Essential Mix - Celebrating Tony Wilson

Pete Tong & Mike Pickering, BBC Radio One Essential Mix: Celebrating Tony Wilson August 26, 2007 (YSI link) tracklisting in comments

Wow, it's clear now that Pete Tong and I are on the same wavelength. Perhaps he's a Pound for Pound fan and is doing what it takes to keep the weekly Essential Mix post going. Or maybe not. Whatever the case, he and the BBC Radio One Essential Mix program have outdone themselves with this most recent episode, Celebrating Tony Wilson. It's a two hour tribute to Tony Wilson and all of the music that he helped foster and promote with his Factory Records and Hacienda nightclub. The first hour of the mix is a journey through the Factory Records catalogue with Pete Tong, . The second hour features Mike Pickering, giving us an hour of Hacienda classics, the songs that set the club on fire back in its late 80s, early 90s heyday.

Not surprisingly, I recommend this highly; in fact, it really encapsulates what we've been doing here at this site for the past few weeks. You'll hear all sorts of familiar stuff, from Joy Division and New Order to the Happy Mondays and A Certain Ratio to the house classics that dominated parties like Nude at the Hacienda. G-d, it's so wonderful to have a nice two-hour trip back to such a magical place and time, Manchester in the 80s. It's interesting to hear how much of the music I love and put up here connects, how the kids in Manchester discovered Chicago and New York house music and would make it there own, the same way the U.S. kids heard Kraftwerk and made that their own with hip-house and early rap and house, or kids in Rio and Sao Paolo heard Miami Bass shit.

We're gonna keep going with the Tony Wilson tribute here, as there's still some goodies I'd like to get to and I'm enjoying it. We're gonna be simulataneously continuing our look at lots of new stuff, including the return of dance music to complement the indie. I feel like Tony would want it that way.