CityLife

Advertorial:Sarah Walters meets Brendan Blood who has penned a book about Sasha

DJ Sasha is the subject of a book by Brendan Blood

Everyone has a hero, but few of us will ever find our names sharing billing on a book cover with our favourite star.

For Leigh-born writer Brendan Blood, this becomes a reality next week when his debut book, God Is A DJ But He Only Warms Up For Sasha, launches at Thomas Restaurant in the Northern Quarter on Thursday.

It’s a lively amble through Blood’s very personal love of the work of 1980s progressive house music DJ and pioneer Sasha, recalled via a series of scene-changing club nights up and down the country – Stoke’s Shelley’s, Manchester’s Hacienda, London’s Ministry Of Sound, Liverpool’s Masque – and even out to Ibiza at Space.

It’s a book Brendan has wanted to write for a long time, ever since he first met the enigmatic, Welsh-born mixer at his former flat in Fire Station Square, Salford.

Back then, Sasha was the original pin-up DJ and Brendan was a keen clubber desperate to get his hands on new records and into the best clubs.
So he started a fanzine – Ace Of Clubs – to get an interview with the great man.

“I wrote it with a friend, Gareth Jones, and he worked at a printers where they’d been producing this Chippendales calendar,” Brendan laughs.

“Because Mixmag had called Sasha the first pin up DJ, we decided to take this huge cut-out of a Chippendale and put Sasha’s head on and take that to his flat. I had an Astra convertible at the time and Gaz had to sit with this thing in the back holding it so it didn’t blow away.

“I’ll never forget knocking on the door with this pin-up thing next to me.

“Sasha kept it for a while stood up behind his decks until a friend of his punched the head off at a party!”

Sasha cemented his reputation as an influential spinner in the north west after being exposed to the dance records of Detroit and Chicago at the Hacienda nightclub.

He moved to Manchester (later decamping to Salford) and started playing illegal raves in disused warehouses until rave culture was cut short by the arrival of the Criminal Justice Bill in 1989. Soon, Sasha would be behind the decks at the Hacienda, working alongside Jon DaSilva, and inviting the club’s owners – New Order’s Bernard Sumner and Peter Hook, as well as local bands like the Happy Mondays – to his house parties.

He’s gone on to be one of the biggest success stories of the scene, remixing hits for artists like Madonna (Ray Of Light), scooping Grammy Awards and even being dubbed the son of God by industry magazines.

 It really is little wonder that Brendan got hooked – first on the excitement of the illegal rave scene, and then on Sasha’s inimitable style.

“They were interesting times,” Brendan recalls. “There were no mobile phones, no emails, no sat navs: you found those raves by just talking to people at Knutsford services.

 “We’d think nothing of driving hundreds of miles for five hours to a rave and then doing the same the next night. We just wanted our next fix of music.

“You couldn’t buy CDs, you couldn’t hear it on the radio, you could occasionally get a bootleg tape of the live show, or you could go 100 miles to hear it yourself.”

Brendan’s vivid memories of this time – a period from the late 1980s to the mid-Noughties – are what form the backbone of his book as he revisits his youthful immersion into house culture: getting to know the clubs, the DJs, the record labels and the famous clientele.

Around three years of writing in the downtime between Brendan’s day job working for HM Inland Revenue and five years searching for a publisher, the book is being released by Lancashire-based Dawber Publishing, better known for football titles.

But Brendan’s book is far from an intellectual analysis of the house music scene or a coffee table staple to be flicked through. Instead, it takes an unashamedly personal approach to outlining why DJ culture – and one DJ in particular, as he led the last pre-internet word-of-mouth musical revolution – changed the author’s life.

 A chapter on the evolution of The Warehouse Project (run by another celebrated Manchester Sacha, former Sankeys boss and now director of TWP Sacha Lord Marchionne) brings the clubbing story up to date, and both Sasha and Sacha have thrown their support behind the book.

“Sasha is such an enigmatic character, very shy,” says Brendan. “I think he’ll be enamoured by the esteem I hold him in.”

God Is A DJ But He Only Warms Up For Sasha launches at Thomas Restaurant, Thomas St, on Thursday, 6pm. Ace Of Clubs DJ Richard Warburton and Solarphonic’s Garry Lomas will be DJing live until late.