Stockport, 2006. I’m sitting in my friend Nathan’s back garden, under a tarpaulin, hiding from the rain. Boredom has set in but Nathan has a new Sony Ericsson Walkman phone, so I turn to him for entertainment. His 18-year-old cousin, who goes clubbing in Manchester, sent him a song over Bluetooth last night. He asks to play it out loud. For a moment, I’m nervous. I’m on the edge of 13 and only really like Orson; what kind of frightening songs do 18 year-olds enjoy?
“It starts off weird, but it gets good,” Nathan promises. A squeamishly pitched-up toddler sings a saccharine nursery rhyme. Then, suddenly: ‘WHO THE FUCK ARE YOU?!’, a blast of laser synths, another pitched-up voice, now backed by relentless thumping. “Who’s this?”, I ask. “DJ Cammy”, he answers. That song, ‘Cuppy Cake’ (aka. ‘Celebrate the Summer’), soon lights up every phone at my school. For fresh-faced teenagers, still half a decade away from stepping into a nightclub, DJ Cammy was our ticket to another world. He was a chance to grow up early, something bestowed by our older cousins. A shot of imagined adolescence.
I only observed DJ Cammy (and his contemporaries, DJ Rankin & DJ Boonie) from a distance after that. I listened to my classmates gossiping about how they sat on park benches the previous night, drinking and making memories to his music. I imagined how popularity felt, and how liberating it must have been to get drunk on a school night. I constructed fictions where I said the right words one day and got invited to their drinking games, singing ‘Cuppy Cake’ with them. Facebook page The Council Estate Bible asks, “If you didn’t have DJ Cammy on your phone, chilling in the park with cider, did you even have a childhood?” I don’t know, did I?
I recognise the scenario from the reports I eavesdropped on, and the fictions I dreamed up, but the nostalgia is incomplete. My only intimate experience with DJ Cammy was under that tarpaulin. Looking in from the outside was how I ended up experiencing his music, and dance music as a whole. I later developed odd fears and neuroses about nightclubs and alcohol; looking in from the outside is how I’ve always preferred it.
Smartphones soon made the Ericsson Walkman obsolete; Bluetooth came and went and came back again; those of us who lived through DJ Cammy, either on park benches or vicariously, watched happy hardcore fizzle away. Then, a great recession, Tory austerity, Brexit, and a life-altering pandemic. 2006 is another lifetime now, even if the original DJ Cammy videos — lovingly created on Windows Movie Maker — still exist.
These days, people return to DJ Cammy for temporary reprieve from COVID-19 lockdown restrictions. Once a snapshot of the future, ‘Cuppy Cake’ has now become an escape to a simpler past for millennials, back when sitting on park benches and dancing in groups weren’t punishable, virus-spreading offences. The years have revealed that, if your destination was once forwards and is now backwards, DJ Cammy always made time-travel music. I thought it was just me, but, sooner or later, everyone at my school turned to him so they could capture the feeling of being a popular, drunk teenager.
After a year of lockdown, “normality” feels close again in the UK. Ever since learning of the ever-elusive Freedom Day, I’ve started dipping into my imagined observations of dance music again, and I’ve been dreaming up fictions about my old classmates too. This is thanks to Harlecore, the debut album from DJ, producer, and PC Music associate Danny L Harle. Since its release in February, Harlecore has had me thinking of DJ Cammy. For some reason, it’s always playing whenever I imagine my former classmates (or the teenagers who came after me) dancing or drinking in a post-COVID world. Its whomping percussion, furious tempos, and futuristic production styles; its nostalgic, sugary melodies and beaming synths that evoke the vocal trance explosion from the turn of the millennium - it all sounds so fresh and yet so familiar. Harlecore is time-travel music, too.
From reading Harle’s own words about Harlecore, it’s clear that it’s an album borne out of experiencing dance music through non-traditional contexts and trying to capture other peoples’ feelings by eavesdropping on reports: “My love of rave music was between me and some headphones”, he told Mixmag. He was “too young” to attend '90s free parties, so he crafted Harlecore as a love letter to, and an imagined evocation of, the nights he never lived. In other words, Harlecore is about dance music. Not in the way LCD Soundsystem’s ‘Tonite’ wryly chuckles about the genre’s penchant for heightened drama; nor in the way Jamie xx’s subdued, introverted In Colour is about a party not attended; nor in the way Burial’s Untrue and The Streets’ Original Pirate Material are about the scene’s systematic repression by the British government.
No, Harle loves the heightened drama, searches for euphoria, attends the parties, and soaks in the glory. Where DJ Cammy once celebrated the summer, Danny L Harle now celebrates dance music as a live experience; where DJ Cammy transported kids from the classroom to the big city dance floor, Harlecore can release us from our lockdown conditions if we close our eyes and reach out. Under present circumstances, its pinpoint evocation of dance music as an agent of intense emotion feels urgent.
Its aesthetic and spiritual fusion of PC Music’s bubblegum basslines and spaceage polish, and trance’s relentless speed and layered synthesizers, allow it to inhabit worlds we’re yet to see and a world we left behind. It is something utterly brand new, something beamed back from an unknown future, and something deeply rooted in my days of imagining the point where dance music, friendship, and cheap cider intersected.
Back when I used to eavesdrop on those park bench reports, I used to imagine them singing ‘Cuppy Cake’s direct description of elation: “Celebrate the summer, back into the scene / Celebrate the feeling, you and me”. Ever since Harlecore, though, my mind has run away with itself and concocted a recurring vision where they sing Harle’s ‘Take My Heart Away’ instead, over a decade before its eventual release. “If you want it, you can take my heart away”... I can hear it coming out of Nathan’s phone too. With its saccharine, broad lyrics, sickly, pitched-up vocals, laser synths and thumping bass kicks, it could have blown up my school’s Bluetooth economy back in ‘06 just as easily. Add in a couple of iconic mashup signifiers -- a random voice sample, a sudden tone and beat shift -- and compress the audio so the percussion feels watery and distorted (which does happen in the last 10 seconds of ‘Shining Stars’), and it could be a Stockport smash.
Elsewhere, MC Boing — Harle & Lil Data’s homage to Scouse House — pops up to fire short, sharp lyrical shocks, voice clipping all the while. YouTube Scouse House compilations feature slideshows of MCs wearing England shirts from the 2006 World Cup, and crowds with arms raised. These compilations and slideshows are evidence that these nights happened, but to catch the emotion you’d have to ask those who were in attendance, even if their stories aren’t completely true. Human memory is the only thing powerful enough to preserve the feeling of a classic night, even if the details are sloppy. But who cares if they are? It’s what drives dance music’s heightened drama, it’s what drives ‘Cuppy Cake’, and it’s what drives Harlecore. Tomorrow may never come, and we might have forgotten this moment by then, so let’s savour every inch.
Pictures put the facts in our brains, but memories and stories are what make our hearts flutter. We experience live music first through feeling it, then by trying our best to freeze it in time, then embellishing the details of our memories later on. Harlecore gives you the materials to do this. ‘On a Mountain’ flies to a fantastical location and offers to let you stay there: “We can lie here on a mountain, me and you / Can you feel it?” ‘Do You Remember?’ conjures dreamy images of a dance floor in heaven. ‘Car Song’ depicts people “going mental in a room together”. ‘Interlocked’ hopes a night can last forever: “Looking at you / We cannot stop, don’t wanna stop.” ‘Shining Stars’ gestures towards the emotional peak of an evening: “Close your eyes and meet me there”. Harlecore doesn’t give you specifics; whatever shape that dance floor takes in your mind’s eye, it’s yours – even if you’re an outsider.
Sometimes I wonder if Nathan ever actually showed me ‘Cuppy Cake’ on that specific rainy day, or if my classmates ever associated cheap cider and DJ Cammy with teenage euphoria as much as I thought they did. But whenever ‘Cuppy Cake’ or Harlecore have been in earshot during lockdown, I’ve stopped doubting the validity of my recollections and have simply chosen to drift where I’m taken. I print the legend. If the memory is crystal clear, enjoy the beautiful lie.
