Getting a lot of spins on Radio 1 daytime, 'a return to the finest values of house music' says Tongy and probably the only tune around at the moment that could drag my tired old limbs onto a dancefloor.
They've been heralding the return of true house music for sometime now but as far as I'm concerned it's never gone away. You may have had to try harder to find it, but it's always been there lurking in dirty corner of a back-street club rather than on the floor of a city center chain venue week in week out.
A year ago when I was still DJing I would've hated to hear something like this on daytime radio, knowing that for every daytime play it's life on the dancefloor would die just a little bit more. But since hanging up my headphones (exactly a year ago today strangely enough) I've run a mile from dance music. Hardly listened to any. And it's been great.
Soon after I started DJing I got into a discussion about music with my old mate Kenny. As things got heated he told me that I was in no position to discuss music now I was a DJ because I didn't see music as music any more. I couldn't agree less until he likened it to when he worked in the jam factory. The minute he started seeing jam 8 hours a day he hated the taste of it.
When you become a DJ music can become a commodity that will put feet on the dancefloor rather than just something that stirs you internally. You stop liking it for what it is but how it would please people other than yourself. A commodity to be sold to people... A bit like jam. Imagine how different films and books would be if your first concern was how full the cinema would be or how big the queue in the bookshop would be.
After a year of avoiding house music this is the first tune I've heard to really stir me internally. Free from the concerns of how it will work on a dancefloor it probably sounds so much better than it would have back then. A killer tune and a pleasure to hear on daytime radio.
That reminds me... Must ask Kenny if he's started eating jam again.
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