Richard Fearless is Death in Vegas, is that not a cool name or what????? I was recently reminded of the mans greatness by his recent Fabric CD which has been stuck in my car player for the last week. Anyway, this is the usual Death in Vegas sound, droning guitars and trip hop beats. They had the inspired notion to recruit Dot Allison to perform vocals, no lyrics, just her wonderful voice singing la-la-la again and again... it feels gloriously uncomfortable. DiV recruited a whole host of A-List vocal talent for The Contino Sessions - Boby Gillespie (from Primal Scream), Jim Reid (of The Jesus And Mary Chain) and Iggy Pop (from somewhere other than Scotland). So the fact that Dot Allison eclipses them all without even bothering to write lyrics is a testament to just how darn good this record is. There's also an equally awesome remix by Slam which manages to do justice to the record in techno style and serve as a formidable challenge to bassbins wherever it's played.

This is where it all started, before they did Discovery, made an Anime cartoon and appeared in Gap ads there was a 12" from two french guys named Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo and Thomas Bangalter. In 1994 they released their debut record 'The New Wave' on celebrated scottish techno label Soma. But it was the following year that 'Da Funk' came along and really made a mark on the world - it became quite a big hit after being championed by DJ's all over the place, including the legendary Annie Nightingale who was instrumental in drumming up interest in the mainstream record labels. The record is a simple groove, running at a surprisingly sedate pace for a dance record, there's a wah wah guitar hook that gets chopped up and in true daft punk style everything gets pushed through a load of filters. Daft Punk are frequently cited as early innovators in the genre of Filter Disco. The video is memorable, featuring a man in a dog mask wandering around a city with a boom box, he gets some wierd reactions and rejections when he tries to go about his business.

The most open tribute to Syd Barrett, from the album 'Wish You Were Here' this is their great balearic moment that regularly gets trotted out by DJ's who know their stuff. It even features the line 'Come on you raver' - from the era when a raver was a looney....

I kinda missed my opportunity to comment on the passing of Bob Moog, well this track features a somewhat muted moog solo - better late than never eh?

This is the version on Erlend's DJ Kicks album, Amy got me the CD for Christmas - generally the DJ Kicks mixes are top notch and feature DJ's from a little more leftfield than other mix series. Erlend's DJ style isn't going to set the world on fire, he picks a load of excellent records and mixes them with a minimal of fuss - no turntablism here. What sets him apart from his peers is the fact that he performs acapellas over many of the records, stealing vocals from pop music and adding them to stripped down house grooves. In a way this lets him play some really obscure house tunes and still give the audience a familiar anchor to help keep them grounded. His voice isn't particularly strong, but it's eminently listenable - he's probably better known for providing vocals to fellow Norwegians Röyksopp and Kings of Convenience.

This track for me is the standout moment on the album because it's his own vocals and production the lyrics aren't borrowed from some 80's pop classic (at least as far as I can tell....). The track is just brilliant tech-house with every retro infused synth sound providing a clean rhythmic impetus to the record. And the lyrics are perfectly appropriate for his voice, almost conversational in places, and flowing dreamlike in others.

Get your kicks with DJ Kicks ( and Röyksopp / Kings of Convenience are well worth your time) too.

http://www.amazon.com/o/ASIN/B0001ENY30/102-3459643-8352136?SubscriptionId=15AZP1DJ4V427Z6NMB02

Skye has managed to eat the '6' key on my iBook, don't ask me how, she just managed to tear it off and chew on the rubber nipple under the keycap. She didn't actually swallow it but entering the number 6 requires a bit of effort now.

(Oh and she also likes to suck on the business end of phone chargers when they're plugged in, we've lost 2 motorola chargers because the positive terminal basically disintegrated under electrolytic action)

This is another record that I used to bring out to make a bridge to elitist music wankers. The original 12" release in 1997 includes several remixes by Sasha, including a then innovative breakbeat version. Every time I play it I get people asking where I got the bootleg from, they think it's some exclusive underground release from Hybrid or other artists... but no, it's an 8 year old B Side that most breaks DJ's walked past a million times while looking for cool records.

Ok it's not Madge's best record by any measure, it's the remix that makes it important - at the time big-beat was still big, and the big room clubs were heading into trance territory. It'd be another couple of years before we heard 'Rabbitweed' or 'Finished Symphony', or, the first Y3K compilations from Distinctive.

This is a 'secret' track on 'As Heard On Radio Soulwax Vol 2' - just rewind the CD before track 1 and you're there - and after it finished you can of course listen to the rest of this awesome CD. Kylie has been around forever, she's an icon in the british music scene, and she got there by sticking to what she does best - straight up, no excuses pop music. I can't really listen to her early Stock, Aitken and Waterman stuff, but the live versions of those older records sound a lot better with almost 2 decades of hindsight. Sure there were moments in her career where she's worked with the Manic Street Preachers and there's a load of dancefloor destined remixes in practically every style - including this evil stripped down and glitched up mix. The great thing about this glitch house remix is that you can catch those elitist music wankers off guard and play them a kylie minugue record, and that, is priceless in my book.

This is a great final record for a DJ, since there's nobody that can follow it. It's a carnival themed creation with brazillian drums and brass riffs punctuated by vocalists singing 'make it happy baby', it certainly does sound happy. But what really puts smiles on people's faces is the fact that the record starts out slow and just gets faster and faster, which of course makes it impossible for most DJ's to cleanly mix out of.

My favourite track by the band, never was a single, but it did end up as a freebie on a cover cd from British rock magazine 'Q' - a pretty darn good CD if I remember. So... Oasis, well they're not exactly modest, and they tend to get in fights, they're not as good as they think, but they're good enough to make many trips to my CD player.

As is appropriate for this show, everyone died, well at least everyone who we'd seen in the first episode. I wonder if the producers had ever seen the BBC sci-fi show 'Blakes 7' - the only other series I can think of that made a point of killing everyone off in the final episode.

Series finales are always interesting, things happen that would qualify as jumping the shark if they'd happened any earlier. Plenty of births, marriages, deaths and resolutions to other drawn out stories, or frequently enough dangling threads that cancelled shows leave in the hope of picking them up, which rarely happens. I remember an awful sci-fi show called 'Space: Above and Beyond' that basically put everyone a hairs breadth away from death, they're still waiting in that limbo almost a decade on.... I don't think the network is going to renew.

And then there's Babylon 5 - one of my favourites - that show had 2 final episodes. Originally there was a 5 year plan, but it looked like it would get cancelled after series 4 so they wound up the main story arc and filmed a finale. Then they got picked up by another network and had to film a new series 4 finale without much of the cast. Actually, I think sci-fi and fantasy shows are more likely to take the opportunity to play with life and death - Star Trek TNG destroys the Enterprise not once, but 3 times in 'All Good Things', Voyager's finale starts out with everyone back on earth, minus several chacters who died on the way there, but this is Star Trek - the captain travels back in time to change history and bring everyone home alive. The X-Files brings back all sorts of dead characters, and kills them again....