30DC:D30: worst gig you’ve ever been too

I tend to enjoy most gigs. Live performance always has that element of danger what with the safety net of a second take being removed. Even the celebrity DJs have to remember to put their Mojito down and mime a mix over the pre-mixed CD their miming too. I may have filed away the bad gigs deep in the recesses of my mind as I had to really wrack my brains to think of a bad one, but think of one I did. Luckily the gig in question came at the end of a fantastic day I had spent playing pool, drinking beer and buying a massive parka that you could live in on the North Pole, all with my good mate Kev for company. It was also the only gig to date that I’ve been too with my little sister, and I had a bunch of good mates and drinking buddies from work with me. Sadly, although the fun didn’t stop and we enjoyed the over-priced Earl’s Court beer, Radiohead (for it was they) might as well have been playing in France and broadcast it on a plasma screen at the end of a corridor.

30DC: D29: best gig you’ve ever been too

I was 18 years old. I was studying Music at Southampton University. I was young and free and the beer was cheap. More importantly, I had discovered Drum n Bass at the beginning of the year and now had an insatiable hunger for it. All in all, it was a fortuitous time for the Creamfields festival to come along, and to be occurring in the same County that I was currently living in. My housemates Laura and Danielle (who was always up for a party and was my co-pilot on many late night raving missions) and me bought tickets. A few friends on the music course also got in on the action, and the network of mates, course-mates and mates-of-mates that had built up also bought in. A small army of us descended on Creamfields ready to party.

30DC: D28: tune that you love but nobody else gets

I’ve already discussed my embarrassing love for Aqua: Barbie Girl in great detail. Although the isolation of my current location (deep in the Northern Cape) has led to me playing a lot of Solitaire, which in turn has led to an unhealthy amount of shouting “for the love of God, please give me a queen”, I am still lucid enough to remember doing so. Although its a guilty pleasure, to write more about it would amount to writing movie reviews for porno’s so I will write about something else I like that a lot of my friends here in South Africa don’t get. More importantly, it gives me a chance to relive one of the few DJ slots I landed this year (I’d like to think I’m building up a mystique by not playing much, but to be honest, Lord Lucan has probably made more appearances).

30DC:D27: what music would you have played at someone you don’t like’s funeral

When I was a youngster I was a really into He-Man. I had as many of the toys that I could lay my grubby hands on. Between me and my brother we had He-Man, Man at Arms (complete with his single shin-pad, not sure what that was about), Skeletor and various other characters. My Mum even built me a paper-mache version of Snake Mountain using the Argos catalogue as a reference (I only realised what an amazing thing that was for a Mum to do when I was a lot older). At some point He-Man was expanded and Hordak and his cronies were added. My brother and I scored Hordak, Beast Man and Slime Pit as a result of my parents going to the States for a month when we were young, and leaving us behind (long story, nothing like Home Alone). Even back then I was a sucker for completing collections, so if we had Hordak et al, we needed his arch-enemy, She-Ra. Without thinking it through, I requested a She-Ra toy for Christmas. Only when I received it did I realise what a fatal error it was for a young boy to ask for a toy of a woman for Christmas. To cut a short story long, be careful what you wish for.

30DC:D25: ring music

If you ask my mate Evert about fighting, he’ll tell you he won his last one by 25 metres. I hold a similar philosophy when it comes to physical confrontation. I don’t think I ever evolved from the days when putting your mate in a headlock constituted a battle won. As such, my ring music as a boxer would probably be a major symphony that lasted several hours, and I would insist on not entering the ring until the last note had sounded. This would give me plenty of time to board a plane to somewhere a suitable distance away from any risk of physical contact. If I was contracted by a boxer without the tendency to turn both (arse) cheeks at the first sign of trouble and said boxer required some ring music to fire him up and generally terrify anyone unfortunate enough to be waiting in the ring for him, then I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend ‘Messiah’ by Konflict.

30DC:D24: favourite one hit wonder

For a while during my youth, Levi’s became king-makers in the music world. A stream of tunes that accompanied 501s adverts would promptly get released and go straight to number one. Sadly this just demonstrates just how musically-ignorant the general public in the UK were. When the great Nina Simone died, the item on the news stated that she was best known for the song that was used on some car advert or other, but I’m digressing. At least in the case of Levis, their marketing department sought out new tunes and made some quiet cool adverts. The only downside to being handpicked by a guy with a goatee and a polo-neck to be on the new ad, was that, like being handpicked by Simon Cowell, you were doomed to forever be a one hit wonder. This leads me to wish that Levi’s had made an ad with Simon Cowell in it, and perhaps he might have disappeared along with one-hit-wonders into the same mysterious parallel universe that odd socks disappear too.

30DC:D23: music genre or album you feel you should like but just don’t get

My brother-in-law hates men who urinate with the toilet seat down. Hate isn’t a strong enough word really. Imagine a Spur’s fans revulsion at the idea of wearing an Arsenal shirt multiplied by Julius Malema’s dislike of common sense and you might be close to the scale. His eyes will glaze over, steam will gush out of his ears, and he will recount one of his many stories about finding a urine-splattered toilet seat in a motorway service station somewhere. I can understand irritation at such a discovery, but to be put into a state of mind where murder is a mild punishment for such a crime perplexes me. In the same way, I can understand why people would like Footwork/Juke, but I cannot understand the fever for it that seems to burn in most producers of bass music at the moment. I suppose that if you spliced together my brother-in-law’s DNA with mine and then urinated on a toilet seat while shouting FOOTCRAB FOOTCRAB FOOTCRAB over a sped-up electro beat at the resulting creation, you’d get a pretty confused and irritated creature. I just don’t get it.

30DC:D22: instrument you wished you could play and someone you wish you could play it like

I learned to play the Cello at the age of 8. My Grandpa was a composer, and a lover of the Cello. My Dad’s Godfather, Francis Harvey, was a Cellist and gave me first lessons when we visited him while on holiday in Wales. Most importantly, my parents realised that the sound of an 8 year old learning a violin is such a monstrosity that even the Americans at Guantanamo Bay declared it a bit morally iffy as a means of coaxing information out of suspects. Sadly, it quickly dawned on me that the Cello wasn’t exactly the most Rock N Roll of instruments (this was before Therapy? and Nirvana’s Something in the Way). Maybe my Music teacher picked up on this as she suggested I join the school’s swing band and play the bass parts on my cello. I didn’t have a clue what was going on, and couldn’t follow the music, but luckily it was Jazz baby, so no one noticed. I later went on to play Drums, but still hold a great love of the bass, so much so that I won’t try and tarnish its great name by attempting to learn it. Here are three bass players that I would try (and fail by some distance, as anyone would) to emulate if I did.

30DC: D21: favourite format and why

When I was a teenager my Dad would give me and my brother a lift to school. He would nearly always have some classical music or other playing on the car radio. When he dropped us at the lights, me and my brother would jump out of the car quicker Usain Bolt in a hurry so as to avoid anybody who could identify us realising that our Dad listened to classical music. Over time I realised that my Dad is my Dad. For better or for worse, for richer or poorer, ’til death do us part. He’s got the attention span of, oh look what’s that over there. He takes great pleasure in being as embarrassing as possible, and he dresses according to his Father’s theory that if you dress in exactly the same style for your whole life, you will be the height of fashion once every-other decade. I love my Dad wholeheartedly, flaws and all. I feel fairly confident that he feels the same (although he’s probably got a few more of my flaws to deal with than me of his). Sadly, a lot of DJs out there don’t seem to embrace vinyl, easily my favourite format, with the same warmth and open-mindedness.

30DC:D20: band/artist that has influenced you or impacted your life

My Dad taught me that having zero social skills is great because you don’t need to make any effort and people call you an eccentric. My Mum taught me that there isn’t a situation you can’t get out of with a well timed joke. My Grandad taught me how to take things apart, sadly he didn’t ever get round to explaining the art of putting them back together again. My mate Phil taught me to climb trees. I learned how to fall out of them all by myself. My brother taught me that… er, nope, can’t think of anything. All of these people taught me things, but none of them taught me the art of making minimal, soulful, and staggeringly beautiful drum n bass (technically nor did Calibre, but he has, at least, patiently demonstrated it time and time again).