An ode to Michael Gray’s ‘The Weekend’

In all my life I really, truly believed I would never write 700 words on Michael Gray’s ‘The Weekend’ but here we are. Look, I don’t feel particularly proud about committing these thoughts to a lasting online document, it’s not like I’m writing about an obscure, Balearic Italo track that changed my life. But at the same time it feels very cathartic. There’s a reason Catholics have the confession box. This is mine. And by today’s standards of everything ‘cool’, ‘hip’ and ‘credible’ I’m hoping to receive a lifetime of Hail Marys from the echo chamber that is the internet and be sent on my way into a life free of guilty pleasure.

I fucking love Michael Gray’s ‘The Weekend’ and it is a goddamn banger. That is just fact. Like the fact that Gray is from Croydon, a place known for its garage, two-step and dubstep over funky house. Or the fact that ‘The Weekend’ went number seven in the British charts before being disposed of like a banana out of a car window, left to decompose in the lay-by of the M1 motorway.

Beats were big at the beginning of the millennium. People didn’t want subtlety. We survived Y2K FFS! The Chemical Brothers, Fatboy Slim and Groove Armada were in their prime and people got away with wearing cargo shorts. When ‘The Weekend’ came out Greece had won the Euros and the Hoxton Fin was sweeping the nation. It exemplified how the ease of whacking a fat, booming kick under a disco sample had created and simultaneously destroyed filter house by making it fodder for places of workout worship; 'The Weekend' worked in the club AND the gym.