Music and Me (Kolja – The Old Raver)

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Back to talking music bollocks now …

In the summer of 2004, I already knew that my marriage was in its death throes and I also needed to make some more friends, so I started dabbling in internet dating.  Being an internet marketer by trade and having the novelty factor of being one of the few foreigners living in Riga, I proved to be pretty good at it.

I soon found out, however, that women in their thirties were not very interesting in the main – their English was usually pretty poor and they had been worn down by the hard lives that they had left.  So I ended up dating younger and younger.  Some of them were probably just prostitutes looking to make some quick cash and so were disappointed that I wasn’t just some sleazy old guy looking to give them some quick cash for a quick shag.

One girl I got on with pretty well though.  There was never going to be any romantic interest as she wasn’t my type and I wasn’t hers, but we had similar interests and liked similar music.  She told me avout a rave that was happening the following weekend (I am sure she never thought that I’d go to it).  But, having missed out on the whole rave scene when it was new and fresh in the Nineties and enjoying my midlife crisis, I thought it sounded fascinating.

So I went together with a few friends.  It was called something like Berlinale Extreme Noise Festival or something and was at the old film studios and was playing mostly really hardcore techno (which I wasn’t into then and still aren’t into now).  I found the place fascinating though – consisting of thousands of scruffy teenaged kids off their heads on narcotics.  My friends all thought it was Hell on Earth and left within an hour, but I stayed on.

I bumped into the girl who had invited me there.  We spoke a little, I offered her some E for her and her friends and so she just grabbed it all and headed off, saying she would be back soon.  I didn’t see her for the rest of the evening.  But another girl had heard us talking English and was curious to find out what a strange old English guy old enough to be her Dad was doing there and wanting to practice her terrible English.  I was only too happy to have someone to talk to.  Her male friends were suspicious of my motives, but there were none.

We spent all night talking – hard work for both of us as she could scarcely string a sentence together in English.  At the end of the night, we swapped numbers and she said she would tell me whe there was another good rave on. Much to my surprise, she did.

I then began to go to raves quite regularly as I found out about them and she introduced me to all her friends and they accepted me when they realized that I was a genuine strange old guy who was genuinely into the music and not just there to try and pick up chicks.  One of the guys, Danik, quickly became my new best friend and we hung out together a lot.  Through him, my social circle grew quite quickly. 

They were all into the alternative scene, where freakiness was considered cool.  And you didn’t get much more freaky than a middle-aged English guy who was getting heavily into the rave scene.  They called me Kolja (this being the Russian nickname for Nikolaj).  As I went to more and more raves, I began to become something of a minor celebrity on the scene.  Some of the kids were now coming up to me wanting photos taken with me and one even asked for my autograph.

I remember one time, some young Russian guy came up to me wide-eyed.  “It’s you!” he exclaimed.  “You’re The Old Raver!  People told me about you but I didn’t really believe that you were real!”

The music of choice for my new social circle was drum and bass – not a style that I had had much knowledge of up until this time, but high on E and in the high adrenalin environment of a rave, it just sounded like pure magic.

Here are some of the tracks that sent the floors wild at these raves:

Pendulum – Tarantula

Subfocus – X-Ray

Noisia – Block Control VIP (which came in the latter stages of my rave years)

But probably my favourite track from the era is local is a track from the local Kylie Minogue pop star who collaborated with a top Moscow DJ and was then remixed by either ill.skillz or Pendulum, depending upon who you believe:

Yana Kay and Sunchase – Remember Me

The raving and clubbing at weekends was a distraction away from the fact that I was still not earning anything and the money was starting to run out.  Fortunately, myself and another 22-year-old girl I met off a dating site started up a business running a videochat studio at the end of 2004.  It was not, however, based in Riga, but Latvia’s #3 city called Liepaja – which was little more than an over-grown village, which seemed like, to quote Morrissey, ” a seaside town, they forgot to close down”.

It was funny at first to be based someplace so small on the edge of Europe – pretty much the only foreigner living there.  But it soon became horribly boring.

My business partner left me just a week after we set up the business, leaving me alone in an apartment full of crazy 18 year old girls (but that’s the subject of another posting). 

New Year’s Eve 2004 was a miserable experience.  I was in a strange town (in every sense of the word) in a strange country and didn’t know anyone.  Fortunately, there was one decent club in the place, Big 7. Nowhere near as cool as Nautilus in Riga, a bit tacky, but not bad for such a small, poor town.  Although New Year’s Eve was a lonely experience and I didn’t speak to a soul all evening, after a while I started to make some new friends there.  And, even when I didn’t, I was still able to get off my head on E and enjoy some decent house tracks like:

Jupiter Ace – 1000 Years

Porno – Music Power

Ferry Corsten – Fire

The best ever evening in Big 7 came in the autumn of 2005 when, instead of my going up to Riga to see my friends, they came down to Liepaja to see me.  Fuck, did we get wasted that Saturday night, as you can see here:

Kolja - Down wiv der kidz

By about 4.00am, I looked like this:

Off my fucking head on E

Sadly though, dead cool evenings like that were most definitely the exception rather than the rule.   I was in an unhappy ‘on again/off again’ relationship with my new business partner throughout this period, but she spent more time in Riga than Liepaja and so most of the time I was alone – bored, with nothing to do and no money to do it with even if there was.

I needed to sit in front of my PC for 12 hours a day in case something happened, but it very rarely did and so I spent much of my time expanding my MP3 collection.

Although hardcore drum and bass is great in a club, it’s hard to listen to as background music when I was working away – I needed something more mellow, such as chill out.

With my newfound love of drum and bass, I did more investigating and discovered that ‘dnb’ comes in several different flavours, my most favourite outside the full on mayhem of a club being described as liquid funk.

This is what I was mostly listening to while alone at the time, liquid funk with a melancholy edge due to the fact that I was going through a bad relationship at the time.  Here are three absolute classics:

Jaheim – Put That Woman First (Calibre Remix)

Makoto and MC Conrad – Golden Girl

These two tracks were the exceptions though as the masters of liquid funk are Hospital Records – still my favourite record label – and home to such great artists as High Contrast, Nu:Tone, Cyantific and Logistics.  But. most importantly of all, they are home to London Elektricity, headed up by Hospital Records’ founder, Tony Colman.

Of all their tracks, this is the one that means the most to me:

London Elektricity – Different Drum

In my first posting to this blog, I said that the lyrics to Orbital – Beached redefined my life.  But for the four years I spent in Latvia, this track pretty much summed up my thoughts on life.  Here are the lyrics:

Stone cold sober
How can I hide?
I can’t go to work today
Lord, oh Lord, what have I done?
I wanna dance to the beat of a different drum

Things ain’t what they used to be
Makes no difference to me
Your words came through, my time has come
I wanna dance to the beat of a different drum
24 hours in a day
I can’t keep going in this way
Got no choice, just got to run and run
Just wanna know I can dream of a rising sun

Do do do do do do do
Woowoowoowoowooooh (etc)

I will dance to the beat of a different drum
I will dance to the beat of a different drum
I will dance to the beat of a different drum (Ah!)
I will dance to the beat of a different drum

Shade your eyes it’s getting bright
Don’t look down; I know you’re scared of heights
Bit by bit we’ll overcome (bit by bit we’ll overcome)
I wanna dance to the beat of a different drum
I look around, what do I see?
A thousand faces all staring at me
Lord, oh Lord, what have I done?
Just wanna show what we are, what we will become

I’m gonna dance to the beat of a different… drum, drum, drum
Ah, oh

I will dance to the beat of a different drum
I will dance to the beat of a different drum
I will dance to the beat of a different drum (Ah!)
I will dance to the beat of a different drum (wanna dance to the beat of a different drum)

Do do do do do
Woowoowoowoowooooh (etc)

I’m gonna dance to the beat of a different… drum
Drum

(Just wanna make a change
Just wanna make a change
Do it a little different
Just wanna make a change
Do it a little different
Than yesterday)

But I digress (yet again).

My time in Liepaja was getting me down more and more.  I had had to give up my apartment in Riga as I couldn’t afford it any more and I felt totally trapped in this shithole.  My New Year’s Resolution for 2006 was to get myself out of this hole, by starting a new business.  By May it was just about up and running and looking good.  This coincided with having the mother of all rows with my girlfriend, which resulted in my throwing the key to the office at her, stuffing my meagre belongings into a bag and moving back to Riga permanently.

I got myself a luxurious apartment – small – but brand new.  It was so nice that I practically became a recluse for a few months until I started to get bored and started to go out with my old friends again.  There were less raves these days, but I became a regular at Sub-Terminal, the monthly drum and bass night at Riga’s grungy alternative club, Depo.

It was always a great atmosphere there – a social club to meet up with old friends.  Nearly everyone knew me and I knew them.  I was often backstage, smoking joints with Lithuanian DJ’s and Estonian MC’s or whoever was on that week.  Happy days.

Sadly for me, Danik moved away to work in London.  I picked up some new friends, but it wasn’t quite the same after he left.  The novelty of being alone in my new apartment had worn thin by the end of the year and I felt too much alone.  So after a really great New Year’s Eve with a couple of gay friends of mine and their air hostess friends back at Nautilus, my New Year’s Resolution for 2007 was to do something about it.

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Tags: 2005, dnb, drum and bass, hospital records, latvia, latvian, liepaja, life, liquid funk, music, musings, personal, random, random thoughts, raves, riga, russian, thoughts