Liquid Liquid

Liquid Liquid are one of my very favourite bands. I love everything about them. I love the music; so interesting and rhythmic, and always danceable. I love the record sleeves; always interesting and evocative of the music. This article is about how I first discovered Liquid Liquid in Glasgow, a city which is sort of famous due to Liquid Liquid (in a roundabout sort of way).

I moved to Glasgow in September 1998, just as the legendary club night Optimo was beginning. I think it may have started a bit before I arrived, though I can’t really remember. I should point out now that I had heard of Liquid Liquid already, and not through Optimo. It must have been August 1997, and I was looking in Missing Records on Hope Street before I caught my train home. There was a list of forthcoming releases on the counter, and I had noticed that there was a new DJ Krush album coming out: MiLight. This was on Mo’Wax, and as I had become a big fan of Mo’Wax through DJ Shadow and James Lavelle’s Cream Live 2 mix, I looked at the release sheet some more and discovered that they were also releasing a compilation by a group called Liquid Liquid. I ended up not buying either of these releases for a few years, but the name intrigued me.

Fast forward a year and I had moved to Glasgow. I saw that the Psychonauts were DJing at The Arches and decided to go, I thought it prudent to check out some of their work, so I went to Fopp and bought Time Machine, a Mo’Wax retrospective mixed by the Psychonauts. It was amazing. I still think it is amazing to this day. So many records chopped up and mixed together. It was the first time I had ever heard anything like that, and I remember thinking it must have taken them ages to put together. What I really liked about it was this song that came in near the end that had all this scraping noise through it. It turned out to be the Psychonauts remix of Scraper by Liquid Liquid. It had an amazing bass line, amazing drums and seemed to switch up tempo half way through the song. I wasn’t buying vinyl at the time, so I never really knew about the remix 12″ you could buy, and at the time I couldn’t really look up the band on the internet either. (In the end, I didn’t get to see the Psychonauts dj at The Arches, but I did see them dj in Jim’s Bar of the QMU two years later.)

Back to Liquid Liquid… I finally got hold of a copy of the Psychonauts remix of Scraper a couple of years later. I had bought a big chunk of someone’s Mo’Wax collection, and this was one record I was definitely after. I played it over and over, and I played it loud. It was even better than it had appeared on the Time Machine mix. It starts off with a weird sci-fi noise, before the bass line kicks in. There is so much going on in the remix, but I think it does the song justice. It beefs everything up and gives it a good hip hop feel, even though it isn’t really a hip hop track. I love all the crowd cheers and claps that appear in the remix, and Pablo’s scratching is excellent – particularly the helicopter scratch. The Cut Chemist remix of Cavern is on the other side of the record, and this is a great remix too. He’s kept the bass line and used the drums from an 80s track, though the name escapes me at the moment. There is also a great break in it near the end.

The next Liquid Liquid record I bought was the DJ Harvey remixes of Bellhead. It was only 99p for the record and I remember when I took it up to the counter the guy said, ‘This is really weird, are you sure you want to buy it?’. I said yes and that it was only 99p and I was willing to take the risk. I guess he said that because I had been buying lots of backpack hip hop from that shop. It was Avalanche records in Glasgow, just at Queen Street Station. I took the record home and played it. He was right, it was weird. I wasn’t too sure I liked it at first, but it grew on me and I now think it is great set of remixes. I think what threw was the fact that it was a remix of a live track and for someone unknown reason in my brain, I thought live tracks were inferior to studio tracks. I should point out that I still hadn’t been to the Optimo club night at this point, but I was becoming more interested in going as this was around the time they used to type up their play lists from the club and I had noticed they played Liquid Liquid a lot. I was too into hip hop at the time to go.

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