Various - Trade: Past Present Future

Beechwood Music: 2000

More than just another UK superclub, Trade’s legacy will forever be as important as Warehouse, Paradise Garage, and other early gay clubs championing that house sound. While there was no shortage of such venues at the turn of the ‘90s, they were still subject to standard clubbing curfews, leaving patrons with little more to do than wander streets and parks as they kept the party vibes going the morning after. Thanks to some wheelin’ and dealin’ by founder Laurence Malice, however, an afterhours slot at Turnmills was secured, one of the first ever in the UK. With an ad campaign specifically offering a safer alternative for post-clubbing all-night benders, Trade quickly flourished, becoming one of the UK’s dance music institutions, and launching the careers of many notable DJs (Tony de Vit, Tall Paul, Fergie).

And like any successful clubnight with a brand reaching global status, Trade got in on that DJ mix CD market too. Its first series of double-discers came out in the mid-‘90s on EMI offshoot Feverpitch, successfully promoting a hard house stylee the club was growing famous for. When the label folded after a mere two years, Trade eventually found a new home on Beechwood Music, kicking off with Past Present Future, two CDs supplying all the sounds you might hear at an all-nighter in Turnmills.

By this point in Trade’s lifespan, the clubnight had grown large enough for a second room playing funkier house music, from which production duo The Sharp Boys were instrumental in running. CD1 mostly focuses on their sound, and they definitely run the gamut. Groovy garage opens things up, loopy disco escalates the tempo (yep, Loleatta Holloway still going strong), and you can’t have such a set without a soul-sista’ monolog (Antoine Clamaran’s Get Up). The Boys take a turn for the tribal (X-Press 2), offer some bouncy house (DJ Antoine’s Do It has a donk on it), hit you with a little tech-house action (Smoking Schoolboy’s Tell Me (Detention Mix)), finally unleashing an unabashed anthem in Bryon Stingily’s Stand Up Right. Oh, and they finish off with an Armin & Tiësto collab’ of Eternity. Because clearly a club catering to hard house heads crave that Dutch cheese, absolutely.

With so much genre hopping, CD1’s an erratic set at best, and hardly indicative of the pummeling sound Trade’s all-nighters were built around. Step up to CD2 then, where ‘future’ representative Gonzalo Santiago hits you with a full mix of NRG! The beats come hard, some tracks have hoovers, others have acid, and build-ups are blessedly brief. I don’t have much else to say about it, my knowledge of NRG severely lacking. It’s fun for the time I play it, but I don’t want to play it much after. Not even that Baby Doc rub of Praga Khan’s Injected With A Poison.

A bonus third CD is a ten-minute snapshot of Tony de Vit rinsing out on New Year’s Eve, 1996. A touching tribute to one of Trade’s true legends, taken away far too soon.

Various - This Is... Techno

Beechwood Music: 1996

Before they became notorious peddlers of dodgy electronic music compilations, Beechwood Music was known as peddlers of respectable indie music compilations. Meanwhile, their sub-label Mastercuts was a haven for those scouring the funk and soul archives in search of rare groove, classic jazz, and other vintage rhythm records trainspotters obsess over. Even their early forays into house and techno were respectable offerings, the minds behind the CDs clearly as involved in the UK’s acid house years as any regular punter. For all intents this was a class print on the independent market before they started getting their fingers deep into the cheap, bilge churn.

This Is… Techno came out in the mid-‘90s, as Beechwood was transitioning from ‘what was’ to ‘is now’, and already out the gate you see the problems surfacing. The cover art is astoundingly tacky, assaulting your retinas with ugly typeface, including an inexplicable italicized boldface in the back-half of a four letter word. I just… why? But never judge a record by its cover art, right? All that matters is the music within, and the tracklist does feature plenty bona-fide classics, with a whole slew of problems saddled alongside.

The first three tracks are as pointed as any in this case: Prodigy’s Poison, Josh Wink’s Higher State Of Consciousness, and Carl Cox’s Two Paintings & A Drum. Something sounds… off, in Poison, as though I’m listening to a rougher master rather than the smashing album cut. Higher State, meanwhile, makes no mention of it being Version 1, a mix closer in vibe to deep house than the famous tweekin’ acid funk of Version 3, for which I’m certain ninety-five percent of folks buying this would have expected. And don’t worry, trainspotter in the back anxiously waving at me, I know full well Carl Cox never released a track called Two Paintings & A Drum, though the EP of the same title did hold his Phoebus Apollo. Which is the track we get here, in a severely edited form. Dammit, Beechwood.

Those are the most erroneous examples though. Mostly we get a lot of well rinsed-out anthems you should know off by heart (Plastikman’s Spastik, LFO’s LFO, Moby’s Go, Leftfield’s Open Up, The Orb’s Little Fluffy Clouds, Aphex Twin’s Digeridoo, Underworld’s Dark & Long, Carl Craig’s Dreamland, and others). Not a terrible selection of tunes, but hardly an adventurous assortment either. If you’ve even but dabbled in electronic music, you’ve likely got a few somewhere in your collection, with little reason to get this as well. True, most Beechwood compilations were designed with the impulse buyer in mind, giving them an easy starting point should they wish venturing further. This Is… Techno works in that regard, even if the information provided is sometimes grossly inaccurate.

And those infamous in-house ‘exclusives’ Beechwood was notorious for? Yeah, there’s a drab few scattered about, most of which are repurposed for the bonus mini-mix on CD3. In that context, they… actually do a good job representing techno’s rhythmic potential? Huh, go figure.

Jim 'Shaft' Ryan - Miss Moneypenny's Glamorous Grooves (Original TC Review)

Beechwood Music: 2001

(2013 Update:
This probably shouldn't have come up here, but for some reason Windows Media Player has this listed as Glamorous Grooves only, so whatever. Get it over with, right?

Actually, this CD's held up fine, even with a laughable mono-mixdown (how'd you neglect mentioning that, 2007 Sykonee?). I think I might have oversold the glitz Miss Moneypenny's advertises, but the brand is still kicking it around, Jim 'Shaft' Ryan still holding residency. Good for them, especially in maintaining the funky disco vibes in an era that would have it coming off dated. Proper house music will never die! Or something.)


IN BRIEF: Not as bad as you’d expect.

Miss Moneypenny’s. Expensive cover and cocktail drinks. V.I.P. lines longer than the regulars at lesser clubs. Tarted up barbie-dolls. Shirtless clubbing guidos. The very epitome of style-over-substance. Where the most fabulously fabulous go to bask in each other’s fabulousness. Oh, and apparently they play house music too.

In all seriousness, the clubbing franchise has done well for itself considering its humble beginnings as boat parties near Birmingham over two decades ago. It made Ibiza’s euro-trashiness its divine ethos and has remained unapologetic about the high-class standards it places on its patrons. They believe Studio 54 had the right idea, and along with Mediterranean hedonism indulge in the disco-glamour fantasy that legendary club made for itself. All fine and dandy, I suppose. For as many artistic or spiritual attributes folks place on the clubbing culture, there are still far more out there who prefer the skin-deep good times a place like Miss Moneypenny’s provides. It can make you feel like a million bucks because you’re forced to look a million bucks to even attend, and are often surrounded by folks- sorry, la beau monde dressed in similar fashion.

At the turn of the century, the night was finding huge success with a booming club culture, and like nearly every other mega-brand, they started making sponsored DJ mixes. But whereas most were jumping on the trance bandwagon, Miss Moneypenny’s stuck with the sound that made them who they were: funky disco house. In hindsight, that was unusually wise for a club typically known for expensive shallowness; the brand remains as consistent as ever whereas other superclubs like Gatecrasher and Slinky have fallen off.

And so we come to Glamorous Grooves, one of a few DJ mixes cheapo label Beechwood released for Miss Moneypenny’s before the club established it’s own label. Considering all the factors that should have made this a dodgy release (superficial club, crap label), it turned out not half bad.

Chalk it up to the fact funky disco house is just, well, fun! Granted, the music is often secondary compared to the patrons of Miss Moneypenny’s, where they be far more interested in flaunting their styles to each other than discussing the subtleties of a filter effect. However, such concerns have no bearing when throwing on a CD at home where the music can be judged on its own merits. And here Glamorous Grooves yields plenty of housey delights that saw the rounds at the turn of the century. Rui Da Silva’s Touch Me; The Face’s Needin U 2, in the guise of a then-modern update; remixes of chart toppers from Fatboy Slim and Moby; other remixes from singing legends like Grace Jones, Barry White, and Loleatta Holloway; plus plenty of cuts from usual house favorites like Olav Basoski, Junior Jack, Harry “Choo Choo” Romero, Robbie Rivera, Joey Negro, and so on.

Disco, tribal, Chicago, garage, latin, and even jazz are all blended into the funky bowl, effectively making the music on here dateless. It’s certainly more entertaining to listen to than most of what passes for popular house these days. Give me the filtered disco build over a stomping fart bassline any day.

Unfortunately, whereas the music itself holds its own, the presentation of it leaves something to be desired. If anything, Jim ‘Shaft’ Ryan, who’s long been the main resident for Miss Moneypenny’s, handles his trade well but is unremarkably routine.

He knows his role as a club DJ and that translates onto disc one’s sequence. Opening with the instantly catchy All I Do, he works a slow burn to peak out on his own Happy Daize. Things subside for a bit, and this usually means easing the crowd down from their dancing euphoria to grab a drink at the bar. Some simple groovers play out while you wait in line for your cocktail, drink it down, share a chit-chat with some hot minx or thick stud; maybe make a quick bathroom run too, for whatever reason you see fit. Soon enough, the groove gets more infectious, and DJ Disciple’s It’s Easy hooks you back in, where the disco delights continue on the dancefloor for the rest of the mix. But what’s with that slam-mix into Let The Music Play? Just yipes.

Disc two, meanwhile, tries to go deeper into the tribal funk. For the first half, Ryan mostly succeeds, and Sharem Jay’s remix of Honey makes for a nice little peak. Sadly, the mix takes a steep drop in the momentum after that, and never recovers with any sense of flow. It seems Ryan has a pile of tracks he wants to play out but can’t figure out how to make these cuts fit together, so he just hodgepodges it. And while Sax Heaven from The Italian Connection (a pre-shit Robbie Rivera project) makes a valiant effort to rescue this mix for the end, it’s not enough to erase the memories of bland that came before.

And then there’s the general sound quality. Of course, this being Beechwood, it won’t be the best mixdown, but even the DJing sounds rough in places. I’m all for authentic DJing but surely some of these mixes could have used a couple different practice spins to make them work better?

Still, I suppose the real question lingering is whether this older release is worth your time. In all honesty, only if you see it for bargain-bin cheap and you have a bit of spare change burning a hole in your pocket. There are tons of funky disco house mixes out there, and while Glamorous Grooves is a decent enough product, it’s hardly essential listening. The Miss Moneypenny’s faithful may find more worth in it, mind, but for the rest of us it’s merely a passing fancy.