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Jimmegee steps up to the challenge of a guest column

Jimmegee’s electronic life

jimmegee

Monday, 16 June 2008

Being asked to be a guest columnist on the fabulous Real City Network is a bit daunting... I live in Brighton’s Kemptown with my beautiful boyfriend and my cat and spend all week commuting to a job in Soho, whilst the weekends mean making the most of what either city has to offer. More often than not, that means Big Nights Out in Brighton.

I had an early run-in with REALBrighton over some long-forgotten touchy comment

So what to do with my column? Oo-er missus indeed. Well, music, film and travel are my three passions so there’ll be a lot of random features about those - expect Madonna to feature heavily. I also have a reputation for not toeing the line in blanket adoration of what goes on in the Brighton nightlife scene (I had an early run-in with REALBrighton over some long-forgotten touchy comment) so I hope to be a teensy bit controversial. Oh and I hit 40 next February so I’m kind of obsessed about the whole age/responsibilities thing. I’m looking forward to getting the ball rolling...

OMG, is it seriously 20 years since the so-called Second Summer of Love? Without wanting to sound like my parents, it seems like only yesterday. The difference between my parents and I is that they’re not still jumping around nightclubs off their tits on a regular basis.

My electronic life kicked off as an innocent Fenland lad throwing himself around the school disco dancefloor to New Order’s ‘Blue Monday’. Shortly before heading to Brighton for university, some friends played me a pirated copy of ‘Streetsounds: Electro 2’, an album that by its title alone suggested I’d already missed out. This music laid the foundations for a movement that rocked my world in the summer of 1988.

My hometown of Brighton saw the tunnels of The Zap (now Digital Brighton) pumped with dry ice as clubbers felt their way through the sweat-soaked crowd. DJs would drag Londoners away from the Shoom of a Saturday night, including an ex-Housemartin called Norman Cook and so began a scene that gradually repeated itself in towns and cities across the country. I promised myself then that I’d never stop clubbing or enjoying music that had the power to move huge crowds of people. I kept that promise (my Wilderness Years are a whole other blog in the making) and I never, ever stopped loving the music.