Berlin Love Parade, late nineties: amongst the floats drive two American muscle cars with Funktion-One horns rising up on hydraulics out of the boot. A stereo speaker pair, rolling in front of Tipper’s float, his bass-fueled breaks spinning on the decks. If you missed it… well, tough, it’s gone now. Or has it? Join toby*spark as he dusts off a zip disk from back in the day, and puts your speakers through their paces.
That’s the pitch for this performance project. As that suggests, there’s history here. The blurb for a Fuel Records sampler I made twenty+ years ago is a good place to start –
fuel records should have been huge, but somehow never caught the wave, or the wave somehow didn’t pick them up… depends on how you look at it, but man they had something: the music that drum’n’bass and electro should have become, artists like tipper and si begg as buckfunk 3000, and an identity light years ahead of anyone else. i was there in a field in liverpool when they bought the trailer to tour their dragster and dual dodge challenger '70 soundsystem (like, one car for left, one car for right: the 10k rolling muscle car sound system), complete with dj booth to break out the side. and i’ll never forget that trailer costing less than my £3k laptop… some deals going on, back then.
from the flyer: prepare to be disturbed. this will be played at high volume, preferably in a residential area.so this is a bittersweet video for me, but it was the tour that set me up solo and gave me the confidence both in myself as a vj and that you could vj with just a laptop.
— *spark - fuel records [2001]
Now, years later, if I were to tell you about Fuel, you probably wouldn’t believe me. You’d turn to the internet, and see it’s just not there. That came as quite a shock, undermining a lot of what I hold dear, from the digital revolution of the time to the sheer gumption of those involved. And that’s the genesis of this project: even if the internet might not have this stuff, I have an archive, and there’s a story to tell.
So: an experimental documentary performance? A DJ set with anecdotes? I’m not quite sure what the form is, but it’s going to be me on stage, trawling that archive, with music that’s going to give the PA a work-out.
Image Credit – Props to Vice, who do have a 2001 article archived on-line. Even more unusually, it’s one where the image isn’t a dead link. And it’s a good image, project defining even. So that’s what used here. Except that the one on the website is so low-res that you can’t read the text. But – aha! – in that archive of mine was a scan of the print article. And so the salvage starts.