SOMEWHERE there is an alternative universe in which Stuart McMillan works as a financial adviser and Orde Meikle is an executive for a national brewery.
It’s a universe in which a key component was missing from Scotland’s second summer of love, Glasgow was robbed of a major role in the Daft Punk story … and thousands of people missed out on one of the best nights of their lives.
Today, in our own universe, McMillan and Meikle are sitting shoulder to shoulder trying to piece together the story of their rise to prominence in the techno world as Slam DJs in the run-up to the release next month of their seventh album, Dark Channel.
It is a long and complicated tale, encompassing a mystifying number of dance clubs, raves in huge venues and the creation of a record label. All the details are being pieced together by the two main participants as they try to agree on a timeline which stretches back to the 1980s.
During that time, Slam have established an unbeatable reputation for pounding and pulsating techno which has taken them all over the world, from America to Australia to Berlin, where they are currently regulars at the iconic Berghain club hailed as the world capital of techno.
The Early Days
IF the Slam story starts anywhere, it’s probably at a bar called Chimmy Chungas on Glasgow’s Great Western Road, where McMillan and Meikle both worked in the early 1980s. They had started collecting records before they met and were vaguely interested in becoming DJs but these were very different days.
McMillan: We wanted to play the music that we had started to accumulate. I’d occasionally go down to London and to Camden Market and buy rare groove tracks. Orde was an avid collector as well. We were collecting some early house stuff but this was around 1985, so the very, very early days of house.
It wasn’t trendy. It was really uncool music.
Meikle: I was at university in Sheffield, where there was a club called The Leadmill, which did a kind of student night on a Thursday. There was also an alternative Saturday night, which had a very mixed crowd, but you would hear everything from 12-inch Joy Division tracks mixed into Depeche Mode, into Pete Shelley.
That was also the era when The Human League were just coming out, plus Gary Numan, all that early European electronic music.
When I came back to Glasgow after three years, I had already started a stupidly large record collection. When I came back we would go to clubs around that time you did hear some house music, but not the avant-garde stuff.
The Turning Point
McMillan: We were buying rare groove disco. Then I went to Heaven in London. I walked in and heard this music and the way the DJ mixed it … it just blew my mind. We used to go to the Sub Club in Glasgow when it was a night at Lucifer’s [a club on Jamaica Street which changed its name to the Sub Club in 1987] and we’d hear Graham Wilson [then resident DJ] play mainly soul, funk and disco.
But he played a Derrick May record, a really early techno record called Nude Photo. We thought, “what the fuck is this weird record?”.
Meikle: I can’t remember the point where we both decided we wanted to DJ. We’d started buying kind of less-known music from a shop called 23rd Precinct … American imports. We were already buying quite a lot of music, including some early house music.
Our major break came when I was working at [Glasgow club] Fury Murrys. One Wednesday, the DJ who had been booked pulled out at the last minute. I said: “We can do that.” So the next Wednesday, they gave us our first night.
Stuart and I had decided we both wanted to be DJs but we didn’t have anyone to put out any PR or anything. We asked Dave Clarke, who also worked at Chimmy Chungas and was a childhood friend of Stuart’s, if he’d be interested in printing up some flyers and taking them around the bars and putting them up.
McMillan: I think the night was called Black Market. We had been running it for a couple of weeks and it was quite slow. And then one night it was fucking packed. I had gone for this financial adviser job and then I just thought I’d do this instead.
Meikle: The Wednesday night reached a kind of capacity and so they gave us a Thursday night, which got busier and busier. We were quite sociable young fellows back then and had quite a lot of friends who would come and support us.
McMillan: At that time we were still playing hip hop, rare groove … stuff like that. And when the whole house thing started kicking off, all these imports were coming into 23rd and we made a decision quite early on that we were going to play only house and then acid house.
We decided we would do a Saturday night in the Tin Pan Alley [another Glasgow club, which opened in 1989]. Nobody went to Tin Pan Alley. So it was one of these ones where we’re thinking: “Let’s do a club where nobody goes. Let’s try playing music that nobody’s heard. Let’s put these fluorescent posters out and just see what happens.”
The Dance Explosion
Meikle: I remember at that time we were buying all this new music, the kind of weirder Chicago stuff, a lot of quite underground New York house, Derrick May, early Kevin Saunderson and early releases on the Warp label. I always remember that there was so much new music we were hearing and buying but you never heard it in clubs.
McMillan: I remember in Tin Pan Alley, we just filled the place with smoke. We had all these drapes and mirrors. We had people dancing in cages and the place was full of smoke and strobes.
Meikle: The growth of that over a five-week period was phenomenal.
It was reasonably busy the first night. The second night was busier. The third Saturday, people were on the bar dancing in the strobes and the smoke and everything. Then it was absolutely mobbed every Saturday. This sort of thing was happening elsewhere … in other cities in the country.
The second Summer of Love
McMillan: Sometimes it takes distance to look back and say: “Oh, right, that was a bit of a movement.” It was like someone had flipped a switch on, and all the things that had gone before were now completely different. The way people dressed changed, attitudes changed, the way people started to mix socially changed.
It felt like a musical revolution and a cultural revolution. And you would start hearing cars driving around the city playing this music. You could feel there was an energy in the city.
It felt like punk to me. I was a punk but I was a 10-year-old punk. I wasn’t an adult. I wasn’t old enough. It was like when I heard disco records on the radio, I thought it sounded like someone was having a really good time somewhere else but I’m too young to go there. But this felt like we’d arrived at something that was ours.
Meikle: I remember thinking that no-one was really controlling this. Most of the music, prior to that, would come through certain kinds of mainstream sources, major record companies. But the majors hadn’t jumped on this by that time. And there was just a sense of freedom. And it was very much a grassroots kind of thing.
McMillan: A drinks brand approached us and asked us if we wanted to do a tour around Scotland, culminating in a big event in the Tramway theatre in 1989 and we agreed. We realised quite early on that we’re not really corporate guys. With the Tramway, we didn’t sell tickets. It was just ... show up for it. I think around 2000 people would have been the maximum for it. I remember getting a cab down there, and the street outside was packed.
Meikle: We were doing four or five big events in Scotland, starting off at the People’s Palace, which was free. We had all kinds of different things going on, including a space simulator. It all culminated in this big gig in the Tramway, we’d invited up 808 State and [DJs] Mike Pickering and Graeme Park from the Hacienda in Manchester. So we ended up with 2000 filling the space really early on, and 4500 people outside trying to get in. We decided to go larger still. We staged Slam 3D at Ingliston with Regular Music [in 1991], a real watershed moment because the logistics of upscaling became really problematic.
McMillan: The rave scene had expanded at the time, and it just got a bit ugly. At one point we didn’t really want to be involved in that any more.
Meikle: Lots of worries seemed to arise, you know, about policing. We felt it was a little bit too corporate, too big. And so we went back to our club roots,
Launching Soma Records
Meikle: When we were coming out of Glasgow’s time as European City of Culture in 1990, the seeds of Soma Records were taking root. There were three of us involved in Slam – Stuart, me and Dave Clarke, who was brought on board to do PR and later keeping an eye on the finances, which he still does. Then we met Glenn Gibbons, Jim Muotune and Nigel Hirst.
McMillan: You’re buying all this music and you’re thinking: “I want to try making music, you know.” We kind of tried to make it with various people. I had played guitar in a band. Jim Muotune used to be in a band and Glenn Gibbons had been in bands affiliated to Postcard Records and the 1980s Glasgow Orange Juice era. Nigel had a studio.
Meikle: Doing it yourself was very much a natural thing, because you controlled it. We have never – and still don’t, to this day – have any commercial consideration when it comes to music, not only what we play, but what we put out via the label That was always what the ethos of Soma Records was and still is.
Our first release featured Slam and Rejuvenation [Gibson and Muotune], the second was by a band called
One Dove, which Andy Weatherall [the DJ who also worked with Primal Scream on Screamadelica] became very involved with.
We approached certain people we knew in Glasgow for advice [on the music business], and none of them were interested, from a financial point of view and also because it was predominantly rock then, and they didn’t understand dance music. They were still set in the way that you get a band together, you sell it to a major, you went down to London, recorded an album and that was the pathway. This whole dance/DIY thing didn’t mean anything to them.
Daft Punk
McMillan: Slam put a record out in 1993 called Positive Education, which sort of became the calling card, not only for the label, but for us as well. The record kind of blew up, not only in the UK but everywhere. It had a real kind of Detroit sort of techno sound.
We were invited to do various things. While we were in France we were invited to a flat in Paris and someone put on a cassette. The first track was a track called Alive by Daft Punk. And we all just looked at each other.
It just sounded really fresh, but in a French way. You kind of knew that there was some kind of energy or vibe within the music. I think we signed them there and then they came over to Glasgow because we’d started playing at the Arches.
Meikle: The big turning point was when they sent us a demo of a track called Da Funk. And when we released it was a huge moment. What that record showed me … I think it’s one of the few times I’ve come across a tune that crossed every genre.
The Arches
McMillan: We started doing the Arches around 1992 and that’s kind of when the music started to get a little bit more techno focused …
Meikle: It wasn’t a club then.
It was a non-profit-making theatre group. We were asked if we would be interested in doing a night there. It was quite a big decision to take this venue that had never been
a club before and try and do something with it. We ran that as a Friday night, every week right through to 1998. Those six years in the Arches every Friday were just off the scale.
How did it feel when it closed?
I always see these things as when a door closes, you look for another one to open. It was a bit of a shock because it happened so quickly. But I always, personally, thought it gave us an opportunity to do something new, somewhere else.
McMillan: It really touched people’s lives. We didn’t realise that until we got the opportunity to do another night there [Slam first returned to the Arches in August last year and pays a third return visit tonight]. It’s just incredible how much that whole era of the Arches was so much a part of people’s lives. They absolutely were invested in it.
The Slam Tent
McMillan: We were booked to play at T in the Park and Joe Strummer was there. When I was a kid I was a massive Clash fan. When we got to the stage at the festival, there was no monitor for the DJs.
Somebody introduced me to Strummer and instead of saying, “I love you, my hero”, I said: “I’m just about to start DJ-ing and there’s no fucking monitor.” He went off to get me one. That will be the title of my autobiography: “Joe Strummer Got Me a Monitor.”
Meikle: The Slam Tent at T in the Park came about because the order in which they were putting the DJs on in their dance tent was all over the place. It was just bizarre.
We were a bit bold and we told them we could do better than
that and they let us do it. And that’s how the Slam Tent started. It was just a couple of Stellas into the afternoon and us just being a bit kind of ballsy I suppose.
[The Slam Tent continued at T in the Park from 1997 until the festival ended in 2016]
Dark Channel
McMillan: The new album is paying homage to the dance floor. It’s the first album we’ve made which does not have any other elements other than dance floor tracks.
It’s the equivalent of a rock album with no ballads. In an increasingly divided world, the dance floor is still a place where people can put their differences inside. I think that’s a beautiful thing.
Meikle: We’ve played all over the world and the similarities are greater than the differences. Regardless of your culture, your language, your religion, your beliefs, the dance floor and the parties and the way people behave within the parties is universal.
McMillan: Darker techno has a different effect on the dance floor. It’s more immersive, in a sense, where you don’t know when one track is finishing, or one track is starting.
It’s like, if you go to Berghain you hear that music just going for hours. And there are people who are on that dance floor for hours, just with a head down, getting totally immersed in the music.
What amazes me is that a younger generation hasn’t gone off and found something else.
There must be something in this whole experience that keeps people coming back.
Meikle: We’ve never had a grand plan or planned where we wanted to be two weeks from now, six months from now, a year from now. It hasn’t felt like a career, more like happy accidents. We very much take things in our stride. We are always looking for new challenges. There is definitely still a bucket list of things we’d like to do.
