Spreading the Love, Peace and Unity...
2007-09-01 by The Double KMickey Finn & MC GQ – Live on Kiss 100 FM, 1994 (Part 1)
Well I’ve been away for a while… did you miss me?
And to mark the return of The Double K after a stretch in the off-line wilderness I’ve decided to bring you something just a little bit special. Let’s face it, it’s all well and good us blogging individual tunes that we like and you go away and listen to them one after the other, but this is really anathema to what dance music is all about: the real unit of dance music is (or at least used to be) not the track but the MIXTAPE. Mark Moore was right when he predicted back in about 1988 that DJs, not producers would be the figureheads and idols of electronic music but blogging one track at a time (barring the occasional mix from our man Tommy Squeaker) takes the DJ and the mix out of the
equation.
So here is a full 90 minutes of high-quality VBR goodness (in two parts, as all good mixtapes should be) from the heyday of Jungle, early in 1994 (I think this was recorded in Feb or March ‘94). Until then Jungle was strictly underground; only played by the pirate stations, no commercial station would touch it. Even Kiss FM (a London commercial dance music station), with its roots as a pirate, operated a “strictly no jungle” policy. All this changed in 1994 as Jungle reluctantly poked its head into the mainstream: Kiss FM broke their “strictly no jungle” policy and aired a series of 3-hour Jungle shows that ran from 1.00 to 4.00 in the morning, I think on a Thursday (i.e. very late on Wednesday night). This is the first half of one of these shows, as recorded by my mate Paul (I was living in Leeds at the time so couldn’t get Kiss FM). He fell asleep at some point between 1.45 and 2.30 and so we didn’t ever hear the second half of the show.
Despite it not exactly being prime-time, the junglists took the Kiss shows as an opportunity to showcase the quality and diversity of Jungle for a wider audience, and in this show the true connoisseurs Mickey Finn and GQ do just that. Slim comes with a variety of styles from the darkest darkside to jump-up anthems and the shout-outs throughout the show from GQ form a roll-call of pretty much everyone who was anything in the Jungle family at the time. During this show we also learn why Mickey Finn’s a DJ (he knows how to spin those tunes) and not an MC, as his occasional vocal interjections add much less to the show than GQ’s masterful microphone skills!
Hopefully your appetite is sufficiently whet – grab yourself part one of the show and I’ll see you for part two in a mo…
Comments 
::
NEWSFLASH
You can get the whole 3-hour show – in a better quality (but obviously less loved :) recording than mine – here:
http://kiss100archive.blogspot.com/2007/02/housednb-show-mickey-finn-mc-gq-16-3.html
Here's a shorter URL for the mix:
http://tinyurl.com/33y4nc