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RA.940 Man Power

Veröffentlicht
Jun 9, 2024
Dateigröße
275 MB
Länge
02:00:02

Versatile heaters from a grassroots champion.
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Man Power has a long track record as a producer and promoter, but if you had to boil his work in recent years down to a single quality, it might be altruism. Geoff Kirkwood hails from North Shields, a small town fringing the boundary of Newcastle in England's oft-neglected North East, and he wears his heritage proudly. The Me Me Me label boss's involvement in a flurry of civic restoration and no-filter paeans to the importance of working-class involvement in culture have become as central to his life as music-making itself. For an accomplished DJ who has played at nearly every good club you could name, that's no small feat. Young Brits might today know Kirkwood as the earnest geezer going back-to-back with DJs like Ewan McVicar, Paul Woolford, La La and Skream—peak-time specialists with a fine line in boofy house and ravey techno. Kirkwood is also a dab hand at the kind of elliptical house and deep cut detours favoured by '00s labels like DFA and Optimo (typically, his side project with The Juan Maclean comes with a winking moniker: Juan Power). So which side of Man Power were we in for? The answer on RA.940 is both. '60s free-verse poetry, Zebra Katz, Gesaffelstein and John Carpenter in the opening stretch? Makes sense. Octave One punching through Rozalla? You got it. An extended Joe Claussell workout over Radiohead's "Everything In Its Right Place"? Why not. In Kirkwood's hands, it all goes down as smooth as a pint of Newcastle Brown Ale. What have you been up to recently? That's quite a big question. Music-wise I've hit a bit of a purple patch and I finally feel like I've shook off the pandemic. That's lead to me releasing something every month for the last nine months, which is prolific even for me. It's all been stuff I'm super proud of with people who are fun to work with, like Radio Slave and Rekids, the Make A Dance Guys, Live At Robert Johnson, La La and people like that. I probably shouldn't admit this, but at some points over the last ten years I've had periods where I've arguably been chasing the wrong stuff and maybe haven't maintained my best standards, or have been motivated by other things beyond just doing cool shit with people I like—so despite how industrious I've been as of late it also feels like a return to something a bit more authentic and satisfying. It's also seen me get really busy playing a bunch of places I love like Lab.Oratory for Panorama Bar, Robert Johnson in Offenbach, Nitsa in Barcelona, The Berkeley Suite in Glasgow and loads more places where I just feel I get to be entirely myself while I play. Outside of DJing and producing I've been back living in North East England since the pandemic and I've thrown myself into a bunch of regional projects. Me and some friends started a social enterprise that bought and saved a 150-year-old heritage building in my home town of North Shields, and we've turned it into affordable workspaces for creative people. I'm also coming up on two years of throwing mad parties at King Street Club, our local CIU Social Club that's just round the corner from my house. We're in a small town outside of Newcastle but we've built a diverse community from the ground up which feels quite unlike anywhere else, and we've put on loads of amazing artists, like Optimo, Special Request, Artwork, Daniel Avery, Prosumer and more, with Skream, Ewan McVicar and Paranoid London all scheduled to appear soon. Lots of them actually ask us to play, which is mad considering we're just a little post-industrial town in the forgotten North East. It feels like I've gone from putting on little-known acts in big cities, to big acts in a little-known town, which is something I'm totally fine with. How and where was the mix recorded, and can you tell us the idea behind it? The mix is a bit of a philosopher's axe to be honest. I first came up with the opening section about four years ago in the first lockdown when nobody had anything better to do than sit around all day thinking about mixes. I had some CDJs on loan from the World Headquarters club that was in lockdown at the time. Originally it started with A King & J Matthews' "Pots and Pans" which went into "Numbers on The Boards" by Pusha T, which is a kind of smart ass blending of a sample and the song that samples it that I'd wanted to do for a long time. Those two tracks only got subbed out at the last minute with something by my friends Ess O Ess playing under a piece of North Eastern modernist poetry by Basil Bunting, which I'd literally only read about the week before last in the AMAZING book The North Shall Rise Again by Alex Niven, which I urge everyone to read. After recording the first bit and not knowing what to do I re-recorded it in the second lockdown and brought it up to almost exactly an hour long, ending on the Robag Wruhme track. At the time Pioneer had lent me some CDJ-3000s and a V10 mixer to road test. I liked the mix but it felt unfinished, so at some point last year I jumped in and recorded the second hour at home, with a pair of rented CDJs that I still had in my house after throwing one of my Cheap Thrills all-night-long parties. As I say, I then swapped out the intro a couple of days ago. Just to be clear, I don't normally put mixes together like this and I tend to be way more instinctive. But I really felt compelled to do something with a bit more thought in it than usual after kind of shitting out mix after mix during the pandemic like a lot of other DJs. Nearly every track is something I have played in a club and provides a clear memory of having connected with a crowd. The only exceptions are the poem at the start, and the closing song which I have a vivid memory of playing to death when it was the only tape I had on site while I was working as an apprentice decorator for my grandad back when I was 17. The mix is me trying as best I can to cram in as much as possible of the spectrum of how I DJ into a cohesive two hours. It has everything from smartypants film soundtracks at the start, to trippy bangers, to heads down house, to proper techno, to me gambling on recontextualising a controversially twee pop-house hit to abject anthem-bashing at the end, all of which are admittedly very me. There's also a bit of storytelling going on too. Lyrically this starts off with a paean to unrequited love, moves through some pretty dark relationship stuff and then gets more and more optimistic until it ends on a completely smitten note. What's one club or party that had a major impact on you as an artist? Foundation in Newcastle was the first proper club I ever went to, and the one that was the scene of my mental liberation and social deprogramming. I still don't think I've been anywhere with a better layout to this day, too. It was back in the days when you could have a weekly party that just booked great DJs. We had Shindig which was a great introduction to house music, but you'd just as likely find me at Wax:On on Fridays, or pogo-ing to rock & roll at Stone Love on a Thursday. Even the student night on a Monday, Smile, was fantastic.  I was there for the last-ever party at the venue, which is a block of flats these days. It was in the years before the smoking ban and it was so sweaty in there that not only was it dripping from the ceiling, but the air was so moist that you couldn't get a lighter to even work and cigarettes soaked through inside your pockets. I'm obviously getting on a bit now and potentially a little jaded at my age (and after doing this for so long), but I often try to think back to those first experiences and try to tap into that when I make music, think about DJing or plan a party. That mix of excitement, trepidation and a slight sense of danger always feels like it might be the ideal lab conditions for a transformative experience. What are you looking forward to in the near future? DJ-wise I'm taking almost all of June off because I've finally realised what self-care is and how much I fall apart if I keep working at the pace I work at without taking a step away sometimes. After that I'll be headed to a bunch of places like KOKO London, Hï Ibiza, the US and Asia, where I'm really excited to be playing DJ Harvey's new club, Klymax. There's also back-to-back gigs with Ewan McVicar, Skream and Special Request in the coming weeks, which all promise to be fun and enjoyable challenges. I've just started mentoring four young DJs (big ups Becky Woodcock, Macca, Melba and Westy) for a programme I've devised with World Headquarters and Youth Music, which sees us do our best to try and turn over our experience, contacts and networks to people from backgrounds that traditionally normally don't see the same amount of privilege or access. We had our first meet-up yesterday and I'm realising how much fun I'm going to have approaching this all over again from a fresh perspective. I think we can really make a difference for them too and it's obviously a nice feeling to be involved with something you feel is meaningful. I've also just signed a deal to open King Street club as our own full time grassroots venue after finding investment to put a high-end sound system in full time. The idea is that we make it an affordable space for regional promoters to be able to experiment and continue to build our music scene. It's up to an 800 capacity, though, so it also provides a space for bigger acts to come too and help keep this mad momentum we're finding in North Shields. The most important thing for us is that we're doing it with the existing social club members, rather than replacing them. The people who use that club already represent a legitimate community that's at risk, so this is going to give them a much needed financial boost to ensure that they can keep doing what they're doing too. The venue will mainly be for live music, but we'll continue to put on our big dance parties too. Beyond that I'm doing the final touches on a plan to take the idea of doing social clubs on the road and visit community venues in need in other parts of the country. It'll be part club tour, part social intervention and part video documentary. We're just in the process of getting the other DJs all on board. Obviously for this to work properly we've needed to focus on people with big audiences, but I'm flattered to say a load of them have already said yes with no reservations, so it feels like that's a massive sign. After that we'll be looking at brand partners and media partners. I have to admit the partnership stuff is an entirely new world for me, but I'm happy to try and involve myself in it when I can see a way of using it for what feels like the greater good. Releases-wise, I have more music due on Live at Robert Johnson and Echocentric by the end of the summer, but I'm somehow still finding ways to keep finishing tracks among everything else, so I imagine that release schedule will have swollen again by the time this interview gets shared anywhere.
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