Everyone loves a birthday and it suddenly occurred to me that it was 21 years since my 18 year old self slipped out of the 100 Club onto Oxford Street carrying a three-track 12 inch single from the brand new BGP label. Those three were Pucho and the Latin Soul Brothers’ ‘Got Myself A Good Man’, Willis Jackson’s ‘Nuther’n Like Thuther’n’ and Billy Hawks’ ‘Oh Baby’. They were the hottest records selected by the two DJs Gilles Peterson and Baz Fe Jazz who were fronting BGP for its parent, Ace.
21 is a big one so we wanted to do something special to celebrate and so I called up Andy Smith, who was last seen in this parish with his wonderful “Andy Smith’s Northern Soul” mix CD which proved a great success.
Andy came to prominence for his fantastic eclectic sets as tour DJ for Portishead as they shot from obscurity to international success in the mid-90s. He achieved his own fame with the release of his seminal mix CD “The Document” in 1997, which mixed everything from the James Gang to Grandmaster Flash and went on to sell over 100,000 copies.
My idea was to let him chose from BGPs long archive of funk and soul, jazz and other sorts of grooves and create the sort of mix for which he is rightly famous. When he delivered we were far from disappointed. He has used this opportunity to great effect cutting up classic breaks such as Dyke and the Blazers ‘Let A Woman Be A Woman…’ and Pucho’s ‘Smoking At Tiffany’s’,as well as BGP discoveries such as Billy Garner’s ‘Brand New Girl’ and the Billy Hawks groove that started the whole thing off.
by Dean Rudland
