At Centuries of Sound I am making mixes for every year of recorded sound. The download here is a placeholder to appear on the podcast feed. For the full 3-hour version either see below for the Mixcloud player, or come to patreon.com/centuriesofsound for the podcast version and a host of other bonus materials for just $5 per month. You can also support me by buying one of the audio services I offer – https://centuriesofsound.com/services/

Mixcloud player with full mix – or listen on the Mixcloud website.

In the summers of my university years, I often worked at music festivals, serving fried breakfasts to the crew, and it was for this reason that I found myself at Reading on Sunday 27th August 2000. It was “rock day” and very little of interest was on for me. Looking around the grounds that day I noticed a shift had taken place – people aged 20 or older were still around in their Britpop Adidas tops and bucket hats, but now they were outnumbered by people a few years younger, with dyed hair, piercings, big boots, bootcut trousers and chains. Skate-punks, nu metallers, moshers, emos. Had this generational shift meant the sudden end of the 90s lad culture? I was about to find out.

I’d first seen Daphne & Celeste on MTV2 the previous year – their deal was subversive childish pop music – for example their debut single Oo Stick You was a catchy kids pop song which repeatedly told you (the recipient of the song) to f**k off, though obviously not in those exact words. It was very much the kind of thing I liked, and it was a pleasant surprise to see them on the bill. It turned out, however, that the rest of the crowd were not as excited to see them. Daphne & Celeste arrived on stage not only to a cacophony of booing, but home-made signs telling them to die and a constant hail of projectiles including cups full of urine. Despite this they performed two out of their three planned songs before it became impossible to continue. An hour or so later, I saw them arrive at the signing tent, where the bottling continued.

This incident has gone down in popular memory as a funny story about a hostile crowd, but it didn’t feel like that from where I was standing. Yes, it is a tale of bravery, there are very few people who could stand up and take that for near-on ten minutes. From my point of view however, it was revelatory. This “alternative” crowd that I was at least nominally affiliated with were willing to be violently abusive to two young girls, just for playing music that wasn’t to their taste. The hemmed-in aggressively straight misogyny of the 90s hadn’t gone away, it had just found a new form.

This would of course be a ridiculously myopic way to view music, but as has been established in part one, I was not engaged with contemporary music in this year. Happily, the impression I have picked up in my listen-through is not one of conservatism in new clothes, in fact it’s quite the opposite. One influence on these mixes was the mashup culture of the time, from Cassetteboy’s cheeky cut-ups to the sound collages of The Avalanches and the use of vivid, surprising samples in Hip Hop. At university I had access to an edit suite and hated the laborious process of planned three-deck video editing – but by the end of the year 2000, I’d have my first try at digital editing, where I could be free to move chunks around and play with different ways of making them fit. No doubt there were similar revelations happening around the world as producers got their hands on these newly-affordable DAWs.

Here I have tried to imitate some of the editing styles of these artists and producers. If I’ve succeeded, you shouldn’t be able to tell where they start and I begin, not without checking. If you can tell straight away, well I had a great time making it anyway, and I also feel that this is one of my favourite mixes to listen to, so hopefully you will feel the same – and forgive me for the section on the US election, which took me two weeks and convinced me that this may be the may be the turning point for our civilization.

Tracklist

0:00:00 Cassetteboy – The Parker Boy’s About Yer Know