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