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