Greg Wilson – Credit To The Edit Vol.3 (Tirk – 2018)
Available here: https://ift.tt/3vSQqTUMike Pickering was someone I first met in 1983 when, along with Rob Gretton, New Order’s manager and Factory/Haçienda director, he approached me about taking a weekly Friday at the club, its first regular bespoke dance night. Mike was then the booker for the Haçienda, but he’d take over DJing duties in ’84, evolving that same Friday session into the hallowed Nude night, a key ingredient of the rave explosion – his eventual partnership with Graeme Park now the stuff of legend.
Apart from working at The Haçienda Mike was also a member of Quando Quango, whose Factory single ‘Love Tempo’ had reached the top 3 of the US Dance chart in 1983. Simon Topping, who played percussion with Quando Quango, and A Certain Ratio before that, would later join Mike in a new project, T-Coy (an acronym of ‘take care of yourself’), with keyboardist Richie Close recruited to complete the trio.
Their first release was 1987’s Latin-flavoured ‘Cariño’, a blend of Tito Puente and Adonis, as Topping put it, fusing live and electronic to deliver one of the UK’s first authentic House releases. It made its debut on Stu Allan’s essential Piccadilly Radio show, played from cassette, before being pressed to white label 12”. Remarkably, Factory frontman Tony Wilson, on the cusp of a dance revolution his club would be at the very apex of, was shying away from putting out dance releases, so T-Coy signed instead to the newly-formed Deconstruction label, Mike also taking a position within the company – his previous A&R work for Factory having unearthed the Happy Mondays. During the coming years Deconstruction would establish itself as one of Britain’s leading dance labels, its artists including Black Box, K-Klass, Bassheads and Felix, plus Pickering’s hugely popular band, M People. By contrast, Factory would encounter cashflow problems due to the delay in delivery of new material from New Order and the Happy Mondays, going belly up as a result in 1992.
Very much a cult-classic, ‘Cariño’ would also feature on the seminal 1988 British House compilation ‘North – The Sound Of The House Underground’, which, in an echo of the ‘UK Electro’ project I was involved in four years earlier, saw the bulk of material produced by the same people, in this case Pickering, Topping and Close. The album would also include Manchester anthem ‘Voodoo Ray’ by A Guy Called Gerald, which, of course, appeared on the second volume of Credit To The Edit.
In 2010, Mike, nowadays a Sony executive, approached me to edit ‘Cariño’ for a remixes package issued on the re-activated Deconstruction label, and it’s a variant of this edit that now provides a fitting opener on the CD.
Written by Pickering / Topping / Close
Produced by T-Coy
Published by Copyright Control
Deconstruction Records 1987
Licensed courtesy of Deconstruction Records Ltdhttp://gregwilson.co.uk