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Not A Diving Podcast with Scuba

#123 Steve Bug: Where are the anthems? "We need the big new tunes to unite people"

Season 1, Ep. 123
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Are we partying like it's 1999? I mean what it was actually like in 99, not how Prince imagined it might be back in 1982.


Millennium eve was supposed to be the best thing ever. I was beside myself with excitement for months beforehand, possibly years. But when push came to shove, my group of friends didn't even bother going to a rave and spent an underwhelming evening drinking warm champagne on Brighton Beach before attending a number of deeply boring house parties.


The subsequent inquest carried out in the pages of Mixmag, DJ Mag, and the rest suggested that our experience wasn't unusual. Promoters lost unfathomable amounts of money that night and the overall impression was that an enormous bubble had prematurely burst with the least fanfare possible.


The current landscape lacks a similar finishing line, but the bug-eyed faux enthusiasm and lip-smacking commercialism which seems to define everything in the dance scene right now definitely has a similar feel to the end of the 90s. But what, if anything, is going to let the air out this time? 1999 was also the time that our guest this week, Steve Bug, and some of the Superstition Records gang from Hamburg started Poker Flat Recordings, one of the labels that would define the minimal sound that emerged from the wreckage of Millennium Eve.


Steve has been pretty outspoken in his interviews of the last few years on above topics, so of course I wanted to get him on the podcast to talk about it. This conversation dovetails nicely with last week's episode with Radio Slave, in which I noted that 'if something is shit, then you should say it's shit, and this [the current dance scene] is shit'.


There is a reasonable degree of constructive comment in this episode though, as well as the doom. I think there is anyway!


If you're into what we're doing here on the pod then you can support the show on Patreon! There are two tiers - "Solidarity" for $4 a month, which features the show without ads, regular bonus podcasts, and extra content. And "Musicality" which for a mere $10 a month gets you all the music we release on Hotflush and affiliate labels AND other music too, some of which never comes out anywhere else.


You can also make a one-off donation to the podcast using a card, with Paypal, or your Ethereum wallet! Head over to scubaofficial.io/support.


Plus there's also a private area for Patreon supporters in the Hotflush Discord Server... but anyone can join the conversation in the public channels.


Listen to the music discussed on the show via the Not A Diving Podcast Spotify playlist


Follow Scuba: twitter instagram bandcamp spotify apple music beatport

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