No heritage acts: Dance music allows its veterans to remain creatively free

It’s not just DJ sets, either: the wisdom of age can lead to truly awesome music. Some of the very best dance albums of the last year or two have been by grizzled veterans. As DJ Parrot, Yorkshireman Richard Barratt was one of the very first to spin house in the UK in the mid-eighties, yet his work as Crooked Man is as strange and new as music by people half his age. Hi-Fi Sean, aka Sean Dickson of The Soup Dragons, made an absolutely extraordinary album, ‘Ft’, with a galaxy of left-of-centre star guests riding slo-mo house beats, and at the time of writing it’s #1 on the Billboard dance chart. UK house scene mainstay Luke Solomon’s Powerdance project makes vintage house and disco licks sound like they’re brand new – and makes them double camp and triple trippy into the bargain. Björk’s new collaborations with Arca sound like nothing on earth. The Orb are making some of the music of their careers. Chicago veteran Mike Dunn has a new record of acid and jacking house coming up that sounds as if it could have been made 25 or more years ago, yet still fizzes with vitality.

And maybe that’s the key. Dance music might have phases and trends, genre splits and innovations – but unless it gets ruined by total over-exposure, once something works, it works. In the heat of the dancefloor, a banger remains a banger, whether it’s brand new or 40 years old, made by a 15-year-old or a 55-year-old.

Obviously there are potential downsides to this: having a bunch of old-timers taking up slots on bills might look a bit like bed-blocking, stopping new talent coming through much like the way the mainstream festivals rely on the same rotation of Foo Fighters/Coldplay/Muse/U2 over and over. And yes, all too often the DJ hierarchies do value name and connections over talent. But realistically, not that many oldsters make it this far. Not everyone can keep up with Carl Cox or Andrew Weatherall or Goldie’s inhuman work-rate. And at its best, the relationship between old DJs, young crowds and new acts can be a symbiotic one: the vets can mentor and showcase the tunes of the newcomers, and give their own sets a constant injection of fresh blood into the bargain. Next time you’re tempted to joke about OAP’s in the rave stop and think what they might be contributing – even now.

Joe Muggs is a freelance music journalist. Follow him on Twitter

This feature is taken from the November issue of Mixmag