An afternoon with Booker T

Back in May this year I was lucky enough to interview one of my DJ/producer heroes Booker T on my show.

As well as my music I like to write and so when we were done I turned our interview into an accompanying article.

Any I had nowhere to put it at the time so now I have this shiny new website, I thought I’d share it here.

Enjoy, and let me know what you think.

An afternoon with Booker T

On big crowds, beats and the recipe for house music happiness

“I’m feeling rough today.” Hardly surprising after nearly forty years in music and a weekend with Mi Soul in Ibiza. Booker T won’t hear of rescheduling for another day though when offered an easy out. “No, no it’s cool, let’s do it.” People say you should never meet your heroes as they’ll disappoint. Here was a man who had worked with pretty much everyone I’d idolised from Mica Paris to Soul to Soul making time for me even though he was feeling under the weather. No chance of that.

We’d begun our conversation on a nostalgic note via Instagram, my eye caught by a stream of labels from his seemingly never ending discography. I’m interested in how a prolific career like that even begins. “I was a reggae selector back in the late seventies and early eighties as a youngster, “ he remembers, “then I started playing soul and rare groove. There wasn’t any house, any jungle, any garage, there was none of it.” His switch to house music was triggered by the London acid scene, catching his big break at the now legendary Energy events in front of twenty thousand or so dayglo party people. “That was pretty scary at the time,” he chuckles, the memory clearly still vivid.

Like so many stories in the music business, serendipity played a big part in his progression to remixer. Ricky Morrison, himself a house production legend of M&S fame, had a small studio above his Catch a Groove record shop in London’s Soho where he and the young Booker T would spend time. “He was hanging out with another DJ producer called Danny ‘Buddah’ Morales and they were working with this drum machine called the [Akai] MPC-60. When I saw them doing the drum programming it really hooked me. I was like, yeah this is what I wanna do, I wanna make some beats.”

His remixing CV of course now reads like a who’s who of R&B and soul of the last thirty years. When I press on how he deals with star names, he’s remarkably humble to the extent I sense even a little discomfort in talking about the limelight. “At first it was nuts! I was really starstruck but now it’s just the norm. I just try to do my thing. Most of those tracks were R&B style songs and what I did was I took them, time-stretched up the vocal, changed the vibes a bit and gave them more of a house feel.” In the beginnings of what became UK Garage, Booker T defined his own very specific sound in that early scene. Whilst identifiably part of that genre, unlike some of the more drum ’n’ bass influenced contemporary tracks, it was somehow unmistakably still connected to the US garage world too too. It turns out that was deliberate. “I followed the American vibes of house music more. Even though I’ve got a UK flavour and I’ve got my own style, I kind of blend my style from the Americans.” And favourite collaborations? Tellingly the majority are from that era, Angie Stone’s Life Story, Bizzi Bizzi’s Party getting a specific mention. Typically he’s not afraid to gloss over some less memorable moments. “There’s some tunes I didn’t like, remixes I did that I didn’t think were that great.” I don’t press for names, and he’s far to much of a gent to say.

What advice would he give aspiring to DJs looking to emulate his success? “Just be real with what you’re doing, don’t let anyone tell you that you can’t do whatever you want to do. Just practice hard, there’s always a learning curve. Even DJing’s a learning curve.” He goes on to describe his continued happiness as attributable to a deeper sense of purpose that is poignant when considered in the modern era of the superstar DJ. “I just love music. If you really love music you will get through. If you’re doing it for the money, your head’s not really there. It’s nice to get paid, but I really love what I do. I love making music, I love DJing. It keeps me going, pushing the music, pushing the boundaries.”

And keep going he does. True to his word, as well as a busy schedule DJing, the remainder of 2019 is just as busy on the production front. “I’ve got loads of stuff coming. I’ve just finished doing a new Stephanie Cooke track, a Mike City track’s coming, I’m doing my album at the moment. I’ve got my own label Liquid Deep Recordings which I’m promoting at the moment, and I’m putting out tracks on there.” As we conclude and say our goodbyes, one thing is for sure: whether it’s as a prolific musician or as a person, Booker T is one hero that definitely doesn’t disappoint.

Martin Gale, May 2019

Putting Rekordbox Playlists into Mixcloud

Being a professional geek as well as a DJ has its benefits.

After my show each week, I like to do two things:

  1. Upload my show to Mixcloud (and others).
  2. Put posting up so people can find the replay including a tracklist.

When you upload a mix to Mixcloud, you can provide the playlist to go with it so people know what tracks are on there. Whilst you can add each track by hand, Mixcloud lets you copy and paste a tracklist with each track a line of text in the form:

artist - track name

The nice thing about the above is it’s actually also a good, readable format you can also use for posting the tracklist either in a graphic (like I do) or simply as an accompanying post on Facebook.

Great, both problems solved!

But, however, Rekordbox doesn’t spit out the Playlist in that nice format so you have to find a way to translate from Rekordbox into the Mixcloud format. Now you can copy/paste between the Rekordbox fields and a text editor, then copy and paste the lot into the right format.

But that’s a bit of a faff. And I’m a geek and we like to automate stuff.

Rekordbox allows you to export Playlists in a couple of different file formats, KUVO and m3u8. So, to make life easier, I’ve worked out a command that will take an m3u8 (I looked at the other one but for a variety of reasons m3u8 was easier) and spit it out as text in the nice Mixcloud format.

In the spirit of sharing is caring, I’ve included it here for you to use too.

It’s written for the Mac, so I’ll apologise now I don’t have a Windows version. The code is not my finest hour – it’s a quick hack that does the job – but it works. Please do refine it and find a better way if you can.

From a Terminal window, simply type the following:

cat myfile.m3u8 | grep "#EXTINF:" | sed 's/^#EXTINF:[0-9]*,//g'

Where myfile.m3u8 is the name of the file you exported from Rekordbox. It should give you a number of lines that look a bit like this:

The Shapeshifters, Kimberly Davis - Life Is A Dancefloor (Club Mix)

Then you can simply select, copy and paste into Mixcloud on the upload page or into wherever else you need it.

5 things I learned during my DJing comeback

It was my birthday last week.

Not only did that signify 42 years on the planet, it also marked two years since my DJing comeback was triggered by playing again at my 40th birthday party.  I hate the phrase “a journey” when I hear it on reality TV, but I can’t think of a better one to describe my experiences since that night in 2017.

Here are the five main things that stick out as the most important in case anyone is contemplating something similar.

A piece of me was missing and I didn’t realise

There is just something you can’t describe about doing that one thing you’re really passionate about. I have many good friends, for example, for whom their running is their “thing”, their true happy place. I really thought it was mine until I got behind my decks once again.

Yes, I still love to run and the social dynamics of being in a club. But DJing for a crowd again showed me how much of a void still remained until that point. I can only describe it as feeling like doing a jigsaw and discovering the tablecloth underneath was hiding that you had piece missing.

There are more ways to start again these days

The entertainment business is tough which ever aspect of it you’re involved with. DJing can be particularly so. I remembered the frustration of being young and trying to source good gigs in the closed shop of a provincial city. I wasn’t unsuccessful but it was very hard just to find an audience.

The phenomenon of internet broadcasting offered a different route back than had been available fourteen or so years before. There are a wide variety of stations out there with an inherently global audience and most of them provide a route to submit auditions. A related but different phenomenon is podcasting. In my case I was inspired by a friend to audition for Househeads Radio. Thankfully, they liked me, and I’ve been with them ever since.

Auditioning is still scary but gives confidence

My connection with music is such that there is a lot of me in everything I do. Having not made audition mixes for a number of years it was somewhat scary to put myself out there with complete strangers. To say I had some fear, uncertainty and doubt sending off my Mixcloud links for the first time in years would be an understatement.

The one thing of course I’d forgotten was the unique rush of adrenalin when you get a positive result. It started with that audition for Househeads and I’ve felt it since when I’ve successfully shared studio mixes with prospective venues. It’s a kind of affirmation that connects with your confidence deep down in something you care so much about. There is nothing more reassuring than a complete stranger who knows their stuff liking what you do when you haven’t done it for nearly fifteen years.

Finding a balance can be tricky

Like most people my life in my forties is way different to when I started in my teens and twenties. Trooping round bars and clubs every weekend is just not something I can or actually want to do any more. As well as my music I have family and career responsibilities and I enjoy them.

This is where radio is good again because it provides a regular weekly gig with an audience that I can plan around. More and more gigs “out” have arrived over time which has been great and broadly speaking manageable. It is difficult though as on the one hand your passion is to play and you don’t want to turn gigs down but on the other you don’t want to tip things out of kilter.

My best advice is stay focused on gigs you’ll enjoy and don’t be afraid to say no if it’s not your style or you won’t benefit sufficiently from it in other ways.

One creativity leads to another

I always enjoyed art and design at school and pay a close eye to presentational material in my career. I hadn’t however anticipated how much I would grow to enjoy developing fliers and artwork to promote my radio show and events. This has almost become a secondary passion alongside my DJing.

The thing that has changed of course is the media is so different. Facebook pages, Instagram feeds and blogs like this all have their own particular dynamics. Developing a personal brand and keeping it consistent has also been an enjoyable discovery.