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Features
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| Introducing NEM3SI$’s new label Infinite Resistance! | | Mindbenderz talk ‘Lord of the Rings’ and fishing, as well as the creation of their new album ‘Celestial Gateway’! | | Iono-Music artists One Function, Eliyahu, Invisible Reality and Dual Vision talk Robert Miles, kids, dogs and vinyl, while we chat about their current releases! | | Luke&Flex talk influences, the Irish rave scene, why Flex wears a mask and Play Hard, their new EP out now on Onhcet Repbulik Xtreme! | | Lyktum expands on his new album ‘Home’ – talking about his love of storytelling, creating new harmonies and the concept behind his musical works. | | Pan talks getting caught short crossing the Sahara, acid eyeballs and tells us Trance is the Answer, plus shares his thoughts on his latest release 'Beyond the Horizon' - all from a beach in Spain! | | Miss C chats about living with the KLF, DJing in a huge cat’s mouth, training her brain and the upcoming super-duper Superfreq Grande party at LDN East this Saturday, 16th September! | | NEM3SI$ - I Live for the Night – talks superficiality, psychopaths, and bittersweet success, ahead of a plethora of evocative, emotional, and passionate upcoming melodic techno releases! | | Psy-Sisters Spring Blast Off! We talk to DJ competition winner ROEN along with other super talents on the lineup! | | Blasting towards summer festivals with Bahar Canca ahead of Psy-Sisters Spring Blast! | | Shyisma talks parties, UFO's, and Shotokan Karate ahead of his upcoming album 'Particles' on Iono-Music! | | SOME1 talks family, acid, stage fright and wolves - ahead of his upcoming album release ‘Voyager’ on Iono-Music in February 2023! | | The Transmission Crew tell all and talk about their first London event on 24th February 2023! | | NIXIRO talks body, mind and music production ahead of his release 'Planet Impulse' on Static Movement's label - Sol Music! | | Turning the world into a fairy tale with Ivy Orth ahead of Tribal Village’s 10th Birthday Anniversary Presents: The World Lounge Project | | The Psy-Sisters chat about music, achievements, aspirations and the 10-Year Anniversary Party - 18/12/22! | | A decade of dance music with Daniel Lesden | | Earth Needs a Rebirth! Discussions with Psy-Trance Artist Numayma | | Taking a Journey Through Time with Domino | | New Techno Rising Star DKLUB talks about his debut release White Rock on Onhcet Republik! | | PAN expands on many things including his new album 'Hyperbolic Oxymoron' due for release on the 14th April 2022 on PsyWorld Records! | | Psibindi talks all things music including her new collaborative EP 'Sentient Rays' on Aphid Records, her band Sentience Machine and 10 years of Psy-Sisters! | | N-Kore talks Jean-Michel Jarre, unfinished tracks and fatherhood! | | Celebrating International Women’s Day and Ten Years of Psy-Sisters with Amaluna | | A Catch Up with John Phantasm ahead of his upcoming set at the Tribal Village 4 Day Outdoor Event in Kent 6-9 May 2022! | | 'The Maestro that is Tristan talks barn owls, Shazamming and keeping it Psychedelic ahead of his upcoming performance at the Tribal Village 4 Day Event in Kent 6-9 May 2022! |
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Interview with Shan
Reported by Tom Allen
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Submitted 24-07-03 13:06
In the latest in our series of upcoming DJ interviews, Tom Allen has a chat with GoodGreef's latest resident DJ, Shan. Kicking off his DJing career 5 years ago and at just 16 years old he's progressed to playing some of the UK's largest and most popular clubs and this weekend heads down to the capital to play for London superclub Frantic. Read on for more...
Tom Allen: Where, when and why did you first get a taste for clubbing?
Shan: I loved The Prodigy when I was younger and went to the V97 festival especially to see them as they were headlining. It was at Temple Newsam in Leeds which is literally only a 20 minute walk from where I live and where my parents used to take me as a kid to go and play and see the farm animals, haha! Whilst I was there I thought I’d check out the dance tent as Carl Cox was playing, I’d heard of him at the time and was curious as to what he played exactly. Daft Punk also played a DJ set and I was already familiar with them as I had their album. I loved Carl Cox’s set that much that I ended up staying in the dance tent the rest of the night and missing The Chemical Brothers and some other of my favourite bands all performing on the main stage.
After seeing Carl Cox I really wanted to go to clubs to experience more but I was only 15 at the time and had a right babyface so didn’t stand a chance of getting in anywhere! Though the day I turned 18 fell on the day of the Leeds Love Parade which was held at Roundhay Park, a 20 minute walk from my house in the other direction and where I used to play junior league football! Thousands of people, floats from every club that mattered hosting some of the best DJs in the world and I still couldn’t get enough so I went to Radio 1’s afterparty too and had the best 18th I could have had!
TA: Who inspired you to take up DJing in the first place?
Shan: I’d say Carl Cox had a helping hand as maybe if I hadn’t have seen him play I might not have become so interested in it myself. But the desire to get decks and learn to DJ myself just came from my love of dance music at the time and the fun I saw in being able to get bits of tracks, cut, mix, sample, and play about with them turning them into something new. It was like a big dance music jigsaw which seemed fun to me at the time!
TA: How and where did you get your first gig? What was it like?
Shan: By the time I got my first gig I’d been mixing trance for nearly 3 years and had just started to discover hard house. I’d gone through the listings in Mixmag and sent my demo off to every hard house or trance club as far as the Midlands then followed them up with phonecalls. I eventually got invited down to a club in the small town of Halifax called The Tube. As with most small towns, house or retro house is the norm, but they were trying to introduce trance and hard house into their second room by booking people like AJ Gibson, Daniel Soto and the like. They invited me down to see what I could do. Naturally I was shitting myself, especially as they’d invited another two inexperienced DJs down to play to compare us all on the night, who were all looking over my shoulder my whole set just waiting for me to start galloping horses! In the end, my set went really well and I was the only one out of us invited back to play weekly for a whole £20!
TA: As a student it must be hard to strike a balance between studying and DJing / Production - how do you manage it?
Shan: It was extremely tough, so much so that I don’t think I’ll be going back in September! I just want to see how the DJing goes as I can always go back to university, whilst the opportunities I’m getting from DJing I might not get again. When I was juggling both, I was doing multimedia & web design at uni which was 90% project work. I was having to stay up into the early hours most weeknights to get stuff handed in before the deadline because I’d been out DJing and clubbing it at the weekend!
TA: Winning the Fluffy DJ competition in Birmingham kick started your DJing career somewhat - how did you prepare for the competition or did you just rock up with a bag of records and wing it?
Shan: There were over 40 entrants split into 3 heats over 3 weeks. So that was over 10 entrants each week to fit into about 6 hours. Meaning we only had a half hour set each to impress so you really had to stand out from the rest. I had a few tricks up my sleeve but still thought half an hour was too short an amount of time to show them what I could do. So I worked out my set beforehand to fit in as much as I could within half an hour. Whilst everyone else just mixed one record into another, I ended up starting on a Fatboy Slim record on it’s wrong speed @ 45rpm pitched down to -8 so I could mix it into hard house, putting a Madonna acapella over the Glazby mix of RR Fierce’s ‘Miloude’, a Soulsearcher acapella over Chris C’s ‘Freefall’, the vocals to ‘Hold Your Head Up High’ over a Stimulant track, and going through 11 vinyls and 3 CDs all whilst standing on a crate because the CD decks were too high for me to reach! I ended up with 144 points out of 160 and winning by a healthy margin!
TA: Do you find having an agency represent you helps your career significantly? Is it a disadvantage in any way?
Shan: For me, I’ve most definitely progressed at a faster rate and gained more opportunities than I would have had I been managing myself. I’ve been lucky that Barry & Ben at Goodgreef took responsibility of managing me at a time when they’d just won Mixmag Club of the Year. They’re not an agency as such and mine’s the only diary they look after, however, people immediately took them seriously and felt they could deal with them easily and professionally which was great. The only disadvantage is that I’ve had to get in a car with Barry behind the wheel a few times, talk about risking your life! haha
TA: You're closely associated with the 4clubbers.net website - how important do you think clubbing sites are to the scene today? Where do you think we'd be without them?
Shan: I think they have and always will have a big part to play. They help create communities within clubland via message boards and galleries, and spread awareness within the scene quickly and easily. A good clubbing website acts as a huge source of information, like a centrepoint of any information you want to find on any club which is why so many clubs use the web as one method of promoting their events. Even if what you want’s not on the site, you can just ask on a messageboard and get your answer within an hour or less. Nowadays, the internet is such a part of a lot of people’s everyday lives that it’d be foolish for clubs to not use it to it’s fullest. There’d be much less promotion without clubbing websites, and without that, the scene probably wouldn’t be as strong as it is now.
TA: You tend to mix quite a lot of material off CDR - do you see CDR's increasingly taking over from vinyl or will they always stay complimentary to them?
Shan: I can’t see vinyl being ushered out by CDRs. I think mixing off CDR when you can easily get the same tracks on vinyl is when you’re not willing to pay for your records to be a DJ. It’s bad for the scene in general as then less money is being generated through record sales resulting in the scene struggling to fund new music. Vinyl will always be the purist’s favourite, and I just can’t imagine a club without a pair of decks anyway! I do mix a lot off CDR, but it’s not out of choice. I just have a lot of material that isn’t, can’t or won’t be on vinyl. I don’t mind it, but I prefer the interaction with vinyl, it’s so much more fun for a clubber to watch. The Pioneer CDJ1000s go some way to keeping that, but it’s still not the same! I think as long as record labels keep churning out vinyl and don’t convert to CDs themselves, then vinyl will still be filling our boxes for many years to come.
TA: What's been the highlight of your DJing career so far?
Shan: Being made Goodgreef’s newest resident since Eddie Halliwell last September as I knew I’d finally been given the chance to be recognised for what I do and play my music out on a larger scale.
TA: What plans do you have for the next 12 months?
Shan: Well we’re currently working on a Goodgreef album due for October. I’ll be helping compile and mix the first CD with Alex Kidd, and the second disc will be the sound of Goodgreef’s Houseparty. Hopefully I’ll get the chance to get into the studio more regularly over the next year as the satisfaction of hearing your ideas out loud is second to none.
TA: Do you think that there is anything that really sets you apart from the pack?
Shan: A good 3 or more inches in height?! Haha. I guess there aren’t that many hard dance DJs who use acapellas in their sets either.
TA: Which venue and promotion would you most like to play for and why?
Shan: I’m pretty much playing all the clubs and events I’ve always dreamed of playing. Something the size of the Dance Valley festivals in Holland would be a great experience or the legendary Berlin Love Parade!
TA: You've not played much in the capital to date, do you find you have many fans down here or is it a case of working from scratch to build up a profile?
Shan: From not playing in London as much the north, I don’t yet have the connections with the clubbers that I do up north, but that seems to grow each time I play down there and hopefully it’ll continue to do so. Frantic have really been pushing me over the last few months which has really helped so thanks to Will and everyone for having faith in me. I’ve started to play more regularly now and my first peak time main room set went really well for me at FranticMeetGoodgreef. Elsewhere in London I’ve played Wildchild and should be back there before the end of the year, so fingers crossed it keeps going the way it does and you’ll be seeing a lot more of me!
TA: How did your sets at Frantic first come about?
Shan: In July last year, Frantic did an event called Unity which was a collaboration with Sundissential and Goodgreef with 4clubbers.net hosting the upstairs bar. Me and Guffy represented 4clubbers on the night. From that we must have done something right as Guffy’s now Frantic resident and I’m answering this question!
TA: Do you think there's much of a north/south divide in hard dance these days?
Shan: If there is, it’s far less noticeable than before. I don’t know many people from the north that haven’t been down to London to go clubbing. Then with clubs like Goodgreef and Frantic working together and collaborating it encourages people to travel even more. I do reckon us northerners do most of the travelling though as clubbers in the capital have it all there for them, whilst the attraction of venues like Brixton Academy, Ministry Of Sound, and The Coronet which we don’t have up north are far too tempting. Musically, the divide’s all but gone. Whereas it used to be different styles of hard dance that rocked people’s boats up north and down south, nowadays it doesn’t matter what you play where, as long as it’s good, people will appreciate it.
TA: What do you love and hate most about this business?
Shan: Love – The music, the memories, the satisfaction. Hate – Foul play, dishonesty, and the mileage you do on a weekend!
TA: How's the production side of things going for you, any work in progress?
Shan: I currently work with a lad up here who Goodgreef have just signed up for the future called Gaz West. He’s got massive potential. We’ve done a remix (unofficial might I add!) of Ralph Fridge’s ‘Angel’ which I’m playing out on CDR and also another which I’m just testing out on some dancefloors at the moment. Eddie’s playing some of Gaz’s latest material out too including the remix of ‘Angel’, as is Anne Savage amongst some other high profile DJs. We’ll be working on more as and when we get the time.
TA: Which current producer and/or DJ do you admire most and why?
Shan: There’s a lot of people in this industry I admire as they’ve achieved so much that it’d be hard to choose one. However, I recently met Todd Tobias and his pure enthusiasm and love for what he does really inspired me, granted he was quite pissed at the time so was babbling a bit, haha. DJ wise and on a personal note, a good friend of mine, Frantic resident Guffy for his choice to quit his secure job in Leeds, move to London for the sake of his DJing, and follow his dream.
TA: Can we have 3 tracks from your record bag which you're really loving at the moment?
Shan: Yeh of course you can.
Scott Mac ‘Damager 02’ - A real crossover tough trance/hard dance track that goes down well whether the crowd like it trancey or hard. Has a killer synth that rips right through!
Rawkraft ‘Mission Accomplished’ – Gaz West collaborated with a friend over the internet to create this. Has a gorgeous melody and a really intense build up which took the roof off Camden Palace!
Ralph Fridge ‘Angel’ (Gaz West & Shan Remix) – I don’t need a reason, haha
TA: Finally, what do you have lined up for us at your gig at Frantic?
Shan: A guaranteed good night for at least an hour or however long my set is! hehe
TA: Thanks for your time Shan!
Shan: No, thank you! 
Shan plays at Frantic Hardhouse Academy on Saturday 9th August at Brixton Academy - for full details click here.
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Other Features By Tom Allen:
Hardhouse Academy Preview: Interview with Nuw Idol
The Thirsty DJs Interview with DJChewy
Lashed Preview 2: Interview with Charlotte Birch
Interview with Nick Rafferty
Interview with Jana
The views and opinions expressed in this review are strictly those of the author only for which HarderFaster will not be held responsible or liable.
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