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Union States

House DJs Bamford and Lorimer reminisce - By Morgan Short, Sep 24, 09

This Saturday Club G Plus welcomes back Union DJs Carl Lormier and Steve Bamford for a night of what they're calling "big room" House music. Staples of the Shanghai clubbing scene for decades and decades and decades, Lorimer and Bamford have played all over Shanghai, in clubs glitzy and baffling, and clubs dim and smelly.

If you're a fan of no-bullshit, straight-up good house music, in a town perennially bereft of just that, don't miss these guys this Saturday. Honestly. They're good.

Diverging from the normal Q&A interview, SmartShanghai sat down with Bamford and Lorimer to hear them blah, blah, blah about their opinions on the highpoints in Shanghai clubbing over the years. They came up with seven memorable and important shows and events, and one horrendous event, which they discuss herein.

Here is the event listing for their shaker on Saturday.

***


Lorimer: Yeah, we picked seven highpoints in electronic music and clubbing, and one low point.


Bamford: I got here at the beginning of 2004. My first show was at Park 97, where I was the Music Director. I was in Hong Kong working for the same company and they brought me to Shanghai.

Lorimer: When I moved here I met Pat [Mai, former manager of dkd] on the message boards in Shanghai, and when dkd first opened he got me a gig there.


Bamford: Yeah, there was loads. Coming from Hong Kong, it was quite surprising because Hong Kong was all about House music, and I didn't expect there to be much in Shanghai but there was. Tengboon, Pauly Can, back when he was playing music. Yeah, and around that time there was quite an influx of DJs...

Lorimer: Julian, from dkd. I thought the DJs were quite upfront with their music. Calvin had just moved in from Hangzhou too.


Lorimer: Well, the whole idea behind Union in the first place was myself, Trix, and Kingpin -- we were DJing around China the most out of the Shanghai-based guys and I was really tired of getting paid crap money, so we talked to our contacts in clubs outside of Shanghai to set the price rate. We three stuck to that, and from the actual DJ union it evolved into a party.


Lorimer: This first moment was actually before any of us even got here.


Lorimer: Yeah that was a significant one in 1999, because back then he was doing an "Essential Mix" world tour for Radio One. The Essential Mix for people who don't know, is kind of the number one electronic music radio show. It's been around forever, every Saturday night.

Bamford: Like 50 shows a year for 20 years...

Lorimer: I remember listening to that Shanghai show in my dorm room in first year, thinking "wow, he's playing in China."

Bamford: Yeah, Oakenfold had played in Hong Kong as well, but there wasn't the fanfare. Oakenfold in China. He sort of set the ball rolling for what was to come. Big DJ, big scale...

Lorimer: He opened the imagination for other DJs to go to places that no one had been to. Also in that year he went to Havana as well, to sort of prove you could play these places.

Bamford: [Laughs.] He's a terrible DJ but he got the ball rolling.

Lorimer: Yeah, but in 1999 he was excellent.




Bamford: Well, the one on Maoming had character as well, but dkd started doing lots of stuff -- they had an after-hours, which no one was doing...

Again dkd, just set the ball rolling for what was to come. The couple times I DJed there were very good because the crowd was so into the music and they would go with you to certain places.


Lorimer: Yeah, it would probably be like a pre-Shelter. Back then they were playing Trance-ey stuff and House as well. But I think they were only for a very small subset of the clubbing population on Maoming, so when they moved to Huaihai it was a bigger deal because it showed that something was growing there.




Lorimer: On different nights obviously, but both in 2005, and both proving that Drum n Bass could work in this city. Kind of proof of the concept, and after that Siesta [Drum n Bass promoter] started working at Bonbon, and that's when Bonbon took off.

Bamford: The scale of the DJs themselves -- it's something to note. Opening that door. And it was Goldie too, you know, he's a movie star...


Lorimer: Um, well, it's definitely scaled down a bit from those Bonbon days -- you know, packed houses for a Drum n Bass DJ. But I still think the vibe is good, and the people who come out for it are definitely hardcore.


Lorimer: [Laughs.] Yeah, they love the Drum n Bass.



Lorimer: Yeah, well it was huge. He had a private plane with his face painted on it. He did four gigs: Shenzhen, Guangzhou, Beijing, and Shanghai. And it was at the Museum of Science and Technology below the I-Max. They had like a VIP lounge and all. The gig itself, though, was very echo-ey and his computer crashed. He was all about Ableton back then.

Bamford: Yeah, just when he was getting going, the music stopped. His computer crashed. [Laughs.]

Lorimer: Actually, it was kind of a boring gig, and you had to drink Chivas all night.

Bamford: Again, it was the scale of the thing. Sasha in Shanghai. And there was like 2,000 people, with retardedly expensive tickets. Like 600rmb or something and more for the VIPs. And yeah it just wasn't that good. He didn't play well, the crowd didn't get into it; the place was too big.

Lorimer: I kind of remember it as the start of the completely over-the-top bookings of big DJs. Like, the next year and a half there was a flood of Top 100 DJs coming in. Anyone who has ever been on the list has been through. I remember at one point we had four DJs from the top 25 in town on the same weekend.

It's funny because all these top DJs kind of hate Shanghai. John Digweed hates Shanghai. Steve Lawler hates Shanghai. They think the crowds suck. Like Digweed and Lawler especially, they go to a typical club in Europe or the States or wherever, and they play eight hours minimum -- a slow-burn kind of set where it builds, and people get into that. But they come to China and they're told, 'you have two hours, maybe three and you got to bang it out right away,' which isn¡¯t their style.

So they play what they do and people in the first hour are like, 'what's this? I'm bored.'



Lorimer: No, that was more 2007.

Bamford: [Laughs]. I was doing travelling. 2008 was garbage though.


Bamford: Because I was there. [Laughs.]

Lorimer: No, because the Formula 1 parties were special and unique to Shanghai, so this was back in the day where everyone in Shanghai was going nuts over F1. The corporate sponsors were dumping ridiculous amounts of money on these things too. But yeah. Big, big party. Good DJ.

Bamford: 2,500 people through the door. Good show. It was that whole F1 thing. It was an epic party. It went until 7 in the morning and people were still going. They had to shut off the sound system. Most of the time when it gets late, people lose steam and wander off but at that one, people were still wanting more at 7am.

I'd never seen that in Shanghai before. It should happen more often but it doesn't.


Lorimer: That one was special because he was doing his "Global Underground" thing. Global Underground is a record label based in London, and they take their big-name DJs to cities that they think have risen on to the international stage. So Shanghai getting one was a big deal. And it was absolutely packed.

Bamford: Yeah, a lot of people disagree and think that it might be a bunch of bullshit, but it still did mean a lot to the city, to get one of these shows.

Lorimer: I think it mattered more to people outside of Shanghai. People back in Europe took notice and a lot of the international hype of Shanghai comes from things like that. You know, a lot of the hype is undeserved, but I think that party made some people sit up and take notice.

Bamford: Most people in Europe are like, 'China? Is there anything there? Can you even drink there?', but when you get of these happening, it shows the city off to people back home.


Lorimer: Yeah, they're not so "mainstream", but that place opening affected the nightlife in Shanghai as a whole and had all the other big clubs looking, as well as impacting the local electronic music scene. In wonderful ways.

Bamford: It just brought this other way of clubbing to the forefront -- the type of clubber, the club without tables on the dance floor. You don't have to get a bottle to sit down, it was quite refreshing.

Lorimer: But we don't need to go into it. We've all said a lot about The Shelter in the past.




Lorimer: Mike Tyson appearing at a club called Snatch for about 12 minutes and then going back to his hotel room or wherever with 50,000 USD.

Bamford: [Laughs.]

Lorimer: The hype. The hype. People were talking about that for months, and they had a huge turnout, but then it was just a disaster. The club changed it's name in about three weeks and then just outright closed.

Bamford: [Laughs.]

Lorimer: Yeah, but if you remember, Snatch opening was right in the middle of all those clubs opening -- Attica, G Spot -- and it was just the worst. You know. Especially with that name, Snatch, and the horrible gimmick of bringing out Tyson.

They had some good DJs too working there, I think John Yang was one of them, but they basically put all their eggs in the basket for Mike Tyson being there for 10 minutes, and for some reason thought that it would translate into a medium-term business plan. Which is nonsensical.

But it seems like still no ones learned anything in Shanghai because clubs are still opening that are highly questionable.


***

Union DJs Carl Lormier and Steve Bamford play at G+ this Saturday. Head on down for big House music.

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