Midweek Mixes (15/12/2021)
Robbie Leslie - Live @ The Saint, Part 2 (25/06/83)
Since I shared the first part of this recording I’ve been reading up on The Saint, and with each new fact or story my mind is blown a little bit more. The soundsystem reached 140db (take THAT, limiter!). The dancefloor was encased in a glass dome that was 23 metres wide by 11 metres tall, and stood on an independent platform with rubber pads to soften the feeling under your feet. The lighting system projected planetarium-style displays on to the interior of the dome; whereas if you were outside the dome (that is, on the sex balcony), you could still see directly into the dome and down to the dancefloor below. A giant mirror ball would be lowered from the ‘oculus’ of the dome at a certain point of the night, to further heighten the madness.
[You can read about it at some length here, in a paper that, while not an amazing piece of scholarship, does communicate some of the outrageousness of the space and the emotional and bodily experience of those who passed through it. It also touches briefly on the less appealing aspects of The Saint - its exclusivity and resulting homogeneity - which are important to recognise alongside all the fantasy.]
This second three-hour section of Robbie Leslie’s season closing set of 1983 ramps up the menergy with relentless bangers in the first half, before softening in the second. It opens with Machine and continues with Hazell Dean, Arpeggio, Vera, Patrick Hernandez, Amanda Lear, Irene Cara, Sylvester, about 10 ABBA tunes… The lyrical themes are as you’d expect - men, sex, dancing, heartbreak, the desire to live and to love free of judgement - and Leslie puts them together with passion and craft. Don’t miss Sylvester’s ‘Don’t Stop’ leading into Phyllis Nelson’s ‘Don’t Stop The Train’, for example.
In among this parade of hits there’s a live performance by Laura Branigan, who was then riding high on the success of her versions of ‘Gloria’ and ‘Solitaire’. You can hear the screams of the crowd of thousands as she takes to the stage and ‘Deep In The Dark’ starts up. Her mid-set monologue is pure gold:
Oh you’re so beautiful. I’ll tell you something: it’s great to be back at The Saint. I’ve told everybody all over the country about this place. I said, you know, I walked in there and the stage went up, and all of a sudden there’s a sea of bare-breasted men, and I said, Oooh! I said, Laura honey you must be doing something right! So I had to come back and take another peek. You don’t mind do you? Oh I love it!
Her performance runs from measured to unhinged - especially on ‘Gloria’, where she sounds like a bar-room karaoke version of herself, committed 110% to the bit. The Saint clearly had this effect on her and it’s a joy to hear.
Aside from the many tunes I already know and I love, there are a few I had to look up or still haven’t been able to find. Amanda Lear’s ‘Love Your Body’ was new to me, on which Amanda, tongue always firmly in cheek, appropriates the middle eight of Tantra’s classic ‘Hills Of Katmandu’ from 1979. She naughtily changes the original’s mystical lyrics to suit her rather more earthly theme:
Jumping and turning and jogging all over town
Breathing and bouncing I'm watching the muscle man
Then there’s the huge italo instrumental at 12 mins; the “turn out the lights” tune shortly after (can anyone tell me what this is? It has exactly the same chord progression as Armand Van Helden’s ‘Hear My Name’); and the sequence of older piano-led/orchestral numbers in the closing section of this segment, starting with ‘Alive With Love’ by Cut Glass, which act as a welcome breather after all of those Hi NRG bangers. This handling of pace and mood is masterful from Leslie, who, remember, was by the end of this portion only halfway through a 12-hour marathon set.
Watch this space for parts three and four.
Lakuti - Bring Down The Walls (28/11/21)
Two hours of pure Lakuti goodness, leaning towards the slower and home-listening side of things. Broken, deep, jazzy, dubby, bumping house and surroundings, woven together with love. I listened to this on my way to Madrid last weekend and it soothed my body and soul ahead of a long night out. There’s not much else to say about it so I won’t!