Search

Pop music has always run from the sublime to the irredeemable. The charts have rotated from gold to grot since the dawn of the Hit Parade, and the model doesn’t look likely to change anytime soon. So whilst there are always dark periods when commercial radio is little more than a cemetery of tired ideas, dug up and forced to fandango one more time, every now and then a new generation of musicians kick down the door, reset the rules, and party ‘til the lights come on.

In the music industry there are two types of meteoric rise. One is a scary, Susan Boyle-shaped process, where the basking lizard kings of pop pluck an unknown, polish them dumb, tell them what their new name, hairstyle and personality is, and thrust them mercilessly into the light, there to cavort for our pleasure.

In Germany towards the end of the nineties, Berlin was synonymous with hard-edged techno sounds but Hamburg was flying the flag for a more traditional flavour of house music. So the young Alex Ridha grew up surrounded by influences from Detroit and Chicago, which provided the fuel for a serious life-long vinyl addiction.

By now the history of electronic music and its journey into clubs, concert venues, stadiums and homes worldwide is a well-established narrative. It’s a story...

It’s Tuesday night in early October 2005 and Colin McBean is lying dead on an operating table at Royal Free Hospital in Hampstead, London.

Just...

“All great things must first wear terrifying and monstrous masks, in order to inscribe themselves on the hearts of humanity.”
 FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE, Beyond Good and Evil...