a. More Romanowski 2b. A continued supply of booze. I recognized that 2a and 2b were both equally critical to the continuation of the vibe, but subservient to need 1. Thinking on my feet, I spotted an untouched bottle of gin on the mantelpiece, swiped it, and headed outside for a breather. I was not alone – a stream of people, peaking post-Toots, followed me out. But as I had the bottle with me, I was confident that my re-entry would be a successful one. I had visions of myself as the conquering hero, pouring neat gin into punters’ mouths as they danced to rare groove.

Unfortunately, this particular petrol station was across the street from the San Francisco City Police Headquarters and County Jail, and just as the motley crew piled out of the door, three patrol cars on their way home stopped at the light in front of the building. The party people around me scattered guiltily and ran, for reasons unclear. There stood I on Bryant Street, alone, a large open container in my hand, and three of SF’s finest looking to make their arrest quota for the night.

That was my first and hopefully last night spent in jail. For those of you who haven’t been, let me dissuade you: it’s a terrible place. I spent the night cowering in the corner of the cell as massive, angry drunks hurled lunchmeat from the ‘free’ sandwiches at each other and vomited near, but never in, the open toilet. I never slept a wink, fearing I’d miss the moment that they’d come round to tell me I could go.

And damn. I missed the rest of Romanowski’s set.

http://www.mixcloud.com/ROMANOWSKI/old-rski-party-mix/

13. Kruder & Dorfmeister

13. Kruder & Dorfmeister 

Note: The only requirement for inclusion on this list is that I had to see the DJ in person at least once. I saw Kruder & Dorfmeister at Coachella in 2001. So that’s out of the way.

The reason they’re on this list, and the reason they should be on everyone’s list, is the DJ Kicks mix album they did for !K7 in 1996. By the time the recorded music industry died in 2009 or whenever mix albums had become a plague on the planet, mostly pretentious and pointless and no longer any guide at all to who was at the head of the DJ class.

But K&D’s DJ Kicks album was different: it arrived at a time when only a handful of DJ mixes had ever reached a broad audience. It was a 70-minute masterclass in a sequencing and mixing records, moving through different tempos and styles – dub, hip hop, drum’n’bass, flamenco! -- with both technical precision and an artful grace that no one had really even attempted at that point and no one has bettered since. It introduced millions of people to a new part of the clubbing universe. And it had an ‘iconic artefact’ vibe that had already become rare, post-vinyl: handsome artwork and charmingly goofy liner notes describing the album’s genesis and production. There might be a couple of other mix albums that were as influential, but this is the only ‘classic’ of the genre.

As luck would have it, they could do it live, too. A huge tent in a California desert is not the place you’d want to listen to DJ Kicks, but 2000 people were packed inside thanks to that very album. K&D navigated the situation perfectly, upping the oomph factor while staying inside that lush deep-green sound that made their name. They were bold with their mixes and surprisingly present as performers, connecting with the crowd and cheering on their favourite records. I never doubted them, of course, but there was something vindicating about that night that made DJ Kicks even more precious afterward.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bTcOq2z6WjA

14. Erol Alkan

14. Erol Alkan

Erol Alkan is a big DJ. He’s the biggest DJ on this list, in fact. He headlines big clubs, all over the world, giving the kids all the throbbing acid/disco/electro/house they can handle. He’s a star. And he deserves it - he’s genuinely great. Go check that link down there. But that’s not the DJ I’m putting on this list.

The Erol on my list is the shy, lanky, 18-year-old kid who played indie records at the Gass Club in Leicester Square in 1994. Being an indie club DJ is not especially hard; you know which ones everyone wants to hear, and those are the ones you play, and you are free to let one record end before starting the next one. But Erol *was* pretty good at it, considering. He always played ‘Weirdo’ by The Charlatans at exactly the right moment. And he was ok with a little Ned’s Atomic Dustbin or Pop Will Eat Itself … right up until that wasn’t ok anymore. He was good like that.

But mostly he was *ours*. He always played the long haul at Gass, sometimes the whole 6 hours, and we went every week, and he could wind us up like toy soldiers on too much lager. And he would take our requests! Requests are awful. Never make a request at a nightclub. Only an exceptionally gracious human being can tolerate the bellowed appeals of total – and totally intoxicated -- strangers. Erol would not only tolerate them, he’d start conversations with us about our requests. “No, not ‘Popscene’ yet! I’m gonna play ‘Lipgloss’ first!” Maybe he was just young, but there was something else. It wasn’t just that *we* saw him as one of us – it was that he saw *himself* as one of us.

And so we followed him around from Gass to the Mars Bar, and to the one under the hotel in Tottenham Court Road whose name I can’t remember … and he led us through Britpop, and gave us our first hearings of ‘Girls & Boys’ and ‘Connection’ and even ‘Wonderwall’. Eventually we outgrew the indie clubs (a little) and so did he (a little – he started Trash and kept one foot in indie). And then we got old and he got big and good for him. But he’ll always be ours.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03q9l9g

15. Tim 'Love' Lee

15. Tim 'Love' Lee

I knew one track by Tim ‘Love’ Lee (‘Again Son …’, which the Chemical Brothers had put on a mix album) when I arrived in San Francisco in January 1998. By the end of February I had heard his debut album (‘Confessions of a Selector’) about 20 times at 10 different parties and in 10 different record/clothing/head shops. I owned it myself by then, because in winter 1998 in San Francisco you had to own that album. In the days before the web it was unusual for music to get genuinely popular without any corporate or mass media push. But ‘Confessions…’ was just too San Francisco to be denied, psychedelic thrift shop world perv funk that put a roll in in the collective stroll and was, for the City’s sizable underground, the only album that really mattered at that moment.

And that was the moment that I got to see Tim ‘Love’ Lee DJ. He was a sort of special headliner/really obvious secret guest at a tiny bar called The Top on Haight Street. The Top had absolutely nothing going for it other than being full of magic – everyone who was really dialed in seemed to know exactly when to go there, and there was always someone spinning who could have filled a much bigger club but who seemed wildly enthusiastic to be playing a dive bar where the toilet doors opened directly onto the packed dancefloor. Around 2 a.m. ‘Love’ Lee began lurking around behind the DJ, dressed in a beige leisure suit, hirsute to his boots, grinning like a loon at the rising delirium on the dancefloor.

In the grand scheme of things, he was a small-time musician playing to a small faithful in a small nightclub, but he was absolutely larger than life at that moment, and his mere presence sealed the deal before he even played a record. The honest truth is that I don’t remember much about his actual DJing, but at that moment Tim ‘Love’ Lee was the best DJ in the world. And it was the moment that was the thing. It almost always is.

http://soundcloud.com/tummytouch/sets/tim-love-lee-old-dj-mixes/

16. ?uestlove

16. ?uestlove

I love talking about music, and listening to people talk about music (perhaps, to paraphrase Martin Mull, I’d also enjoy dancing about architecture). I’m a sucker for someone who can talk a good game about music, and ?uestlove is probably the best in the world. He is the Dr. Pangloss of musicbabble -- he knows everything about all the best examples of the best kinds of music. Like Indiana Jones in the jungles of Peru, he is always chasing where no one else has looked, always a step ahead of the rolling boulder of boredom.

Which makes it kind of a bummer that his band, The Roots, suck. (I realize this is not a popular opinion, but it happens to be true). The Roots’ monochrome hip hop bears no resemblance to ?uestlove’s Technicolor mission.

Thankfully, he’s also a DJ. And unlike, say, Giles Peterson, he’s more than a box of records, he’s a proper club killer: I saw him play at home in Philly and it was palm-of-the-hand, crowd-orchestration city. He is the only DJ I’ve ever seen play several hours of tunes that lots of people in the crowd recognized … and yet every track went over like a huge surprise. You know that feeling when a house DJ mixes in a familiar melody -- say, Blue Monday, or Prince -- in the middle of two-hours of instrumental house? With ?uestlove, every record was that record.

Which made for just about the perfect party, and a perfect explanation of what all that talk was really about.

https://www.mixcloud.com/egotthejazz/questlove-live-the-jew-ma-122711/

17. Corey Black and Sunshine Jones (Imperial Dub)

17. Corey Black and Sunshine Jones (Imperial Dub)

They would have made a brilliant comedy duo – tiny, curled-lip Corey and massive, wigged-out Sunshine, both possessed of a scorched-earth sarcasm that was the yang to their stoner yin. As it happened they usually played back-to-back rather than side-to-side, but they complemented each other perfectly.

Most of the music I’ve danced to in clubs – maybe 90% -- could be fairly and simply characterized as very similar, musically anonymous house records played one after the other. There’s nothing wrong with those kind of DJs – I’ve had lots of great times in that setting -- but they’re certainly not in short supply, and only a few ever really leave an impression. Corey Black was a committed practitioner of this art. He had a new box full of dubby, smoky house records every time he played, and he played the hell out of them, mixing them with panache and never failing to conjure the quintessential west coast house vibe. He worked in a little record store that sold almost only this kind of tackle, and if the sun was up, he was in there, digging, memorizing, fine tuning. There were lots of more celebrated guys playing that sound in SF – Jenö, Joshua Iz, etc – but nobody had it sharpened to quite as fine a point as Corey Black.

His sessions might open for a Dubtribe live show, or occasionally for a closing DJ set from Sunshine and Moonbeam. It was a perfect setup, 2 hours of precision San Francisconess from this little hood-eyed punk rocker … and then on comes the hype man. Behind the decks Sunshine carried himself like a motivational speaker or a revival preacher. He entered the scene with 100% enthusiasm and full certainty that the crowd was coming with him. He didn’t do anything special, technically, but he made every record an event, his big body searching through crates with exaggerated motions, hunching down low to inspect grooves and levels, all the while shaking his curly mop and working himself into a smiling sweat.

In 2001, near the height of Dubtribe’s ‘Do It Now’ popularity, this lineup played San Francisco’s Club 6, a dirty hellhole of a club in a dirty hellhole of a neighborhood. The place was such a pit and the promotion so shoddy that it never filled up, and Corey handed over a good groove but no prospects of the venue getting past half full. Disappointment is death in clubbing, and this situation was ripe for it, but Sunshine shook into action like he was marching at the front of a parade, and the energy swept through the room and pressed hard against the low ceilings. He made no big departure from Corey’s template, but he was an ecstatic ringmaster who knew that time was short and disappointment was not an option.

Suddenly the perspective shifted: this wasn’t a half-empty club, this was the best kept secret of the year. Sunshine’s vibing, seemingly so inappropriate and over the top on arrival, would not be denied. An hour in we reached fever pitch, with irony, cool, and the thought of disappointment long since departed and forgotten. Sunshine declared victory with ‘Celebration’ by Kool & the Gang, and the moment was perfected. Do It Now.

http://www.timeout.com/newyork/clubs-nightlife/dj-mix-sunshine-jones

18. Mr. Scruff

18. Mr. Scruff 

And now for something completely different. If Harvey is the Holy Man, Scruff is a scientist, labourer, toastmaster, traveling salesman. I first saw him in a boxy converted art gallery in San Francisco, and he made it his personal laboratory and workshop, stuffing so much into his three hours, it made me feel like other DJs, myself included, weren’t even really trying. After that show I swore I’d spend more time hunting for lost classics, more time constructing complicated sequences, more time evangelizing for what I loved. Just look at Scruff! Surely we must all try harder.

Being a nerd and a control freak in the world of party music is a dangerous game, and it’s to Scruff’s credit that the dancing spirit wins the day. If you’re going to lose your cool over this whole DJ thing, you’ve got to be awfully good with the actual stringing-together-of-great-tunes. He’s one of the best.

http://soundcloud.com/mr-scruff/sets/mr-scruff-live-club-mixes/

19. DJ Harvey

19. DJ Harvey 

The only time I ever saw Harvey in person was at the height of my own activity as a DJ. I was very interested in technique, and spending a lot of time learning to dothings with records that seemed very hard and very important.

Harvey was the antidote. His reputation as a DJ was (and probably still is) unmatched. He is maybe the only DJ to successfully cultivate a proper mystique, partly by being weird and remote but mostly through pure musical iconoclasm. By 2001, when I saw him in San Francisco, he was already something of a legendary figure.

What was important to me was that the legend turned out to have nothing to do with doing difficult things with records. In fact, Harvey did absurd things. Sometimes he would just let the music stop. Sometimes he would change the volume of the record ever so slightly, an action he undertook with the bearing of a watchmaker calibrating a tiny gear. He was ambitious in his selections and totally capable technically, but that was not the point. Sometimes he would seem not to be paying any attention to the records at all, and to be watching the crowd like a screen, as if *they* were the ones making the music, and he was deciding whether or not to adjust *them.*

And it was all brilliant. His reputation was fully deserved. I had a blast, and everyone in the club got what was going on instinctively. And it changed me as a DJ: all those hard things that mattered a lot – I realized that they really didn’t matter at all, that I’d probably never be very good at them, anyway, and that being a serious DJ actually required that I not take myself seriously.

http://www.mixcloud.com/artistsupport/dj-harvey-live-kissfm-1993/

20. Sasha Crnobjna

20. Sasha Crnobjna

Dropping in on the Organic Grooves and Giant Step parties in New York between 1994 and 1996 was a kind of through-the-looking glass experience. Sometimes you’d be in a big, classy nightclub, and sometimes in a pub with horrid sticky carpets. Regardless, dreads –black and white – were everywhere, and there was almost always live accompaniment to the DJ, at least congas, sometimes guitar and vocals. Hippie alarms immediately.

And then you’d cock an ear. Hip hop. Deconstructed, the best bits looping, the lyrics turned into accents, the accents and the groove totally repositioned. Dancing was unavoidable. And then they’d ambush you. The groove would get edgier, and they’d drop Da Funk (to the hip hop kids, James Murphy!). The tempo would gradually rise, and in would come ‘Peg’ by Steely Dan. And the roof was off. It was a big collective, and

Sasha was just one part of it, one angle. But he went off and formed Codek Records, the most underrated dance label of the turn of the century, and later In Flagranti, whom everyone loves to this day. So it’s clear that some part of that magic was his, and I’m granting it to him here. He slept on my couch in 1999 in San Francisco, which is both the world’s most obscure humblebrag and an admission that this kind of analysis is always personal (even though I never ‘knew’ Sasha, really). But he’s been a dance music magician for almost 20 years now – so no apology is necessary.

 http://soundcloud.com/inflagranti

Introducing the band

Against all odds, on the 21st of February I’m going to get to revisit one of my favourite clubs, the (resurrected) Heavenly Social in London. This has me thinking a lot about DJing and the amazing experiences I’ve had over the years. The following is a reminiscence of 20 years in nightclubs by way of a list of my 20 favourite DJs (approximately speaking). One post per DJ to follow...