Peace Pipe – Peace Tape VII

Peace Pipe 7, deep house remembered, warm, weird and relentless.

In 1997 I moved to Newcastle-upon-Tyne to study art. A new city meant a new way of going out. Growing up in london before mobiles you needed to plan your night, to arrange in advance. I’ll see you in the queue, at this pub, on this corner at this time. Newcastle was different. The group of likeminded music people was smaller, knowable, if only by sight. You could drift a bit. Once I had been there a while if I turned up somewhere chances were I would see a friend or at least someone familiar. Extra dark drum and bass and hippie trance were the norm at student nights, quite privileged and straight, very focused on one way of being cool, one aesthetic. But Shindig at the Riverside was another thing. It had an older crowd, mainly locals, people who had been dancing to house music for years. The music was nothing like I had experienced in London, maybe Soulsonic came close, but not really. This was house music as heard in the midlands and the north, deep US dubs, tribal drums, memory traces of handbag and prog, thick relentless kicks. I felt out of my depth but in a really good way. I’d constantly see people I knew by sight from another context, a bus queue, a clothes shop, behind the bar in a pub. Maybe we would end up talking, or at least nod and smile in a blurry way. Although everyone was scrupulously well dressed, this wasn’t a fashion thing, an obscure place you had to fight to find. It felt, to me at least, like house music as a function of society. Ordinary and psychedelic at the same time...