Major label content arrives at Beatport

Major label content arrives at Beatport

8 October, 2009 | 1.38AM

• Written by: Terry Church
• Filed under: Music News: beatport, deconstruction, mike pickering, moby

Today is a special day for dance music, because Sasha’s ‘Xpander’, the progressive house masterpiece that cemented the British DJ as one of dance music’s biggest talents, has been remastered to mark the launch of Deconstruction Records on Beatport.

Deconstruction’s catalog is some of the first major label content to hit Beatport, and there is a hope that if it succeeds, it will spark a domino effect, with more major label content to follow.

Sony’s Deconstruction Records (the new team behind Deconstruction can be seen above) released some of the dance music’s most famous records during its 14 years (the label closed in 2001), including Felix ‘Don’t You Want Me’, K-Klass ‘Rhythm Is A Mystery’, Bassheads ‘Is Anybody Out There’, Robert Miles ‘Children’, De’Lacy ‘Hideaway’, and much more, from artists like NJoi, Way Out West, The Grid, Black Box, Lionrock, and Evolution.

The re-release of Sasha ‘Xpander’ is just the beginning - Deconstruction plans to re-release some of its biggest dance hits in the coming months and years, as well as commission new remixes of old classics.

“This is a full relaunch,” said Mike Pickering, head of Deconstruction. “It’ll start off with digitizing and re-releases, but this is a new company that will sign artists, dance acts, and records. All of the acts that I look after - Calvin Harris, Kasabian, The Ting Tings and others - will come over to Deconstruction, as well as some new signings.”

If anyone can bring major label dance content to DJs, it is Mr. Pickering who has worked for every facet of the dance music industry. In the underground, he DJed at Britain’s most famous acid house club, The Haçienda in Manchester, during its most formative years. In the mainstream, he worked at Factory Records, signed The Happy Mondays, founded M People (one of the biggest dance acts of all time), and headed up Deconstruction, one of the most commercially successful dance labels of all time.

Dance classics freed

“We’re starting with ‘Xpander’ because Sasha is still very pertinent now, as he was in those days and he has managed to retain his credibility, so we felt ‘Xpander’ would be a great start for the re-launch of Deconstruction,” said Pickering.

“But what excites me most, and all of the people I’ve spoken to about the re-launch, is that when we get in touch with the original artists, we ask them who they would like to have remix them, and we also open the door for them to do something new. We’ll see what happens, but wouldn’t it be great if Felix or NJoi did some new material?”

Wouldn’t it just? But tracking down Deconstruction’s old artists is not as easy as it sounds. Felix for instance, also known as Francis Wright, disappeared circa 1996. “He was a really young kid when we signed him to Deconstruction, and he made an album,” explained Pickering. “But then he disappeared, I think because he over-partied.

“Then one day, Harvey Tadman who is involved in the relaunch of Deconstruction with Three Six Zero Group’s AnD press, bumped into this guy called Felix in a small local club. ‘I don’t suppose you’re THE Felix, are you?’ Harvey asked him. Unbelievably, it was him. We had been looking for him for years.”

Mike Pickering: A quick Q&A

With your long career, you must have a unique insight into the dance music scene. Do you have any theories on the scene in 2009? Where would you like to see it go ideally?

I think it’s very strong right now. Everything in our business works in cycles. A few years ago, it was all guitar bands, and guys with pointy shoes and tight pants. Dance music went from being such a big thing in late 80s and early 90s to suddenly having major labels shed dance people, but now they want start it up again, and they’re hiring people like me to help them.

That’s a sign that we’re on the up again. Plus dance music always tends to do really well in a recession. In 1988 when acid house blew up, we were going through a particularly bad period of British history and conservatism, and like punk before it, the whole hedonistic approach was due to political circumstances.

That’s not to say that the recession we’re in now is as bad as it was back then, but it certainly is having an impact. There’s a lot of quality in nightclubs and a lot of variety at the moment, and the success of things like the Warehouse Project in Manchester is staggering.

What happened to dance music in the 90s?

In the mid 90s, I retreated from the DJ scene because superstar DJs took over, and it felt quite disgusting. You knew that that was the end of the cycle, when DJs thought that they were superstars. The greatest thing about electronic music, for me, is that it was always like punk. Anyone can make it, even guys in their bedrooms. All you need is a laptop, some software, and taste, and you can make dance records.

The last peak of dance music I think was between 1990 and 1995. Around 1995, the superstars like Paul Oakenfold and Fatboy Slim came along, and although some of them were great DJs, you had a lot who weren’t that great charging obscene amounts of money to play.

They had people carrying their records for them, and you could see that it was all going to implode as people weren’t getting value for money.

Do you think we will ever have another great dance music boom?

I hope so. I don’t see why not. If you can marry great songs with dancefloor mixes for the clubs, then it should blow up.

Like punk, commercial success is a tricky business in dance music. It seems that whenever a dance artist pokes their head above the parapet, it is cut off. Do you think that is a hard thing for major labels to understand?

The very nature of the dance scene is, like punk, anti-success. For instance, if you have a DJ who has hit records on the radio - I know this because it happened to me - the underground people completely lose interest.

At the beginning of M People, we had the respect of the hardcore dance fans because we used to play at Renaissance and The Haçienda. We were the hippest thing in clubland, and then we grew bigger, and the club people didn’t want anything to do with us anymore.

There’s a very strong sense of ownership in dance music. Take Deadmau5 - if he started having loads of big hits on the radio, he would be walking a tight rope.

But I think that’s one of the great things about dance music and I’ve always been like that myself. If I liked a band, and then heard them on BBC Radio 1, I’d think, ‘fuck I need to find a new band now.’

I think the reason for this is because a lot of what is mass produced is bollocks, and dance music fans are quite suspicious of the system. But they’re also the ones who are the most passionate.

It’s funny, when people come up to me and talk to me, they’re more likely to mention Deconstruction or The Haçienda than M People, even though we sold 11 million albums.

I was in Patagonia in Argentina of all places, last January, and these two people came up to me, and said ‘we loved your DJing back at The Haçienda’. I was in the middle of the mountains in Argentina! I don’t know how many people we could fit into The Haçienda, but M People played arenas and sometimes stadiums.

What happened to M People?

I stopped doing that in 2000 because I thought I had taken it as far as it could go. I needed to get back to the underground, and M People was 10 years of really great times.

I founded the band, produced it, and wrote most of the tracks, as well as play the sax in the live band. As a schooling in A&Ring, I couldn’t get better than that.

How did Deconstruction become so successful?

We were only small, but obviously we had the might of BMG behind us. We operated out of a small room in Islington, North London.

We used to mail out DJ promos ourselves, which in those days, was a massive chore. We used to take them to the post office, or get in the car, and go around the clubs handing records to the DJs.

Like Factory, profit wasn’t our aim. We got on a real roll, and we hit a certain moment when everything dropped into place. I would DJ at The Haçienda, and play an acetate or tape at the club on Friday night, and then on Saturday morning I’d call Pete Hadfield, and tell him that we have to sign this or that record because it destroyed the floor. So we’d sign it, release it a couple of weeks later, and it would be a hit. We signed most of our big records that way.

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