Category Archives: News

Business, News

Er, you do realise you sell MP3s, right? Traxsource show rare fail in their social media marketing by posting pictures from an Aussie producer whose first love seems to be vinyl…

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You might not be aware of this, but Traxsource was set up by two gentlemen called Marc Pomeroy and Brian Tappert. They started the site in 2004 and are still at the helm today – but the history of the two men goes back much further than their 18 years at Traxsource.

They’ve known each other since at least 1993 – the two men used to form a duo called Jazz-N-Groove. Between 1993 and around 2001, they became well known in the house music scene for their remixes – Kim English, Crystal Waters and Jocelyn Brown are just three of the names whom they’ve been asked to stick their signature sound to. They also provided Defected with their first ever release – “Can’t Get Enough” under their Soulsearcher alias.

So the two gentlemen will be well versed in vinyl – it’s what they would have known and worked with during the 1990s. And many who started out in that era still have an understandable love of wax – but there’s a time and a place for everything.

And the Traxsource social media pages are probably not the best place to express that affection…

Traxsource was founded specifically in 2004 to provide a solution to a problem – vinyl sales were down, and DJs could not acquire digital copies of many records legally. Hence why Traxsource was created as a legal alternative to piracy. You could pay and be guaranteed top quality files or go to the pirate sites and get a dodgy vinyl rip – that was the choice.

But vinyl has never been in the Traxsource plan. So to showcase these turntables and plants – as easy on the eye as these pictures admittedly are – through their official accounts just seems downright weird to me…

Business, Club Culture, News, Politics

That’s yet another thing this country’s short of! As figures show Britain has lost 3000 nightclubs in 11 years, the Comical Ali dance press shows little sign of asking what’s going on…

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Whatever has happened to the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland over the past few years? We’ve been short of all kinds of things – lorry drivers, Covid tests, petrol, and evem ginger nut biscuits at one point after flooding in the north of England. And now, yet another thing has to be added to the seemingly endangered list.

That thing is, apparently, nightclubs. Some number crunchers have been examining figures from the Office of National Statistics and have worked out their numbers are in freefall. In 2010, 10,040 nightclubs were registered across the UK. At the last count, that number was down to 6,985. That’s 3,055 nightclubs which have disappeared in that period – a drop of 36%.

There’s little doubt that’s grim – and I’d be surprised if this figure doesn’t fall further. This blog has been contacted by a number of clubs who say their financial situations are dire, to say the least. But the end of the report contains this line, which has been clutched onto for dear life by the music press…

“With 6,985 registered clubs in 2021, from a high of 10,040 in 2010, it’s entirely possible that the UK will soon have less than 5,000 clubs, especially if COVID disruptions continue and capacities do not reach their maximum potential in the years ahead.”

No evidence is explicitly presented to back up this strong claim – although if current trends continued, the number would be reached by 2028. Which would be terrible news for the culture and a damning indictment of the country which was the first to truly fall in love with dance music.

That said, the lack of evidence for this statement isn’t stopping the dance music press from going predictably apocalyptic. Perhaps they could explore questions such as why so many have closed, and what is making the UK such as unfriendly place to set up a nightclub. Unless I’m very much mistaken, that’s their job – and as much as I try, I’m only one guy.

Another one to file into the “keeping an eye on it” category…

Business, Club Culture, Covid-19, News, Politics

So what ARE they basing their decisions on, if not the evidence? Welsh government forced to admit it has no idea how many cases of Covid originate from nightclubs

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We all know what the state of play has been for the past two years. When Covid hit the UK in March 2020, the whole country went into lockdown. Nightclubs were closed, just like almost everything else did at the time. Given that we knew next to nothing about Covid and how it was spreading, this wasn’t a great surprise.

But whilst the likes of clothes shops and hairdressers got to open up again later, nightclubs remained shut until last summer. England was the only part of the UK not to shut them again in response to Omicron, and I’ve been deeply suspicious of this decision – how were Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland coming to a different conclusion to England on almost identical evidence?

Well, a gentleman called Tom Fletcher decided he wanted to know more about what his local government in Wales were basing their decisions on – and he sent off a Freedom of Information request down to Cardiff. How many Covid cases originate from nightclubs? It’s a fair question and you’d imagine they’d have a good idea, right?

Not exactly…

So “this information is not available” – there it is in black and white. The Welsh government has literally no idea how many people have caught Covid-19 after attending nightclubs. Which begs a question – exactly what were they basing their decision to close an entire industry on, if not the evidence on the ground?

It looks more and more to me like they were working on assumptions – such as that the virus could spread more in a space where people were closer together. And whilst this presumption isn’t entirely wrong, it doesn’t take into account things like ventilation in nightclubs.

I’ll be continuing to keep a close eye on this one…

Club Culture, News

Could this be the strangest excuse ever for cancelling an event? House II House scrap plans for a live feed of a warm-up show citing “male menopausal behaviour”…

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The dance music world is a strange place. If it was just about the music, it would be alright – but more often than not, things like money and individual egos start to get involved. Still, I can’t complain too much – it gives me a heap of content to write about.

Anyway, someone sent me this late on Friday and I thought it was worth sharing – because it’s one of the most bizarre things I’ve seen for a while. In recent years, events have normally been called off due to either government imposed Covid-19 restrictions which stop them taking place – or the inability to get insurance in case of this happening.

In more normal times, reasons for events being pulled include issues with the venue, a major act being unable to make it to the show or something similar. They don’t normally include “male menopausal behaviour”. And yet that’s precisely what happened when a live stream of a House II House was scrapped just hours before it was due to start…

Curiously enough, Friday was the same day which Adele announced she was cancelling her Las Vegas gigs – just hours before she was due on stage and after people travelled from all over the world to see her. Still, at least the House II House crew spared us the ordeal of a whining, self-pitying video…

History, News

As Daft Punk’s album Homework celebrates it’s 25th birthday, spare me the bother of joining the hysteria surrounding the French duo…

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The whole dance music world seems to come out in a bizarre display of idolatry whenever Daft Punk are mentioned. The French duo, consisting of Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo, were together from 1993 until February last year.

And for reason unknown, the dance music press seems to eulogise them. It appears that doing their job of trying to find a new album destined to be tomorrow’s classic is too much hard work – hence one reason why this band gets promoted hard. Anyone holding a dissenting opinion would never get their opinion into the hallowed pages of Mixmag, for example.

Their split last year wasn’t exactly sadly received by this blog at the time. And nearly a year later, I still feel much the same way. Like many, I was a fan of Daft Punk’s music in the 90s and early 2000s – but their later output beared almost no resemblance to it. And I don’t think they offered anything particularly distinctive during this period.

To be fair, Homework is a good album. I did have a copy of it in the past, and I readily admit I enjoyed it. However, some of the responses are just bizarre – including the curious claim that Daft Punk had roots in Chicago. The two men were actually born in Paris and certainly cite Chicago artists like Paul Johnson as inspiration – but the idea this means the band has roots in the city is plainly absurd.

And whilst I have no problem in celebrating an album’s birthday, I do pose one question. Which album being released in 2022 will we still be listening to come 2047? I only have to do another 25 years of blogging to find that out…

Business, News

The Flying Lotus used the pandemic to make changes which brought him a Grammy nomination – what a contrast to the lazy so-called innovators of dance music…

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I’m going to start this post with a passage from The Bible, of all places. The book of James, chapter one, verses two to four state “Consider it pure joy, my brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith produces perseverance. Let perseverance finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything”.

It’s a good lesson in life. Character is built during tough times, not the easy ones. And the pandemic over the past two years has been one of the toughest periods of history for quite some time. Living under all kinds of restrictions – where things you could do and previously took for granted weren’t there anymore – has taken its toll.

A lot of the best music that we know comes from hard times – look at the number of songs which are about relationships breaking up or about death, for example. So the past two years should have brought about a lot of innovation within music – with many of the usual revenue streams out of action, there was never a better time for taking a risk. Nothing to lose, potentially a lot to gain.

But what has happened? Very little. A friend sent me an article recently about a producer called The Flying Lotus. I’ve heard the name, but know little about him – but he spoke last year to Vice and talked about the changes he’d made to stay afloat during the pandemic. And not only did they work, they led to a Grammy nomination.

Compare and contrast with the dance music world which this blog covers. The difference could not be more stark. Instead of pushing the envelope and trying something different and new, most producers responded by becoming even more conservative than they were before. And this is something which applies across the board.

Whether it be newbies who are trying to make their mark on the digital stores or veterans of the scene, the story is the same. For example, look at Carl Craig – a producer who undoubtedly did show innovation back in the 1990s. Instead of showcasing his latest innovations, he responded with a remix contest for a track he released back in 1989.

What’s innovative about getting a bunch of people to rework a decades old track? What’s forward thinking about endlessly trying to rinse your own archive? Even Craig’s own friend, Alan Oldham, can see “it’s all about what the new stuff”.

The same story can be seen in the charts, which are filled with remixes of decades old records. Dave Lee, Dr Packer and Michael Gray might be doing nicely out of this trade, but that’s no reason the rest of the scene should go the same way. Rehashing old glories is obviously easier than creating new ones, but there are only so many oldies which can be dusted off.

If a global pandemic doesn’t encourage producers to get off their backsides and make something new, I don’t honestly know what will…