Last weekend saw the Academy getting its pre-fresh on with a two-day taster session in Manchester. Couch teamster Emma Warren was there.

Friday 29th January, 10am

I’m about to leave south-east London for the North. I have my coat and gloves on when Chicago house don Marshall Jefferson rings. We talk about what records we’re going to play during his lecture, and I spend 20 minutes trying to retrieve very old and very battered 12”s from my record collection. The bag bashes against my legs as I wheel my slightly grannyish bag up to the station.

12.15

Get on the train. I write questions for the weekend’s interviewees: Manchester innovator A Guy Called Gerald, Hyperdub owner Kode9, Dutch drum ‘n’ bass producer turned post-dubstep hero Martyn and the aforementioned Marshall Jefferson. Two women from a dance company (I know this because they spend the whole journey talking about business plans and their website) keep looking over my shoulder as I watch decade-old clips of dance crews in Moss Side dancing to early house music. They are wearing spats. They are marvellously, magically cool. Why are they not as famous in the history of UK house music as those southern DJs who went to Ibiza?

2pm

Arrive in Manchester. Immediately buy a ham roll and orange juice from Greggs. Mmmmmanchester.

2.20pm

Check in to the hotel. My room smells pleasingly of weed. I assume this is to do with the previous inhabitants but gradually realise it is just the room fragrance they use. Perhaps they are aiming to subconsciously please the ageing hedonists they cater for? Either way, it is a pleasant ole factory backdrop to the hour or two I spend finessing my interview plans and watching old jungle records on YouTube.

3pm

I make my way to The Deaf Institute, the venue for tonight’s taster session. Tony Nwachukwu, Wookie and GoldieLocks are hosting a workshop on music production. The room is filled with computers, and people are dropping by to find out how to make beats. Or more usually, how to improve the beats they already make.
 


5pm

Gerald arrives at The Deaf Institute. It’s the first time he’s been back in Manchester in some time and things have changed. There are new areas (Spinningfields? That wasn’t there back in the ‘90s) and Piccadilly Gardens, previously a trench-like city centre wasteland populated by the homeless, pigeons and cans of Breaker, has a swish new building over it. We sit down to talk in front of a hundred or so people who’ve come to hear him speak. There’s no way on earth we can cover the whole of Gerald’s career in an hour. I mean, this man had the best selling indie record of 1988 with Voodoo Ray (originally called Voodoo Rage, but his sampler only had a few second’s memory and not enough for the whole word), helped set the blueprint for British electronic music when he made Newbuild with 808 State, then went off and pre-empted jungle by making a hugely influential tune in 1991 called 28 Gun Bad Boy, as well as making one of the finest English electronic records in Black Secret Technology. He describes Manchester in the ‘70s and ‘80s; the wastelands, the reggae dances at the now-demolished PSV (where Factory records held their first club nights) and picking up dead radios in skips and bringing them back to life. I accidentally swear quite badly as we finish. But it’s only because I’m in Manchester with A Guy Called Gerald and he’s a don.
 


8pm

The Marshall Jefferson lecture goes well. We hear some old music, we hear some new music. Marshall talks about going to the equipment store with his friend one day in the early ‘80s. He’d been buying house music, which at that time was any of the good European and American electronic music that was played at Ron Hardy’s nightclub The Warehouse and hanging out at Frankie Knuckles’ all-night rave The Power Plant, and the salesmen obviously saw an in. He bought a sampler. And a drum machine. And a few other bits. He walked out with $9,000 of electronic equipment and his friend didn’t buy a thing. A year later he had a massive hit with Move Your Body. We dig out one of the records I’ve brought but to my shame! It’s the wrong mix.
 


11pm

A drunk student has a pair of tights around his neck. Mars is shiny in the sky, a bright rust-coloured dot to the left of the moon. It is flipping freezing. Inside, Marshall has created an instant party. There is whooping. He plays for two hours and the room is solid packed throughout. Gerald takes over on a custom-build table that allows him to use both laptops so he can play live.
 


Saturday 30th January, 3pm

It’s a cute little walk from the hotel to the Northern Quarter and Common, the popular bar and cafe where we’re hosting the second part of the Manchester Academy chapter. I am happy to see that Mancunian record emporium Eastern Bloc is alive and well. I am reminded of going in there to buy records when I lived in Manchester and being told, by the staff, that the record I wanted to buy was shit. Record shops in the olden days were combatative places. I liked it.

4pm

Martyn and Kode9 arrive and we start interview one, with the former. The lecture will chart the music that has influenced him and we start with a blast of 1990s jungle, specifically The Angels Fell, a Blade Runner-sampling slice of badness from a man called Dillinja (who once put out a record called Mutha Fucka). The sofa begins to vibrate in a potentially alarming way. My face reorganises itself into a shape known in the trade as ‘bass face’, the sonic equivalent of sucking lemons. In a good way. We also cover some killer Detroit techno, UB40 and hot new DFA band, Detachments.
 

Class of Academy '08 Débruit at Common

6pm

Kode9 has had two hours sleep. He talks us through the music that’s inspired him over the years – and tells us about his two new cats who sit on his speakers when he’s making music. We play Black Satin from Miles’ On The Corner; some more jungle, this time from Dillinja’s co-pilot, Lemon D which takes the sofa close to take-off; and a collaboration between Ryuichi Sakamoto and ‘80s pretty boy David Sylvian called Bamboo Music which is still in my head days later. I ask about concentration and creative process because there’s no way I’m going to ask him dumb questions about whether dubstep is dead. Kode9 has a philosophy PhD; he’s just written a book on sonic warfare! N-Joi are rumoured to be in the audience.
 


Midnight

Hudson Mohawke is on stage at super-packed Hoya:Hoya, an ebullient club night that has taken on the spirit of Manchester’s sadly-departed Electric Chair. He announces his arrival with his specially destructed version of Tweet’s sassy R&B ode to self-love, Oops (Oh My). It sounds great. So great, that they play it at the end of the night, after Kode9’s super-sharp selections, like a sort of musical bookmark.
 


4am

We leave. It is snowing. That was fun.

BONUS:
Lecture Session with Marshall Jefferson (Video)
Illum Sphere (Hoya:Hoya, Manchester) - On The Floor! - Live at Hoya:Hoya, Manchester
Mount Kimbie (Hotflush Recordings, London) - On The Floor! - Live at Deaf Institute, Manchester
Steve Mason (Domino, UK) - On The Floor! - Live at Common, Manchester
Emma Warren’s Wandering Feet podcast on iTunes