Colm O'Regan: Let's hear it for all the DJs bringing us together
Colm O'Regan: 'What I like is seeing people hang out online in a non-weird way and getting on great because one person’s favourite love song appears in another person’s favourite US House/UK Garage Live DJ Set From 2003.'
This column goes out to the DJs. Not the wedding DJs this time. Though they too deserve praise for their ability to fill a floor, get a rock-the-boat-going, listen to drunken requests, drunken propositions, people shouting ONE MORE TUNE, pack everything up at 2am and not lose a single lead while a fight breaks out between cousins.
No this is for the mixing DJs, the samplers, the painstaking creators of dance music out of bits of other dance music and unlikely or obscure bits of not-dance music.
They’re bringing people together across age, location, and taste in surprising ways.
I am comfortably of an age now to be reappraising music I used to be sniffy about before. You may find me lurking under a YouTube of Joe Dolan’s 'Tar and Cement' commenting “underrated classic”.
Recently I’ve given the seal of approval to The Carpenters (Karen and Richard). Have you guys heard of them? They went under the radar and struggled to barely reach about 100 million record sales. A few little hits like 'Close to You', but that’s about it. Anyway I’ve found them now.
While watching 'Maybe It’s You' from 1970, a lot of the comments underneath say “Todd Edwards brought me here”. Todd Edwards is a US House DJ who in 2003 appeared a club in Romford in Essex and mixed two tracks and sampled The Carpenters’ 'Maybe It’s You'. And now all his fans are here listening to Carpenters music for the first time along with people in their era of comfortable trousers.
I know about as much about house music — “a genre of electronic dance music characterised by a repetitive four-on-the-floor beat and a typical tempo of 115–130 beats” — as a dog knows about a modem but I know what I like. And what I like is seeing people hang out online in a non-weird way and getting on great because one person’s favourite love song appears in another person’s favourite US House/UK Garage Live DJ Set From 2003.
Fans of Beyonce’s 'Hold Up' — the one where is FUMING at Jayz for being a shnakey cheating hoor — are bopping along to Andy Williams’ 'Can’t Get Used to Losing You'.
You go and find William Bell’s 'I Forgot to Be Your Lover', and you find a lot of people who are fans of late 90s hip-hop band Dilated Peoples. Everyone under a Steely Dan song is saying “I never knew this was a song”.
You mightn’t be interested that much in this kind of music but there’s a strong chance if you’re from Cork, or indeed anywhere where humans are, you’ll have seen Kabin Crew's 'The Spark' by children from Cork and Lisdoonvarna. Played at Glastonbury 2024. There were 22,000 videos using it on TikTok within a month. The reviewed it!
And of course Fine Gael used it in an election campaign video (never not at it).
But 'The Spark' is a latest great link in a long chain. According to WhoSampled.com, my new favourite website, 'The Spark' samples Papa Padro’s 'Titan', which samples one of the most sampled songs of all time Lynn Collins’ 'Think' — which in turn covers 'Think' by the Five Royales.
So you have hip-hop kids in Cork and Clare tracing a sort of direct line back to an 1950s American doo-wop R&B group from North Carolina.
It goes on all the time, of course, in trad. Every time a creamy pint is supped and a bitta hush is called for and few verses about a mad goat making shite of a policeman’s trousers (RIP Seán Ó Sé) is barrelled out, people are keeping an old choon alive.
But sometimes, the work is done by a nerdy teen obsessive who’s not one for talk or trad sessions. In their own way, they’re a very good mixer.
