Welcome to JC’s Vinyl
Room, a new section on CubikMusik, where I (JC) will be digging into my old
crates of vinyl to bring you some long forgotten nuggets.
So here’s the deal. Me
and Cubik go way back. Like back to secondary school (high school for US readers)
when we both had silly hair and an obsession with The Cure. We’ve stayed best
mates through a variety of musical adventures since then – including his brief
career as a roadie for the band I managed and me leaving him in my car for
three hours as I ligged backstage at Feile (Ireland’s major outdoor music estival
of the late 80’s and 90’s).
Anyway I built up a
fairly substantial record collection between the late 80s and mid-90s covering
everything from indie to hip-hop via house and rave. My collection has a fair
bias towards funky techno and hard house, largely due to the fact that between
1993 and 1996 I was co-promoter of the UFO Club, the infamous Dublin techno club that
had another good friend of mine, Francois, at the controls. Crazy, crazy, fun
times. It was a real privilege to make a living out of putting on a club where
you could hear the music you loved and where you got to party with your
friends.
A year-out for a world
trip at the tail end of 2001 saw my vinyl collection going into storage in the
attic of my house (hauling those boxes into the attic, seriously stressed poor
old Cubik’s skinny little body). It remained there until last month when Cubik
arrived back from Austin with an iTTUSB turntable which allows you to easily convert your vinyl to MP3.
Several hours later, after a few beers and some funny cigarettes, the idea of
JC’s Vinyl Room was dreamed up.
I’ll be posting
regularly with some of my old favourites that will hopefully bring back some
great memories and maybe even inspire you to go out and investigate some
artists you haven’t heard before. Here’s my first tune from the vaults:
God Made Me Phunky by The MD X-spress
(Open)
This is a good deal
more house-y than most of the stuff I was listening to when this came out back
in 1995 even though it was on the Ministry of Sound’s techno imprint Open. The
work of Mike Dunn, a Chicago DJ since the 80s (and not as far as I know any
relation of the hip hop DJ of the same name but I could be wrong), this is just
one of those infectious old school numbers with a groovy almost spoken word
lyric. This gospel-inspure number was guaranteed to get pulled out at least once a night in our
after-hours club that ran in the front room of my apartment most weekends.
Still makes me want to get up and dance around the room – and it’s not that
often that happens these days.
As the man himself puts it “To understand a
groove like this you got to be funky”.
Download God Made Me Phunky
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