All 4 of my mixes from this year’s Glastonbury Festival have now been uploaded to SoundCloud. It was great to be back after a 4-year absence, and I made up for lost time playing a quartet of gigs in the space of 26 hours, 3 on the Saturday and 1 on the Sunday.
Another busy summer approaches, dominated, as ever, by a number of festival appearances, listed below, mainly in the UK, but also in Ireland (The Beatyard) and Romania (Electric Castle). In addition, I’ll be heading over to Ibiza a couple of times, for Glitterbox @ Hi on July 14th and La Discotheque @ Ibiza Rocks Hotel on September 9th.
So many great festivals for me to look forward to this summer, but you might have noticed one big omission – Glastonbury. I have to tell you, with huge disappointment, that I haven’t been able to arrange anything realistic, so it’s a case of having to give it a miss this year.
I’d written most of this post at the end of last month on the flight from Lisbon to Salvador in Brazil, where I played New Years Eve at the idyllic setting of Biopeba Island in Bahia for the Mareh Music Festival. The intention was to post once I got back to the UK on January 3rd, but fate took a turn.
Festival season 2015 kicks off for me this Saturday in Lincolnshire at the fledgling Lost Village Festival. I’ve also had the final dates I’ve been waiting on, so can now announce the following festival appearances during the summer months:
Amidst everything that’s been going on during recent months I completely failed to notice the passing of a personal SoundCloud milestone, the uploaded content on my page having now surpassed 3 million plays in the 5 years since I opened my account.
Things have been pretty hectic since I got back from Glastonbury just over a fortnight ago (this coming right on the back of a full-on 3 days in the North Of Ireland) – I was no sooner home than I was off on my annual jaunt to Croatia, so this is the first chance I’ve had to catch my breath and blog about what were a few unforgettable days at the world’s most famous festival.
The sun is shining and festival season 2013 is almost upon us. I’ve just finalised my schedule for the coming months, so hope to see you at one, or more, of the following:
Back in March I did a gig with a difference at the Queen Of Hoxton in London, promoted by Cosmic Boogie and Big In Japan. Apart from being booked to play an as per normal DJ slot, a few hours beforehand I’d been invited to present a ‘Soundtrack Set’, where I added a visual aspect to the music of my choice. This took place in a huge tepee on the roof, and the idea certainly caught the imagination with tickets selling out in advance. This was the second Soundtrack Set, the previous one hosted by the illustrious JD Twitch (from Glasgow’s Optimo) who’d played his own selection of music to accompany the screening of the visually stunning ‘Baraka – A World Beyond Words’ (1992), which took its cue from 1982’s eco-conscious cult-classic ‘Koyaanisqatsi’ and its sequel ‘Powaqqatsi’ (1988), its epic scale providing a broad canvas onto which Twitch would re-imagine its score.
When I was in Adelaide in February I received an email from DeFacto, the Nottingham based creative agency whose accounts include the Fred Perry clothing brand. They’d already approached me to appear at one of the monthly Fred Perry Subculture nights they hold at The Garage in London, presenting Reels Of Steel for the first time in the capital, so we’d been discussing a possible line-up for a date later in the year. However, they’d just learned of Afrika Bambaataa’s availability for their 20th April date and, quite rightly, saw this as a perfect fit with me, given my Electro-Funk background, with Bambaataa very much a key inspiration (not to mention that, as serendipity had it, this was exactly 30 years on from his era-defining single with the Soul Sonic Force, the mighty ‘Planet Rock’).
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