Books could be – and hopefully will be – written about the life of Harvey Bassett and the number of ways that he’s contributed to our culture over the years. He’s a man old enough to have participated in punk and disco first time around, and still carries the spirit of both with him in everything he does, but at the same time remains as fresh and enthusiastic as a teenager in the first flush of their dancefloor honeymoon. This is, quite simply, one of the best DJs on the planet.
We couldn’t be happier to have him headlining our Ray-Ban x Boiler Room 007 event in Milan. And here, as a stop-gap until that book is finally written, BR editor-in-chief Joe Muggs picks some favourite magic moments from his decades-long career, and with typical passion and attention to detail, Harvey himself holds forth on his own passions. All together they add up to 12 reasons to be cheerful about this show, and 12 reasons that Harvey is well worthy of the demented love that fans have for him.
Because Harvey always knew where the party was.
Many years ago Harvey was part of the Tonka soundsystem who presaged acid house with their electro-funk parties in quarries and warehouses around the Southeast of England. Tonka would, incidentally, also nurture the career of acid-trance monster Choci (of Choci’s Chewns) as well as deep’n’mellow Brighton mainstay Darius Akashic – a clear indication of the openness of their ethos. But it was only a small step for him to be able to become an early resident at the Ministry of Sound – then still genuinely focused on becoming the heir to the Paradise Garage. From hippies in the fields to shiny-shoes clubbers uptown, he was ready to get them all dancing.
Because Harvey has been rock’n’roll from the get-go.
I knew rock music and club beats could mix. Of course I did, I was from the generation that heard Primal Scream and Happy Mondays in indie discos and thought that the wheel had just been invented. But one night in the early 1990s at my friends’ club night Mufflewuffle, among loads of tasteful house and disco, Harvey – a blues-rock and punk drummer before he was ever a DJ, remember – dropped “Undercover of the Night” and it hit like like a slap round the chops, a reminder that club eclecticism and electronic-rock fusion were nothing new, a clue that there were deeper and longer traditions to be mined… And it set everybody inside the place wigging out like loons.
Because Harvey loves… a day in London.
“Yesterday I walked to the South Bank, looked at the London Eye, looked at the old skate spot, walked over the pedestrian bridge, hung out at Cleopatra’s Needle which is one of my favourite little landmarks in London – it’s a real obelisk that was given to the British by the Egyptians; it’s supposed to be 3,000 years old or something, but personally I think it’s 6,000 years old. I used to sit there and eat my sandwiches when I was a motorcycle courier 25, nearly 30 years ago. Another interesting thing is, it’s scarred by one of the first bombs dropped by the Germans in World War I: by a Zeppelin, I believe. Or the plinth that one of the sphinxes sits on has some shrapnel damage, and there’s holes in one of the sphinx legs.
“He became one of the very first to use digital technology to re-edit tracks for the dancefloor”
“So I did that, then I walked up into one of the little parks opposite there, and I learned something new: that Victoria Embankment is only a couple of hundred years old, and actually the Thames was a hundred yards wider and went further back, all the way to The Strand. ‘The Strand’ means beach, shoreline, so it was the bank of the Thames, and there’s a gate there that’s 500 years old that’s still in the park there, the park where I used to smoke weed and watch bands that would play on holidays, and that gate used to be on the beach.
“Then I walked down towards Charing Cross, down under the little arch, wondering if Heaven was still there, and stood there sighing to myself at the fond memories of seeing Bronski Beat there, and Frankie Goes To Hollywood when ‘Relax’ had just come out, and remembering the wafting smell of amyl nitrate, the vision that was Holly Johnson… then I got a cab, saw a friend, hung out and listened to his soundsystem, walked over to another friend’s council flat and had tea and pastries, then went and had Turkish kebabs with two more friends and talked all about hi-fi all night until about two in the morning… and that was my day. A fantastic day, spending as long as I wanted staring at the things other people wouldn’t tolerate.”
Because Harvey kept close to the edit.
It’s hard to picture it now, but in the 1990s and early 2000s, other than in specialist circles, disco was a dirty word, more associated with wacky student “seventies nights”. But Harvey kept the faith, and also became one of the very first to use digital technology to keep the tradition of re-editing tracks for the dancefloor alive. His label, given the typically ribald name, Black Cock, was his outlet for these edits, and the 12”s he put out deservedly still fetch big money.
Because Harvey can get away with the strangest things.
Yes it’s THAT Jona Lewie – “Don’t Stop the Cavalry” Jona Lewie. Just one example of a track that’s been on rotation in Harvey sets that very, very few other DJs would have the brass neck to play, let alone make into a peak-time magic moment. The stories are legion of DJs and crate-diggers who’ve spent silly money on some rare bit of wax because they’ve seen Harvey turn it into gold, only to discover that outside the context of his impeccable set construction and showmanship, they’re left with no more than a bit of kitsch.
Because a Harvey track never gets old.
This one is 17 years old, and still does the business.
Because Harvey loves… mystical shit.
“I was just talking to a friend about crystal skulls. There’s a museum here that has crystal skulls, and my friend goes to hang out with it. And we were talking about the Voyager spacecraft and how they sent it out in 1976 or whenever with a record on it, a gold record for the aliens to play, and I thought to myself, well, the aliens would have CD players by now, so they wouldn’t know what to do with a fucking record. And we were discussing how activated carbon can record things, and how silicon can record things, how you can make radios out of coal, how carbon-silicon crystals are at the centre of computers and all this fun stuff, and how maybe crystal skulls that people don’t know the meaning of are a kind of recorded medium – but people don’t have skull players any more. So we don’t know how to decode the information within the crystal skull, although people do hang out in their presence to get vibes. So I do think that what people think of as ghosts or whatever is occurrences or information recorded by buildings or places. So I think it’s quite possible that if you got the right machine you could replay what buildings and surroundings have experienced.”
Because Harvey keeps it pure.
For all that Harvey is known as a big character, fashion plate, gentleman adventurer, raconteur, freak brother number one, there’s one thing that is really responsible for his longevity: the fact that, musically, he keeps it simple and to the point when it matters. His remix House Of House‘s “Rushing to Paradise” in 2009 got kind of sidelined, in favour of the original version which had everyone gassed due to 12-minute twinkly-piano deep house epics being thin on the ground at the height of dubstep. But with the benefit of distance, this version can be seen for the work of genius that it is: pure and timeless in its pursuit of dancefloor effect.
Because Harvey loves… surf and skate culture.
“I do surf, I don’t skate properly any more because it really hurts when you fall off. I broke my arm in an empty swimming pool – skating, I mean: I didn’t dive in when there was no water – then I retired a bit from skating, although Venice Beach does have a wonderful skate park with a seventies-style snake run that you can just roll into. And I’d put together my holy grail dream skateboard that I’d always wanted but never had, which is 60mm red Kryptonics, Gullwing Pro 2s, and a Logan Earth Ski, which is what Tony Alva used to skate before he had his own signature skateboard – the ’75, ’76 cusp of the second wave of skateboarding, when polyurethane came and it really started to happen.
“My skateboard’s a real cosmic spaceship – you go backwards and forwards in time when you ride that thing”
“Although actually at the time I had a Sims Taperkick with tracker trucks and 70mm green Kryptonics that my grandmother had brought back from California for me, which I still owned, I always wanted the Earth Ski so I got it, thinking ‘oh I’ll skate down the shops on it and cruise around.’ It’s a real cosmic spaceship – you go backwards and forwards in time when you ride that thing, at the same time, it’s an amazing board. So I do skate a little bit, and I like to surf, at Venice Pier which is my local spot, just a couple of blocks from where I live, so I walk down whenever there’s a little swell. We go and surf there, at the local break, I surf with my friends and we have a nice time, or when the surf’s a little better we’ll go to First Point Malibu, or up to Point Doom, or to County Line, or any one of a myriad of surf spots within an hour’s drive of Venice Beach. It’s great.”
Because Harvey won’t stop rocking til he retires.
More recently, there’s his ongoing band Wildest Dreams on Smalltown Supersound, which started as a knockabout project and has mutated into something more serious. But a decade back, Harvey had Map Of Africa with Thomas Bullock (Rub’n’Tug). At the time, the press around the band described it as “Balearic rock” – or even (sigh) “Balearock” – but listening back, it is nothing but dirty, dirty rock’n’roll.
Because Harvey loves… partying in L.A.
“In Los Angeles I’ve never had a residency as such. For a long time – over ten years – I was doing the Sarcastic Disco parties, which were very traditional semi-legal warehouse parties in sound studios and warehouses in and around central LA. I can probably say, because I’ve been to a lot of others, that it was one of the best underground dance parties in the world for those ten years. When I do my own party, I feel personally responsible for the welfare of everybody that’s come to that party, so I put everything into it, so the security are there to protect you, not to threaten you, the toilets are there to be nice and sanitary, the soundsystem is not abusive, and I will play to the best of my ability and go all night, for seven, eight, nine hours.
“It was a special event, but we got a bit too big for our boots and went viral, and 2,000 people showed up for the last one, of which about 700 of whom were probably there because they thought it was the place to go and not because they knew it was the place to go. Our profile was raised too much, we rattled the cage of the Burbank P.D. and they came and shut us down again. I can’t have that happen again, so Harvey’s Sarcastic Disco is probably at an end, and all the people who went can look back and have fond memories and go “ohh you should’ve been there, parties aren’t like the old days” and all that type of behaviour.
“I don’t like to party at other people’s expense, I don’t like to rage about people complaining”
“So we sidestepped from that and I’ve done a couple of legitimate parties, one at the Sound Nightclub in Hollywood which was very nice, and one in a warehouse in Downtown LA kindly supported by Red Bull who put up the dosh and sponsored it so we could have free entry, free bar, free everything for people to enjoy themselves. The problem has been that off the back of a couple of parties, Sarcastic included, there had been a trend for warehouse parties to happen, and it had become conspicuous. I’m a believer in the theory that if a tree falls in a forest and nobody hears it, it didn’t make a noise, and if a warehouse party goes off in a place where nobody complains, then it didn’t happen.
“I don’t like to party at other people’s expense, I don’t like to rage about people complaining, the last thing anyone wants, including me, is boom-boom-boom in the back yard keeping the kids awake – so if you party respectfully, you can do it without trouble. But people were starting to party without respect and getting shut down because of it, and the atmosphere and climate in LA led to all the parties, even the clandestine ones, getting shut down, so I had to prove that it was possible to do it legitimately too; the police were our security, the fire marshalls were happy we had permits and all the rest, we were free to do our thing in a very grown up and happening way, and it was a huge success. That’s the way for the foreseeable future that Harvey parties in Los Angeles will go.”
Because Harvey still knows where the party is.
From the quarries of 1980s Sussex to his own clubs in Honolulu and LA the dark room of 2010s Berlin, he’s never once lost touch with where the fun people are…
