David Gregory
This is a mammoth 3hr 2min and 50 second nostalgic trip down memory lane to revisit some of the best High Energy, Dance and Italo Disco tracks between 1983 and 1988. Inspired by the sets of DJ Moz Morris (A DJ who knew... and indeed still does know how to sustain a crowd on the dancefloor all night long), and some great music played in The Flamingo club in Blackpool, Lancashire during this time period.

If you were not around at this time due to your youth (damn you!), or didn't frequent the above mentioned club, then this will probably just be a bunch of camp old nonsense.. you may or may not appreciate. However, if you grew up in the 80s in the UK, did frequent the Flamingo Club in Blackpool (many on my friends list did), then this will be a real trip down memory lane.

I tried very hard to include everything that for me, optimises the music of that time and place. There were many, MANY tracks I had to leave out for one reason or another. I wanted to include some of the slower tracks such as I'm Not Scared by Eighth Wonder, American Love by Rose Laurens etc., but they were too slow. Two tracks that I will always associate with the Flamingo are Viscious Pink's C C C Can't You See (not included because it's just a bit too weird) and the Peter Slaghuis mix of Maria Vidal's Body Rock that was included on the Disco Breaks 8 (Ready for The Summer) mini mix released in 1984, so I wanted to open with that. Also, the opening track "dream sequence" uses the intro to this track as it's bed (with reverse reverb and chorus to give the dreamlike quality). Because of this, I had to open at 121bpm... so alas.. the slower stuff didn't make it in. I'll do a separate mix of the slower stuff one day.

The idea of the dream intro and outro was because A) it gives a nostalgic background to that time period, kind of the audio equivalent of the wobbly screen movie flashback :)... hence the news and media footage that people of my age who watched a lot of UK TV the 80s may appreciate, and B) because even now, more than 25 years later this music really does still invade my dreams and seems embedded in my subconscious.

There's news media footage from the 80s... some TV Theme tunes in there... Tiswas, Swap Shop etc... :)

It was mostly mixed in real time using Traktor (which rocks) and a Numark Omni, but some short parts were done using Mixmeister (which is a monumental piece of garbage) due to a great deal of these tracks being old cassette rips: The inconsistencies of wow, flutter and the basic crapness of the machines available at the time make Traktor freak out a little, and also make manual beat matching very difficult without the true tactile experience of getting your hands on vinyl (anyone wanna buy me some decks and a Traktor S4 timecode controller?). Some of these tracks are impossible to get hold of now... many being white label promos and very rare imports.

The quality is variable, and some of the tracks actually have vinyl skips I never noticed at the time I recorded them over QUARTER OF A CENTURY ago.... but hey!.. never mind the quality, feel the width!