The First Time I Heard My Own Record In A Club

The Chemical Brothers were the first DJs I heard play one of my records, and all I could hear were the mistakes.

_{Listen to this article - narrated by Simon Shackleton}

Back in the mid-90s I used to be a regular at The Heavenly Social in London - and by that, I don’t mean a DJ - I mean a regular punter who was a huge fan of the heady eclectic brew that the likes of Jon Carter, Justin Robertson, Andrew Weatherall and residents, The Dust Brothers played. At that point it had recently moved from The Albany to Turnmills and, for a few years, it became one of my favourite nights in the city.

Long before anybody really settled on the term big beat, people were more likely to describe what they played there as eclectic, which always felt like a much better description to me. One minute you’d be hearing breakbeats, the next hip hop, then some strange psychedelic rock record, then house music, then something that seemed to sit somewhere between all of those things - and Tom & Ed were absolute masters of blurring every boundary. There was never a sense of genre-policed guardrails; instead, this was a free-wheeling white knuckle ride, or as the brothers said ‘playing what comes naturally’.

It wasn’t just about the music, though, it was also about the people. That place was full of characters, and as Robin Turner of Heavenly said in his excellent book ‘Believe in Magic’, “Every week you kept hearing these mad stories of things people had done down there. Some guy leching over girls was set on fire with a bottle of amyl and a lit cigarette. Someone chucked a pint over him to put him out. Then there was a guy getting a blowjob on a pile of coats behind the decks. I’m not sure if it was the smell of the place or the fact that it was so packed to the bloody rafters, but the one thing that place wasn’t was sexy.”

Around the time the Social was busy becoming a weekly fixture at Turnmills, I’d been feverishly learning my trade with a stack of hardware samplers, keyboards and a battered old Atari ST (with 1MB of total memory). I’d been experimenting with a track called Contra>Flow under the alias Synchromesh, and looking back now it sounds like a prototype for a lot of things that came later, especially under my Elite Force guise, which was still 18 months off its inception. The track was a busy breakbeat-centric joyride where classic 70s spy-chase movies collided with hamfisted cut & paste beats, and it probably owed more to my ongoing love for the likes of Depthcharge and Renegade Soundwave than any contemporary influences.

_{Synchromesh - Contra > Flow (Remaster - 2026)}

Johnny Matthews and I ended up pressing a small run of white labels - I think there were only about four hundred copies in total - and through a mixture of persistence, contacts and a bit of good fortune, one of those records eventually found its way into the hands of The Chemical Brothers…

Fast forward a few months and I’m bang in the middle of the dancefloor in Turnmills, at around two in the morning, lost in the chaos of it all with a bunch of mates while the place is absolutely going off. The room is packed to the gills (no phones, duh!) And Tom and Ed are in full flight behind the decks. Everybody’s sweaty, slightly sideways and completely locked into whatever strange musical tangent the night happens to be taking at that particular moment.

Then I hear the opening beats of Contra Flow being mixed into the set.

It took me a second or two to register what I was actually hearing because, up until that point, the track had only really existed inside my own little world. I’d literally heard it thousands of times while making it … through my unflattering NS10 monitors, through headphones, through recycled cassette copies that routinely got mangled after run-ins with my car stereo.

What I’d never heard was that track doing the job it had actually been built for - and there it was, blaring out of the Turnmills sound system, being played by The Chemical Brothers. To eight hundred people.

My first reaction was total astonishment, like I was submerged in a very public fever dream. I may have even been excited for a split second, but that sensation was immediately replaced by acute, toe-curling embarrassment.

All I could hear was every single flaw in the music.

The bass wasn’t big enough. The mids felt harsh and abrasive. The whole damned thing sounded thin and fussy and gawky and awkward compared to some of the records they’d been playing earlier in the evening and, as the track continued, I became more and more convinced that everybody else in the room must surely be hearing exactly the same thing.

I remember standing there for a few moments in a kind of daze before instinctively leaving the dancefloor altogether. I scuttled sheepishly off to the darkest recess I could find, crouched down with my head in my hands and just tried to process what was going on. I was convinced that if I looked back at the once-pulsing crowd I’d see an almost complete evacuation underway. I then imagined Tom & Ed looming over me and screaming “WHAT HAVE YOU DONE!!”.

Looking back now, I don’t think it was embarrassment. It was more that the whole thing felt emotionally overwhelming.

Up until that moment, Contra Flow had only really existed inside my own little world. It was a collection of late nights, technical frustrations, creative breakthroughs, endless second-guessing and a thousand tiny decisions made in isolation. I’d spent months living with that track, fretting about the minutiae of each and every production decision and suddenly it wasn’t living in my spare room anymore. It was out there in the world, being blasted through the Turnmills sound system by two DJs whose records I already owned and admired.

Of course, there was no evacuation. Nobody was analysing the EQ. Nobody was debating whether the bassline should have been louder. Nobody was standing there comparing it to some imaginary perfect version that only existed in the producer’s head.

People were dancing, laughing, screaming, hollering, completely lost in the moment, just as they’d been for the past 3 hours.

Gradually, as I sat there listening, it started dawning on me that everybody else was hearing something fundamentally different from what I was hearing. I was listening to the zeroes and ones, to the brick-by-brick components, to the construction of the track, whereas they were listening to the motion, the context, the effect of it on their overheating feet. While I was hearing all the individual components and all the compromises I’d made along the way, they were hearing a record being played by DJs they trusted in a room they loved, at two o’clock in the morning, surrounded by their friends.

The conversation shifts from ‘I’m constructing this thing’ to ‘We are experiencing this thing that you made’. That distinction turned out to be one of the most valuable lessons I’ve ever learned as a producer because sooner or later every piece of music reaches a point where it stops belonging to the person who made it and starts belonging to the people who hear it.

The difficult part is that you don’t get to decide what happens next.

Some records you become convinced will change everything disappear without trace. Others that feel almost incidental somehow take on a life of their own. People hear things you never intended, attach memories to them that have nothing to do with your original inspiration and form relationships with them that exist entirely outside your control. Once a piece of music leaves the studio, it begins a completely different life.

Perhaps that’s why so many artists struggle to finish things. Finishing means letting go - it means accepting that the work is no longer a private conversation between you and the process. It means allowing the world to decide what it thinks, regardless of whether that aligns with your own expectations.

Thirty years later, I still find that difficult sometimes, but I think back to that night at The Heavenly Social and realise that the most important part of making music was never getting the bassline right or finding the perfect mix.

It was having the courage to let the thing leave the room in the first place.