Everybody who was any good was terrible first. It is the least fashionable fact in dance music and the most useful one, so it is worth starting here.
In 1988, Alexander Coe was nineteen, living near Manchester, and going to the Haçienda every week because he had walked in one night and found the thing he had been looking for without knowing he was looking for it. He had grown up on Top 40 radio. He had been made to take classical piano lessons by a stepmother whose insistence he resented at the time and has been quietly grateful for ever since. He had left Epsom College before sitting his A-Levels. None of that reads like the CV of the man who would be voted the best DJ in the world twelve years later.
Then he got a booking. His first one. In Stockport.
He thought it was the volume
By his own account, it went badly. Not nervously-badly, not first-night-wobble badly — properly, memorably badly. He has described the performance as “absolutely horrendous”, and the reason is almost too good: he had not worked out what the pitch control did. He was using it as a volume fader.
If you have ever stood behind a pair of decks, you will know exactly what that room sounded like. If you haven’t: the pitch control is the slider that speeds a record up or slows it down so it can be matched to the one already playing. Reaching for it when you want to turn something up does not make it louder. It makes it wrong, and audibly, and in front of people.
What happened next is the actual lesson
He went back. That is the whole of it.
He kept going to the Haçienda. He got a residency there, and Jon DaSilva — who deserves more credit in this story than he usually gets — taught him to beatmatch and to mix in key. Two years after Stockport he was resident at Shelley’s Laserdrome in Stoke, playing to a room that would decide what the next decade of British nightlife sounded like. Three years after that, Mixmag put him on the cover.
There is a version of dance music history that presents the superstar DJ as inevitable — a natural talent, discovered. It is a tidier story and it is not true. The record shows a teenager who could not work the equipment, went home, and came back until he could.
The people reading this were in those rooms. Some of you were in Stockport. If you remember that night — or you think you might have been at it — the Facebook page is the place to say so.