Mixing House Music - the Alan Mckenzie Way

House Music hit me like a runaway train in the late 1980s. I'd never been much of a clubber up until about 1987, when I was persuaded to go out clubbing a couple of times with friends. While there were some good tunes around at the time - I'm thinking of "Word Up!" by Cameo and "Let it All Blow" by Dazz Band - it was the first time I heard "Pump Up the Volume" by M|A|R|R|S that pulled me into the House Music scene.

So, suddenly I was in London's Limelight every week, waving my arms about to the all the early House tunes like "Let's Get Brutal" by Nitro DeLuxe and "House Nation" by The HouseMaster Boyz. Acid House came and went and I bought my first pair of decks, some fairly dodgy Citronic belt-driven jobs.

By 1992 I'd upgraded to a pair of Technics and had been DJing parties for my mates in all kinds of strange places. Once we took over a railway arch in London Bridge. The locals (two of them) complained, but as it was a one-off party, they let us off with some minor grumbling.

There were other parties, then around 1997, I briefly ran a night at a small club in Hackney. It wasn't a great success, but we did have a laugh doing it.

These days, I maintain I'm too old and too grumpy to be faffing around with record decks at three in the morning. I still manage to hobble along to a club every so often and I make a point of keeping up with the music.

But technology is also a big part of what I do, and I've found it's a great deal less frustrating to put together mix CDs using my Macintosh and ProTools, than it is to mix tunes together "live".

Some CDs I've mixed recently >>

Some tunes I'm looking for >>