Decks Education

Aoife Nic Canna, a regular at such fine Dublin nightspots as the Liquor Rooms, Ukiyo and Hang Dai, is sorting her record bag out for a trip home to Limerick where she’s deejaying in one of her old locals. Mickey Martin’s. While a lot of her colleagues have gone the computer and MP3 route, Aoife is a turntablist in the truest sense of the word. “I bring a handful CDs with me as a fallback, but 95% of what I play is on vinyl,” she tells us. “I’ve some new ones that I’m really looking forward to playing in Mickey’s – I bought an old record I didn’t have by Green Velvet; the High Praise Edits version of ‘In The Groove’, and Joe Corti’s From London With Love EP, which is really cool Afrobeat mixed with house. I always stick a few Soft Cell 12”s in my bag: I treasure those early singles of theirs. Something I picked up recently in All City Records for listening to at home is Quare Groove, a compilation of old ‘70s and ‘80s Irish indie artists like Microdisney, Those Nervous Animals and Barry Warner who is the only Limerick artist I can remember growing up who had a single in the charts! I don’t play the first single I bought, Culture Club’s ‘Karma Chameleon’, at gigs for obvious reasons but I’ve been known to slip in one of my other teenage favourites, the Cocteau Twins, and am looking for an excuse to break out some Pop Will Eat Itself! They were massively influential at the time with their Akai sampling of all these old film scores, Public Enemy and Samantha Fox, but all the credit for the indie-dance crossover goes to Primal Scream’s Screamadelica, which came out a year after the Poppies’ This Is The Day… This Is The Hour… This Is This!” Spoken like a true “My band’s bigger than your band!” music fan. Aoife agrees with what Fatboy Slim said a few years ago in Hot Press, which is that without the loyal support of DJs vinyl wouldn’t have survived into the new millennium. “When CDs came in in the ‘80s, I had this fear that I wouldn’t be able to play my records any more,” she recalls. “I was thinking, ‘Disaster, I’m going to have to buy all these singles and albums again’ when DJ culture kicked in and we needed vinyl to mix. It was those 12” dance singles that kept vinyl alive for a good few years, though only barely.” Apart from the sound quality – “Digital’s improved but it doesn’t fill the room with warm, big, beautiful sound like vinyl does” – there’s another reason why Aoife is sticking to her vinyl guns. “With turntables you mix by ear using headphones whereas with a laptop you do it visually,” she says. “There are a lot of excellent laptop DJs, but to me it’s a bit less musical. I also love the sturdiness of record players. I’ve a pair of Technics SL-1200s, which I’ve only had to get serviced once in 20 years. Them and a really good, loud pair of headphones and you’re set!”