How I learned to stop being a heinous guitar music snob.
Week 5: Roger Sanchez — Another Chance.
UK number one 14–21 July 2001.
In my teens, I was a militant guitar music snob. Dance music was manufactured trash pumped out of money-hungry studios for brainless clubbers and townies.
I defined myself by my loathing of it, as I sat miserably in my bedroom sending off for mail order 7” singles from tiny Scottish indie labels.
To be fair to my teenage self, as I was coming of age, dance music was selling out into the mainstream. The second summer of love was nearly a decade behind us. The illegal rave scene had been all but stamped out, replaced by superclubs and glamour.
Fine if you were popular and beautiful. I was not. And if you were, I was pretty confident you sucked.
Then something weird happened. My friends from school went on to various different universities across the country. One by one, they all came back converted to clubbing.
Even my most bookish music-nerd buddy, with whom I had shared Throwing Muses singles and pored over Urusei Yatsura, the Breeders, the Pixies, had sold out on me and was extolling the virtues of house music. That pointlessly relentless thumping beat.
It was a betrayal on a par with the Red Wedding. An annihilation. I was bereft.
One summer, I was working at Nottingham Rock City and I went out flyering with another bartender who happened to be a house/techno DJ. We couldn’t be arsed doing our tedious job that required interacting with the public, so we ditched the flyers and lolled on a bench in Market Square, chatting.
I had just discovered hardcore punk, and he was (unlike any other dance music fan I had ever met) asking me to tell him about Bad Brains and Minor Threat and all these bands he hadn’t heard of, why I liked it. “Because it’s transcendent,” I said. “It’s primal and powerful and a release. It’s raw and real and it makes you want to move.”
“Well,” he said, “that’s exactly what house music is to me. It’s alive. It makes me feel like nothing else in the world.”
Maybe it was the fact that he too had an extensive record collection and revered music as god-like in the same way I did, maybe it was just the fact that he was impossibly fit, but I listened.
To hear someone who really gave a shit, and had hundreds of records, saying there was art in there somewhere, made me pause on my hating for the first time.
My epiphany came in the summer of 2001. The band I was in had a gig in Manchester. My best school friend, the ultimate party queen, was at uni there. All the rest of the gang were travelling up the night before to go to a club called Sankey’s Soap to hear some house DJ called Erick Morillo. Their frenzy about this guy was unreal.
It seemed daft to be in the same city as them all and not go out, even if it sounded like a shower of shit.
So off I went.
And, yeah, it was a bit boring at first. We danced, to the relentless thump thump thump. Then Morillo came on (not that you can ever bloody tell with a DJ, all I could see was smoke and bodies), and it started to sound ok in a way I couldn’t quite put my finger on. I started to listen out for the subtleties, the groove.
And then, around 1am, in a night full of music I had never heard before, I started to notice some familiar shards of synth weaving their way into the mix. It built and built. Then he dropped ‘Billie Jean’. And the top of my head came off.
I finally got it. That guy was smart, he was responsive, he was listening to and working with the crowd just as much as the crowd were tuned into him. And here I was, with my crew, all looking out for each other, on a big adventure together. It felt like belonging. It was the punkest punk I’d ever known.
Later that summer, on a whim, I decided to go to France with that same group of mates. It was a step out of my comfort zone at the time. I had tended to turn down group holidays before, preferring to hide safely in my bedroom with my records being ‘cool’.
My friend Jimmy and I flew out to meet them to spend a week in a small town on the coast near Bordeaux. They picked us up from the airport, beyond excited to see us.
As we took off up the wide open road, the sun blazing, windows down, ‘Another Chance’ by Roger Sanchez came on the radio. There it was again. That same feeling I had felt in Sankey’s. The lift, the joy, the sense of being together on the edge of something special. A liberation.
After that summer I was hooked. First it was house, then electro, then deep house, Chicago house, minimal techno, more, more, more. I learned to love it all, feverishly. A switch flipped in my head that would not be unflipped. Dance music, DJs and clubbing became the starting point for some of my greatest musical experiences, and the root of many enduring, treasured friendships.
I had been cured.
Life is too short to be a snob. It’s a joyless, thankless endeavour that keeps your heart small and miserable.
There are no bad genres. Only bad music, passionlessly executed. Music without soul, context or community. Because that’s what it all comes down to really— the humans who experience it with you.
Great music and great people — life’s best gift.
#write52 is a writing project by Ed Callow, who basically bullies us into creating original content every week. Follow the gang on Twitter here.
I’m Penny, a freelance writer and content strategist. If you’re interested reading more of my navel-gazing twaddle, the best place to follow me is on Instagram.
