Music
Playing at St Paul’s Carnival this past weekend brought back memories for deep house legend DJ Milo.
When he took to the stage last weekend, it had been over 20 years since DJ Milo last unleashed his mix mastery at the St Paul's Carnival in his hometown of Bristol.
“I'd love to say it's taking me back to being an unruly kid again but the truth is I'm not sure I ever grew up.” the deep house specialist laughs. That particular “unruly kid” was a founding member of the Wild Bunch, the DJ collective famous for all-nighters in Bristol's clubs and abandoned warehouses that earned them a reputation as pioneers of UK sound system culture.
Their last appearance at carnival in 1986 was to be one of their final performances before disbanding – his Wild Bunch peers later evolved into trip-hop heroes Massive Attack, with Tricky becoming an acclaimed solo act, while Milo (later known as DJ Nature and Nature Boy) moved to Harlem to become an icon of gritty, mid-tempo NY disco. Just as well, then, that it was a good one, as Milo remembers...
“It's funny that people ask, didn't you get tired playing from midday through to 6am the next day? That day, we got there at 10am, set our speaker system up, and went right through but it never felt like an endurance thing because we just loved it – the community Wild Bunch had built around itself, the culture we had created around it, the familiar faces."
“We hadn't planned when to play, or even what to play, really. As long as people were there going mad to the tunes we were spinning, we wanted to keep playing. We would barely notice that we were soaked in sweat and had been playing for 12 hours, 15 hours, 18 hours, whatever.
"When you're looking out at a crowd going bananas to the tunes you're dropping – a lot of early Chicago house, a lot of the old boogie tunes, whatever – that's the only place you're head is at, it's all you think about. There were people blowing air horns, blowing whistles and raving it up. It was like a circus. There were never less than 500 people there at any point, the whole night through.
“It didn't feel like a milestone at the time. I had grown up in Bristol but didn't have any real memories of going there as a kid. But looking back on it, where we were at as Wild Bunch, what was to come, it definitely was something special. Which is probably part of why I've been waiting years to come back and do it again.
“It's a thank you to the people, the city that put us where we are. I've been living in New York and going back and forth to Japan to work on music there, and playing shows and parties away, and you realise how much it means to have a hometown crowd – the faces that have been following you since day one. More than anything, coming back here's a reminder that this is in my blood.”