From the Brudenell to Berghain with Tom Sharkett

As I mentioned, the Cure were a favourite of mine growing up. I’ll hold my hands up to ripping off Robert Smith’s guitar across both W. H. Lung albums (and wait until you hear the third…).
After playing Simple Things Festival in Bristol in 2019, we headed to Lakota to watch Avalon Emerson. To my delight, one of the final tunes to her set that night was ‘the Walk’. It was never my favourite tune of theirs’s, but it framed it in a new light entirely and it soon became a new fave. This was before I’d written the Futuro EP and it really made me feel that I could bring whatever influences I wanted into the dance music I wanted to make.

I have to thank Andy for showing me this one quite early on into our relationship working together. This tune fits right in with the new wave and post punk I’d loved as a teenager and slotted right next to bands like Devo in my record collection. Finding out Todd Terje had done a remix was another joining the dots moment for me, and I absolutely love his version. If a band wrote a tune like this today it’d be getting rinsed in clubs no doubt. What a banger.

At the back end of last year, I did a mix for the Phantasy mix series. Labels like Phantasy and Optimo were an instant hit for me as it became clear they were coming from a similar place to myself. I knew that I wanted the Phantasy mix to range across weird, wonky and banging, so I filled it with stuff like Marc and the Mambas and the Durutti Collumn, and then things like Terr and Fantastic Twins. For the last tune I wanted to add a dose of that dark and grey but optimistic sounding 80s post-punk, and the drum machine intro to Cities in Dust made it the perfect fit. Siouxsie and the Banshees are post-punk for me. The vocals, the abrasive but somehow still poppy production and the danceability to a lot of their tunes. I haven’t had chance to play this in a club yet, but I bet it’d work a treat.

When I got to know Liza (aka softlizard) who provides the vocals for Mind in Motion off the Futuro EP, it was great fun to talk about what music we listened to and share stuff back and forth across with each other. One mutual name that cropped up for us both was Death in Vegas, and you can guarantee you that a lot of bands have taken influence from Richard Fearless and co. It was hard to pick one specific tune, but this is probably my favourite (and it definitely works in a club as DJ Harvey shows in Mission Impossible Fallout).

Picking one Patrick Cowley tune was tricky but he absolutely had to be in this playlist. You can tell it’s mostly played live and the wonkiness to it is what makes it so great. New York is obviously a consistent example of live music meeting with club music – from ESG, to the Loose Joints to LCD. On the note of ESG, as someone who grew up in Manchester it was another full circle discovery to make the Martin Hannett connection to them.

Carrying on slightly with the New York theme (although only for the label), DFA was another favourite label of mine and an obvious stalwart for bridging the gap between alternative music and dance music. I played LCD’s records to death, but one of my favourite DFA releases is the debut album from the German producer, Perel. At the time I heard this, it was exactly the music I wanted to make. It had all the synth wave elements I loved but still had an organic feel with the sound of natural drums. This could easily be played on stage or dropped as an end of night tune, and it’d work equally as great in either setting.

DAF were another band I didn’t discover until my 20’s but they were an instant hit for me when I heard them. My Dad used to play stuff like Bronski Beat and the Human League when I was younger and whilst I was listening to bands like the Fall. DAF in my head slot somewhere right in the middle and it felt like they’d always been in my life. I didn’t even know what EBM when I first saw it written about next to DAF and others like Front 242, but I knew I loved it and that it was a nice wonky mixture of everything I liked.

Cabaret Voltaire were a band I’d listened to as a teenager and upon deep diving further into what constituted as EBM, they were now cropping up again in my 20’s. I knew the more well-known tunes like Nag Nag Nag and heard Matt Peel who produced the band reference them, as well as some of my favourite Leeds bands of that time like Eagulls. It was now exciting to hear DJs like Eclair Fifi play them, which is where I heard Sensoria for the first time.

Perhaps an obvious choice for a playlist like this but I couldn’t not put it in. The first time I heard it was in Haai’s Essential Mix a few years ago and it was another tune that felt like it’d been in my life forever. It had everything in it that I had loved growing up and I couldn’t wait to show my Dad, Matt, and any friends who hadn’t already heard it as I knew they’d absolutely love it! This was another moment that made me feel comfortable taking the new more dance-y influences into writing with the band, and bringing the band background influences I had into the dance music I was making.

If you asked a group of people to put a similar playlist together, I can guarantee that October (Love Song) would appear on the list. Like Cabaret Voltaire, Throbbing Gristle were another band I listened to as a teenager and whose name I saw crop up across mixes and interviews with producers and DJs in my 20s. Andrew Weatherall was the DJ who put me onto this song in particular and I’ve seen friends of mine from similar musical backgrounds discover this song at various points in our 20s too. It’s a perfect end of the night tune whether it be in a grimy dive bar or a dancefloor and is another tune that feels like it’s been in my life forever.