little off the back of it, which I may follow with a fuller ramble about the
North-West rave scene at some point later (& I’ve attached at the bottom a
previous bit I wrote as part of a longer piece about Italian dance music). I’ve
seen the North/South divide a lot clearer since I moved to Blackpool six years
ago than when I previously lived in Leeds for three years. I’m always a bit
ashamed when I see my fellow Southerners treating Northerners as if they are an
undiscovered species, & on this occasion they even subtitled the entire
documentary! They attempted to cover this up by subtitling the presenter too
(the aforementioned Donky), who I was going to completely disregard as an idiot
with a stupid fashion hair cut, until the last part, when he made some quite
heart-warming comments about how the up-for-itness of Wigan Pier had explained
it all to him (& then ruined it by, on reflection, talking about “the
horror, the horror” on the voiceover). It was quite funny seeing him getting friendly
stick about his poncey outfit, as that was exactly what happened to my friend
from down south when we went out raving up here a few years back. On one level,
I can see Vice were making the effort to relate to the various scallies (&
they deliberately picked a good few fruitloops in amongst the pack) & the
approach was clearly to try to make the North-West seem exotically bleak &
menacing, just like Grime’s crucible, Bow. They also did an amazing job of
keeping Scouse House completely out of the picture, with not a single rococo trance
flourish being present, reinforcing the idea that the scene is based entirely
around the unstoppable pounding ‘donk’ sound all the time. I must admit, the
donks are more persistent here now than previously & can wear you down over
an extended period, but it is hardly the only thing being played... ....

All this amounts to a pretty
thin veil though, covering a huge sign saying “Northerners are a bunch of thick
morons who chuck hundreds of pills down their neck & can hardly speak”.
Ironic, considering the subtitler couldn’t even spell “weird”! I also find it
amazing that a magazine that can be quite on the money at times re: music is SO
far behind the pace...I must admit that it seems to have taken Blackout Crew’s comedy
genius “Put A Donk On It” to wake the country up to Donk, but you expect that
of the Guardian etc. I think I first started hearing Donk records around 2004
(Lee S’s “Got Your Number!” sticks in the mind as a particularly blatant early
use of the sound). Can you imagine the Londoncentrics taking four & a half
years to wake up to Grime?! By 2007, that was in need of resuscitation! The
donkumentary seemed to make it out as if it was a new, rabid explosion of
interest, everyone foaming at the mouth at this new discovery, when in fact I
doubt the rave scene here has gone up or down in size much since the big
national drop-off in the late nineties. Since the early nineties, the
north-west scene has had as defined a history as any other, splitting off from
the national scene because of the local preference for Italian house, then
adding in a dollop of Scottish bouncy techno, falling back to a pumped-up house
position when the Italian & Scottish stuff dropped off & then regrouping
around vocal euro trance records (Scouse House), a particularly local strain of
hard house known as Bounce & Bounce’s ultimate bastard child & more
successful heir, Donk.....

Anyway, I persevered, mainly
to see if I could glean anything new out of it. They certainly drove around a
good bit, hitting Bolton, Burnley, Wigan & Scarborough (I didn’t realise it
was popular over there). Considering it was only one week being filmed, there
seemed to be LOADS going on. It was nice to see Bad Behaviour getting
interviewed (one of the more credible names), and to catch glimpses of Electron
Records in Burnley (which I rather liked the one time I went in, about eleven or
twelve years ago) & Power Records in Wigan, which I really must go back to.
....

The biggest surprise to me
was the number of guys on the scene taking steroids. This was counter-balanced
nicely by the honest picturing of quite a few scratty, scatter-headed
middle-aged Donk fans who clearly never came down from their first pill in
1987, but the lightbulb came on in my head. No wonder it felt much less loved
up & much more testosteroney when I went to Sanctuary last year than on any
of my other coupla-times-yearly visits to north-west raves. I hope that gets
knocked on the head sooner rather than later. ....

It wasn't until 2003,
when I moved to Blackpool, that I started to work out much of what had happened
after 1991. Big music fan as I am, I was blissfully unaware of the fact that
this later period of over-emotive Italian Parmesan had become the new Northern
Soul. I had long been telling people throughout the late nineties that happy
hardcore had a similar vibe to Northern Soul, with youngsters shunning more
fashionable styles in favour of bombing wraps and staying up all night, dancing
to chirpy songs until they collapsed, but here was the real thing. All of the
above was true of the Italian stuff, but added to that was the fact that it had
survived as the oldies scene for the young crowd, aficionados of the new Bounce,
Donk and Scouse House tunes reaching back to rediscover their predecessors from
the boot-shaped Mediterranean land. Not only that, but the nearly-always
impossibly obscure records seemed to uniformly command high prices (even for
this era when vinyl pressing is more and more expensive) and were being bootlegged
right, left and centre onto compilation EPs.



This all became apparent to me within weeks of moving. Remembering the
strangely 'other' look of the names on flyers and the releases in shops in
Blackpool when I visited a few times in the late nineties, I bought a local
tape pack and was immediately struck by how different the rave scene really
was. Obviously, you can still buy drum n bass sets up here (ye gods, you can
even get the odd garage one in Manchester), and happy hardcore and hardcore
techno are just as popular here as down south, but you just don't get rave
crowds going wild to what is essentially house music in the south. The
difference between club music and rave music is often marked by the presence of
MCs, and this was the first time in years that I'd heard MCs really going at
that kind of music. One of the four tapes was an old skool set, and in amongst
Gat Décor and the other countrywide smashes were a surprising number of warm, synthy
tracks that I'd never heard in my life before. Lalene's "The Best",
JK's essential "Beat It". A whole new spin on the previous ten years
or so. The other tapes were full of new stuff, but the trance- and hard
house-derived tunes here weren't even the relatively serious, overwrought
examples of lengthy breakdowns or the 'plain biscuit' instrumentals I'd been
hearing (reluctantly) down south. The northern scene is like seeing Dave
Pearce's creed about only playing the biggest anthems being writ large. Trance?
Dump a lass with pidgin English vocals on top and call it Scouse House. Hard
House? That's a bit boring. Why not scratch in a load of rap vocals, make the
bassline a bit more bumpy, give it a few more catchy hoover sounds and call it
Bounce? Bored of that? Why not bring the beats down to just a
hammer-drill-style succession of four-to-the-floors, and just pitch them up and
down until the listeners can't hold a normal thought in their head anymore, so
brutally addled are thir brain cells. We'll call that Donk, because that's what
it sounds like! Donk, donk, donk, donk…



I'm not being rude here. I like all this stuff. I've always preferred music
that goes straight for the jugular instead of pussyfooting around. And my point
is that when you hear it all together, it works and the influence of the
Italians is obvious. I'd heard some of that Scouse House of course before I
migrated back to the north, but DJ Sammy just sounds like Clock all over again
until you put the songs in the right context. I like him a lot now. I even like
Ian Van Dahl a bit, despite finding "Castles In the Sky" to be one of
the most irritating records of the new millennium. The scene is shot through
with covers and reinterpretations of Italian tunes and other belters from the
same period. The way that the Bounce tunes use samples mirrors the way the
Italians did, American hip-hop providing the hooks because you couldn't
possibly entrust the job to the local MCs...