Every Thursday I look back to the past.
Last Saturday, Dave and Steph reunited with Erol Alkan for a B2B set at BuggedOut! 30th anniversary in London. So in this week’s throwback Thursday, I’d like to revisit their friendship with started over 20 years ago behind the decks at Trash.
So if you are completely unware of what ‘Trash’ was, let me fill you in real quick. Trash was Erol Alkan’s now legendary club night in London. Although he started the first Trash parties in 1997, two years later the kids in London would go dancing on Monday night at The End. It was in that exact same year the Dewaeles met Erol Alkan and played their first gig (still as ‘The Flying Dewaele Brothers’) there.
Both Dave & Steph and Erol have talked about these early days in the past (like in this facebook post from 2017 by Erol), Disco Pogo wrote this great article ‘Trash: An Oral History’ earlier this year which I can highly recommend if you want to read the whole story.
But here are a few quotes from that article where D&S and Erol look back on when they first met.
Erol: “Someone at PIAS (Soulwax’ record label) called me and said there were these guys called Soulwax from Belgium who were also mashing records together. They were going to play live in London and then DJ afterwards as the Flying Dewaele Brothers. They sent me this CD titled ‘Hank The DJ’ which pushed all my buttons. I went to see them at Dingwalls as we had them booked at Trash the following week. David asked me to take over the decks as they had to go and do something backstage, they had eight crates of vinyl – and they were over from Belgium – and I went through the records and it felt like I was going through my own collection. They were soulmates immediately.”
David: “The reason Erol approached us is we had done a series of radio shows which culminated in the compilation (‘As Heard on Radio Soulwax Pt. 2’). He’d heard a bunch of them and had singled out what we called bootlegs. We connected over them and the juxtaposition of putting records together. He’d been doing them as Kurtis Rush. He pressed ours up too and put them out.”
(yes, that ‘Magnificent Romeo / Dreadlock Woman’ white label 12″ was pressed by Alkan in 2001. A fun fact: at the time Dave and Steph asked me if I had the truetype ‘Soulwax’ font, and I send it to Erol so he could made the stamp that was used on the label)
Stephen: “I vividly remember playing at Trash for the first time and it was like an indie wonderland. At some point we played Motörhead’s ‘Ace of Spades’ and all of a sudden Lemmy was standing in front of us.”
David: “He gave us the nod of approval and the devil sign. Maybe he was looking for a place that played rock music.”
The first dj set by Erol that I attended (if my memory doesn’t fail me) was at the 2002 launch party of ‘As Heard On Radio Soulwax Pt II’ at Club 69 in Gent. But he was also a regular at RAUW, the (electroclash)parties that were hosted by Joost van Bellen in Amsterdam and Utrecht – where I was living at the time.
I did know about Trash and what was happening in London, because of Dave & Steph but also because they had a very active forum on the Trash website. Only once I attended Trash at The End. I remember there was a big buzz about the band that would play on that particular Monday night. I remember hoping it would be Pet Shop Boys, but it was a reunion of UK punk band The Slits (and google tells me this was on April 17th, 2006).
I looked hard to find pictures of 2manydjs or Soulwax playing at Trash, but there’s none to be found except the one at the top of the page that was taken by Erol.
If you really want to go back in time: here’s an amazing mix by Erol, recorded at Trash in the magical year 2002:
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