Just a week to go until one of my favourite festivals – tucked away on the North Wales coast in a magical village like no other. Famous as the location for the classic ’60s TV show ‘The Prisoner’, Portmeirion is a place plucked out of the imagination.
‘Don’t You Worry Baby The Best Is Yet To Come’ is a track that was first played at Blackpool Mecca in 1976 following the acquisition of a US promo from fabled Norfolk based Glaswegian record dealer John Anderson (Soul Bowl) by DJ Colin Curtis, and then a release copy via a London based supplier who specialized in importing new American releases to distribute to US Troops in Germany & Europe, specifically black GI’s with a love of Soul and Funk. The Northern Soul sessions at the Mecca were hugely influential, the club revered, along with Manchester’s Twisted Wheel, The Catacombs in Wolverhampton, The Golden Torch in Stoke-On-Trent, and the scene’s most famous venue, Wigan Casino, at the vanguard of the movement.
The Secret Life website has just put up my ’20 Choice Edits & Reworks For 2014′. It’s becoming something of an annual occurrence, this 3rd year that I’ve put together the list, each inclusion complete with its own SoundCloud embed so you can hear all the individual tracks.
‘The Construct’, the opening track from the Blind Arcade Meets Super Weird Substance In The Morphogenetic Field mixtape, which is fast approaching 50,000 SoundCloud plays, is the subject of both a video, produced and directed by Elspeth Moore & Philip Lyons, and an ‘acid rework’ by Peza.
It’s 10 months since I blogged about the first 2 A&R Edits releases, issued simultaneously on DJ only limited 12” vinyl. Since then there have been 3 further additions, with another to follow next month, making 6 releases in all, each containing 2 tracks.
Daft Punk are sitting pretty at the top of the UK singles chart for the first time. The track in question, ‘Get Lucky’, taken from their forthcoming album, ‘Random Access Memories’, came as something of a surprise, for instead of hitching itself to the current EDM juggernaut that’s sweeping America, the French duo have completely bucked the trend by drawing their influence from Disco, featuring its most celebrated guitarist, the great Nile Rodgers of the Chic Organisation (as well as R&B vocalist, Pharrell Williams). A media sensation, it’s everywhere at the moment – on the radio, on the TV, in the clubs and, of course, all over the internet, becoming the most streamed new release in Spotify history. It’s already been re-edited by a whole host of DJs and is pretty much nailed on to be the single of the summer.
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