Forgive the profanity. Heh-heh.

So the betterh half and daughter head off to Wales for the weekend to see da family and get rained on heavily and I find myself in the almost unbelievable situation of having the place to myself for a couple of days. After all the running around is done (haircut, defrost fridge, have a ruck in Argos, spend a fruitless hour in Dalston Oxfam, that sort of thing) it’s time to get serious with the decks.

I’d been meaning to do another mix CD for aaaaaaaaages. The first one I did was a sort of UK steppers, electronic dub thing, mainly to show people who bang on about how if it ain’t 70s and it ain’t JA then it’s automatically rubbish. I did that one with a blinding headache. This time I had come down with a really serious cold (at least I hope it’s a cold – can’t be too careful these days, eh?)

I was going to do a ragga one, but Paul’s just done one of them. Whilst it would be highly amusing to BLOW HIS SELECTION OUT OF THE WATER with my own effort, I wasn’t really feeling up to it. So 21st Century roots all the way, then.

I don’t know about you, but I always think about these things in advance far more than is healthy. So for probably about the last 3 months I’ve been subconsciously planning the mix – I’d be there, superstar DJ, seamlessly mashing it up in the living room. Inevitably there’s a few false starts with this stuff, but the combination of my crappy decks and mixer, and the somewhat less than pristine nature of your average Jamaican 7″ lead to some “interesting” additions to the mix. All the snot didn’t help, either.

My crossfader doesn’t really work, so there’s all sorts of random bits of the wrong track in the left channel. Plus the arm on the right deck has a tendency to skid off the combination of dirt and vinyl which IS the run-in on some of the sevens (and the resulting scrunchy noise of needle on slipmatt also ends up in the mix because of the dodgy crossfader).

JA pressings are like they just wave the tune in the vague direction of the vinyl, and then add various bits of hair and bumps. This obviously goes down a treat with fanboys the world over, cos it’s, like, really authentic. (People cream themselves over the possibly apocryphal story about someone getting an LP with ganja leaves pressed into the vinyl). Obviously I’ll hold my hand up and admit to falling prey to this on occasion, but it mostly pisses me right off. It’s another one of the eternal contradictions of being a white bloke from the home counties who is into reggae.

I thought about leaving all the noise and errors on there and overdubbing some random bits of Merzbow, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and my Jonathan King flexidisk from when he was running as a independent candidate in Heathrow (not quite sure how I have ended up with that one) in the vain hope that I could then pass it off as a sort of DJ /Rupture, Coldcut megamix type of thing. But basically, it just sounded like really bad mixing, even for me.

The tunes, however, are excellent. So I’m going to give it another go tonight.