Storm Queen; click to listen

Sure every man and his dog adores Jamie Jones right now which as a rule would make us run a mile, but in Jamie’s case, he really is the exception that proves the rule.

This new remix ( click HERE or on the picture to listen to it) is out on Defected so it’s unashamedly housey but it’s also a great club track that works.  Click HERE to buy it.

Great new remixes of this track are now available but we still love the original.

click for more Very Wrong stuff

Click to take a sound test: "If you can't hear any of the high frequencies played back during this test, don't blame your speakers too quickly. Unlike low frequencies, high frequencies are easily reproduced, even with cheap speakers. Assuming your sound card is not prone to aliasing (please refer to the comment below), the weakest components in this test are your ears."

A father of two who developed tinnitus after forgetting to take his earplugs to a Them Crooked Vultures gig, killed himself after being unable to sleep for three months, a court heard this week.

Robert McIndoe, 52, became increasingly desperate after he failed to find medical treatment and even considered permanently deafening himself by having his auditory nerve cut, the Daily Mail reported.

“When it first happened he wasn’t too bothered about it because he thought it would subside, and the friend he had been with also had ringing in his ears that day,” his wife Shirley McIndoe told the inquest.

“It was awful, he looked terrible, and he just felt so bad all the time,” she continued, “He was desperate that it was never going to change – he didn’t know if he could live like this.”

Mr McIndoe’s death came just over a year after fellow Brit Mark Hughff, 42 was found hanging from a tree in a wood in Durham after reportedly complaining to doctors of being ‘annoyed by tinnitus symptoms’ to the point of expressing ‘suicidal thoughts.”

More hopeful news for tinnitus sufferers emerged from America earlier this year when researchers from U.S. National Institute on Deafness announced positive results on new treatment techniques involving stimulating the vagus nerve to ‘reboot’ the brain.

“Current treatments for tinnitus generally involve masking the sound or learning to ignore it. If we can find a way to turn off the noise, we’ll be able to improve life substantially for the nearly 23 million American adults who suffer from this disorder,” said Dr. James F. Battey, Jr, in a press release.

“We are returning the brain from a state where it generates tinnitus to a state that does not generate tinnitus. We are eliminating the source of the tinnitus,” he added. (MedicineNet.com: http://bit.ly/fb01Gb )

Click HERE to test your ears (‘If you can’t hear any of the high frequencies played back during this test, don’t blame your speakers too quickly. Unlike low frequencies, high frequencies are easily reproduced, even with cheap speakers. Assuming your sound card is not prone to aliasing (please refer to the comment below), the weakest components in this test are your ears . . .’)

Jonty Skrufff: http://listn.to/JontySkrufff

Detroit techno pioneer Carl Craig chatted about the secrets of his success to the Independent this week and attributed his longevity to listening to the ‘just say no’ advice of his mother.

“My mum is the person that had the most impact on me because she can see situations, analyse them and see the negative and the positive. And that’s part of her whole thing,” the 40 something Planet E veteran explained.

“She told me at a young age, and I tell a lot of people this: ‘Don’t do drugs. And you know why you don’t wanna do drugs? Because it takes all your money and you don’t wanna lose money, do you’,” Carl recalled.

’I didn’t start drinking until I was 25,” he added. (Independent: http://ind.pn/sRU6Kg )

Plastikman; sheet one

The importance of parental support was also emphasized by Richie Hawtin’s mother in his 2007 DVD documentary Richie Hawtin: Pioneers of Electronic Music, Vol. 1 in which she recounted him keeping her awake night after night, working on ‘the same old beats, the same old beats’.

She also helped out the then unknown young producer doing the door at some of his first parties, reputedly turning away gatecrashers who pretended to be cousins, earning eternal gratitude from her nowadays multi-millionaire son.

“My parents are really cool,” Hawtin told Digboston.com in September, when he was asked when his parents finally realized what he was doing ‘wasn’t just a funny hobby’.

“They realized quite early on, but in around 2001 we had this huge festival in Detroit called the Detroit Electronic Music Festival. And I headlined and closed the stage at the very first festival and it was like 50,000 people, downtown Detroit,” he recalled.

“And my mom and dad were up there and I think they were like wow, what the fuck. That was really on point,” said Hawtin.

German DJ Sven Vath also named his mother as being one of the key architects of his success, in an interview with Australian newspaper the Sunshine Coast Daily in 2008.

“She always comes when I play here in Frankfurt and she is always here dancing next to me for four to six hours in a night. She is 64 years old and in such good shape,” the Cocoon chief explained.

“She is such a wonderful woman and she was giving me all she had and was filling my life with this and probably this is why I love to share so much because she was feeding me with love,” said Sven.

Jonty Skrufff: http://listn.to/JontySkrufff

Demolition panel (saturday 19.00; click for more details)

The Skrufff team will be temporarily relocating to Amsterdam next week as Jonty Skrufff moderates and appears on seven panels at this year’s Amsterdam Dance Event.

Also DJing on Friday night at Club Home (alongside Da Fresh, Christian Cambas, John Acquaviva and Anthony Attalla) in the day time he’s moderating panels on new talent (Room at the Top: http://bit.ly/nKg9ju) and Russia (http://bit.ly/qhBDXO ) plus a heavyweight panel Staying Alive on Friday afternoon (http://bit.ly/pUtuTi )

Da Russia panel (Thursday: 17.00)

“Staying Alive features six of the sharpest, most opinionated, accomplished characters in today’s music business, chatting about everything from egos (how should you handle out of control artists?), releasing music (are albums obsolete?) and surviving failure, I think it’s going to be particularly interesting,” said Jonty.

“The panel is all about how to survive and thrive in today’s music business and all six (Mute Records founder Daniel Miller, Ed Banger chief Pedro Winter, Cream CEO James Barton, Mo Wax’s James Lavelle, Wall Of Sound’s Mark Jones and Pieter van Bodegraven (Talpa) are full of knowledge, experience and ideas.”

Nastia (appearing on Room at the Top, Wednesday 15.30)

On Wednesday he introduces upcoming talents DJ Nastia (Ukraine), Claudia Cazacu (Romania, London) and Egbert (Holland) on Room at The Top, discussing how they’re carved themselves niches in today’s massively overcrowded club scene. Legendary R&S chief Renaat Vandapapaliere (Belgium) is also on hand, discussing how he reinvented his seminal label two years ago (almost 20 years after he first helped popularize techno).

Claudia Cazacu (on room at the top, Wednesday)

Thursday’s program includes a panel on Russia plus another on Ibiza, featuring panelists including Judge Jules and Ibiza Voice chief (and until recently Cadenza/ Luciano guru Samuel Guetta).

Alongside more panels scheduled for Friday and Saturday (including Radio: How relevant is radio to the next generation?), Staying Alive and Dave Clarke’s Demolition panel, he also DJs at Anthony Attalla’s party at Club Home, on Friday night (http://bit.ly/pTjBlj )

Friday Club home

“ADE’s greatest attraction is its audience, which is comprised predominantly of independent music people who are paying their own way to be there,” Jonty added.

“I’m looking forward to meeting up with old friends and connecting with new ones- please come and say hi if you’re at one the panels or see me rushing round Amsterdam. I’m the one with the big black umbrella with a yellow stripe.”

Seb Mortimer (Skrufff.com)

Barefoot Doctor: “Of course it’s OK to feel disappointed, it’s inevitable to feel disappointed and to momentarily lose your faith in the benign nature of the path you’re on.

What would not be OK would be to go into denial about it, as that would produce stress, which depletes vital reserves and you’d be needing those to rally yourself and get back in the game, with plan B.

So you acknowledge the hurt and let yourself feel it in a physical sense in the chest and belly, then you breathe a little slower and deeper and use your mind to get that area to relax, in order to disperse it.

Once it releases from your body, it starts dissipating in your mind too and then you remind yourself that you are not that which feels the pangs of momentary local disappointment but are something far greater and limitless. And as such you are on a wondrous path to goodness knows where and that into the vacuum created by the let-down, something more appropriate to your healthy growth in the long run, will soon come to fill it.

Rallying yourself and returning to a state of balance and positivity doesn’t preclude feeling the hurt, however. It’s perfectly OK and healthy to feel the hurt and still be positive and optimistic at the same time.

It’s also important to always remember that the actions of others are never really meant personally, even when it looks that way – they are simply doing the best they can acting out their processes under the circumstances and according to their current stage of personal evolution.

Recalling this makes it easier to forgive them and move on, as there’s no point carrying the weight of a grudge around. Forgiving them doesn’t mean forgetting their transgression, just in case you fall into the same trap with them in future- the bastards!”

Questions by Skrufff.

Discover the Taoist super-skills and find out more about the Barefoot Doctor at

http://www.barefootdoctorglobal.com/

———-=———-
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Push today (click the picture to access his articles)

“The most bizarre situation I experienced was setting fire to Katie Price, I got chatting to her in a bar once and she asked me for a light. I must have had a new lighter or something and it must have been set very high.”

15 years after he launched seminal British dance music magazine Muzik, founding editor Push admits his memories of the era are a little hazy.

“I can’t remember when and where it happened, but I think it was somewhere in Soho,” he continues, recounting his incendiary encounter with the uber famous (in Britain) reality TV star (who at the time was better known as topless model/ glamour girl Jordan).

“As she leaned forward, a huge jet of fire shot out from the lighter and there was this horrible smell of burning hair and a squeaky scream,” he chuckles, “I think it was mainly her eyebrows that went up because her hair was in braids and pulled back from her face. Luckily she was totally hammered and seemed to soon forget about it.”

One of the first music journalists to start seriously championing acid house and techno, Push started his career with then hugely indie music magazine Melody Maker, setting up the newspaper’s first dance section in the early 90s. From Melody Maker, he left to become founding editor of Muzik, which he edited from its launch in 1995 until the end of 1998.

Notable for taking dance music and its fast-growing global culture seriously, the magazine was instrumental in launching superclub brands such as Cream and popularizing Ibiza yet also covered underground club culture and issues,successfully campaigning for free drinking water in clubs and warning of the dangers of tinnitus in one of its earliest editions.

It also created a new caste of fledgling superstar DJs, in putting then relatively unknown producers such as Deep Dish, Brian Transeau, Slam and Josh Wink on the cover, most of whom were then booked at the same nascent superclubs and festivals.

“I’m so proud of Muzik. It was a terrific magazine and a very successful magazine,” says Push, “It won several awards and sold over 50,000 copies a month during my time there. My personal greatest achievement was getting through the first year. I’ve never worked so hard in all my life.”

“I think the magazine’s single greatest achievement was giving dance music a sense of identity that it had never had before in the music press,” he continues.

“We took all those supposedly faceless DJs and musicians and presented them the same way that Melody Maker and NME presented rock and pop stars, and I think that was exactly what was right for the dance scene at that point in time.” 

Though virtually all of the stars and clubs Muzik first championed remained global club brands today, Push himself stepped out of both the limelight and club culture soon after leaving the magazine, going on to write several books.

His best known one- Rat Scabies and the Holy Grail came out in 2005 soon after Dan Brown’s million selling epic Da Vinci Code popularized the pursuit of the Holy Grail though Push stepped even further out of the public eye after developing cancer. 5 years on he’s thankfully survived and has just set up a new website collating much of his writing from the early club days: http://www.pushstuff.co.uk Jonty Skrufff (who worked with Push as Muzik’s lead feature writer for its first two years) found out what’s been going on.

Skrufff: Starting with your new website; why did you decide to start it now?

Push: “I actually started working on it a couple of years ago, but for various reasons it’s only now seeing the light of day. It’s partly an experiment to see if anyone is remotely interested in this old stuff, partly an ego thing, and partly a fun way for me to fill in time. I first had the idea several years ago, when I was facing some serious health issues. It was like a promise to myself. I sort of told myself, “OK, once you get through this, you’ll be able to do that”. So it’s also about me keeping my promise to myself.”

Skrufff: What was your original vision for Muzik?

I wanted it to be a music magazine for the 21st century. That’s one of the reasons we called it Muzik, a title which wasn’t particularly tied to the dance scene. It was always meant to be more about the music and musicians than about clubbing and clubbers. That was what made it different to Mixmag”.

Skrufff: When did it all start to go wrong for you personally?

Push: “I don’t think it ever went particularly wrong for me personally, but it did get to the point where I wanted to try to do other things. I was editor for 40-odd issues and I felt that was probably enough.”

Skrufff: Others have since taken the credit for your work in founding the magazine and it seemed to me like you were written out of Muzik’s history: how conscious were you of that?

Push: “I don’t know anything about that. I always saw it as very much a team effort. (founding deputy editor) Ben Turner and I worked on Muzik for almost 18 months before the first issue came out and I think we made an awesome team. We brought different skills and ideas to the project, but the partnership worked well. But it wasn’t just me and Ben, there were also lots of others involved prior to the launch. Bruce Sandell, Muzik’s advertisement manager and later its publisher, was just as important as us.

Then there was Alan Lewis and Andy McDuff on the publishing side – they’d launched Loaded just before they launched Muzik. Then once the magazine started coming out, we had all the journalists and photographers and designers and subs and so on. Everybody played their part. As for me, well, you can’t actually write me out of the history. Last time I looked at any of those first 40-odd issues they all said “Editor: Push” in the flannel panel.” 

Skrufff: How did you feel at the turn of the millennium as the magazine lost its credibility and slipped ever close to closure: did you ever communicate with- or feel anger towards, Conor McNicholas?  (Skrufff; Conor later went on to be become NME editor after presiding over Muzik’s closure)

Push: “I don’t know Conor. I’ve never met him or spoken to him, never had any contact with him. I’d been gone for several years by the time he took over. I was sad to see Muzik’s sales figures dropping and sad to see it close down, but I don’t know what the story was at that point, beyond the fact it wasn’t selling. The covers they were putting out towards the end couldn’t have helped, though. Some of them were fucking dreadful. We had a couple of stinkers when I was editor, but by that point they were all stinkers.”

Skrufff: More recently you wrote the Holy Grail book with Rat Scabies; how much did you consciously abandon club culture? Why?

Push: “It wasn’t just club culture. For a long while, I lost interest in music altogether. I’d always had a very broad taste in music – as a kid I’d like punk as well as disco, as a music journo I’d interviewed the likes of Nirvana and Guns ‘N’ Roses as well as your Chemicals and your Orbitals – but after I’d left Muzik I almost couldn’t bear to listen to anything. I don’t know why. Maybe my ears were full.

So the Holy Grail book was an opportunity to do something totally different. People see Rat’s name on the cover and think it’s a book about punk, but it’s nothing to do with music at all. It’s a road trip about two blokes trying to find the Holy Grail who spend all their time poking around in old churches and hanging out with nutcase treasure hunters. As it happens, since I finished writing that book, my appetite for music – of all different kinds – has returned with a vengeance.”

Skrufff: In an interview with Fortean Times you said ‘If I had to say what the book is about in one word, I’d say: “belief”. ‘ how much was Muzik about that? How much did you loose your sense of belief? Why specifically did you walk away?

Push: “I had other things I wanted to do. Plus, to be honest, I was exhausted. I needed a break. For the last few months I was at Muzik I’d also been working up dummy pages for another new magazine for IPC, which the powers-that-be then decided not to launch. I was frustrated by that decision, but it coincided with me being offered a book deal for what became my first book, The Book Of E, a history of ecstasy which I wrote with Canadian journalist Mireille Silcoff. Muzik was certainly about belief and I still believed in it, but I felt my time there had run its course.”

Skrufff: You also told Fortean Times “Technology, communications and medicine are changing the world faster and faster by the day; I certainly need to step outside that and ask where my place is as a human being in all that’: have you found any answers? (Are you still actively seeking the Grail?)

Push: “I said that? Wow, I’m impressed with myself. What was I on about? Hmmm. Well, no, I haven’t found any answers. I’m not even sure I know what the questions are yet. As for actively seeking the Grail, yeah, I’m still doing that. Absolutely. But everybody’s doing that, aren’t they?”

Muzik's very first issue

Skrufff: What’s your take on the rumours of treasures being found in France?

Push: “My take? I’m jealous.”

Skrufff: And how about 2012, December 21st? Where are you planning on being?

Push: “Bugarach, a French mountain village near Rennes-le-Chateau, which is where Rat and I do a lot of our grail hunting. Bugarach was Jules Verne’s inspiration for Journey To the Centre of the Earth and Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind. It’s your best hope of surviving the apocalypse. Apparently. Mind you, some say it’s going to happen on December 12th, not 21st, so you’d better get there for then. It’s probably a good idea to get there early anyway. I suspect it’ll be busy and it’s only a small village.”

Skrufff: At what point did you develop lymphona? What were the first symptoms?

Push: “I was diagnosed with lymphoma in early 2007. It started with a tumour in my left eye socket, which developed quite slowly. The first signs were double vision, which got progressively worse, and problems with bright lights. My vision was very strange for a long time. It was like looking through a glass pyramid. I was shocked by the lymphoma diagnosis, though. I knew I had a serious problem with my vision, but I hadn’t expected anything like that.”

Skrufff: What lessons has having the disease taught you?

Push: “The same lessons everyone learns when they go through something like that. You can’t help but reflect on your life and what you’re doing – and I do have quite a different view of life now. I haven’t always been happy with my lot, but I’m bloody ecstatic these days. Life really is too short. It took a little while to get my health back on track and I have some ongoing problems caused by the treatment I had, but that’s OK. It’s more than OK. I have been very lucky – extremely lucky – and a lot of other people in a similar position haven’t been.”

Skrufff: With reference to Muzik; any regrets; looking back, anything you wish you’d done differently?

Push: “Lots of things, really. The main thing is I wish I’d written more for Muzik. I wrote almost nothing. In the 10 years I was at Melody Maker I wrote more than 1,000 pieces. But at Muzik, I wrote less than 10 features and maybe only 20 or 30 reviews over the course of three-and-a-half years. I just never seemed to have time to write. There were too many other things to do.”

Push’s website is at http://www.pushstuff.co.uk

His blog is at http://pushblog.co.uk

Jonty Skrufff: http://listn.to/JontySkrufff