Greg Bowes Dance music tour
In what promises to be one of the dance events of the year, a veritable who’s who of commercial and underground dance musicians and DJs have been assembled for this year’s Camel Experience. The series of parties – this year subtitled, for reasons unknown, Quadropheria – begins in Cape Town on Friday May 8, moving on to Durban on Saturday May 9 and ending up in Johannesburg on Saturday May 16.
Dealing out the disco delights will be live act and multi chart-topper Sash, joined by DJs Baby Doc, SJ, Mrs Wood and Blu Peter from the ever-popular React label, who will be firing up the “progressive” floor. Drum’n’bass legend Rob Playford will head up the jungle floor, and could well turn out to be the real star of the show.
Apart from engineering and production credits on both of Goldie’s albums and having toured the world as Bj”rk’s support act, Playford also runs jungle’s most successful independent label, Moving Shadow, which recently celebrated its eighth birthday. This may surprise a lot of people who think of jungle as a new phenomenon, but vinyl-concerned labels like Moving Shadow and Suburban Base were very active during the United Kingdom’s rave scene of the early 1990s, forwarding breakbeat-driven bleep anthems under the tag of “hardcore”.
Many of Moving Shadow’s early releases were Playford and friends under “probably about 20 aliases”, he tells me on the line from London. Playford is better known as a label boss, but coming from a DJing background he is familiar with a few of the more commercial DJs sharing the bill from his rave days. When Moving Shadow took off and the pressures on the illegal rave scene got too much he packed it in, but after getting back into turntable manipulation again recently he says, “I feel 20 all over again.”
A must in any discerning jungle DJs box, Moving Shadow has released well over 100 singles and about 14 albums – including The Deepest Cut, the first full-length album by drum’n’bass artist Omni Trio. Their newly formed wing entitled Audio Couture “was originally just for remixes,” says Playford, “but now we’ve coupled it with a lot of stuff we get that’s a bit different – things that are not really in Moving Shadow’s style.”
Playford has been one of the guiding lights of the drum’n’bass scene in the United Kingdom and has seen it rise from relative obscurity to being approved of by the mainstream with veterans such as Fabio and Grooverider now doing national shows on Radio One.
“There used to be a few taped shows syndicated to various small stations througth a network. Now because Radio One is linked up to the Internet you can get Fabio and Grooverider anywhere in the world. All of a sudden people from far-flung places know exactly what you’re playing.”