Dave Seaman joined Super Progressive to talk about his label Selador and upcoming Seladoria shows, becoming the editor at Mixmag magazine, his residency at Shelley’s, forming Brothers in Rhythm, Renaissance mixes, Global Underground mixes in Buenos Aires, South Africa, Melbourne, and Lithuania, and his Bape collection.
This interview originally aired on November 4, 2021. Transcribed by Revan Aponso.
Super Progressive: All set to go. Mic check. Mic check. Alright, well welcome back to another episode of Super Progressive, and today we have an amazing guest. We have Dave Seaman joining us today. Super stoked. Dave, how are you doing?
Dave Seaman: I’m all right, thank you. How are you
Super Progressive: Beyond excited? It’s about 6:00 AM in the morning here in Los Angeles, probably around 6:30, 2:30 PM in England. And it’s cool meeting up with DJs all over the globe. It’s very exciting.
Dave Seaman: Yeah, it’s an early start for you on a Monday morning. Sorry about that.
Super Progressive: Oh no, it’s awesome. Just the fact that you could fit us in, we’re super thankful. So we’re going to talk all about your career today, but no better place to start than the present. You have post lockdown, you have your Selador and Seladoria gigs going, and you just had your first gig at E one. Can you tell us a little bit about the concept of Seladoria and then also how the gig went and how everything’s going with it?
Dave Seaman: Yeah, it was great. It felt like forever we were waiting to actually get it off the ground with various lockdowns and having to keep pushing things back and everything. But it was a concept that we’d talked about before Covid hit, just to do label parties, really to have a bit of a platform for Steve and I, Steve Perry. I run the label for Steve and I and the roster of artists that we have to be able to do gigs under the cell door banner, but to try and not just turn up with a banner and some DJs and actually have a bit more of a concept. So we’d kind of invested into doing some big visuals. I mean the branding that we have as a label, the whole idea of Cell Door, the name comes from the film, Donny Darko, when they talk about the three most beautiful syllables you can put together in the English language being cell door. So that’s kind of where we got it from. So the whole Frank Rabbit from Donny Darko came into play, and so our logo is the son of Frank. He’s Harvey, the son of Frank, allegedly the love child of Frank from Donny Darko and Jessica Rabbit after a wild weekend at Twilio in the late nineties. But I can’t, it’s just conjecture at this point. There was no DNA test done, so I can’t prove anything.
But yeah, so Harvey is our rabbit king, our enigmatic rabbit king. And so we had some huge visuals using Harvey and the whole idea of clubbing as going down a rabbit hole, going on an adventure, a bit psychedelic, the whole coming when you go into a club and you don’t quite know what to expect. And then you come out in the morning and it was all a bit of like, wow, did that all really happen? Which was the whole idea of being able to be free and losing yourself on the dance floor and everything. It’s an age old clubbing and not even just clubbing, the idea of people celebrating life together, it goes back as far as the Druids and the Native American Indians. And this has been going on for a long, long time, people gathering together and celebrating life to a rhythm, to a drum. So we try to incorporate all that into a bit of an immersive experience. So when you come in, you get all this, the visuals are really the main thing. That’s our thing that we were hanging in. So we spent a lot of time getting all that together, and finally we managed to get the gig in E one off the ground when we were opened up again here in the uk. And it went great. We were really, really happy and already got lots and lots of conversations going on with people around the world about coming and bringing the Seladoria thing to other dance floors. I’m so excited. Yeah.
Super Progressive: Yeah. We’ve actually been talking with Dom, who I’m not sure of your agent or tour manager, but we’re working hard to get you here in LA. It sounds amazing. We know there’s a rich history of underground dance music here and it’s post pandemic. There’s a lot of cool stuff going on. So we are working with Dom and some other promoters to hopefully have Seladoria come to LA. It would be awesome.
Dave Seaman: Yeah, that’d be amazing. Yeah, I need to renew my US visa first. That’s my, which expired through Covid and I never got around to doing it. Obviously we didn’t really know what was happening in terms of things opening up, but now they are doing by all accounts, I need to get that done. But yeah, we are hopefully going to come back to the States next summer-ish roundabout then. So yeah, it’d be lovely to return to LA with cell Seladoria in tow. Yeah, very excited to take that hot concept around the world.
Super Progressive: When was your first memory of consciously and through our research, music has been a part of your life forever it seems like, but when do you remember going into a record shop or listening to a pirate radio station or whatever and getting into underground dance music for the first time? And what were some of those first records that left a really big impression on you?
Dave Seaman: Oh gosh, it would’ve been sort of mid eighties time. I mean, I started collecting records when I was just eight or nine or something like that, just really playing seven inch pop singles records I’d acquired from various family members and just fell in love with. People forget that way back then you couldn’t even hear recorded music properly in stereo. All radio stations were all mono and a bit crackly and reception was poor. So when you actually got a record, you maybe hear something on the radio and think, well, that’s amazing when you’ve got a record and you put it on your turntable at home. It was like hearing it, this amazing sound came out. So yeah, finding more and more seven inch records as it was at the time was very exciting to me and hearing it in its full glory. So I started doing that, and then I went on holiday when I was about eight or something with my parents, and there was a DJ who just set up a mobile rig in the hotel there, and I was allowed to stay up and help him. He kind of invited me to help him set up, and I was allowed to stay up and go to the party as it was in the hotel. So I became a DJ quite early. I wanted to be a DJ quite early, but this was before dance music. I mean, dance music was around of course, but I was only, by the time I started getting really into being a dj, I was 12, 13 and wasn’t old enough to go to nightclubs as such. But I did start devouring all that was available to me in terms of weekly magazines, which was pretty much what was available really. There was a little bit of maybe on the radio where I was growing up in Leeds, there was no dance music on the radio really at all. It was pop music on and one column a week in record mirror it was, talked about DJing and DJs and more club music, which then I sort of devoured all that. So yeah, so it would’ve been sort of mid eighties. I would’ve started to become a little bit obsessed with the New York music scene at the time, because New York pretty much was the epicentre of dance music back then with all the clubs of legendary clubs that they had. And it would’ve been things like a lot of the Arthur Baker productions. I got into break dancing when I was like 15 or 16, and that’s kind of really where I got more into dance music and club music, A lot of electro, a lot of rockers, revenge and African Mumbaata as Planet Rock. And I used to religiously watch Wild Style and Beat Street and all those kind of movies that had a lot of electro music. And I used to buy all the Electro Street sounds albums. New Order, I was kind of a bit of a fan of New Order anyway, and then suddenly they started doing some stuff with Arthur Baker and Blue Monday came out. And so that was my introduction to more club music at the time, but I was still too young to get into a nightclub. So yeah, it was limited, and again, you can Google anything and find out anything, and I’d be there for days down a rabbit hole learning about certain things, as you probably are now learning about underground Dad’s music back then. It was really, really limited. I would probably read that column like three or four times that week because there was no other way of getting any more information about club music than that one column. And I think Radio One had a little dance show on a Sunday night, more of a soul show, which I used to listen to every week. So yeah, very, very limited information used to devour it all.
Super Progressive: So you’re kind of nurturing this passion for dance music in any way you can. You say you’re devouring it. What age were you and how did you decide to get it, because I’m sure you had to save up your money and stuff, but how’d you get your equipment to start mixing for the first time?
Dave Seaman: It was very difficult, really. I had a mobile rig, so I was working in some of the pubs and I used to do people’s weddings and birthday parties and all that kind of thing on the circuit around my local area where I lived. I was the local DJ, if you like. So I was doing a lot of friends’ birthday parties, but it wasn’t really about mixing. I was 15, 16 and I couldn’t go to clubs and there wasn’t really a club culture in my local area. This is pre house music. So it wasn’t until 1987, ‘86, ‘87 when house music arrived that there was any kind of dance music explosion. ‘87 would’ve been the year that Mars and S’Express and Bomber Bass and Coal Cut and all those producers started making DJ sample records. So again, this was all flourishing through ‘86, ‘87, ‘88, and by that point I’d got myself a job at MixMag through big twist of fate of winning a raffle, a DJ convention, and I ended up winning a week in New York at the new music seminar in 1987 and getting on well with a lot of people in the music industry, DMC particularly, who were the people that sponsored that raffle and got offered a job to come down and work for them.
So I was really very much in the eye of the storm in terms of the UK record industry and what was going on and the explosion of Acid House as it became known as a culture over here. Before I even started thinking about mixing as a dj, I stopped DJing pretty much when I went down to work for DMC and just jumped in the deep end of being in the record industry.
Super Progressive: Now during ‘86, ‘87, ‘88, what I know to be called the Second summer of love in England, were you enjoying it just in solitude learning about these records or were you in the clubs going and experiencing club culture?
Dave Seaman: I was at that point once I moved down to London in 1987, I was 19, so I’m old enough to get into a club then. And of course, I started working for DMC who were the owners of MixMag and they had studios there, so they were making remixes, one of the very earliest companies doing regular remixes before record companies really did regular remixes. They were doing a remix package on vinyl every month, and they did the mixing and scratching championship. So it was very much about DJ culture. So I started, I was going out all the time then, but not DJing because I was kind of dropped in the deep end. I became editor of MixMag really before by the time I was 20 while they were trying to find another somebody else to take over after the editor left, and I ended up just carrying on with that. So I became more of a journalist really at that point, and of course experienced it firsthand and got to know all the protagonists of what was going on in that Summer of Love in ‘88 and ‘89 and reported on it. And being right there in the eye of the storm. I couldn’t have been any more lucky really, to have experienced it, but I didn’t actually start DJing again until 1990 when a friend of mine who was one of my main photographers at MixMag, and he used to do a lot of assignments with, I used to go to places with him. He used to take photographs. I used to be doing the interviews or whatever or reporting on club nights. He started a night in Stoke on Trent called Shelly’s and that, and Sasha was actually living in his same building, Gary’s building, so they were quite good friends, and he asked Sasha if he’d like to become resident there, Sasha said he only wanted to do a three weeks out of every four because there was other clubs he wanted to play on a Friday. So I ended up doing the other night and then also doing some warmups for him. So the first time I played in a club and actually started mixing was at Shelly’s, and because I was working at DMC at the time, they had studios there with Technics 1200s. So I was learning in my spare time when I wasn’t working on the magazine, how to mix in the DMC offices there, and so to get myself a little bit of practise in terms of mixing, and I was out at clubs every weekend, so I was learning a lot about how to mix from a lot of amazing DJs on a weekly basis. So yeah.
Super Progressive: That’s really amazing. I just want to backtrack a little bit because I think fans of Underground Dance music and fans of DJs are so dedicated and want to know everything. You said that your relationship with DMC and that’s your relationship with MixMag kind of began with a raffle and a twist of fate. Do you mind giving us the behind the scenes story of how you actually got connected with them and what this trip to New York was all about?
Dave Seaman: Yeah, I was a member of DMC, so through my teenage years, as I say, I was trying to devour as much as I could about DJing and club culture. One of the ways that I could do that was to become a member of DMC. So I became a member of DMC I think from about 1985. I think the first time I started to get by and to become a was a DJ only organisation, so it was your subscription, and when you paid your subscription, you got three pieces of vinyl every month and MixMag, which was kind of a glorified newsletter about DJs, and it was perfect for me. It’s exactly what I wanted to be getting. So I paid my subscription every month, got some exclusive remixes that you couldn’t buy in the shops and got magazines. And also they did a convention every year, the DMC convention, which is where they did the mixing and scratching championship finals, and they also gave out a lot of awards, and they had Janet Jackson come and to accept awards, all sorts of people, James Brown eventually, and oh, amazing, amazing artists come and collect their awards. So I went to the 1987 convention and Camel Cigarettes were the ones who were sponsoring a grand raffle. If you took a cigarette off them, you filled your name and an address in and went into the hat, and I came out of the hat first. I mean, just never won anything else before. I have never won anything else since. I won my career. I mean, probably with Acid House, what was around the corner and house culture in the UK, I would’ve found my way into the industry anyway, but I was so lucky to get in early to be, because I won a week in New York at the new music seminar, which was then the equivalent of what the Miami Music Conference is now. Where all people from all around the world go to have a dance music convention, and there’s lots of gigs going on, lots of seminars, lots of places for like-minded people from the dance music industry to meet. I was 19. I wasn’t old enough to get into a club in New York at the time, but I went out there, I had a week out there, I had an amazing time, met a lot of people from the UK record industry and the American side of things, went to some amazing clubs. But on the final day, the reason why I got my job was on the final day, I had been out shopping. I went around New York shopping, went to all the record shops, and we were staying at the Marriott Marquis on Times Square, which is where the convention was being held. I went to McDonald’s on Times Square, and whilst I was in the queue at McDonald’s, I met a guy from a club who is a security guy from the club. He noticed I had my pass around my neck. He said, you from the UK, you’re here for the convention, dah, dah, dah. You should come to my club. I work at a club, I work security on the door there. And he gave me his card. I thought nothing of it, put it in my pocket, and went back to the hotel. There were all the people from the UK industry from DMC, were all in reception, they were all just about to go out for dinner, and invited me out for dinner. I was like, I just ate. I’ve just ate McDonald’s, where abouts are you all going? Maybe I can meet up with you later. And they said, oh, we’re going to have some food and we’re going to probably go to Nell’s. And I said, oh, right, okay, I’ll see you there. And kind of walked off. And they all just kind of went thought, well, he’s not going to get in, because I didn’t realise at the time that Nells was one of the hardest, most exclusive clubs in New York to get into. But he was working at the door at Nells, was the guy that had given me his car, complete, fake, complete coincidence. I thought nothing of it. And went down to the club, met the guy on the door, he got me in. I was, had a few drinks, underage drinks, I shouldn’t have heard, but I knew the bouncer there, the security guy got, after about two hours in the club, there was no sign of anybody coming. It was the last night, we were all flying back the next day. So I thought, oh, forget it, I’m going to go back. As I left the club, quite a few people from DMC were all stood on the pavement. They couldn’t get in. They were having trouble getting in. I’d had a few drinks, oh, come meet my friend Michael. Michael, these are all my friends from England. And I remember they all just kind of looked at me, who is this kid who’s not even old enough to get into a club here, getting us all into a club in New York? So yeah, a few days later, the people who own DMC, Tony and Christine ran me up and said, I don’t know what we want you to do, but if you can get us all into a nightclub in New York, you are our kind of person and we can see your passion for music and DJing, and we’d like you to come down and work for us. So I went down to be a tea boy to start off with. I was just making tea for everybody, and I just kind of fell into doing some reviews for Mixed Mag. So it went, and this was 1987. This was right at the very cusp of everything of the electronic music DJ culture revolution starting. Yeah,
Super Progressive: It’s so cool. And what a chance and what a twist of fate. Yeah. What were some of your specific responsibilities with MixMag in its infancy? You said it was more of a newsletter than anything, but are you writing, organising, and then designing the newsletter itself? Are you pretty much doing everything or what were you doing?
Dave Seaman: I mean, I’m probably undercutting it a little bit there. I mean, it was a magazine, it wasn’t just a newsletter, but it was very much like it wasn’t a public magazine. It was very much talking about DJ stuff, and it was very industry led, so there was all sorts in there. And it was still coming out of the eighties, which DJing in the eighties was still about people, a lot of personality DJs, radio DJs, telling jokes in between the records and stuff like that. So there was a definite change just about to happen. As I came down, obviously they reviewed records and they did talk about some DJs that were working in clubs, but a lot of it was still in that old eighties mentality of DJs being the personalities rather than the music makers. As DJs were just about to come really. So yeah, I was the young new boy who was really riding that crest of a wave of the new thing that was happening. So I just started doing reviews really, record reviews, and then went to a couple of clubs and maybe talked to a couple of the DJs there, maybe did a little interview with them, and it was just all just changing. And then within six months of me being there, the old editor left quite quickly and they were stuck. So I was kind of thrown in the deep end to kind of do more and more and try and get a magazine out that month. Well, they were trying to find somebody to replace him. They didn’t find somebody, a perfect person to replace him. And that went on for a couple of months while I made the magazine happen one time and made it happen another time. And eventually Tony said, you know what? You’re doing a good job. We’re just going to let you carry on with it. We can tell that things are changing and you are right on it on that kind of thing. So yeah, we tried to change the magazine a little bit there into bringing in the whole idea of this new DJ speed. Everything changed. When people started turning towards the dj, everybody started facing the dj. All of a sudden it was like the DJ was the focal point of the night. And that all happened around about that time, ‘87, because otherwise people went to clubs. Before that, people weren’t all facing the dj. It wasn’t the focal point. You might have even been tucked away where somebody couldn’t even see him. And then all of a sudden as acid house culture exploded, the DJ became the focus and what he was playing. And yeah, that was, as I say, ‘87, ‘88, ‘89, the social landscape of the UK. And eventually the world completely changed. If you were going into a different city in the UK pre ‘88, and you came from a different city and you went into somebody else’s city, it was likely that you might end up in a bit of trouble. They might hear your accent. It was a territory kind of thing. And it was the football hooliganism and stuff from the eighties, and it is animalistic really. It was a territorial, neanderthal kind of way of thinking. And then all of a sudden there was a real community built from dance music and from DJing, and then all of a sudden people were travelling all over the country and embraced, where you are from. And that changed really quickly in the space of, well, a space of one summer, really over 1988, very, very quickly. And all of a sudden you could travel all over the country. People were going out there and everywhere without fear of being embroiled in some sort of trouble they weren’t looking for.
Super Progressive: It’s cool, I think, well, one of my favourite films of all time is 24 Hour Party People, which is all about Manchester. And the climax of that film is when Tony Wilson’s explaining how the clubbers turned to the DJ for the first time. Yeah, it’s really interesting. When you were a clubber, were you one of the ones that were travelling? Were you travelling all around as well, going to different cities?
Dave Seaman: Yeah, I was going all over the UK. I was the editor of a dance music magazine, so they wanted me to go to their clubs and then report back and talk about their clubs. And I had access to all these DJs because they were all getting MixMag and they wanted to be in MixMag. And of course, by 1989, we launched Mixed Mag to the public and it became a public dance music magazine and the voice of the Clubber. So yeah, I mean, I was going out every weekend nonstop and sometimes a couple of two or three gigs a weekend, and I used to go to the Hacienda religiously in Manchester on a Friday night to watch Mike Pickering in Grain Park. That was where I really cut my clubbing teeth really. As soon as I started at DMC, I was up there almost every weekend.
Super Progressive: So cool. I got the chance to go to Manchester two summers ago, and even though you can’t go inside the club, it’s still awesome to be able to see, and there’s a plaque there, but see where all these buildings in the birth of club culture all happen. It was really cool. So I have a couple of questions. So Shelly’s, according to, or Shelly, according to my research, you started their residency there in 1991. And not sure if that’s not, if that’s correct, but my question is, when you started this residency, did you already have a reputation because of MixMag or was your name not really well known even though you were the one making a lot of stuff happen?
Dave Seaman: For Mix Mag, I didn’t really have much reputation as a DJ particularly. I hadn’t been DJing for a few years, and my DJ-ing career prior to that was very localised in a little suburb of Leeds, so nobody really knew me on a national basis. It was 1990, actually, August 1990, Shelly started and I went to the first week there because as I say, Gary was a good friend of mine who was the promoter, who was my main photographer, head photographer at MixMag. So I went there and I was soon, I started DJing there without any kind of reputation, but I did have access to all the best music. I editor at MixMag, and –
Super Progressive: That’s really cool.
Dave Seaman: So again, I was very lucky I had access to all the equipment at DMC, so I could practice a lot on good equipment and then have access to all the latest music. And also at that time, I started to make music as well with Steve Anderson as Brothers in Rhythm, who was also working at DMC in the studios downstairs. He came and did a lot of writing for MixMag for me, and I was going downstairs and started making productions with him. So in 1990, we made Peace and Harmony, which was the very first Brothers in Rhythm record. And then before the end of 1990, we made Such a Good Feeling. So I was also making music that was quite big in the clubs for those specific clubs. So that kind of elevated my name as a DJ as well, quite quickly. It was like, oh, it’s the guy that made that track. Yeah. So yeah, from 1990, towards the end of 1990, those few months, it kind of did escalate quite quickly for me, and I was getting invited to go play other clubs around the country. And again, I think obviously being the editor of the magazine at the time, I’m under no illusion, that really did help in terms of me getting more DJ work. They wanted me to come and DJ their club and hopefully write about their club as well at the same time.
Super Progressive: So we spend a lot of time talking to Clubbers who are of your generation, so a lot older than us now, but they really look back fondly at the Shelly’s era in that specific time. My question is, when you were DJ-ing at Shelly’s and Sasha has three fridays and you have a friday, did you know something magical was happening in the club at the moment, or was it more this is just how things are, and then looking back you realize, wow, that was really a special time?
Dave Seaman: Yeah, I mean, it was an amazing time and we did know that we were having an amazing night on a weekly basis, but Shelly’s, the first time that that happened, the Hacienda through 1988, ‘89 it was like that every week. Yeah, I was well aware of what was happening in the UK was amazing times. As I say, the whole social landscape of the country was changing, and the fact that you could travel up and down the country and go to all these nightclubs and be warmly received by the people that live there, but also all these other people converging from all around the country, it was like a pilgrimage. It wasn’t just people in Stoke that were going to Shelley’s or people in Manchester that were going to the Hacienda, but it was an amazing time. It was amazing music being made. The thing is, it was all very new. And when something’s brand new like that, and we’re talking about a revolution, a cultural revolution not seen in the UK since maybe New Romanticism a few years earlier, or punk before that, or mods and rockers before that, we were pretty good actually at the UK in terms of making a movement out of music cultures. It was one of our best exports, really. And I think all at the time, I think we saw Acid House as it became known. People sometimes think Acid House is a genre, which it is, I suppose, but it’s also for people of that generation. Acid House was the whole culture, rave culture was Acid House, and it was the next youth movement that was happening, and we seem to be having them every few years, and it was the next one. And I think we probably all thought there’s another few five years in this. There was in new romanticism or there was in punk and, but actually of course, it’s been more like rock and roll actually. It’s just been carried on for 30 plus years now and just keeps getting repackaged for the next generation. It’s the electronic version of rock and roll. Rock and Roll was built around a guitar and acid house. And house culture was built around a sampler and equipment and technology. So yeah, we were aware that something special was going on, but I don’t think any of us realised it was going to be going on for decades.
Super Progressive: To kind of wrap up my questions about MixMag, one monumental thing that you guys accomplished was MixMag Volume I featuring Carl Cox. And this is remembered as, and correct me if I’m wrong, but one of the first commercially available mix albums. Can you talk to us a little bit about how that idea came to be in the execution of it?
Dave Seaman: Yeah. Well, at the time, this was all very, very underground what was going on. It was all a big secret. I think that was part of this, what made it all so special. These clubs that weren’t, it was not something that the media generally knew about, and it was all word of mouth, and the music was being passed around by cassette tapes, DJs being recorded when they were doing their sets, and then they’d be passed around and taped, copied and copied and copied. And sometimes DJs were selling cassettes of their sets to top up their money. They weren’t getting paid very much at the time. What DMC did, of course they did, as I say, with these vinyl albums that they used to sell as part of the subscription service. They had a licence to remix tracks and do mega mixes, do mixes of people’s tracks. It was legal, it was done, but it was a subscription only. It was DJ only. You couldn’t sell ’em through the shops, but they did have an in with the powers that be in that respect. So they had a license with PRS and PPL and so on and so forth. So they realised that actually it would be great because obviously when people were doing it illegally and it was all bootlegs, these cassettes, nobody was getting paid, none of the artists, it was music, it was, and all the DJs. So they quickly realised that they were probably in a good position to licence all the tracks through their contacts with the UK industries, music industries, the powers that be in that sense, and make a commercially available thing that you could actually sell through the shops. So yeah, so MixMag Live Volume One was, as far as I know, it was the very first commercially available DJ mix compilation. And yeah, I did one side of it and Carl Cox did the other side of it. And of course, they went on to do many more mixed Mag Live compilations with lots of other amazing DJs. And off the back of that, then the whole mix compilation very, very quickly escalated and became a massive, massive industry in the UK and around the world.
Super Progressive: Yeah. We’ll get to your contributions with Global Underground and Renaissance very soon. I want to talk about Brothers in Rhythm. It’s really cool to me because when researching, it seems like you went through this experience that a lot of DJ producers go through where you have a dedicated fan base, very dedicated to the underground sound, but as a musician, you’re making music that people want to listen to and want to hear. Can you kind of talk about walking that balance with brothers and rhythm of being pop conscious, but also an underground sound?
Dave Seaman: Yeah. Well, to be honest, when we made “Peace and Harmony” and we made “Such a Good Feeling”, there wasn’t any other reason. “Peace and Harmony” was made to play at the Hacienda, it was just simply a track made to play for that dance floor. And “Such a Good Feeling” was made to play at Shelly’s. I wasn’t thinking of anything else in terms of becoming a pop hit, which it eventually did. And that was just simply because the whole explosion of that culture happened and it spread like wildfire really. And then all of a sudden these records were making it into the pop charts. There were so many thousands of people going to these parties on the weekend, these illegal raves in the fields around the country with 20-30,000 people, all they’re hearing these records, they all wanted to go and buy ’em. So it became pop music by default. It wasn’t made as pop music, it was made as an underground dance track. And then as Brothers in Rhythm escalated, “Such a Good Feeling” became Chris Lowe from the Pet Shop Boys, it became his favourite record of the time, and all of a sudden we were being invited to remix for the Pet Shop Boys and co-produce with them very quickly as well. So talk about being dropped in the deep end. Again, very, very quickly. The first artist we ever worked with in the studio was the Pet Shop Boys who at the time were two of the biggest, one of the biggest artists in the country, if not the world, and two heroes and icons to me and Steve and we’re in the studio with him. Crazy to think of, but at the time it was all just, oh yeah, we’re just doing that, we’re doing that. And so at that point then you are making pop music, but I was always a Pet Shop Boys fan. I was always a fan of pop music to a certain degree. And as I say, New Order and people like that, they were bands that were going in the pop charts as well. So dance music suddenly became pop music. And we did do a lot of remixes for a lot of artists, big name artists for New Order and for Michael Jackson and Janet Jackson and David Bowie and so on and so forth. Because a lot of the big artists wanted a piece of this new, it was like rubbing electronic music culture, rubbing off on them was a little thing that they wanted, and having club mixes that was being played in the clubs was a cool thing for a lot of pop artists. So, we ended up working on a lot of stuff that was maybe considered more pop, but it was all driven by the dance floor. It was all driven by me wanting to play out at the weekend. We did do some other pop stuff as well that wasn’t necessarily for me further down the line, but certainly that period, late eighties, early nineties, was all driven by making records for the dance floor.
Super Progressive: We can kind of take this a couple of different directions, but one kind of standalone question I had was, did you ever have a chance to one club or one promotion that we learn a lot about and read a lot about is Up Yer Ronson with Dave Beer. Was it cool going back to Leeds and playing gigs as a bonafide DJ?
Dave Seaman: Yeah, very much so. I’ll just correct you Up Yer Ronson wasn’t Dave Beer, Dave Beer used to run Back to Basics. Up Yer Ronson was another club in Leeds that I did play for, it was another one of the big clubs in Leeds. I did play for Dave. I did play for Up Yer Ronson a few times, and going back to Leeds was amazing. And a lot of my friends from Leeds who I went to school with were coming to the Hacienda with me and going to Shelley’s with me. So I used to go back and hang out with all of them, so they were aware of what was going on in Leeds, and yeah, I ended up going back and playing. It was lovely to go back to my hometown because when I left my hometown, there was no dance music in Leeds really. I remember the warehouse was going on, it was kind of a rare groove, that kind of thing. But yeah, it exploded. All the other big cities in the country exploded very, very quickly. As I say, the whole scene spread like fire through ‘88 and ‘89. It was blanket across the country, all the little towns, little towns in the middle of nowhere all of a sudden had house music nights on a Saturday night, let alone the big cities.
Super Progressive: Really, really cool. So can I ask, how did your relationship that would go on to span almost an entire career, but how did your relationship with Renaissance begin?
Dave Seaman: Well, Jeff, who runs Renaissance, he used to go to Shelly’s. So I knew Jeff from Shelly’s. And when Shelly’s kind of closed or kind of started to get a little bit tired, once you’ve got something special going on, it’s very amazing at the beginning. You’ve got all the cool cats going and it’s all very secretive. As news spread, generally, this is how things happen when everybody around the country starts to hear about it, then the cooler people go somewhere else. And maybe the clientele towards the end of 1991 was people who weren’t really, there weren’t as well, they were there still for the music and for what was going on, but it wasn’t so much the trendsetters so much the people that were really making things happen, so Shelly’s kind of fell away a little bit and there was more trouble with the local police and all that kind of thing. The secret had been spoiled a little bit. Sasha wasn’t enjoying it so much. So yeah, so Jeff decided that he was going to start a new night somewhere else where Sasha and myself and John Digweed. He had lots of people come to play at Renaissance, which he opened in 1992. And again, that was another one I made. The Mighty Ming “Brothers Love Dubs” was made specifically for Renaissance’s dance floor. So yeah, so he started at Venue 44 in Mansfield in 1992. It’ll be their 30th anniversary next year as Renaissance. And that’s where I started my relationship with Jeff. Even though I knew him from the dance floor, that’s when he started as a club promoter, and I started DJing for him, and it went on through there and I am still working with him to this day.
Super Progressive: Yeah, definitely. It’s so cool to me that you’re making specific songs for a dance floor, and we have the opportunity to go back, listen to these tracks, and actually learn about the culture of the club that the track was made for by listening to it. It’s really cool, and you can hear the progression of the music. Now, one thing that we’ve learned across our interviews with Anthony Pappa, Danny Tenaglia is, and I just learned this, but you started Stress Records.
Dave Seaman: That’s right, yeah.
Super Progressive: How, first of all, how do you have the brain span and the bandwidth to start all these different projects? And you have so much stuff going on, but also when did you decide to start stress amidst everything else going on in your career?
Dave Seaman: Just, I mean, I’d been at MixMag for about three years, and then I’d started DJing at Shelly’s and I was getting more and more offers of work for DJing and Brothers in Rhythm was taking off. So I realised that I couldn’t do all of them. And after three years of being editor of MixMag, I didn’t have any journalistic credentials really. I was just a fan really, and driven by passion and enthusiasm. I didn’t have any qualifications as such. So I realised that at the time, maybe it was good to bring somebody in with a little bit more journalistic experience to kind of take MixMag on to the next level because it was becoming a public magazine that everybody wanted to, more corporations were getting involved with advertising and all that kind of thing. And because the other parts of my career were taking off, which I enjoyed more the DJing and the music making, I decided to get a couple of my writers, David Davidson, Dom Phillips was actually the assistant editor who took over from me and Nick Gordon Brown at MixMag. And then also it made sense for DMC to start his own record label. We were getting sent, there’s a lot of producers working out of the studios there, and we were getting sent a lot of music and we had access to pressing records. We were doing that. Anyway, I’d been doing that for years with all the necessary factors at our disposal to easily start pressing our own records up. And the whole white label thing was very big round record stores there and people wanting underground music on limited edition white labels. There was a producer there at DMC, Phil Kelsey, who was PKA, we made a record. I said, oh, that’d be massive. We should rather than start shipping it around to record companies who probably didn’t understand what was going on quite as much as we did. We thought we could do it ourselves a little bit. So we started stress without any grand plan to turn it into a massive record label, just as a way to put out some white labels to start off with. But that quickly escalated as well. Yeah, the making the music, the DJing and the record label all kind of went well with each other. I was getting a lot of demos sent, which was great for me to have exclusive music. So yeah, so it all sat side by side. As I say, DMC had everything we needed to run a record label and the studios and the DJing, it all went hand in hand. So Stress started, I think around the end of 1991, just as I was finishing with Mixed Bag around mixed bag to October ‘91. David and Dom took over from November ‘91, and that’s when we first put out stress. So one kind of took over from the other a little bit
Super Progressive: Really, really, really cool. And it’s cool that stress became an avenue for so many other DJs for you to get connected with so many other DJs. It’s like you look at the discography of it and you’re pointing out the who’s who of the progressive Epic House era. It’s awesome. One huge part of Anthony Papa’s story was him opening up for touring DJs in Melbourne, and then he said he got a gig with Stress in London and allowed him to come over and make the trip and start his DJ career in England. So cool.
Dave Seaman: Yeah, I mean, I met Anthony when I went on my first trip to Australia in 1993. Anthony and Phil Kay, god rest his soul. So yeah, I kept in contact with them and then eventually he came over to work for us at DMC. We brought him over, he had a couple of gigs and he said, oh, if I’m going to further my career, I realize I’ve got to be in Europe. Australia was a long way away, still is a long way away. So he came over and moved over, and I got him some work there at DMC. So yeah, a lot of people went through the DMC kind of that building there and Stress. And I mean, I got Sasha, some of his first remixes for DMC. And then obviously for Stress as well. John Digweed went through his first release was on Stress. Tenaglia got to do some remixes. And so yeah, that building had so many things going on with the access to the biggest magazine at the time, access to studios, access to be able to do these amazing remixes for big name artists. They were doing that from before. The whole DJ culture thing took off. So yeah, so a lot of big, big names went through that building, and I was very lucky to be a part of it for, I dunno, 14 years I think I was at DMC.
Super Progressive: Yeah, I’m sure when they met you in New York, they couldn’t have imagined what the future for you and DMC and everything you’d bring to it would come to. It’s pretty cool.
Dave Seaman: Yeah, it was good for both of us, definitely. I mean, I got a lot out of it and was able to bring a lot to them as well, I think in terms of being the guy, the young guy who just came in. And then of course, as I say, there were lots of other people that came in and followed me and we were all living the dream, really, all of us together, and it was a very, very cool period of time to be a part of that.
Super Progressive: Yeah, totally, bro. As I was explaining before the show, how our journey learning about this history of underground dance music began, it began with Global Underground in us understanding what Global Underground was all about. And we have your Melbourne and your Bueno Aires here in the studio. We listen to them all the time. And I just have some questions about those specific releases. One, I think every DJ we’ve had on the show mentions Buenos Aires as a very special place that embraces underground dance music. Now, can you kind of tell us a little bit about your decision? It’s your first global underground to bring it to Buenos Aires and then what the party was like?
Dave Seaman: Yeah, I started to do quite a lot of travelling. I was very lucky to start doing all these international gigs through the mid-nineties. And Global Underground obviously started, as we talked about before, in terms of doing these illegal cassettes as boxed, they were called beforehand. And then they realised that they could do it properly officially, because Jeff had done Renaissance Volume One with Sasha and John as a mixed compilation. And then they realised Global in the ground realised that they could licence all the tracks properly. It was becoming a business that everybody could do officially rather than selling cassettes out of the back of a car boot, or a car trunk, as you say, over there. So yeah, so Buenos Aires was one of the places I think I went to for the first time in 1998. And it just was incredible. The energy and the passion of the South American crowd there and particularly Buenos Aires, really blew me away. So when I got approached by the Global Underground guys to do a CD for them, a compilation for them, it was my instant thing, oh, we’ve got to do Buenos Aires. That was amazing, guys, you’ve got to come to Buenos Aires with me. And it was an incredible night and has gone on to be, it is the clubbing capital of the world in a lot of respects is Buenos Aires. I mean, you could talk about Ibiza and we could talk about Berlin and other big cities, but the passion, the size of the underground scene there, and Ibiza obviously is a very seasonal thing.
It’s a holiday destination. Whereas Buenos Aires is a year round clubbing capital where it’s just, it’s really under, it’s never really sold out. There were quite a lot of places that did go quite commercial post the millennium. And it’s always retained its real underground roots and has really thousands and thousands of people going to party there, but still retains a very, very discerning, knowledgeable crowd that’s just a pleasure to play for. And that’s never really changed since the first time I went, which is almost 25 years ago now. So yeah, I’m very lucky. I’m glad that I managed to get in and do Buenos Aires before somebody else did because I’m sure they wouldn’t have been long before somebody else was doing it. But yeah, that was my first of the four Global Undergrounds I did. And yeah, it’s always a pleasure to go back there. One of the highlights of, as you’ve alluded to there, I think most DJs will tell you anytime it’s one of the best places to DJ. Yeah.
Super Progressive: Totally. And when you’re making these mixes for Global Underground, you’re going to these crazy cities and every DJ kind of treats the mix as something different. But my question is, the city is such a big part of the mix beyond just the packaging, but it goes into the story, the album notes. Did the city affect your song selection at all, or were you really just playing the sound that you were playing and trying to drive forward at the time? And you would’ve played this same set in any city that you were in?
Dave Seaman: There were definite cultural differences at the time between, say, Buenos Aires, and Tel Aviv or something, which actually are really close, more closely knit now. But at the time, probably as areas you could be a little bit slower maybe in your buildup. It was this kind of that slower, sexier vibe going on. The people don’t really go out until really late. They have late dinners. The club might not even really get busy till two o’clock in the morning, but they were all still there till seven or somewhere in the UK, which was finishing at two o’clock or three o’clock. A lot of that, well, by that time, by the late nineties, more like four o’clock, but the licences got a little bit later. But the UK was still used to cramming it all in really quickly. People get in there early. And so there were differences in terms of how the night panned out. But overall, the sound that we were playing was the sound that people wanted to hear around the world. So you didn’t really change it drastically. People booked you, they wanted you to come and play your thing. They didn’t want you to change it to try and make it different for them than what it was somewhere else. As I say, you might make it slightly tailor it, depending on how the night was, pans out, how it was done in terms of times and how long you had to play and all that kind of thing. And maybe, as I say, the history of somewhere like Tel Aviv early doors, they were quite fast and furious. There was that sort of goer feel going on there. So there were little cultural differences. But no, overall, it wasn’t until Melbourne, actually Melbourne was one of the first ones that you mentioned where I tried, because I knew a lot of producers down there.
I’d become friends with a lot of producers down there. So I tried to include a lot of them. The ones that had actually made me really started to make a name for themselves as producers. I wanted to try and reflect all that. And I did get most of the people that I knew down there at the time to contribute a track to the Melbourne album. But before that, no, not so much. It was just whatever was the best music around at the time that I could lay my hands on, go and have an amazing night playing that music could hopefully be able to licence all those tracks, not all of them. Sometimes it wasn’t quite so easy. That’s why we could never really do a live mix.
You’d have to clear the tracks before you went to do the gig. And sometimes clearing tracks used to take months. So by the time you got there, if you did that by the time you got to the gig, a lot of those tracks would be old. You want you to be playing the brand new, fresh stuff. So it was always post the gig that we tried to licence as many of them as we can. And also you get things when you do a live mix. We had a bomb scare on the night of the Cape Town album. Yeah, it was just a rival promoter who tipped off the authorities to try and sabotage our night. So we had to be taken seriously. The police had to evacuate the building. So halfway through my set, everybody had to leave the building. If it was a live recording, there would’ve been a big gap there. And of course when you come back in, I couldn’t just carry on from where I left off. I almost had to start again. So the mix would’ve been very disjointed. So you can’t legislate for things like that As It happened, that was one of the best things that happened that night because it was my birthday, so everybody had to leave the club. We all had to stand outside in the car park while the police went in and made the necessary checks. And everybody outside was singing Happy Birthday to me in the carpark. And it was really a communal kind of feeling that we were all in it together. And then by the time they said, okay, you’re fine, you can go back in. Everybody rushed in. And of course, from the first record I played on the place just exploded.
So it had the opposite effect to whatever the guy that was trying to advertise the night, because it actually just elevated the whole night into something even more special overall. So yeah, we didn’t do live mixes for many reasons, that being one of them. But yeah, the licensing was the real problem. Sometimes it would take weeks and weeks to get clearance to use some of these tracks. So used to just try and try to, well obviously record the night and try to remember exactly how it went. And if you couldn’t get something, maybe you had something else that fitted in that came along after the event that you would’ve played on the night if it had been available at that time. And just really give the essence of the party and what the feel was the atmosphere of that particular night. Yeah.
Super Progressive: Yeah, really cool. My last kind GU related question is they started making these awesome documentaries like video documentaries of your trips and the one they have of you was in Melbourne, and you said that Melbourne was one of your favourite cities in general. It’s like a second home. What is it about the city that is special to you or special to club culture? And you want to talk a little bit about Melbourne?
Dave Seaman: Yeah, I think the people of what makes it a lot of the time, I mean it’s an amazing city in lots of respects, but I got to know and got to strike up a lot of friendships with a lot of people down there, a lot of very talented people. I dunno whether it was something to do, I dunno. Just generally it’s the same now. I dunno if it’s something to do with the geographical aspect of them being so far away from everybody else that they feel it’s not so much the case now with the advent of the internet and stuff, but maybe back then when you are kind of a bit out in the middle of nowhere, you almost feel like you have to go the extra mile, extra 20%, to get noticed. So they were really per capita, there were so many talented producers there, which as I say for the Melbourne album, I got to make sure a lot of ’em contributed to that. So yes, I used to really enjoy going down there. I used to love Chapel Street in particular, which was part of a suburb down there, which was some, and that’s where DMC used to have a shop, a record shop where Phil K used to work out of, and Anthony was down there obviously. And yeah, Kassey Taylor and Jamie Stevens and the infusion guys, and I mean Gab Oliver and all the Sunnyside guys. Stuart used to run DMC. I had a lot of friends down there, Sean Quinn. So it was like being home from home really. I think that was the thing used to really enjoying spending time there and being wowed by their enthusiasm and by their talent of all the people that were down there. And so yeah, I actually really came close to buying an apartment there on Chapel Street. I wish I had, I bought a place in Ibiza instead and that was a nightmare. I lost loads of money on it, so there you go. But yeah, it was just an instant affinity with the place and the people there that it’s still true to this day.
Super Progressive: Nice. In the same documentary, you kind of said how there are no pun intended, there are stresses involved with being a DJ in the DJ lifestyle and sometimes the club, you were saying how on your off day the club is sometimes the last place you want to be. It’s like if an office worker wanted to go to the office on a Saturday and Sunday, can you talk about these periods, and I don’t mean to get too personal, but these periods in a DJ’s career where it’s going, sometimes it’s going well and I imagine other times it’s really difficult and really tough. In the documentary, you said you got a place in Ibiza and just kind of took off for three months and just got back into the flow of things. Can you kind of talk about that perpetual flow as a DJ in a career of knowing when to kind of take your foot off the gas a little bit?
Dave Seaman: Yeah, it’s difficult, and everybody has their own way of dealing with it, I suppose. But when things are going really well and people want a piece of you all the time and you’re maybe doing several gigs on a weekend and the whole concept of being at a party, you feel like you’ve got to join in with that party and people want you to be a part of it. They don’t want you just to come in, be really cold and calculated, do your thing, take your money and off you go. Again, you do want to embrace the relationships with the people that are there, the promoters and the other DJs, and the people of course the crowd more than anything else. So if you get involved in that and then you’re having a few drinks and then you’re on the next one and trying to deal with not looking after yourself in terms of getting enough sleep and not eating properly and all that is doable for a little while, but over the period of years, if you’re doing that every weekend for a few years, then it starts to take its toll a little bit and you have to find time to take care of yourself, and maybe get off the hamster wheel for a little while, especially because a lot of people think they are DJing, they just do that at a weekend and then they’ve got all week to recover and they go again. But actually no, during the week, just as incredibly as busy, especially now with social media, we’re making music, we’re running record labels. It’s just a 24/7 job. And under no circumstances am I complaining about that. That’s what we all want. We all want to be busy. We all want to be the ones that people want us to do this, want us to do that, want us to do the other. But sometimes you just say yes to too many things eventually, and it’s just realising when to say no and just to have some sort of handle on it so it doesn’t get all spiral out of control. When you’ve got too many things on your plate, that’s when it gets stressful. And then it’s harder to deal with everything when you’ve had no sleep and you’re stressed and then it can spiral out of control and then you can fall off the wagon really, really badly by going down the wrong road. So it is a really difficult balance to strike because of the nature of the business. We are in the entertainment business, in the business of having fun, but it is a business at the end of the day. And if you really want to be in it for the long haul, then you have to focus on taking care of yourself and the long-term goal. So as I say, it’s a really, really difficult balance and everybody loves their own way of dealing with it. Some people can’t do so many gigs all in one go, I think more and more so now it’s about having a good team around you. I think that’s how the big DJs are really managing. They’re not doing it by themselves. They’re the front person there, but there’s lots of other people doing a lot of work on their socials and running the labels and their agencies and so on and so forth. And it is about having a great team. Teamwork makes the dream work in that sense.
Super Progressive: Yeah, definitely. It’s cool. I guess my last question of the interview is a funny one. You do a great job with your social media accounts, and one of the consistent comments we always see is Dave has got to have the largest Bathing Ape (BAPE) collection of clothing in existence. And I was just wondering, I was just wondering kind of, I love the intersection of fashion and club culture and all that, and you have some iconic covers with Bathing Ape on it. How did that kind of start? I saw in the documentary you rep Nike, Levi’s and Bathing Ape.
Dave Seaman: Yeah, not so much Levi’s anymore, and maybe I still buy Nike trainers from time to time, but not solely. But yeah, I still do buy a bit of BAPE, Paul Smith as I’ve got older and I’ve become a little bit more gentrified. Paul Smith is good as well. He’s a local designer. He’s from Nottingham as well. So yeah, probably more Paul Smith and Japanese fashion is my thing, actually. That’s where I’ve, because Paul Smith’s massive in Japan as well. He’s got so many shops over there and even things like Uniqlo, because actually the guy that started Uniqlo, started Bathing Ape is now the creative director of Uniqlo Niko. So yeah, Japanese fashion, that’s where it stems from. And I think that was my love of falling in love with Japan, which was another late nineties thing. And the way that that whole limited edition exclusive very cool thing, and the branding of Bathing Ape and the way that they, I mean, BAPE have done collaborations with everybody. I mean, there isn’t a big brand they haven’t done a collaboration with. You want to talk about doing Formula One cars and Coca-Cola and Rolex, and I mean, everybody they’ve done collaborations with, it’s just one of the coolest brands ever, really. I mean, everybody wants a piece of that BAPE collection collaboration. So that was something that started in the late eighties, and I still collect to this day. I mean everything, gosh, from the models to, to the mats, I’ve been a BAPE collector for over two decades now. And that’s something to take a little piece off for Selador really. And the whole Selador logo, which I’m sporting there, the idea of doing lots of different collabs as well. I’d like to get into doing that kind of thing. I think, yeah, there is, as you say, there’s a massive connection between club culture and the music side of it. And I think James Lavelle is another great one at doing that kind of thing on UNKLE and all his merchandise, he’s very much, he loves his Japanese Colabs as well, so some of those graffiti artists that he works with and so on and so forth. So yeah, that’s something I’m very, very keen on as well. Yeah,
Super Progressive: Yeah, it’s awesome. He’s really, really cool. But yeah, bro, thank you so much for joining us today. It’s like we’re out here trying to tell this grand story of the history of underground dance music, and you can’t tell that story without you. So it’s a super essential piece of our puzzle that we’re building and we’re really appreciative. So thank you very much.
Dave Seaman: My pleasure. Anytime guys, and hopefully I’ll see you in LA at some point next year.
