MIKEQ @ Chow Down, Aug 9th

BIG UP to everyone who came to Chow Down for MikeQ - what a night! Great to see ballroom finally taking off in my home town, here's some ace pics taken by Mike himself:

And two more - taken from the balcony of our 14th floor flat in Salford, just outside Manchester city center, great to finally have a photographer who can capture our nighttime view!

CHOW DOWN w/ MIKEQ & CVNT TRAXXX Aug 9th, Soup Kitchen, Mcr

ARGH!! Playing with the Legend that is MIKEQ next week - the first time a true ballroom star has djed in our city. Pros to CHOW DOWN for bringing him up and booking me to support!

MANCHESTER ALT QUEER SCENE piece for Thump UK

Having gotten a bti sick of reading about how fabulous London's queer scene is atm, I decided to put something together for Thump about what's going on here in Mcr. I didn't think they'd publish this but they did! Kudos to Lauren and everyone at the site. :)

Bored of London's Queer Club Scene? Manchester's is Wild and Wonderful

Hey kids, wanna know how the media in the UK works? Here's a rule of thumb: if something is not happening in London, it's not happening. If a music scene doesn't have an outlet or any representation within the capital, then it obviously must not be happening anywhere in the country. Everywhere outside London is filled with behind-the-times bumpkins, who are desperate to emulate the forward fashions and tastes of swinging London.

 

Well fuck that noise. Right now, regional scenes are the healthiest they have ever been in the UK. In a way, you could even thank London for it - by ignoring what is going on around the country, these scenes have had a chance to flourish. 

 

I live and work in Manchester. Before I moved here, I lived and worked in Glasgow. Both cities have incredible live music and clubbing scenes - gay and straight, DIY and commercial. I'd like to tell you about some of the awesome shit that is going on in Manchester right now, particularly on the queer scene.

 

FEATURING: House OF Suarez Ball, Vogue Brawl, Cha Cha Boudoir, Tranarchy, Mother's Ruin, 2 Koi Karp, Kurt Dirt, Islingotn Mill and a fuckton more, right HERE! 

TRANARCHY Disco Bloodbath flyer

House Of Tranarchy's next party - we will be performing live and hosting the 2nd room at Bollox "Party Monster Ball" over Pride Weekend, Sunday August 25th, 10-4am, Manchester. I'll be spinning NY disco, diva house, cunty beats and club kid classics with DJ Alectronic. I will probably throw a cake into the audience.

HELL NO to racist drag at Manchester Pride

Here are screen grabs from the latest video by Manchester drag/pop-parody act Queens Of Pop, whose previous hits include “Kerry’s On The Coke Again".

Their latest video is a parody of Will.I.Am’s “Bang Bang" performed as black & white minstrels, to the tune of the Charleston. Both perfromers appear in black face with enlarged jazz-hands, and the lyrics include jokes about black men having big willies, black men infecting others with AIDS and gay black men being rapists:

Queens of Pop will be performing on the main stage at this year’s gay Pride festival in Manchester.
Fuck that.

If, like me, you don’t want this disgusting racist nonsense given the stamp of approval by Manchester’s most popular (publicly funded) gay event, or performed live to a crowd of thousands as a representation of the best of Manchester’s gay culturer, email Manchester Pride directly here: http://www.manchesterpride.com/contact/

Or you can sign this petition: https://www.change.org/en-GB/petitions/manchester-pride-act-out-say-no-to-racism-at-manchester-pride-3

GREG WILSON "How House Music really hit the UK"

Great article by Greg Wilson about the white-washing of House music’s roots in the UK, and how that relates to the “no-shuffling" discrimination of certain modern dancefloors. Personally, I think there’s a lot of str8-washing in the “accepted history" Greg is railing against too, but race is the very deserving focus of this excellent piece:

During recent times I’ve been intrigued to hear about the growing schism on the House scene here in the UK, brought about by the introduction, primarily by young black dancers, of ‘foot shuffling’ (aka ‘cutting shapes’), an increasingly popular style of dancing that has been met with much hostility in certain quarters, and, somewhat bizarrely, resulted in shufflers being banned from some clubs for dancing in this way. The accusation is that not only do they take up too much dancefloor space, but there’s a general ‘moodiness’ with regards to their attitude. Although it no longer seems to be online, there was even an ‘Anti Foot Shuffling Campaign’ page on Facebook, with some of the posts suggesting underlying issues of racism. As one person commented, “It's not that all these people on here hate shufflers, they just don't like fact that black people are into House music now.” Although this comment may be well intentioned, it’s also somewhat misguided given there are, and always have been, plenty of black people in the UK who are big into House – it’s just that their presence is usually to be found away from the mainstream, in more specialist avenues like the Deep and Soulful House scenes. Furthermore, some of the older black crowd are also resistant to this new wave of shuffling, so to present it as a purely black / white issue would be wrong.

That said, what’s clear from this whole kerfuffle is that there are a significant amount of mainly white enthusiasts on the scene today who seem to segregate House as somehow belonging to them, whilst suggesting the black crowd should stick to ‘their own music’, the likes of Grime, Hip Hop, R&B and other more ‘urban’ genres. This is all despite the fact that House, as anyone with even a basic awareness of its origins would tell you, was born within Chicago’s black clubbing community back in the mid-80’s.

The 25th anniversary of the Acid House ‘Second Summer Of Love’ is upon us (the original ‘Summer Of Love’, of course, being way back in psychedelic ’67, emanating from the Hippie movement of San Francisco). It’s remarkable that House music has been the main staple of British dancefloors for a colossal quarter of a century, the original ‘ravers’ now middle-aged. Yet despite its importance to this country’s popular culture, its true roots have never been fully acknowledged. In fact, if you told many of those on the House scene today that it was mainly black kids in the UK who first embraced the music, they’d no doubt look at you incredulously, for everybody knows that Ibiza ’87 was year zero, as this is how the story has, and continues to be told – the true origins in the relatively grim cities of the North and Midlands buried deep beneath the sun-drenched romance of the White Isle.

What’s even more remarkable is that the original style of dancing to House music in this country, before the hands in the air approach of the Rave era, was uncannily similar to shuffling, as illustrated by this now historic video, recorded at the Moss Side Community Centre in Manchester on September 27th 1986:

Read the full article here on Greg's blog.