12. Flowered Up
This is of a similar period in the 90s that was quite life-changing for me. When this track came out, it was like an album on its own, or a whole symphony. I was absolutely blown away by it.
I’d been playing all these Acid House tunes on the radio, bought from specialist record shops, who would not even sell them to you unless you were, you know, a pretty serious DJ. I had to convince them – I’d been on Radio 1 for quite a while then, so, you know, why was I suddenly interested in all this stuff? When I started playing all these 12"s and white labels on Radio 1, people’d get in touch and say: this is absolutely fantastic! I can’t find it anywhere, where can I buy this record?! Of course, you couldn’t, because they were the limited pressings, maybe only 200 copies anywhere. And so I thought, well, we should make a compilation.
Compilations were not fashionable at that time. I made this compilation with a label called Heavenly, who are still very cool. Jeff Barrett, who runs Heavenly, agreed that I could do it. He helped me immensely. We managed to get ‘Weekender’ on there, and it also had Sabres of Paradise, Andrew Weatherall, people like that. Early Daft Punk, cus I’d discovered them early on.
That album, that compilation, changed everything for me. People had kind of got used to me being on Radio 1; I’d been there a long time. And this was suddenly like people just looked at me in a completely different way. It was like oh! You know… somehow I got cool again, which I hadn’t been.
The centrepiece of the whole compilation was ‘Weekender’. Flowered Up fell apart pretty quickly after that. But to make one classic like that, that’s 13 minutes long…you cannot play that on the radio and fade out early. You cannot. I mean, it’d be a crime. Still, if I get the chance to play it, I do, but you’ve gotta play the whole thing or nothing. It’s a real classic, brilliant piece of music, and I’m very proud to have it on that compilation. Very.
