A History Of Electro

Revisiting my Electro-Funk past this Saturday with a gig at Café 1001 in London’s Shoreditch for Memory Box. The night, titled ‘A History Of Electro’, will feature a live performance from West Coast rapper Egyptian Lover, whose 1984 tracks ‘Egypt, Egypt’ and “My House On The Nile’ assured his place as a pioneering Hip Hop artist.

It’s been a while since I played a purely Electro-Funk set, so currently busy sorting out some of the old tunes for Saturday. My website, www.electrofunkroots.co.uk, has now been online for 12 years and, in that time, has become a leading resource for this musical movement that set the tone for the oncoming era of Hip Hop, House and Techno. As I’ve said previously, Electro was the missing link, it’s growth from the New York underground to international success planting the seeds from which Electronic dance music flourished.

Ten years ago, in 2005, A Guy Called Gerald asked me if I’d do a mix for his Samurai Radio show, and given that Gerald was a regular at Legend, my early ’80s club residency in Manchester, which was right at the cusp of the Electro-Funk scene at its formative stages, it seemed the perfect opportunity to bring together the biggest tunes of the period into a single mix covering ’82/’83, when these records first appeared.

As I pointed out later down the line:

This is the most involved mix I’ve ever put together, even more so than my Essential Mix in 2009, for which ‘No Sell Out’ very much provided the prototype. I intended it as a definitive document to the period May ’82 – Dec ’83, when Legend and Wigan Pier were at their most influential, the new Electro-Funk sound turning the black scene on its head as the old gradually gave way to the new.

Ticket info for Memory Box – A History Of Electro at Resident Advisor:
http://www.residentadvisor.net/event.aspx?706118