Untidy Trax’s hot property and new sensation Andy Naylor gives us this week’s Tidy Treasure…
Let me take you back to 1997…
I’m 18 and not long moved from the family home all the way to Nottingham to essentially be closer to all the clubs my friends and I had been traveling to for the past year.
Passion in Coalville being the main one, we had gone there many times but this one night we walked in and completely unknowingly walked into a TDV night. Tony came on about 12pm and the club was beyond rammed. We could tell there were hundreds who were in there for that set and that set only and they were pretty much following Tony across the UK that night. The Club had run out of water, it was hot like the fires of Mordor and the music absolutely blew my head off.
I had only really just started DJ’ing and was transitioning away the Drum and Bass into a more house vibe, but after the insane experience of Tony and that night there was only one direction I was going in after that…
I knew nothing about the labels, the producers and where to find these amazing tracks. So I bought Global Underground – Tony De Vit Live in Tel Aviv. This was my actual starting point. I did my best to go and find those tracks and others from the same artists.
Looking back now, at the time I had no idea I was collecting what we could now say are some of the trail blazing tracks and artists that made the scene explode in the way it did. I mean, both discs were full of them!
Kitty Lips ‘Keep Rockin’, The Experts ‘Take You There’, Dave Randall ‘South’, Committee ‘ Welcome’. You get the picture…
My collection was growing, and I had started to record mixtapes, yep back when they were actually tapes and of course on 1210’s. We had to use the tape counter to judge when to fade out the track at the end of the sides. You would fade out and then there would be this awful wait as you hoped the tape would stop immediately and not roll on in an awkward silence and wasting potential playing time.
At this time, we had also started going to after parties. Passion would close at 2am-ish and we would all leave desperate for more tuneage. So back to a location we would all trek and week in week out there was a core 30 or so of us back at a house in Loughborough and we all would have brought someone new who we met who was cool enough to come back.
In other words, it was utter carnage and we LOVED IT… I think we probably enjoyed the afters as much if not more than the club sometimes.
So, one day, I was brave enough to put on my little old mixtape. Honestly, I just handed it to a mate they put it on when whatever what was playing stopped because I was too shy.
Twenty minutes in and I heard someone say “Fuck me… who’s Tony tape is this?’
My mate pointed at me, the whole room turned and looked and I said;
“Yeah,it’s mine, but its me!”
The look of shock and everyone’s faces. I think in that moment my path as a DJ really began. Someone stopped the tape rewound it and put in one of their own to grab a copy. This tape would now get played back to back for what seemed like weeks and weeks while people would grab a copy, ( I still have the poor and battered original.)
So to my Tidy Treasure
There were many big tracks on it but there was for sure ONE that caught everyone’s attention more and it was the Ian M remix of Dyewitness ‘What Would You Like To Hear Again?’. It stood out as so different to all the others, its simplicity, its marching vibe, the way to catchy vocals and the riff.
There would be whole rooms at the after parties singing along. ‘Heyyyy babe’
‘What would you like hear’
‘You are …. Wrong’
And although I can’t really type people singing the riff, if you know the track, you know the riff, and you should now be humming it in your head too.
I think of this track and all these memories come to me, very happy times, very hazing times and I’m so glad I got to experience them.
Stream & Download this release here: https://tidytrax.fanlink.to/WWYLTHA