Truly an artist who needs no introduction to the No Tags universe, Midland is also one of the nicest people we know in this bottomless viper pit called dance music.
Harry Agius has been a constant presence on the dancefloor since we were first finding our feet as music writers, and we’ve followed him every step of the way – from his early run of steppy house records on Aus Music and Phonica, to ‘Final Credits’ mania in 2016, and his current incarnation as something of a grande dame of gay club culture.
That role is one he’s grown into slowly but surely, as he explains to us in this episode, and it blossoms into something very special on his debut album Fragments Of Us. It’s far from your typical wham-bam, nine-tracks-and-an-ambient-interlude dance music long-player. Constructed around gay voices past and present – including ‘80s artist and Aids activist David Wojnarowicz, mould-breaking Black filmmaker Marlon Riggs, and Luke Howard of London institution Horse Meat Disco – it’s a genuinely personal record that’s also a kind of time capsule for future generations.
We talked to Harry about growing into his identity as a gay DJ, the many, many reasons to turn down a gig, and whether Arthur Russell would have liked dubstep. Plus, he loves his films! We get an excellent recommendation and confirmation, if it were needed, that he’s #PartyGirlHive.
A quick notice for Berlin Taganistas – if you’re in the city this Sunday, Chal will be there to give a talk about one of our favourite NT topics: nostalgia, trend loops and the current revival spiral. There will be slides!
The talk is part of 3hd festival (from the brilliant Creamcake collective) and it’s free to attend, starting 2pm at Silent Green’s Betonhalle. (They really called it Silent Green. Still getting over that.) Afterwards there’s a panel on “the uncanny in modern mysticism” and even more talks. Find more info yonder.
As ever, if you enjoyed this episode of No Tags, please do rate, review and subscribe on your go-to podcast app, as it does really help. We’d also ask you to consider subscribing to our paid tier, which costs £5 a month and helps us continue planning, recording and editing these (often long!) podcasts.
TL: It’s almost 15 years since your debut release, so first question: have you been called a veteran in press yet?
M: To the best of my knowledge, I don't think I've been called a veteran. My husband recently called me a heritage act. [Laughter]
TL: In a damning way?
M: No. I mean, if you’ve spent time with him, or in our presence, there's a kind of a gentle rolling bicker, which is very non-malicious. But yeah, he sometimes comes out with these things where people are like… [gasps]! I don't feel like either a veteran or a heritage act currently. I'm in my late thirties and I think there's still some runway left before I start playing my music with an orchestra.
CR: I was thinking about your FACT mix [from 2010], and how your trajectory roughly maps onto our careers as well. We're roughly the same age and have followed a lot of the same waves. I was just thinking about 2010 as a year for music – it was exciting times.
M: It was very exciting, wasn't it? There was a lot going on and it all felt very fresh.
CR: It felt like a confluence of different people suddenly discovering each other as well, and going in new directions because of it.
M: Yeah, there were a lot of spaces where you could converge. FWD>> at Plastic People, you just could always go there. I just happened to be, very luckily, in the orbit of some people who were in that world who I was very good friends with, and as a result was going with them. I went to FWD>> for the first time to see my friend Pearson Sound play. You'd end up just behind the curtain on the other side, just chatting to whoever was there at the time, Appleblim or Julio Bashmore, anyone like that, you’d just bump into them. And as a result there was a lot of cross-pollination on the lineups as well. You'd have someone like Shackleton and then David [Pearson Sound] and you could hear all these threads, but they were quite different. I remember seeing Shackleton there and having to leave because it was so overwhelming on that system. Really pummelling toms for about two minutes – like, I'm going to be sick.
TL: It's funny that when people talk about Plastic People and rightly romanticise it, everyone talks about the system, the dark room – all true, but probably the crucial thing is there was that great bar area where half of Rinse FM would be every single Thursday night. I met so many people for the first time there, like countless amounts of people. That's probably the club's lasting legacy more than a sound system, it's the amount of connections built there.
M: No, definitely. I don't feel like I have a space in London that’s similar now. For me, I guess something like Horse Meat Disco. I could go to Horse Meat Disco on any Sunday and there'll always be people I know there. It's just one of those places.
CR: I mean, London is a big place, and even working within music I think it can take ages to get to the point where you go to a night and [know a few people]. I can see why people go for an early retirement, if they don't have that proper social core to it.
M: Totally. I think it's more [about] parties now than venues .
CR: So the album has been a long time coming, right? We should probably get our bearings on the current era of Midland. I feel like some years ago you made a decision that you were going to be touring less, or focusing more on certain shows. Is that right?
M: That is correct. A month after the pandemic started I had the realisation. It had been brewing, obviously, but the realisation happened around April. I had this very vivid moment [where I realised that] a lack of shows does not denote working less, and I need to make the decision to work less if it comes back. And it has to be a conscious decision to step back.
It was a combination of feeling, am I being self-important here? Or am I doing this in a way that will give some people context as to why I'm not out there as much? Because I was out there so much. I had to kind of unpack this thing, and it was almost holding myself accountable to it. I got a lot of messages from people, other DJs – I'm always talking to DJs who want to DJ less. [Laughter]
CR: We want them to DJ less! Why won't they just stop?
M: I know, but there's just so much involved in it. Even not just about DJing, I was talking about why I had kind of exerted myself so much, as a gay man, and that was this kind of inbuilt feeling of inadequacy that I could at least right by working at a high level. It's like, my work's good, so even if you don't agree with my personal life at least I'm very good at what I do. And yeah, a few friends of mine, high-achieving gays, were like, ‘Whoa, yeah. I'd never thought of it, and now I'm doing therapy.’ [Laughs]
CR: A gay friend of mine told me about a book that’s about exactly that problem.
M: I mean, it's a pretty common theme and it's definitely not an original thought. There's books like The Velvet Rage, or Straight Jacket, they’re these books which change quite a lot of people's lives.
CR: It’s like it needs to happen to you and then you read the book and process it – The Body Keeps The Score, or All About Love – and then once you've read it, it's like, that seems obvious. But you needed to go through it personally.
M: No, totally. You've got to come to these decisions yourself.
CR: One thing that you also seemed to be doing in the pandemic was going through all of your records. Where does that put you now as a DJ, having had this kind of recalibration of wanting to play less, but also going through all your music again. Where are you as a DJ?
M: I'm in a funny place as a DJ right now. I came back and I felt very confident, and I still feel like I'm playing confidently, which to me involves taking a few more risks. Not just in terms of the music you play, but the energy it has, and actually disrupting it. As things have got busier again the fight to retain that special feeling has been a bit tough. And with the album, I've had to kind of keep DJing on the tracks.
Then from last October until March I was really depressed and really struggling with the world, and finishing this project which was so abstract, trying to pull it all together against the backdrop of the world feeling really disrupted and horrifying… I had to do this big show, this Islington show where I play in front of a thousand people, and I just didn't want to be in front of people.
Coming out of April we went to America for a month, and I was doing shows that were smaller and more intimate and required less being the centre of attention. So I've been thinking about DJing a lot again. I always think about it a lot, but I'm trying so many different things now. Sometimes I just go in and I haven't prepared anything, to see how it works. I'm just trying all these ways to keep myself feeling challenged and fresh. The worst thing about when I entered the pandemic was that I was so out of love with it. I hated it. And I hated that I hated it.
CR: How long had you hated it for at that point?
M: I don't know, because I didn't really have time to think about it. But I think I'd just been growing really drained by the travel, everything, you know… I’'ve realised how much I love being at home, how much of a homebody I am.
CR: I've seen your carpet.
TL: Can we elaborate on the carpet, please?
M: It's like a three metre by two metre yellow shag rug, and some nice speakers and stuff.
CR: Who wouldn't want to be at home with the shag pile, listening to records and chilling out?
M: Yeah, and I think honestly, the toll it took on my personal relationships with friends and with my family – not that we were in a bad place, I just hated only being able to see the most important people in my life once every six months. I was also always thinking ahead, you know, in a situation, at dinner or anything, I'd always be like, when are we leaving? What's next? Because my brain was sort of thinking, have I checked in for that, have I booked this? Did I do that? You're always multitasking. So yeah, the rebuild was real.
CR: What about musically, though? It seemed to me as if you were re-cataloguing and deep-diving [into your own records]. Did it affect your taste and what you wanted to play?
M: Yeah, definitely. I was going through all my records – I'm still going through all my records. I'd taken 700 records to my studio, which have been in various piles, and within a day I found 20 really great records I don't remember buying. So I've now got a big pile of those which I'm going to take to the Fabric birthday. I think I'm playing more songs, more music that sounds like dance music but isn't necessarily ‘dance music’. I've been playing some of the early Bugz in the Attic stuff, the London, jazzy, drummy stuff. I'm going into this autumn of touring and the next two weeks feels like a bit of a training camp. I'm going to buy a lot of records, organise, rip, just get ready for it so that it's not called in.
TL: Given the context of what we've been talking about and this period where you hated DJing, how are you approaching touring? Is there an element of trepidation, or do you feel like you've kind of pushed through that and learnt to love it again?
M: Every show that I'm playing I actively want to play, and that's the difference. I'm not doing stuff that I don't want to do, or that doesn't feel like it aligns with me or where I am personally. The album tour is all queer parties that are existing relationships. A couple of them are [where] a promoter I've played for is collaborating with a local queer party. But then I looked at the rest of the tour, which is the non-album [dates], and I'm really looking forward to those – Fabric, Robert Johnson, Magnetic Fields. These are exciting to me.
The only thing that makes me trepidatious is that I've kind of set a limit of four gigs a month. [I’ve got] five in October and maybe seven in November, but then two in December, so it balances out. But yeah, I've done one or two three-gig weekends in the last three years and I was just wiped out. Versus back then, you know, I’d do them all the time.
TL: You've been on this touring treadmill from very early on. It definitely wasn't as common 10 years ago, but you even had management around your first two releases. You pretty much went from having your first music out to being a regular touring DJ.
M: There were jumps. So yeah, I've been working with my manager Chris [Gold, who used to run the Trouble Vision parties at Corsica Studios and is now director of management company 285] for 14 years, and that basically came about because I was friends with his brother Simon – also a manager [for Bicep, no less!]. I'd been making music and he'd just send it to Chris, and he said, ‘Hey, I really like your music, would you like to sort of trial this?’ And I thought, well, six-month trial, why not? And I think it’s the best working relationship I’ve – it's the only working relationship I've had.
CR: Nobody has the same manager for 14 years.
M: No, and this is the thing. When people think about management, they think about this quite bolshy [attitude], you know, we've got to get you in front – and that's never been our thing. We've always been about the long game. And that's not the long game in terms of pulling the wool over people's eyes. It's about the long game of making plans and doing things in a way that… you’re not trying to get in on something that you don't deserve to be a part of. It's just a slow thing. And the amount of times people ask me, ‘Oh, have you got a new manager?’ It's like, no.
TL: I guess what I was getting at is, you talking about coming to this moment pre-pandemic and being like, I need to realign how I do this – I feel like it's very easy when you get on that sort of run that early in your career, to get into this mindset where you're always thinking about the next thing. It can be really hard to stop and take stock.
But it also feels like you've become a lot more comfortable in the last few years being outspoken about stuff in the industry. It strikes me that you're someone that's way more comfortable putting yourself out there now and calling out the kind of shit that, in the first years of your career, you might be worried about the repercussions of. And I just wondered if there was a period of having to unlearn some of that.
M: You know, I hear people say, ‘I would love to have more weekends off, but they're booked up six months in advance.’ So what I say to people now is, ‘When you get the offer, literally sit and picture, how is it going to be? You're going to finish your gig at six in the morning and then you're going to take two flights to Portugal. That's 10 hours of travel on no sleep. That's horrifying, but you do it because you just don't think of those details, and unfortunately you have to think of those details.
And in relation to what you're talking about, I guess speaking out – I still am terrified. Not terrified, but there are a lot of times where I'm up at night thinking about stuff that I've said or whatever. I think the change is that I'm more comfortable in myself, perhaps. But the last eight months, you know, talking about Palestine…
CR: One year today.
M: One year today. And especially at the beginning when it wasn't being talked about a lot, you know, getting really mental messages from people… I don't really look at my stats but I think I must've lost about 7,000 followers in the last year or something. I mean, a lot of that is organic. I think you lose a certain amount [anyway], but the thing for me that changed was, people are always going to have a problem, and do I want to look back on this period and think, why did I not do it? What was holding me back?
CR: So Fragments of Us came out at the start of this month. How far back do we have to go to get to the seed of this project?
M: I think I can trace it back to 2019. I had a very life-changing summer of experiences and shows. A very good Glastonbury after a few tough ones – rain and Brexit and general stuff. And then going to Honcho Campout for the first time. Also I'd been in a book club for a few years, and all these threads started to come together, and there was just a bit more context to why I was where I was.
I think a lot of the time when you're queer, or you identify somewhere on the spectrum, you don't realise how much being around people that you can be authentic with, or [who] replicate or slightly mirror your identity, how healing that is. But also how a lack of it can be very damaging.
I said this to someone else the other day – a lot of the time people come out and they're the only person like that in their friend circle, and of course your friends love you and are supportive but they don't have that thing. And I said to someone, you know, you can spend a whole weekend around your queer friends and it's like you're recharged, like the Energizer bunny. And so I think for me, [after] spending the majority of that summer in spaces which validated me, I kind of came out a little bit less apologetic.
Writing this album which is very personal, and really not ever thinking about it being heard by people – suddenly it's now being heard and interpreted and dissected and it's not mine anymore. And it's going to rub some people up the wrong way, and some people are having life-changing listens to it and sending me these crazy messages. It's a lot. So it's being vulnerable in a way that I haven't had to be in a long time, but I'm more prepared for it this time.
The last time I had a big success, a track and a mix that went huge, I was so emotionally not in a place that I could deal with it, and it messed me up.
CR: When was that?
M: 2016. You spend all this time wanting accolades, and especially when I came up, you know, everything was rated – there was a top DJs [list], there was a top tracks [list], it was so competitive, it was so hierarchical. And you feel left out when you're not in it. Then suddenly I had the top spots on two very big things.
CR: This is ‘Final Credits’, isn't it?
M: ‘Final Credits’ was the top track of the year in Mixmag, and then I got the Essential Mix of the Year. And I was like, I can't deal with success.
CR: What was the effect of that success?
M: Well, there were a lot more eyes on me, and I just wasn't ready for that. The calibre of shows stepped up and I just toured myself into the ground. It was hard.
CR: Tell us more about the concept [behind the album] and how you pieced it together.
M: I mean the concept is the silence I grew up in, and understanding and contextualising myself in the silence, first through the lens of the Aids crisis and then Section 28.
Looking at the dates, it was kind of my entire life from being born to the end of school. I definitely had quite a few gay teachers and it was never spoken about. And then just listening to the monologues of David Wojnarowicz and starting to do these kind of jams in the house in lockdown, before I could go back to my studio. I had some synths and would do these long jams for an hour with his voice playing over it, and then I started to play them in clubs and then little bits started to form.
I started to put it in playlists and once it becomes a playlist, it's more of a thing. Then it was 17 tracks, and then it was 13 tracks, and I was like, 13 is meant to be an unlucky number, but I'm just going to reclaim it.
CR: So how did you discover David Wojnarowicz?
M: From reading Close to the Knives, which obviously we have a shared interest in.
CR: Was this in the book club?
M: Yeah, it was the second or third book of the book club.
TL: What was the book club then?
M: It was [London clubnight] Chapter 10 book club. I met Dan Beaumont, Charlie Porter and Morgan Clement at Bloc [festival]. So the three founders of Chapter 10 were doing the Chapter 10 stage, and I actually played on it.
CR: For anyone who might be listening and doesn't know what Chapter 10 is, it’s one of the more impactful queer parties of the past decade.
M: I mean, in terms of the quality of the music and the taste level, but also the humour... Every flyer was a butt plug, but always in a very funny design – you know, [done in the style of] the Apocalypse Now poster, or Aliens. It was so tongue in cheek, but underneath it was a level of taste. These are some of my best friends, but they also have crazy taste levels. I mean, Charlie judged the Turner prize.
So I basically met them at Bloc and it was funny because they all had these Chapter 10 t-shirts and they called it the gay stag party. There were loads of them at Bloc, everywhere you looked you just saw these Chapter 10 t-shirts. People [had always been] like, you've got to meet Dan Beaumont, and I just hadn't ever encountered him. Then we met and now he’s one of my best friends. [Harry’s husband] Mike calls him my work husband. But he was starting a book club and said, ‘Do you want to come?’. And that was when it all started and Close to the Knives was the third book.
CR: So why did that book in particular have an impact? And what's in it? Who is he?
M: David Wojnarowicz was a multimedia artist. I say multimedia, but that’s doing him a disservice. He basically made art with anything he could get his hands on. Painting, photography, writing. He was in a band called 3 Teens Kill 4. He would be on a tape player sampling and doing live samples. He made loads of videos. He just did everything. He left an absurd amount of work behind, which is scattered across the country. A large portion of it is in the Downtown Collection at Fales Library in New York, which is in a transitional phase right now so it's not so easy to access, because Marvin Taylor, who used to be the curator, is now not working there.
But yeah, he wrote this book and... either you're not ready for it and then you read it and it changes your life, or… I've given it to five people and they've all had to put it down, they can't deal with it. It burns on the page. The first chapter basically has no punctuation, and it just feels like this deluge of thoughts. It's describing his life as a teenage runaway, with a drunk father. He was basically a hustler, selling sex in Times Square literally for the purpose of having somewhere to sleep at night. And then becoming part of this movement with Nan Goldin, Peter Hujar, who was his mentor – and then becoming quite famous, and then basically becoming ill at the point when he was starting to become famous, and not being able to deal with the fame.
The writing is so terrifying and so beautiful, and there's this rage in it that I'd never really been allowed to feel. So yeah, he's like some sort of guardian angel to me. Not that we have similar backgrounds as such, but I just feel this kind of connection with how he writes and how he did things. When I went to the Downtown Collection briefly, Marvin Taylor showed me this thing, his magic box. It was all these things that he collected during his life, you can see all these things that he collected and touched. There’s something about touching something that someone's owned, there's a kind of electricity.
TL: The material of his that you used on the album is obviously incredibly heavy, it's really hard to listen to. And you're talking about jamming for hours with this tape going – what's that like as an emotional process?
M: I mean, I was extremely depressed for the first two months of lockdown because I was grappling with all these feelings. There was catharsis in the process of just starting up sounds and leaving them playing. I once played one of his monologues on a CDJ and left it playing for quite a long time, and someone came up to me like, ‘What is this track?’
TL: This was in the club?
M: I also played his monologues in clubs and just left them going. But yeah, that process was actually kind of fun. Not fun – fun's maybe the wrong word – but just following the energy of where it was going and trying to channel it.
CR: There's something about that particular section that you chose [to sample]... I think what can be quite difficult, quite challenging, but definitely true to his spirit as an artist, from what I know, is that at the end he says, ‘Really, I just don't wanna fucking die.’ And I think that especially with Aids victims, but also cancer patients for example, I think we have this expectation that people will just take it nicely and leave quietly and be kind of beatific and saintly and all of those things. To hear someone say that they don't want to die, and are angry about it, is something quite different. I think what's so interesting is how he was able to use his death as part of his art – he kind of choreographed elements of it.
M: Yeah, there's that famous photograph where he's wearing the jacket at the protest that says, ‘If I die, don't bury me, just put me on the steps of the FDA.’
CR: But it was more than that, wasn't it? Because ultimately, another Aids victim's ashes were sprinkled on the White House lawn. And then Peter Hujar did that with some of David’s ashes also. When I learned about that, the performance of that, and to be able to do something so powerful after your own death… the gesture of it is just an unbelievably profound political event, I think.
TL: And to do it while being confronted with your own death.
M: I think the reason that they were so angry was because they were abandoned. If you're diagnosed with cancer, the sympathy is – or the sympathy was, let’s say, because now Aids and HIV are not the death sentence that they were, in certain parts of the world – but if you're diagnosed with cancer it was something people knew and could sympathise with. And the thing about Aids is, you know, it affected non-white people, sex workers, drug addicts and gays.
What's interesting with all these people is that when they had this awful deadline, which was also undefined, they just made so much work. Keith Haring just went into overdrive. And when Peter Hujar died, David Wojnarowicz moved into his house and had all this photographic equipment and paper that he left him, and was able to really step it up. So I use that to remind me to not wait until there's a deadline, to just kind of keep going.
CR: Tell us about some of the other voices on the album then. Maybe the next obvious person to talk about would be Marlon Riggs.
M: Marlon Riggs was born in Texas, lived in Oakland and made a few films, notably Tongues Untied. Funnily enough, both him and David Wojnarowicz made work using National Endowment for the Arts funds, and both were absolutely destroyed in Congress because of the [accusations around] using the money for pornography.
CR: There were several artists that got caught up in that too, right? Robert Mapplethorpe was one of them.
M: It's kind of like a rite of passage.
CR: If you haven't been banned by Pat Buchanan, what are you even doing?
M: Yeah, so Marlon Riggs made this film, Tongues Untied, which was very revolutionary, the main tagline was, ‘Black men loving Black men is a revolutionary act.’ We went to see it at the Barbican recently and the person who introduced it was talking about being young and black in 1993, and seeing this and just being like, wow. Then he made Black Is Black Ain't, but died halfway through making it and his family finished it.
I've been in contact with Vivian Kleiman, who was his collaborator. She was a sweetheart. I didn't need her permission technically, because I licensed the monologue from an interview in the UCLA archive, but I just thought it'd be really nice to speak to her about this and put it across her desk, and she was really stoked. Her response was just like, ‘Oh, there's loads of people who don't know who he is, and it's really nice to think that they'll now know.’ Because he did die in sort of semi-obscurity, to a wider audience.
CR: There's a bit towards the end of that Marlon Riggs clip where he's talking about this idea of the need for Black gay men to construct themselves, because there's so little of themselves in the past. I mean, part of his work is to find what there was and put it together, right? But that reminds me of a phrase that pops up quite a lot with No Tags, which is this ‘document your culture’ aspect of underground music and this need to pay attention to things as they're happening in case they disappear.
Obviously I'm not saying that underground music is the same as what Marlon Riggs was dealing with! But there's this sense of like, somebody has to take a photo, interview somebody, write it down. And that's what this album does with some of the other people on the record. So you talk to Luke Howard of Horse Meat Disco about NYC Downlow. And when you think about club spaces that have been really impactful in Britain in the last 15 years or so, Downlow’s got to be in there, hasn't it?
M: Both those clips with Jonny Seymour and Luke are part of two-hour interviews that I conducted with them.
I’ve known Johnny since 2019, but Jonny's story is incredible and he’s such a community builder in Sydney. Him and his housemate Paul, who are in Stereogamous, are like the gay uncles of Sydney. When it was Jonny's birthday recently, all the dolls, all the drag queens, everyone got dressed in white, because he always wears white – there's a real community around them. I was like, I really would love to talk about your story and how you made it to Sydney, leaving Tasmania because he got gaybashed, coming to Sydney aged 18 and starting this amazing party called Kooky, which was a slur that people used to use against gay people. So we had this incredible conversation in their living room, with their dog George Michael.
You might have seen that mural of George Michael smoking a spliff dressed as a saint? It’s quite famous, and when he died they painted that on the side of their house. It was at the same time as the marriage referendum in Sydney and it got defaced and they had to hide in their house for weeks. Paul recorded all the people shouting and created an opera out of it. Like, they're amazing people. So I just really loved that conversation, and that was another thing that I had which I could use as a creative stimulus.
With Luke, I've known him now for 12 years. Luke Howard is the house mother of the Downlow – there's a few [other] people, like Jonny Woo, but Luke has been there from the beginning. He moved to London when he was 16, was living in a squat, going to the protests, DJing all these amazing nights with Princess Julia and stuff. The whole intent with the album was that these interviews will be hosted and I will do more, and this is a springboard for this sort of stuff.
CR: You should do a podcast.
M: You know, I just feel like everyone has a unique entry into human experience. I was speaking to someone recently who said, ‘Oh, I work at a soup kitchen and the lady who who runs is amazing, she lived in New York, she did all these things.’ I was like, just record her talking one time, just get it down. You don't have to be a professional, just get it down.
CR: For those unfamiliar, NYC Downlow is a club inside Glastonbury festival. It's in the Block 9 area, which is sort of a temple to dance music history, it's very much about keeping dance music history alive. And NYC Downlow is kind of meant to be in the Meatpacking District of New York City in the ‘80s, with steam coming off of it. But it is a club. You go inside and it’s dark, and very warm…
M: They had air conditioning this year. It was like 20% less warm. I took portraits of the air conditioning unit actually.
CR: Are you a Glastonbury person? And when did you first go to Downlow?
M: I am a Glastonbury person, my first one was 2013.
CR: Not as long ago as I was expecting.
M: Yeah. It was weird. My friends would go and I don't know if it wasn't on my radar because I thought of it as a rock festival…
CR: Well, this is the thing. Downlow has helped to change Glastonbury into basically a dance festival now.
M: This year was definitely more of a dance festival. But yeah, I didn't actually go [to Downlow] that first year. The second year I didn't have a ticket and my friend asked Gideon if I could play because me and my husband didn't have tickets, and he was like, ‘What? Midland's gay?’
CR: Did he actually not know that you were gay?
M: No.
CR: Interesting.
M: It’s a common theme. I don't know what I'm not giving out. I mean, especially if you follow me online. But he offered me a few slots, and one of them was opening the Downlow on a Sunday. I just had no idea what I was walking into. It's also worth noting that Block 9 came from them doing illegal parties in the car park for about six years until Michael Eavis was just like, ‘Have a field, here's two thousand quid.’ They did the first year literally on favours. And it's become popular in a way that people resent, and people can't get in and this sort of thing, but it’s still this beacon at the festival, you know – just head there and you will find like-minded people and good music and mind-blowing stages.
CR: So at the start of your career you’re generally hanging out in straight spaces, I guess. Did you have a queer raving epiphany? You mentioned Honcho earlier, but I more mean going to gay nights and, you know, understanding dance music differently, or understanding yourself in dance music differently?
M: The awakening was very gradual. I remember after the first time I played at Downlow, my friend was like, ‘You just looked so comfortable.’ I remember messaging Gideon that next day and he was like, you're part of it now. And that was 10 years ago.
I play the Downlow every year, and then 2015 was the first time I played Honey Sound System in San Francisco. I was doing a tour with Ben UFO at the time, and it was a collaboration between Honey Sound System and Icee Hot, so a gay party and a straight party. Someone who ran Honey Sound System, Jacob Sperber [aka Jackie House] – who’s one of my very, very best friends and kind of introduced me to everything – the next day took me and Ben and a few friends to The Eagle, which is like a big open plan gay bar, and it was leather day. So it was like, a thousand bears, and you basically got a pint glass and you could just drink as much beer as you want.
And actually it didn't feel overwhelming beause I felt like I was with friends, and with Jacob, but it felt so exciting. I remember having a very transformative conversation with him at the bar, which I won't go into detail about as it's quite personal, but about me as a DJ and me as a gay man, and the kind of convergence of the two which I'd never really allowed. Ever since then, through Jacob, it would always be like, ‘Oh, you're going to this place, you've got to meet this person. You're going to LA, you've got to meet Chris Cruse. You're going to Sydney, you've got to meet Jonny Seymour.’
CR: It changes all the people that you're going to meet and hang out with in a new city, it gives you new networks.
M: Exactly, because this person is not only vouched for by someone you trust, but they come from a background that you can relate to, so you kind of skip a couple of levels.
TL: To go back to the album, we should talk about Arthur Russell briefly. Sampling Arthur Russell is a choice, a very big move. [Laughter] It would just be good to hear what Arthur Russell means to you.
M: Arthur Russell was kind of my guiding… my north star in that lockdown period of making music just for the joy of it and experimenting and trying things. I'd listened to him for quite a long time, but I think we’d just watched the documentary, Wild Combination. And obviously a couple more albums came out.
CR: Yeah, they keep finding them, don't they?
M: There's that one that came out recently, Iowa Dream, which is the kind of acoustic guitar one. I don't want to sound in any way deluded or self-important here, but when I made that track, I didn't exactly think of it as sampling. I had this idea of like, what would it be like if he didn't die, and what would he have been drawn to? What would he have made of DMZ, what would he have made of modern sound system culture? What would it have been like if he'd gone to the West Indian Centre [Leeds venue home to the long-running Subdub night]? Because he loved echo and he loved dub, and what would that have sounded like?
So I started working with this vocal and doing these mad delays, and then I hit this roadblock. I was like, you're approaching this in a way that is far too linear. What would it be like if Arthur came into your studio? What would he be drawn to? And I have this mad little modular box which just makes freaky sounds. I plugged that into a reverb and a delay and just jammed on it. Everything in the track is actually just live jams that I've chopped up. And that was how it came about. So it is sampling, but it also felt like a kind of posthumous attempt at bridging something. But it will probably piss some people off.
TL: Talking about the people whose voices you use on the album, the people you pay tribute to and document, but also about your process… it seems fixated on legacy, and kind of tying together these people's legacy and what they mean to you, and channelling it through your own legacy, as your work that you will ultimately leave behind.
M: Yeah. I think it's backward-facing in one sense, because obviously it's got loads of people on it who died. It’s like three sections, but I did want there to be a present-day bit and a bit which looks forward. I like to think of it as a kind of time capsule that you leave behind and maybe some young people, a teenager will find it and be like, ‘Whoa, I didn't know about this.’ It's like a little Pandora's box for people to open. You know, I've had a lot of messages from straight friends saying, ‘Oh, I had no idea about this.’ Or, ‘I've listened to your album three times and every time I've found out something different.’
TL: 100%, I've learned stuff from the record.
M: Yeah, so it's really weird to have written something that I had no intention of sharing consciously. I never thought at any point during the process about how it's going to be received critically, what people are going to think of it. I really didn't, which is very rare, but less so now.
TL: Something I did want to bring up is Homobloc. For context, Homobloc is an annual queer festival put on in Manchester by Homoelectric and The Warehouse Project. In 2022, a group of local queer club collectives released a statement outlining their issues with the festival, which ranged from its links to the Saudi Arabian public investment fund via Live Nation – who are now 100% owners of Warehouse Project, and then were majority stakeholders – to exclusivity clauses. They argued that through working with Warehouse Project in this way, Homoelectric had lost sight of the community that they're meant to be serving. I believe you don't play Homobloc anymore. Am I right in saying that?
M: Mm-hm.
TL: And I also believe you were quite active in sharing that information with people behind the scenes before the statement came out. I just thought it might be good to touch on that situation and generate some thoughts on the commodification of queer clubbing and queer dance culture.
M: I think one of the things that I thought about a lot over lockdown was where I was playing and what that said and what that co-signed. It’s not just about playing the show, it's about what's funding the show, what are the ethics of the company that own the club you're playing at. As you get older, you start to realise more and more and more of these things. And to some extent it's a whack-a-mole, you know? Nothing is perfect. Far from it, especially in dance music. It's all made out of sellotape and toothpicks, to the point where if something goes wrong – if a flight connection goes wrong or something, I just text one of my friends ‘sellotape,’ and they know what I'm talking about. [Laughter]
But, you know, it's our mess. And I'm at a point where I can turn down work, but at the beginning it was really hard to say no, especially when I hadn't been earning over lockdown. People ask me now, ‘What do you do to make up the loss of earnings?’ I'm like, ‘I just earn a lot less money.’ And that's fine. But I think it was just a matter of, is this a mutually respectful relationship? What are you getting from me?
What do I give to this thing? And aside from anything my heart and my soul lies with small DIY parties. That's been quite hard to navigate as a ‘headliner’, in inverted commas, who's kind of come into this retrospectively, reverse-engineered it, and not ever wanted to leverage that, not ever wanted to be ‘I’m the headliner’ – because there's no headliners, it's not that. And these are my friends, you know? If my friends tell me they're not getting treated right, and they're getting put on at midday in room six and it's not changing, what matters more to me?
But I don't have any ill will. Do what you want. People have to play for different reasons. Some people are supporting their families. Some people are from much more precarious backgrounds than me. I don't judge people for the decisions they're making about where they're playing or what they're doing, and I'm not doing what I'm doing to be like, ‘I'm better than you.’ But as I get older I have this kind of aversion to compromising, so I'm trying where possible to not. But it's a constant work in progress.
TL: I mean, it's tricky even outside of music. We all know that if you follow that path down too far, the world is basically owned by like four evil companies.
M: My niece wants to go to Reading Festival, and I actually worry about her going to that, there's a lot of stories that strike the fear of God into me. But I said to her, the reason is because at the very top, the motivation is money. The first year at Homobloc, we were like, ‘Who are you raising money for?’ And we took loads of people up and raised loads of money, but it wasn't front of mind because profit is front of their mind, not community. And again, this is not in any way to diminish what an important thing Homoelectric has been in Manchester, it’s the reason a lot of these parties exist. So I separate that. But I just don't feel comfortable.
CR: I think sometimes there's just a size element, isn't there? Especially as you get older and you've been to enough parties, you're like, I know what makes a good party now, and it just isn't this. I remember clearly the day that I swore off Warehouse Project, because it had been the ultimate cattle market experience, everything about it was like, you queue for this, you queue for that. There was no space to go anywhere, we missed everything because there was just no room. We came back four hours later, like, what was that even about?
And you just think, actually, this doesn't make any sense. And you suddenly realise that these smaller, weirder parties, the off-grid stuff that maybe isn't even on Resident Advisor, can reignite your love of it when you thought you might be about to retire.
M: That’s my entire goal at the moment, to enjoy it by doing it less, and I’m still striving to do it less than I'm doing. I think I’m on 36 or 37 gigs, maybe a bit more this year, but you know, pre-pandemic it was like 100. So it's going in the right direction, but I want to cook it down a bit more.
TL: I remember when we had Frankie Decaiza Hutchinson on and she was talking about [Black artist-focused New York festival] dweller, and how big dweller could potentially go, she was like, ‘I think there is a cap on it.’ When it reaches a certain scale, you just lose control of what your mission is.
M: There's an element, with social media and with crowds, where it's kind of chasing this exponential growth idea. I once got offered a gig where part of the thing was like, ‘You'll probably see an increase in followers between five and ten thousand.’ I was like, that's terrifying.
Having had one period where I got a lot of new fans, it terrifies me, and actually so much of what I do is not only about speaking out but it serves a dual purpose of weeding people out a bit. Not that I want a homogenous, identical, everyone's politically aligned fan base, but you go on my Instagram now and it's like, these are like 20 posts, and you’ve kind of got to get on board with these things or at least be open for a conversation.
CR: Isn't one of your pinned posts the Palestine flag?
M: It is.
CR: Yeah, that draws one line, doesn't it. I think that's healthy.
TL: So on the other side of the coin, you've been doing these parties at Islington Assembly Hall, which are audience-focused daytime events. In your words, ‘sound that envelopes you rather than beats you over the head.’ You request that people not use phones on the dance floor, there are a lot of non-alcoholic drink options. Tickets kept back for people who might struggle to afford a regular ticket. Some would say the opposite of a Warehouse Project scale event in many ways.
CR: It's a David Mancuso party, is it not?
M: Honestly, the whole mood board for me was doing a party that felt like your living room. I have a playlist with one of my friends called Socks on Carpets. We looked at loads of venues and it wasn't what we wanted. We were looking at ballrooms, we were looking at stuff in central London, and then we went to Islington Assembly Hall, and it's so beautiful and it has all the seats, and they're really nice there, they go above and beyond.
It's an expensive gig to put on because there's a lot to do, but what was really nice was at the end of it, the security were like, this is one of the nicest crowds we ever had. One of the best bar spends. And they didn't have to kick anyone out. The best part is it has seats at the top, and we put sound up to the top.
The thing that always surprises me with clubs is like, you don't make it easy for people to last in your clubs. And that's what I'm really, really impressed with at Fabric now is they have the pizza place, Club Mate…
CR: Honestly, my kingdom for a sorbet, you know?
M: Yeah!
CR: It's crazy that so many venues are like, ‘Hey, do you want to be here for eight hours and only drink, like, vodka Red Bull, and also there's no seats?’
M: A lot less people are drinking, or a lot of people have a two drink limit, and if you're offering cold brew or pineapple juice or anything, the chances are they might spend another 15 quid. I mean, coolers is a drink I always get when I'm at a club, I'll go up and and get cranberry and orange soda in a pint glass. And that was what we put on the menu, coolers. I mean, the poor people who have to go and buy all the sweets. There's a whole lot of stuff. We've got to buy the bananas on the Thursday so they're ripe for the Saturday.
CR: Do you play music differently in that scenario? What kind of things are coming up that you would reach for that you've never played maybe?
M: I remember playing ‘Funkier Than A Mosquito's Tweeter’ by Nina Simone for the first time in there. ‘Railroad Man’ by Bill Withers. The second party got quite jungly at one point and loads of gays freaked out and left, and I got kind of dragged on Twitter. [Laughter]
TL: How much do you pre-plan?
M: The Islington folder is like 30 playlists, so pretty much every rock is overturned, but there's no order. I actually do plan and programme the first hour, because for me the first hour is more like an installation. It's like you're in a gallery, because it's just you and this big sound system and these lovely lights and very few people. And that's the most important part for me to feel comfortable.
CR: Final question. We always ask people to recommend us a film.
M: For context, in another life I was very much dead set on making movies, like as a teenager. From the age of 12, my dad had a camcorder and I used to shoot loads of emo videos, like driving in the car at night on the motorway or whatever. And then I got home once and I was looking at the cables that you plugged into the video player and it was yellow for video and red and white. And then I was like, wait, but red and white is the cable that plugs your CD player into the hi-fi. What if you plugged the hi-fi into the bit where you're plugging into the video, and pressed play on music and play on the video recorder? I basically realised that you could put your own music over videos.
So instead of the audio from the film you'd shot, it was just a little movie with no speaking. I used to get my sister in the car and then I'd sit in the boot and get my brother to skateboard down the road, and I'd film and record Led Zeppelin over it and stuff. Then I got my own video camera and I had Final Cut Pro and was making loads of little movies, but at that point you had to capture the film and it took hours to render anything. You’d spend like a whole week making a film and it'd be three minutes.
So let's just say I loved films. I subscribed to Empire for about eight years. I was bang into films and then I just got completely sidetracked by music, my video camera broke, and I started going out raving.
CR: Okay, so in that case – what's your favourite film? And now you're getting a list up on your phone. Are you a Letterboxd user?
M: No, I just use Notes. My husband has Letterboxd, he's like our shared Letterboxd. But I have the list. Let me pick a couple.
TL: I should say for context as well, when we debriefed Party Girl on a previous episode, I got a very excited email from you.
M: Party Girl is canon. It's incredible. Chris Cruse actually showed that to me. Chris is a DJ and an archivist and lots of things. He's also one of my very closest friends. It was his 40th, we had a weekend of clubbing and hijinks and then a few of us got takeaway and he was like, ‘Let's put on Party Girl.’ I'd never seen it, and then I think we watched it like 10 times that year. It's Parker Posey, it's got this incredible soundtrack…
TL: You know the scene where she uses the Dewey Decimal System to sort her roommate's records? Someone has made a mix of every record they list.
M: I love that. There's so many good lines. But okay, I can look at the list very quickly. Okay, so we've got Blade Runner. 120 BPM. La Haine. Portrait of a Lady on Fire. Grease. Educating Rita. Lords of Dogtown. Brief Encounter. In the Mood for Love…
TL: A classy selection.
M: My bangers are Empire Strikes Back, obviously. It's the best Star Wars by far, it’s the moodiest and darkest, but it's got the most action. Wayne's World. Literally, you can't get better than Wayne's World for slapstick. City of God. Grand Budapest Hotel.
CR: Not my favourite Wes [Anderson].
M: Billy Elliot. Clueless, obviously. The Truman Show.
CR: That is a great film.
TL: Masterpiece.
M: Gattaca.
CR: What’s Gattaca?
M: Gattaca is a film with Ethan Hawke, Uma Thurman and Jude Law, and it's set in the future, but it's like a ‘50s version of the future. OK, let's talk about Gattaca. It was badly reviewed and then reassessed, and where we're at right now, it's very prescient. What I love is when films interpret the future in a different way, and this is a very ‘50s version of the future, so hovering cars but it's all very classy and the tailoring is amazing.
Effectively what the story is about is Ethan Hawke is born at a time when you can genetically choose your children's makeup and and make sure they don't have any defects, but he's born naturally, and then his brother is born with all of the genetic modifications. Ethan Hawke is very intelligent but it’s his body, he has bad eyesight… and they can also predict when you're gonna die, so he's up against it. But basically he wants to go to space, and in order to go to space he has to take someone's genetic identity, which can happen when someone is in an accident. And Jude Law is that person. And Uma Thurman is in it and I think that's where [she and Ethan Hawke] met. Anyway it's a really good film, Michael Nyman did the score, it's beautiful.
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