The Secret DJ lifts the lid on the madness of major labels

After a bruising week in Ibiza I’d arrived back in London for an important event. At this point in rave history the major labels were desperate to get a large piece of the pie. Venal, hungry and paranoid, they were lost for a while, not knowing where raving came from. Naturally they had to own it: lock and stock. Part of this was the need for them to have ‘dance hits’. Major labels call themselves a business, but are insanely unprofitable, utterly uncertain, totally rudderless and completely ignorant. They simply hang around waiting for something to happen and then pounce on it like a bushwhacking spider, pump it full of poison and then leave it hanging to get nice and ripe so they can gorge on it at their leisure.

I was a chubby, happy little fly.

Sign. Record. Deal. It was actually a dream of my youth but part of being ripe for a good plucking is your innate delusion that it’s all there just for you. An inevitability. Justice. Your payoff for being born awesome. I know: what a dick. That’s what the labels think too.

My reckless desire for a record deal was compounded by other factors. My way of dealing with always being tired and in the wrong country at the wrong time was to be perpetually out of my mind. Honestly, you don’t even really have to be hardcore. Most travellers constantly self-medicate with alcohol, pills and caffeine to deal with the shocking effects of sleeplessness and time-zone dilation. You can be a mess just using occupational amounts of legal helpers. Of course, the real solution is exercise and endorphins, but that wisdom comes much later... if you survive the learning process.

At the time I was in a collective of sorts. A commercial venture, slightly prankster in tone. Dare I even say ‘Situationist’ without punching myself in the face? Basically it was to try and keep us all afloat financially. You couldn’t do it today. Everyone in the media had their senses of humour removed a decade ago in a compulsory pogrom.

Anyway, it was a relief to get away from the freakish isolation of the solo DJ thing and be among friends again. Be they ever so oddball, there’s no place like homeboys. So there we all were at the great expense of a record company, being treated to a stay at London’s Metropolitan Hotel on Park Lane.

Having checked in we knew we had arrived – Arrived, in fact, with a capital A. During much of the heyday of Britpop and global 90s exuberance the Metropole was equal parts legit disco venue (the famous Met Bar) and upscale hotel. We decided not to check out the rooms as we were late for our meeting, so we were waiting for our manager in the extremely minimal foyer, looking like nothing more than a couple of deranged vagrants, when we were approached by hotel security.

“Any chance of you cunts fucking off?” the bald giant said in a cheery voice. “You’re making my nice foyer very untidy.”

Which, to be fair, was absolutely true. The trouble with chic minimalism is it really show up the germs. Not having anywhere relaxing to sit or indeed attain a state of anything below mild panic is one of a hotel foyer’s intended architectural functions.

The abuse escalated as our manager arrived behind us through the doors.

Our manager: a deranged relic from a bygone age resembling to a tee a Scottish Joe Pesci. Small, loud and quite deadly. A manager from a time when the music industry had money and acted like it. I actually heard him bellow into a phone once, “PUT ANOTHER FUCKING ZERO ON THE END AND WE’LL TALK” – which is about as cartoon rock manager as it gets. He was from the Peter Grant school of management. Everyone, especially his clients, was an idiot. The only way to get anything done was to bully and swear at top volume. I once followed him out of a venue I was working at and watched him insult every single person on the way down five flights of stairs. He must have shouted random bespoke abuse at about 200 people, individually. “Alright wanker? Your hair is shite, love. Lose some weight. FUCKING UGLY CUNT! Them shoes are fucking prehistoric, man. Fuck me, tall cunt. MOVE YOU DAFT SHITE,” etc, etc, etc.

I sort of admired him in a way. He didn’t care at all if no-one liked him, and it wasn’t a pose. There was a sort of purity to it. Almost an aesthetic. He wasn’t one of those very funny angry Scots with creative televisually crafted swears; to be on the end of it was brutal and shocking. It was quite funny to watch, though.

“You! Fatty! I need a word with you!”

He never addressed anyone by name when an insult would do. In fact, if he actually liked you it was even worse. We stepped to one side for one of his famous ‘meetings’.

“Sign the deal. Get this fucking pantomime over with. They’re all a bunch of cunts at this record company, anyway. If you ask me, this is a joke. You need to get out there and earn. Fuck ‘being a band’. This isn’t the cunting sixties. Just get out there and DJ. Piece of piss and half the aggro.”

Despite discovering many years later (and to the surprise of literally no-one) that one of the reasons he’d been robbing his clients so blind was a humungous cocaine habit, the pint-sized psychopath may well have been proved right. Still, we signed the deal. And that night we eventually talked our way in to the hotel bar… to play our own gig.