I’m the author of three books that trace the history of DJ, music, dance and art culture in New York City during the 1970s and early 1980s—Love Saves the Day: A—Love Saves the Day: A History of American Dance Music Culture, 1970-1979, Hold On to Your Dreams: Arthur Russell and the Downtown Music Scene, 1973-1992, and Life & Death on the New York Dance Floor, 1980-83. Together they amount to an unprecedented, in-depth account of the importance of NYC’s DJ, music, dance and art culture during the 1970s and early 1980s. They’re all published by Duke University Press.
I became a co-founder of Lucky Cloud Sound System after Loft host David Mancuso proposed to me that we start to host Loft-style parties in London back in 2002. I agreed to do it so long as my good friend and colleague Jem Gilbert could also be involved. David said great and then suggested we bring in Colleen Murphy, a friend of his from New York. The first party took place at the Light in June 2003 and in 2005 Colleen, Jem and I took out a loan to complete the purchase of a sound system that resembled the one David had created in New York. The bank required us to come up with a name for the party. I suggested Lucky Cloud Sound System, which nodded to the musician Arthur Russell and his song “Lucky Cloud”. Working alongside David until 2011, when a doctor advised him to stop travelling, amounted to a whole new education.
In May 2017 I had the good fortune to attend Joy, a Loft-influenced house party based in Brooklyn hosted by Nari along with Douglas Sherman, Takaya Nagase and Yuji Kawasaki. The experience made me realise that I wanted to start an intimate, invite-only, musically-open party that started early on a Saturday evening in London. I ended up teaming up with Cedric Lassonde, Cyril Cornet and Jem Gilbert of Beauty and the Beat (as well as Lucky Cloud) to launch All Our Friends in January 2018. After a year or so Jem pulled back as he was overcommitted. The party, where I DJ alongside Ced, Cyril and guests, means the world to me.
For my day job I’m a professor of Cultural Studies at the University of East London, where I started out working on a temporary part-time contract in 1999. That’s where I met Jem Gilbert and many collaborations have grown out of that. After we both lost half our jobs early into the pandemic we launched Love Is the Message, a podcast about music, the dance floor, sound systems and counterculture, in the spring of 2021. It’s since assumed epic proportions.
Meanwhile Jem and I found ourselves becoming somewhat frustrated by the decline in team spirit that had gripped Lucky Cloud Sound System after David stopped travelling to London during 2011 and after two years of uncertainty Colleen assumed control of the musical hosting as well as the sound system in 2013. All was resolved at a team meeting held in January 2023 where we decided that following our 20th anniversary party in June Lucky Cloud Sound System would evolve into two parties, Lucky Cloud Sound System and the London Loft. Lucky Cloud Sound System is owned and run collectively, the London Loft is owned and directed by Colleen.
As for my background, I was born in Ealing, London, in 1967, but grew up in the suburbs. My dad, a German Jew, had fled Nazi Germany on the kindertransport as a 15-year-old in 1939 a month before the war broke out. He studied at night school and as a mature student at university, and eventually got his first job as an English teacher in Wokingham, some 40 miles west of London. Raised in Hendon, north west London, my mum was one of three daughters of East European Jewish parents who ran a lampshade shop on Walkers Court in the heart of Soho. Growing up as the only non-Anglo kid in the schools I attended, I slowly reached the conclusion that I could only feel fully comfortable and alive in a city, where all of humanity can gather. Since then I’ve modified my view, including because I love nothing more than camping in North Wales.
My journey to the dance floor wasn’t the sweetest. My dad died suddenly when I was 19, half-way through my first year studying Politics and Modern History at Manchester University. My mum passed away three years later. Although I’d enjoyed a mind-blowing night at Hot at the Hacienda during the summer of 1988—I genuinely didn’t know that MDMA was going around at the time and thought that the ecstatic atmosphere was solely thanks to the breakthrough of house—I only started to go out dancing on a weekly basis when I joined the rave scene during 1990. Soon after I became a diehard regular at Feel Real, a Friday night party at the Gardening Club. That became the only place that I felt a sense of hope. The experience forged an attachment to party culture that has stayed with me ever since.
Disillusioned with a career in journalism and inspired by the example of Edward Said, a pioneering postcolonial critic, Palestinian activist and exemplary public intellectual who happened to deliver the BBC Reith Lectures on the topic of Represenations of the Intellectual while I was becoming bored at the BBC, I resolved to quit my job at Newsnight and escape the cul-de-sac of UK parliamentary politics. Wanting to connect with the memory of my mum and dad as well as live in epicentre of house music culture, I moved to New York City, enrolled on the doctoral programme in English Literature at Columbia University, went to dance to Louie Vega at the Sound Factory Bar every Wednesday, and bought vinyl at Dance Tracks every Friday.
I started to write Love Saves the Day after a young professor suggested I write a “quick book” about the history of house music/rave culture. Early into my research Dance Tracks co-owner Stefan Prescott recommended I interview Loft host David Mancuso, who at the time was almost completely down-and-out, his contribution almost entirely unrecognised. The interview with David led me to switch my focus to the 1970s. It also marked the start of a social and intellectual friendship that framed much of the rest of my life. Thanks to the international circulation of Love Saves the Day: A History of American Dance Music Culture, 1970-1979, as well as our work with the wider Lucky Cloud Sound System collective, the friendship had some influence on David’s life, too.
My devotion to supporting the creation of egalitarian, open, liberatory dance spaces is now only matched by my commitment to Palestinian justice. This particular journey was also somewhat indirect, as many of the good ones are.
After I took my bar-mitzvah at the age of thirteen my mum encouraged me to try out the synagogue youth club just as it affiliated to an international Reform Zionist youth movement. This became my teenage escape from suburban culture to cosmopolitanism: weekends away in London and Manchester, summer camps, Israel tour. I ended up spending a gap year in Israel where I was indoctrinated in a study centre in Jerusalem for five months and lived on two kibbutzim for five months. I always considered myself to be a socialist (or a human) before I was a Jew and supported the ideal of a single secular democratic, yet was also brainwashed to think that there’s no distinction between antizionism and antisemitism.
By 2015 I’d wriggled free of the stranglehold. That year I supported Jeremy Corbyn’s campaign to become Labour leader and signed up to the BDS academic boycott. I also watched on in horror as the mainstream Jewish community and the British establishment launched a witch-hunt against Jeremy, the first great reveal. Since 7/10 I have become a hardcore opponent of Israeli’s genocide of the Palestinians and a devoted campaigner for Palestinian justice. I openly identify as an anti-zionist. As one placard at a solidarity demonstration put it, I’m not antisemtic I’m just not a psychopath.
I currently live on the Arden Estate in Hoxton, London, with my partner, to whom I’m married, writer Niki Orfanou. I have two daughters, Carlotta and Ilaria, illustrator and drama school student, who also like dancing and are regulars on the All Our Friends floor plus jump on the end-of-night van run—we earn our breakfast :)