Old woman yells at SoundCloud

Joking, I would never. I'm here to yell about 2010s party culture and ghetto tech.

I have had some pretty weird ways of listening over the years. And apologies, the title is deceiving. This isn’t really about SoundCloud. This is a story about how we remember a feeling, and ways of listening, and all thanks to Mall Grab.

I was pretty late to the Spotify game. Well, in a way, I was very early. We had an account on the family computer (Zoomers: this is what life used to be like), and everything was free. Pretty quickly it introduced a limit of something like 5 plays until you got locked out of the free version. I, age 16, was incensed. I wanted to listen to Wile Out by DJ Zinc ft. Ms Dynamite on repeat. I even made a joke Facebook page called FUCK YOU SPOTIFY and no one liked it. This little anecdote not only shows my age, but also my deep, deep teen cringe era. But we must bare our souls every now and then. Also, I deleted my MySpace years ago so the worst is lost forever. Thank god.

Between 16 and 25, I got creative. I devised a complex and messy system of listening to music on the go. When I lived in London, I was blessed with constant access to the incredible radio that we have in the UK. It freed me from the tyranny of choice, and I had Radio 1 on practically all the time. In my defence, I was in my early 20s and living my best hipster hun life. I’d switch over to Kiss or Capital every time Coldplay came on. This happened a lot more than you’d expect. Thanks to this exposure to crap chart bollocks for years, my knowledge of pop music from 2011-2017 is more extensive than I’d like to admit. But it has come in useful. I’m pretty good at music quizzes.

Alongside excellent radio, I could rely on my carefully curated glove compartment of CDs in my beloved Ford Fusion with the broken aux input (RIP). The collection included, amongst others that I’ve forgotten about, ABBA Gold, Ministry of Sound’s compilation Rapper’s Delight, Dutty Rock by Sean Paul, Justified by Justin Timberlake, Lonerism by Tame Impala, Zaba by Glass Animals, and the greatest album ever made, Fantasy Black Channel by Late of the Pier. One day I will sit down and write about those guys. But that day is not today. For now, here’s Dutty Rock.

Via my beloved iPod Classic that was devastatingly left at a bus stop circa 2010, I’d been listening to podcasts since 2008, when I was looking for distractions from revising for my mock GCSEs in Year 10. I got hooked on The Bugle back when John Oliver co-hosted it with Andy Zaltzman, and never stopped. There’s a fairly good chance that I am listening to one as you’re reading this silly little newsletter. I don’t think it is an over-exaggeration to say I have listened to podcasts every day since I was 15. I am 30 next month (Jesus FUCKING Christ). That’s right, I’m extremely cool and interesting, and always have been!!

Then… I moved to the Netherlands, where I had no amazing public radio, no car, and no unlimited data. This is when I had to get really creative. All those car CDs were in my iTunes, and I had to download as much as my shitty phone could handle for offline listening. Everything had to be planned out in advance. Would I even be in a Tame Impala mood later? Well suck it, that’s what you’re getting. I found that if you started a SoundCloud mix, it would play till the end even if you went offline. I took my DAB radio with me only to discover, horrified, it didn’t work abroad. Crestfallen yet undeterred, I spent over a year doing the musical equivalent of being a dog that’s stealing scraps from the table.

An accurate representation of 24 year old me trying to listen to music outside the house

I became rather good at discovering comedy shows, such as audio only versions of 8 Out of 10 Cats, which I’d listen to at school and giggle like a weirdo in the sixth form common room. Thus, 8 years later, into partying, and faced with needing offline access to techno, it seemed logical to start hunting for music that way too. Before Apple Podcasts became shit and unusable, I’d search endlessly for mixes released by radio stations and record labels, searching for the names of DJs and praying that there’d be something. The appeal? Downloading for offline listening, baby.

I don’t even know why I was so determined to stick to these ways of listening by that were such a pain in the arse to maintain. It wasn’t because I couldn’t or didn’t want to pay for Spotify. Maybe it was because I felt like I was working a bit harder for my music, constrained by running out of data and storage and needing to curate and dig through the digital crates of weird shit. Some of it was abjectly impossible. Being a fan of Ed Banger DJ Borussia is no pique-nique. Let me tell you, that German football team is all that comes up when you go a-digging.

And thus, dear reader, I get to the point of this newsletter. Congratulations to all who’ve made it this far. Here’s the best thing I ever dug up: a Mall Grab set from 6AM at the Garage, who according to Resident Advisor are a Melbourne based music collective. They don’t have a website, and haven’t posted on SoundCloud for 3 years. This Mall Grab mix is essentially an audio version of a half and half pizza with a side salad. A ska intro, then first half breakbeat ghetto tech, second half calypso. Wild shit.

But it’s not just the content. I can’t describe noise. It’s the story. The original posting of it on 6AM at the Garage is available via internet archive. A link from a Facebook page is broken. Apple directs to a Podmatic page, a platform for self-publishing. It’s nowhere to find be found on 6AM at the Garage’s SoundCloud. Just on Apple Podcasts, since 2015, floating around forever. Want a tracklist? Forget about it! This link is so decrepit that I can’t even embed it. Audio bf did his best html wrangling, and nada. So be a dear just follow the link up there or the image below. Go go go!

I listened to it hundreds of times, and refreshed my memory the other day. It was kind of amazing. And honestly? Shit quality audio. Some questionable mixing. And yet, it was the first time I’d ever heard Wouldn’t You Like To Be A Hoe Too by DJ Slugo. It’s raw, and for those of a certain age, will give you that feeling of being in some dirty, scuzzy basement somewhere with your druggy mates. Depending on where you’re from, your druggy mates will either be from Goldsmiths or Leeds. It’s sweaty, it’s grimy, and you’ll end up at some random acquaintance’s friend’s house for afters. You will tell a random girl that she has beautiful sparkly eyes. Your eyes, on the other hand, are the size of dinner plates. You have no idea what day it is any more. How do stairs even work? Everything is so sparkly. I may or may not be speaking from experience. This mix is an audio version of how the Bunker in Deptford smells at 3am, for anyone lucky to have descended those particular stairs (if you can remember how).

This mix brought back some extremely hazy memories.

I’m all too painfully aware that I only just caught the tail end of messy U.K. clubbing before the joy got sucked out of our lives. At age 18 in 2011, you could write your name on the Corsica Studios Facebook page to get £3 entry before midnight. Deptford’s Bunker doubles were £2.50 when I last checked in 2016, and you got a gold fringed straw with it, or a jelly shot if you were in the mood. Renting it out was cheap enough that Goldsmiths students could regularly host vinyl only funk and soul nights. I’ve still got a Soul Control sticker on my bike. On another occasion, my good pal and excellent music journalist Chal Ravens hosted Fuck February 2016: APOCALYPTOPARTY at the Bunker, appropriately. It was, as the name suggests, an apocalypse themed party in early 2016, and honestly I don’t remember much about it. All I know is that, looking back, that party was either tempting fate, a prophecy, a warning, or perhaps all three.

The sign on the door at Fuck February 2016: APOCALYPTOPARTY

Sure, it wasn’t the 90s and we weren’t going on scavenger hunts to get the coordinates to a warehouse rave in rural Nottinghamshire in the back of a 1991 Volkswagen Polo GTI (though if you do want to experience that, check out In Pursuit of Repetitive Beats. You’re welcome). But it was still a time when you could just stumble into somewhere and have a blast. Sure, you had to buy tickets if it was an actual DJ playing an actual set in an actual venue. I did also do that.

But most of the time, fiver on the door please, ladies.

Sometimes, it was in some poor sod’s actual home. Bike ex and I would go to these dirty parties in Blackheath in a decrepit old Victorian house our friends lived in. King Krule was there one time. We’d ride fixed, and up to our eyeballs in [redacted], back to Oval at the crack of dawn. Cyclists love drugs, ok. There’s a reason I’m better on a fixie than on my feet when I’m knee deep in [redacted, but not the same redacted as the last redacted]. Years of practise. Zoom zoom.

On my best friend’s 29th birthday, we did our greatest ever stumble. Right into a massive warehouse rave in Dalston (obviously) which had toothbrushes in the bathroom, a kitchen with fruit in it, yet felt cavernously large and dark. Was it someone’s house? Did people live there? Fuck knows. I was, to put it lightly, completely smashed. Aforementioned best mate said she remembers that we climbed up on some sort of wooden thingy to [redacted] some [redacted]. But that is it, as far as our memories go. There were a lot of parties, in our defence.

I don’t have any photos at the Bunker but here’s Soul Control at the Bussey Building.
Yes, I am wearing a wooly jumper in da clurb.
I have no idea where any of these people are now. I still have the jumper though.

But this isn’t supposed to be a newsletter where an ageing millennial complains that things aren’t they way they used to be in the good old days. It was to explain my deranged methods of avoiding conventional streaming services. Naturally, I had to crack eventually. A camping trip to Sweden and Norway prompted my parents to politely ask me to get unlimited data so I could let them know I had survived yet another night of not being eaten by a moose.

Once a spot on the house family Spotify came up, it was over. Well, that phase of carefully downloaded weirdness that people had forgotten was even on the podcasts app, that was over. But a newer, objectively more dull era began. It happens to the best of us. We must all lose one of our weird little sparks sometimes.

Yes, I know Spotify is terrible and doesn’t pay artists and is destroying all that we know and love. But like smartphones, bank accounts, jobs, taxes, social security numbers, and consuming literally anything, we have to take part to exist in modern society, lest we be luddites who live in the woods with the aforementioned moose.

Now I have the attention of maybe a dozen of you (eternal thanks!!), I wanted to write about music. But what, I asked myself. What could I, someone who has worked in the music industry for almost six years, raised classical, a teenage musician myself, write about? Originally this was going to be about how I owe my entire non-electronic music taste to my job, and how Spotify radio was a pretty magical tool in finding new artists. It would have probably been a bit dull and even more self indulgent than this here article. Thankfully, the other day my mind wandered enough for me to remember how I used to listen, and the Mall Grab mix re-entered my orbit.

It feels very nice to remember. Our senses are weird vehicles for memory. Having had my brain cells ground down to a fine powder by mental illness (and probably my fair share of fine powder), it's handy to have these digital records of not only what I listened to, but how I listened to it. Our phones were too crap a decade ago to handle the amount of photos we took. Stuff had to be deleted constantly to make room for more. Alas, no pictures remain of the years and years of fun I had in London. Apart from this one picture of a crab (see below). No friends either sadly. Breakups and moving abroad will do that. But I made new friends and took new photos.

The only Bunker-adjacent photo left. An escaped crab outside a fishmonger on Deptford High Street, around 1am. We put him in a drain and set him free. Wonder where he is now.

So thank god for the audio triggers, and that I can remember where to find them. That Mall Grab mix is like a goldmine. Maybe not for you, but certainly for me. I hope you find the music that makes you remember what having the time of your life felt like.

This article is dedicated to Emerald, without whom my taste in electronic music would be absolute shite. May we have many more decades of decadence ahead of us.