DJ Deeon was a Chicago house hero

So let's all give him - and his peers - some love

By a work-related coincidence in this, the week DJ Deeon died, I have been speaking to a number of Chicago house DJs and producers for a forthcoming feature.

(Obviously this isn’t ALL ABOUT ME but….) I interviewed Deeon, a pioneer of booty house and a Daft Punk Teacher, back in 2021 for my Daft Punk book and he was charm itself: easy going, open, warm and ready to answer any questions. (You can hear the interview here.) For a man whose records included titles like Suck It Deep and Double Glock he seemed an incredibly gentle type, soft spoken and almost shy. He also looked frail, having had well documented health problems, including bypass surgery, chemotherapy and the amputation of his leg.

Deeon didn’t fit into the article I am writing, being more third wave Chicago than second, so I didn’t try to contact him for it. But I was thinking about Deeon and his laidback, humble charm, as I embarked on this new round of interviews. Few things make me as happy as chewing the fat with legendary house heads: over the past year or so, I’ve had the opportunity to speak to K’Alexi, Ron Trent, Boo Williams, DJ Heather and Roy Davis Jr. and each of them has been entirely captivating and utterly friendly, generous with their time and happy to share their stories for the fifth time that year about - yes! - going to see Frankie Knuckles DJing, to an utterly captivated audience of myself. 

So enchanted, in fact, have I been - and such a fan I am of the music - that I briefly flirted with the idea of writing a history of house, before more of the progenitors shuffle off this mortal coil. But then I realised it’s not really my story to tell, so I gave up on the idea and moved onto something else, which I hope to be able to tell you about some day.

I am sure that excellent histories of house music exist and that more will be written. All the same, the roots of house do seem bizarrely overlooked in mainstream music media. A new Daft Punk reissue will generate endless chin wagging - and, yes, I am guilty, having written a whole damn book about Daft Punk - but a new Ten City, Boo Williams, Louie Vega or Inner City album will hardly merit a scratch. (And, yes, I am claiming Inner City for house, despite Kevin Saunderson’s techno roots. Come on: just listen to those vocals.) 

A few years ago, I found myself frantically pitching the 2020 Inner City album We All Move Together - their first in almost three decades! - to music editors on the grounds that Inner City are AT LEAST as important as Joy Division to musical life, a point I was prepared to prove using pencil and compasses. But no dice. (The album isn’t brilliant, incidentally. But it has its moments, particularly towards the end, and certainly merits a listen.)

The one glaring exception to this house rule - which I’m not complaining about, because being an editor is hard - is Moodymann, whose records seem to get covered everywhere and, while I love Moodymann, I wouldn’t say he’s necessarily better than Ten City. I don’t know if he would say so either. (I guess you don’t really want to second guess Kenny Dixon Jr….)

ANYWAY, my point being that these Chicago house pioneers (including Deeon) are heroes to me who have made a nonsense of the adage that you should never meet your heroes by being utterly delightful. (Apart from one, who told me to “f*ck off”. But he’s legendarily grumpy.) 

Maybe, in a way, this every-day affability counts against them in the narrative stakes: some of house music’s most widely revered stars (I’m thinking Romanthony and Spencer Kincy, particularly) are those who are least available, often due to tragic circumstances that I wouldn’t wish on anyone. And that feeds their legend. Ten City’s Byron Stingily, on the other hand, is a part-time principal at a Chicago school, which only make me love him more but doesn’t fit well with the tortured genius narrative we love to employ.

The USA, on the whole, does a good job in recognising its musical heroes. (I am recently back from New York, where I stayed close to the National Jazz Museum and the Universal Hip Hop Museum.) But the country’s house music pioneers often seem to pass unnoticed. (Not entirely unnoticed, of course. But I’d be putting up banners let right and centre.)

I’d love house music, globally, to recognise these producers for the innovators they are; and all of us out there should appreciate them while there’s still time. Maybe the US should make each and every one of them cultural attachés because there is NO ONE out there, however twisted, who can speak to K’Alexi Shelby abut his early clubbing days and not come off a better, more enlightened person, at peace with the world. 

PS Please listen to my K’Alexi Shelby interview. I’m not saying it will being about world peace. But I am hinting at it, just a little. 

PPS How about some classic Deeon? 

PPS You might be able to help: who invented the filter disco sound? DJ Sneak certainly mastered it but I don’t think he was first to it. Was it Todd Terry? Louie Vega, maybe? The Untouchables’ Little Louie Anthem Part II from 1993 definitely has a filtered disco sample….

PPPS I took the picture from Deeon’s Facebook.

A review for you

Various Artists - The Endless Coloured Ways: The Songs of Nick Drake 

Nick Drake, apparently, had very big hands; and composed songs on a piano, which he then transposed to a guitar. The combination of these two things allegedly means that Nick Drake songs are very hard to cover. I say “allegedly”because it seems to me that there have been a number of Nick Drake tribute albums since the English folk artist was rediscovered by the general public in the 90s. 

Perhaps the truth is that Nick Drake songs are hard to cover well. His music, on the whole, is brilliantly orchestrated - on Bryter Later, his second album, he was joined by Fairport Convention, John Cale and Beach Boys session musicians Mike Kowalski and Ed Carter, with arrangements by Robert Kirby - and the featherweight yearning in Drake’s voice is something to be admired, rather than recreated. 

So my hopes were not high for The Endless Coloured Ways, in which the likes of Fontaines D.C., Let’s Eat Grandma and Liz Phair cover the songs of Rangoon’s favourite son. And, frankly, a lot of the album is totally superfluous, unless you REALLY want to hear Guy Garvey, David Gray, Ben Harper et al doing Drakeaoke. (Harper’s effort is especially carbon copy.) It’s a LONG album too at 94 minutes, which is only  a little under the combined length of Drake’s three studio albums.

But, surprisingly, all is not lost. Fontaines D.C. - a group I find myself admiring more and more as the seasons pass - manage to successfully convert Cello Song into a punk-ish drone; John Parish and Aldous Harding put an alluring Krautrock groove behind Three Hours; Let’s Eat Grandma give an electro swoon to From The Morning; and John Grant introduces a desolate, electronic ambience to Day Is Done, in a way that reminds me of the Clockwork Orange soundtrack. 

Sure, you have to pick these songs out of an orgy of mediocrity. But four successful - and even transformative - Nick Drake covers is a lot more than I expected from this album, proving that Nick Drake’s enigmatic melodies can be moulded into new shapes, even if most people aren’t imaginative enough to do so. Or maybe we all just need freakily long fingers.

Other Listening

The Breeders - Divine Mascis

In my daily listening habits I spend a lot of time trying to find music that I listened to as a child / teenager - and therefore has the zesty tang of nostalgia - but not too much to be burned out on. The Inspiral Carpets, REM and James are all fabulous examples of this and, as a result, I listen to them so much they escape any critical faculty. The Breeders, I am hoping, might fall into the same category. I know their hits - basically Cannonball and Divine Hammer - but I have never gorged on the band, so I hope there is still a lot there to discover. All if which is to explain why I was so excited when 4AD announced the 30th anniversary reissue of the Breeders’  second album, Last Splash. You probably know the album well so I won’t make too much of it, other than to say it is artfully slack in a kind of Pavement meets Pixies way that I find very alluring. (And who on earth writes a song as bizarre as Cannonball?) BUT you might not have heard Divine Mascis, one of two unreleased bonus tracks on the new anniversary edition in which, well, Dinosaur Jr’s J Mascis sings Divine Hammer. Sure enough, Mascis leans woozily over the song in a way I find utterly spellbinding. 

Newjeans - New Jeans

South Korean girl group fuse UK Garage, Jersey Club, Brandy-and-Monica-style harps and yearning melody in 100 seconds of the pop perfection? Did anyone say sound of the summer?

Ryuchi Sakamoto - REPLICA

Ryuichi Sakamoto’s fourth album Ongaku Zukan is getting a re-release in its 1984 Japanese edition by the ever reliable crate diggers at  Wewantsounds. REPLICA, which was originally release on a a bonus 7” EP with the album, is stunning, somewhere in between the wibbling worlds of Selected Ambient Works 2 and Kraftwerk’s excursions into sampling on Electric Café. 

Things I’ve done

RIP to the genuinely iconic Jane Birkin. You’ll have heard a lot about her as a fashion legend and star of cinema, as well as her music alongside Serge Gainsbourg. But her solo albums also come heavily recommended and in particular the LP that turned out to be her last: 2020’s Oh! Pardon tu Dormais… It’s a genuinely astonishing album, one that looks back on the death of her daughter Kate Barry with devastating tenderness and reflection but also seems to anticipate Birkin’s own demise, particularly on album closer Catch Me If You Can. I included Catch Me If You Can in a piece for Pitchfork this week, looking at seven songs “That Capture Jane Birkin’s Beguiling Magic”. I could have chosen 77, easily, but I hope you enjoy my selection nonetheless. 

In the last newsletter I talked about our trip to New York, where we recorded a podcast about Catalan music as part of the Summerstage festival in Central Park. Well, you can hear it now: Johann, Mar and I in conversation with Quinn Moreland on a slightly thundery summer’s day. We try to get to grips with what works now in Catalan music, the crossover between traditional and modern music that Catalan (and Spanish) musicians are doing so well, the big shadow of Rosalía, whether this music can break the US and whether it really needs to. Plus we look forward to the gig later that day, with Queralt Lahoz, Marala, Lia Kali and DJ Trapella. Have a listen on Soundcloud and Spotify or watch on YouTube. 

The steady drip of Primavera Sound interviews coming out on video post festival continues at a glue-y pace. And we reach one of my favourites: with Brutalismus 3000, a German gabber punk group I didn’t know that much about before Primavera but who were utterly charming, dead funny and decidedly rock and roll, if that is still a thing. They make being a romantic couple in a touring gabber outfit seem like the funniest thing in the world and I wish them all the very best. Plus, they gave us a shot of flavoured bourbon, which was lovely. More power to them. The video is here.

This just in: I interviewed Luke Turner, Quietus co-founder and author of Out of the Woods: Nature, Sexuality, and Faith in the Forest and the excellent recent book Men at War: Loving, Lusting, Fighting, Remembering 1939-1945, about Britain’s obsession with World War 2, itchy blankets, martial desires, the perfect subtitle and more. He is a brilliant, fascinating author and I loved speaking to him. Have a listen here.

Lots of thanks to Philip Sherburne and Shawn Reynaldo for supporting this newsletter. Obviously, I recommend their two Substacks - Futurism Restated, with an excellent guest post this week by Jesse Doris and First Floor, which kind of kicked off this whole electronic music Substack thing. But I imagine you already know that. So I will mention that I interviewed Shawn a few weeks ago about his new First Floor book and, a few weeks before that, I interviewed Philip about Sónar. Do have a listen.

A book recommendation

Yevgeny Zamyatin - We

Zamyatin was a Soviet dissident, who ended his life in exile in Paris; and We, his 1921 science fiction novel, was the first work banned by the Soviet censorship board. You can see why: the book portrays a nightmare future of totalitarian “utopia”, which influenced both 1984 and Brave New World. As often, with dystopian books, the nervous thrill lies in recognising the current world in this vision of the future past, from We’s algorithmically matched sexual congress to the all-powerful, quasi-religious dictator, the Benefactor. But Zamyatin doesn’t just create this, world, he artfully unpicks it, in a brilliant narrative arc.

The playlist

It’s here: new songs this week from J Hus, K-Lone Disclosure and more.