Dave Haslam
DJ Profile
As a DJ, Haslam played at the legendary Hacienda in Manchester over 400 times as well as touring the world and DJing for the Stone Roses at Spike Island and New Order.Writer Profile
Dave Haslam's second book, Adventures on the Wheels of Steel: The Rise of the Superstar DJs, is out in paperback; his first, Manchester, England, was published in 1996.
Former Hacienda DJ Dave Haslam is has unveiled his second book, tracing the rise of the DJ and the dance music explosion in the UK. Entitled ‘Adventures On The Wheels Of Steel [...] : The Rise Of The Superstar DJs’, it follows the widespread success of his first book ‘Manchester, England’, an historic look at the city and its relationship with music.
The book includes interviews with the likes of Sasha, Fatboy Slim, Paul van Dyk, Norman Jay, Pete Tong and Lottie. - > anonymous in BurntBlue.com
Disco, Paris, New York [...]
Discotheques originated in occupied Paris during the Second World War. The Nazis banned jazz and closed many of the dance clubs, breaking up jazz groups and driving fans into illicit cellars to listen to recorded music. One of these venues - on the rue Huchette - called itself La Discothèque. Then Paul Pacine opened the Whiskey a Go-Go, where dancers would hit the floor accompanied by records played by disc jockeys on a phonograph. Pacine went on to open other clubs in Europe, while in Paris Chez Régine opened in 1960, catering to the self-styled beautiful people. The upmarket thrills of Régine's enjoyed by the American jet-set in turn inspired New York's Le Club, although it didn't last long, closing soon after a new venue in New York took off in 1961: the Peppermint Lounge. --Dave Haslam, http://www.lrb.co.uk/v22/n01/hasl02_.html [LRB | Vol. 22 No. 1 dated 6 January 2000 | Dave Haslam]
Kodwo Eshun
You can't escape the feeling that Eshun doesn't enjoy half the music he's writing about (two releases from Underground Resistance are praised thus: 'techno becomes punishing, a barbed-wire warzone of voltage endured and inflicted') and you yearn for him to write about the female voices that have done so much for modern music - soul sisters like Loleatta Holloway, Chaka Khan, Lauryn Hill. [...]Dancefloor History
Some of the great days of disco, in 1976 and 1977, coincided with punk, but if you read any received history of popular music, you wouldn't know it. The inveterate rock bias in the music papers, magazines and academia has left much dancefloor history still undocumented. The trad agenda set by commentators in the Sixties, heavy with value judgments - glorifying the work of the Velvet Underground over Motown releases, the production skills of Brian Wilson over those of Norman Whitfield, and the social significance and songwriting talent of John Lennon rather than James Brown - persists. Clearly, too, most rock writing foregrounds lyrics, whereas most dance music works through texture, beats and effects. Back in 1976, punk set itself against disco wholeheartedly. In July 1979, at the home stadium of the Chicago White Sox baseball team, thousands of disco records were set alight while the crowd chanted 'Disco sucks, Disco sucks!' The 1989 edition of the Penguin Encyclopedia of Popular Music describes disco as 'a dance fad of the Seventies with a profound and unfortunate influence on popular music'. --Dave Haslam, http://www.lrb.co.uk/v22/n01/hasl02_.html [LRB | Vol. 22 No. 1 dated 6 January 2000 | Dave Haslam]