Interview with Sasha

Reprinted with permission from DJ Times Magazine
DJ TIMES: A lot of people refer to a club called Shelley's when they talk about your influence on the UK dance scene. When did you start your residency there, and what made that gig so influential?
SASHA: I started Shelley's in 1991. What happened was that the Hacienda had a lot of problems with drug gangs -- Manchester's a very small place, and the Hacienda was the only place really to go out at night, so when all these rival gangs would go out on a Friday night, the only place to go was the Hac', so, invariably, there would be fights going off in there. It got heavier and heavier and they had to close the club down, because these two rival gangs were making such a mess of it, and it wasn't until the heads of these two gangs ended up killing each other that they managed to re-open the club. Shelley's was about an hour down the road, and I had built a name for myself in Manchester spinning there, and so when I started my residency, I basically nicked the crowd from the Hacienda. Not only because of the problems there, but because Shelley's represented something new for them to do.

DJ TIMES: What were you doing at Shelley's musically that people still refer to it in this day and age?
SASHA: I was just mixing it up. There were a lot of big, happy Italian records out at the time, and the Hacienda's music policy had changed to where they were playing a lot of American house. I think I was one of the first people to be banging about those big, big, happy records and whipping the crowd up into a real, kind of mental frenzy. It really did go off in there, it was like people had their tops off and had air-horns and whistles -- it was amazing, I used to DJ the whole night, and I would push it every week to see how late I could take it before I played a record that they knew. I knew that by the time I played the first record they knew, I would have to leather the sound to keep the energy level the highest. I used to play the most obscure records -- I played a lot of tunes from the Big Shot label in Canada and really deep sounds, but as soon as they recognized one sound in a record, that was it -- the whole place would go right off, and I would kind of have to play that big sound the rest of the night.

DJ TIMES: What led to the demise of that gig? You lasted there for quite some time. Was it three years?
SASHA: No, no, it was more like one and a half, maybe two years on and off. I went through a period of a few months where I would only play every other week there. I started to get offers to DJ abroad at the time, and that was really exciting to me. I went to Australia for the first time. I also finally got my first spinning gigs in London around the start of '93, but really, Shelly's ended up having it's own share of problems eventually. We started having gangs coming down, and the crowd changed, because the press writes about it, and you get that 'Kev and Sharon' crowd who don't know how to 'have it' like the regulars, and those people chase out the regulars and it changes the vibe of the night.

DJ TIMES: About that same time, you got into production as well.
SASHA: I got into production because a lot of the A+R people from London were coming up to hang out at Shelley's, and I met them through my sets and stuff. I started to get remix offers then, which was really exciting to me.

DJ TIMES: When you started out, you knew nothing about the studio...
SASHA: (laughs) I knew nothing! That whole time when I was producing remixes I would just show up to the studio with a box of records with my latest tunes and we'd sample the fuck out of them. I could play keyboards, so I'd do that, and I'd do the arrangements on the desk, but in terms of the technology, I had no understanding of it, because I didn't have any of my own gear and we were always under the pressure of time being in a big studio,