Ace of Base, Happy Nation
In 1993, the school I went to at the time (Thornleigh, a hideous catholic factory in Bolton) played host to a couple of French exchange students. They were Year 8, same as us, and were touted around each French class for us to practice our French on. A girl called Caroline asked them "Quelle t’on musique prefere?" (or whatever it is in French) and the two boys replied simultaneously "Ace of Base". Their French accents twisted the words we were used to hearing all over TV and radio in a way we hadn’t been expecting and we all fell about laughing.
I think this was the first time I had considered pop music being listened to by anyone who wasn’t English. I think I was aware that Ace of Base were Swedish, but as they sung in that vaguely Americanised form of English that so many singers use, it wasn’t too evident from the vocals that they were Swedish. With the memory of those French students in my head every time I heard Ace of Base, I suppose in a way this was my introduction to "World Music", in the sense that it wasn’t English or America. But then again, that does seem to be the definition of this rather patronising term, a neo-colonialism often forgotten by all those aficionados who trek to womad etc every year.

The banghra version of All that She wants adds more evidence to these feelings – the banghra-ised version includes nothing different (apart from massively-depleted lyrics) but a kind of Indian-style drone (very quiet, almost unnoticeable) behind the original song. I don’t think it would shake Bollywood, somehow.

In another nod to the pan-European state of this album, the fourth song on the CD is "The Sign", which I used to sing when I worked as karaoke-singing sushi/cocktail waitress in a Japanese restaurant in Edinburgh. It has all those great English-translation lyrics such as "under the pale moon, where I see a lot of stars", "is enough enough?" and "How could a person like me jump for you?" which although sound clunky do have a small poetry within…a bit like Take on me by A-ha which has lovely lines like "Needless to say, all odds and ends I’ll be stumbling away" – I know this isn’t "proper" English but is still an endearing and interesting turn of phrase or two and casts a new light on idioms I thought I knew.

Ace of Base did come back, I remember they had a couple of songs out when I was either at late 6th Form or early University, one was called "Always have, always will" and was much slicker than anything on happy Nation, whether that’s down to improvements in technology or the mode of the day, I don’t know. It was quite a 60s song. Also they had a really good song called "life is a flower" which I liked for a long time. Happy Nation is so much of its time, the sounds, the short refrains, every geared around dancing dancing dancing, love and sex. Every song is upbeat. There’s no journey in here. Only a very half-hearted early 90s syncopated keyboard riff on every other song. That particular rhythm (and I know you know it) relates to the Latin 8/8 beat…was the lambada and La Isla Bonita by Madonna responsible for more of the rhythms of the rave scene than we give them credit for?

Bonus tracks on this CD. The bonus track is so different from the hidden track – they are advertising their hitherto untold depths. More of the same, only different. Re-packaging of old LPs onto CDs must be the start of all this bonus track stuff. We become interested in the alternative architecture of the song, we want more, we want orange flavoured kit-kats, we don’t want wispas or caramels, we want dairy milk with bubbles or dairy milk with caramel. Dance, or fade out, but have an acceptably good time while you’re at it.

2 many DJs, Original CD (title unknown – that’s rubbish, I could find out if I wanted)
This was the thing that started it off, Tim copied it for me in 2002. It was withdrawn because they hadn’t been cautious enough in securing copyright permission from something. The Peter Gunn/Basement Jaxx opening. The original fear of “Where’s your head at?” (probably amplified by the scary as fuck video)gets diluted by its new coupling, or as Peaches says it a minute or two alter “Fuck the pain away”. Having being thinking about the cold war and the escalation of the nuclear threat, I have to wonder about the rise of MTV, something must have come along to cushion us from that paralysing fear, something needed to elevate us to buying and fucking and bitching about other buyers and our competition and/or targets in the other category. Lou Reed just in time with his flat voice. John Cale was always cooler.

Interference, I truly don’t know anymore if this was designed interference. CD cloggy, take it out for a clean and start again. How did it get so dirrrrrty?

There are elements here, in this 2 Many DJs first public work, that found new homes on the Soulwax sessions I heard previously. Recycling and appropriation as creation too. How beauty becomes keep-fit overnight.

Perhaps a hangover, a nap and a day of walking around lovely greenery and eating pie has dulled my responses to this. I’m really not sure what of this I’ve heard or not heard before in other 2 many DJs sessions; I mistake Blue Monday for Vogue; songs I knew as means to dancing are rendered as weird and knowing sexscapes and the evening is becoming darker outside the blinds. Shadows of music appear and disappear before I’ve had time to see the nightmare collision or laugh at its humour. Not the actual songs, but almost just the first smell of their perfume as they waltz round the door, and angel-style recline into cruising mobiles.

It’s interesting to see how Independent Women prove such fertile ground for these audio plunderers. Pirate DJs. While the men make wish-lists of height and violence, and demand we ask what’s that sound and that we look what’s going down, the women seem to get on with working 9 till 5 etc. More enquiries about where are your children? Can they all be accounted for before Blue Monday comes round again?

2 many DJs, Soulwax sessions volume eight
5th generation rock and roll. Amateur poetry in a middle English voice. Floating and left-wing. After one session of Soulwax already, my mind feels like a catalogue. I don’t know either of the songs mixed together and I have in front of me a can of Pepsi full of drink and a can of coke half-full of ash. The computer (Microsoft, nearly micro-frost) recognises coke and not Pepsi. Don’t pick up the wrong one for a cheeky swig.

They say we had beautiful girls. Is this kind of music beautiful on the radio and in person rather like an uncle at a wedding rooting through their favourite greatest hits? Editing and editing; creation through choice is a truly consumerist music. In this exercise, I know I’m going to be listening to a glut of an artist at a time… the alphabet is all but what if you get just too much of a person? Like a love affair you wear down to dirty socks and improvised breakfasts of contempt and familiarity? And there the singer confirms it with “Good morning, good afternoon, goodnight, don’t let the bedbugs bite”. What if I acquire a new love? It’s impossible to have a monogamous relationship with music. It will lead you into tawdry rendezvous’ with architecture, history, maths, engineering, literature, art and technology. It’s ten o’clock, do you know where your teenager is? The party of bpm never stops and too many djs in control.

God, I haven’t recognised a single sample or track so far. That might have been George Harrison asking me, Liz Kearton, how I feel but I’m not sure.

An amateur choir, children, singing away mixed over a very electro-stylee backing…how is the listener supposed to recognise that? If recognition is the game? Or is this how 2 many DJs have evolved…the new superstardom where one works actively towards amateurism and mediocrity? It’s not fashionable to say so but Daniel Johnson, over-rated and beloved of those who chase “authenticity”, lacking it themselves... you could say his whole canon of works espouse this…is this where punk led us? People who are shit and are applauded for being shit? Who write hokey little songs that follow no structure, no pattern of the brain or the eye and are instead stream of consciousness with nothing save gratification? But then I love Finnegan’s’ Wake which is the ultimate in this format…

Punk and democracy – that terrible tag-line for a broadband/cable company that says “If you can, you should”. What if you are untalented but you still want to? And the people listening support that anti-oppressive, liberal get up and have a go, anyone can do it idea? Then the gates are open and the act is whored for the sake of doing it. Very little responsibility is taken for the musical animal who is birthed from this then, everything can be justified by “because you’re worth it” and similar. In the world of art, we can’t discriminate against those that have no talent. We are all shoppers now. Music as therapy and self-expression certainly but like all that free jazz that just goes on and on and on, you have to ask if the music there for the performer or the listener? I know this feeds well into John cage’s inversion of the triangle of composer/performer/listener and it’s healthy to challenge preconceptions of the structure (and politics of the structure of )music, but the danger of it turning into musical masturbation of a sort is always there. Therapy’s not a bad thing, but do you then publish it? The risk is there then of disenfranchising the skill and art behind confession, and I’ve seen at first hand the distrust, contempt and even hate at times of a trained musician.

I’ve found something on the shelf I know now, a familiar brand. Beats International featuring some-one I forget. Dub be good to me. Why do I listen closer now? I’ve seen an old friend with a new haircut; older and embittered, showing that the new is preferable. And now linking and loving with another on the tip of my tongue…what is this one with the heavier, decadent beats? Serge Gainsbourg begs me to listen to him while he sings a requiem (I can’t be sure, I have no French on my shopping list today). Is the recognition the highlight? A DJ has saved my life (again) and I do have to get up and get out, but not for an hour or so before work starts.

2 many DJs, Soulwax sessions volume one


You start with numbers before letters, right? Susie and Al copied this for me. I’d heard them before in Edinburgh. Obviously this is terribly clever stuff, and I don’t mean this is in a facetious way, even though they themselves are very playful and knowing with the songs they combine. These tracks are like hurtling through a music supermarket, you know this, you’ve seen this, you’ve heard it, you know some-one who owns this song or you used to, and they all collide monstrously, and it works no matter how much you sometimes don’t want it to. Here I’m hearing Blue Monday with “Sweet seduction in a magazine”…who is it singing? Are these 2 many DJs now the performers or weird ringmasters herding all these great songs together to cavort and sully each other in a fabulous mix? The old producer/performer debate is one that struck me even more with The Avalanches’ first (only?) album. I dreamt its title last night, it was called “Heidi wants one”. That’s not right, is it?

It’s interesting that when Sgt Pepper appears, these djs who render so many things unrecognisable and unexpected hardly do a thing to change the original Sgt pepper (reprise), and how “funky” the Beatles were, outside the other contenders of the 1960s. In the fade-out to Lovely Rita on Sgt pepper, the Beatles seem to have this weird direct injection through to a very Rn’B style current/contemporary/modern style. Listen to it and you’ll know what I mean. The DJs need do nearly nothing to render the Sgt Pepper reprise of a part with The Chemical brothers, Peaches, Madonna and all the other songs and artists weirdly coupled and babied with each other.

What is the deal with this? Is it like those old megamixes of the 80s? Jive Bunny and all that? The Wasteland by TS Eliot has often been accused of being something of a literary megamix (ditto Ulysses by Joyce), and this mosaic nature to the book is cited often by its detractors (who, I think, are usually afraid of missing a reference within the book and being marked as that which they most fear and so hold the book in contempt – we see a mathematical or scientific equation we don’t understand and are vocally awed and humbled by it. Confront the average person with a work of art, music, literature they don’t understand and they react with anger, claiming you’re trying to make a fool out of them). What is 2 many DJs work, but constant referral to the slipstream of music from the last four or five decades? Is it better to listen knowing each and every song? Or to approach each one as “brand new”?

The mix of God only Knows by the Beach Boys and Billie Jean by Michael Jackson is the thing that made me sit up about this album, when Susie played it me, happily moved into her new place in Exeter, the whole conversation stopped, everything stopped and still now when I try to describe this to people, they can’t understand it, and when I play it, it’s incredible.

What am I doing and why?
Having undertaken the weary and wonderful task of categorising my entire music collection (across all formats – CDs, pc-based stuff and vinyl) I’m going to listen to it all in alphabetical order and write a log of this time.


The grammar of albums and music is being lost bit by bit, pick n’ mix n’ piecemeal. When albums were pressed onto wax or shellac, we would listen to them in their entirety. From having read memoirs by George Martin, I know about the though that went into where each song goes in the running order, to construct “a novel” instead of a matchbook of singles…which of course hit a peak with Pink Floyd, Kate Bush etc, with the side A and side B of each record being approached as a first and second act in an opera, or movements in symphonies.

Then the CD became (I guess) the kind of beginning-middle-end Caulfield-style long rush of On the Road or similar – to just keep on driving but to construct the drive around peaks, troughs and witty juxtapositions. And now we put ipods and everything on shuffle and are just constantly looking to be surprised by something which is roughly the same as the rest, the surprise of position and not of content. Justin Timberlake next to Johnny Cash next to Jesus Christ. How much postmodernism and consumerism converge here, I don’t wish to comment on. But I know I’m always looking for new music, to find something new or to write something new myself, and I know fine well there’s a wealth of music on my shelves that I largely ignore. So. A No-Exit of sitting down with my friends, the CDs, LPs and computer files I have used and abused when I needed them, which I have taken and made work exactly the way I want them to for a party, to create a mood, to cheer myself up, to take me out of myself or to research styles, patterns and chord changes for my own musical gains; they’re now going to sit me down and do the same to me.

The rules are: No spoken word, No individual songs that don’t “belong” to an album, No compilations, No original work of me or my friends. No skips. No shuffles.