| NICK WARREN played in Scotland one
December. Did his set, got paid, went home. A couple of days later the promoters
sent a Christmas hamper down to his Bristol home with their compliments.
They felt he was worth more than just his money. It is a rare story in the
hit-and-run world of top class DJing, but not for Nick Warren. You see,
apart from being one of the few nice guys to reach the top, Nick Warren
has a very special sort of DJ talent. He can take a diversity of records
- on this mix, for instance, the creepy hardcore of DesertÕs ÔLose
it' or the sitars and tablas of E.Razor's "India" - and he can
make them sound his own. He is the kind of DJ whose record box you'd like
to own and it takes a special breed of tune to attract Warren's attention:
something funky and hard; trancey yet fresh; one step ahead of what everyone
else is playing. The kind of record that makes you realise dance music has
spun off somewhere new while you weren't looking and it's time to catch
up. This ability to predict and buck trends at the front end became apparent
early in Nick Warren's career. At least, the part that started once he gave
up being a gamekeeper in Oxfordshire, moved to Bristol and started DJing.
Back when DJs were all called Cutmaster J or Swiftmixing Dick, Nick was
half of a duo that rejoiced in the title Slick Nick And Disco Darren. In
1990, when Bristol was raving to acid house at a club called Vision, Nick
was in the upstairs room, DJing Carpenters records over live percussion,
dropping house 12's at the wrong speed, pushing new tunes long before other
DJs started talking about them. Warren and a mate started a night called
98 Proof in solidarity with Paul Oakenfold's anti-BPM fascism Movement 98
which rapidly became a hangout for the city's tastemakers. |
 |
When Massive Attack first broke out of Bristol for an American tour, Nick joined them as official DJ. Nick Warren's national status came once he joined the house circuit, not through hype and magazine articles, but because he was too good not too. He tailored his developing house and trance sound around Saturday night, keeping it wide-ranging and creative, yet wheedling the crowd into his idea of a good time. Clever DJing that won him fans early on in Liverpool, way before Cream became the international superclub it is today, and Warren, finally, its main room resident. I once took him to play three nights in a converted nuclear fall-out shelter in St Petersburg. The crowd, a pre-ecstasy mix of bohemians, hookers and gangsters, didn't know his records but they fell in love with them and a DJ who played keyboards along to U2 remixes, dashed from behind the decks to dance on the floor, and was so unfailingly nice to everyone he met. Since then Nick Warren's skills have taken him all over the world, from Singapore and Sydney to Sao Paolo in Brazil, to a shiny, underground techno club called Base that's full of dry ice and wide eyes. Trance is too small a word for what he plays here, when underneath you'll find anything from funky electro and breakbeats to fluttering synths and raging acid. And although Warren is half of trance act and remix duo Way Out West, who have toured their Deconstruction album "Blue" nationwide, he doesn't include any of his own original tracks or remixes. Which could be a first for a DJ mix CD. Mixed with a featherlight touch, CD1 eases from Locust's mournful "No One In The World" through the trippy, wacky "Northern Lights" by Conscious to VFR's uproarious "Trance Illusion". CD2 starts out softer and more varied with the breakbeat mini-series of Slacker's "Psychout (Thing)" and the African acid of Voices Of Khwan's "Ya Yae Ya Yo Yo Yo". Then before you know it, Nalin And Kane are breathing melancholy magic into Energy 52's classic "Cafe Del Mar" and Warren is trancing again, nonchalantly melodic, whipping up the gears before crashing on Propulsion's frankly deranged "Pressure". A Saturday night on the edges of techno, house and breakbeat that didn't feel like a geography lesson and still left you with memories of something new. Nick Warren gets a lot of Christmas hampers.
DOM PHILLIPS / MIXMAG |
|
