Best Promos: January 22 One

Welcome to this week's mega post on your supa-soar-away * ORIGINAL TEXT REDACTED BY SUE GRAY * ORIGINAL TEXT REDACTED BY SUE GRAY * ORIGINAL TEXT REDACTED BY SUE GRAY * ORIGINAL TEXT REDACTED BY SUE GRAY * ORIGINAL TEXT REDACTED BY SUE GRAY * ORIGINAL TEXT REDACTED BY SUE GRAY * ORIGINAL TEXT REDACTED BY SUE GRAY * ORIGINAL TEXT REDACTED BY SUE GRAY * ORIGINAL TEXT REDACTED BY SUE GRAY * ORIGINAL TEXT REDACTED BY SUE GRAY * ORIGINAL TEXT REDACTED BY SUE GRAY * ORIGINAL TEXT REDACTED BY SUE GRAY * ORIGINAL TEXT REDACTED BY SUE GRAY * ORIGINAL TEXT REDACTED BY SUE GRAY *

The only way it won't be a lorra fun is if I get bored after this week's post and disappear for another four years.

Last night, I was laying awake at night, last night, wondering how many dance music promos I was going to be waking up to this morning after deciding over the weekend and last night to start a new blog about dance music promos called Best Promos and, boy!, I was not disappointed! When I opened my peepers, I caught a glimpse of a fat, jolly old man all dressed in red with a long white beard carrying a sack, clambering out of my bedroom window with a merry, "Ho! Ho! Ho!". I jumped out of bed in amazement and saw him squeezing into a Ford Sierra RS Cosworth (I don't know what colour it was, it was five o'clock in the morning) and he sped off with real confidence. I think he did a wheel skid, too. When I turned the lights on, I spied a giant sock hanging on the door handle that helps to open the door of my bedroom and it (the giant sock) looked full to bursting with goodies. I crept over to it like a midnight lemonade drinker and peeked inside the massive sock with desperate anticipation, precipitation and perspiration. Yes! Lynx Africa with Lynx Africa socks (normal size). Double Yes! A Cadbury selection box! Triple Yes! Hundreds and hundreds of dance music MP3s!!!!

It was like Christmas had come early, and in many much ways: it had. I was now the proud owner of hundreds of MP3s that the ordinary boys and girls on our street would have to wait weeks to listen to. To say my head had grown would be an understatement; it was now enormous. With a self-satisfied grin and some chocolate around my mouth, I felt cocky and, if I'm honest, a little bit more brave in the face of this never-ending Covid-19 pandemic. If that dumpy, pissed-up, scruffy smirk of a PM we have these days (I've been telling people that PM stands for Party Minister, which has got me A LOT of laughs recently) won't wrap his flabby arms around the country any more, then armed with a big sock full of dance music promos, we at Best Promos will (wrap our arms around the country).

How?

By writing some reviews once a week of the BEST promos I've received in the previous week to help you decide which ones to buy the following week.

Best Promos 4 Eva.

Why everyone goes mad about vinyl is beyond me. You pay about £15.99 for the A-side and two or three remixes max, and you can’t even play them in your car! You spend the same amount of money for a CD album with anything between ten and fifteen songs on, and you can play them in loads of different machines. No wonder we're still in the middle of a credit crunch; people are wasting their hard-earned cash on vinyl because dance snobs say it's cool when, in my important opinion, CDs are cost effective, space effective and they look far more futuristic and 'cooler' than a massive black circle ever will. MP3s are just as impressive as CDs because they're invisible. Playing an MP3 is exactly like watching a magic trick in Las Vegas.

Saying that, The Launch by DJ Jean was the first 12" vinyl house record I ever bought, and I’ll never forget how special it felt to have that 180g slab of wax in my mitts. In the summer of 1999, I handed over £15.99 to that rude, skinny, ginger lad at Hard To Find Records in Birmingham, the one whose face looked like it was being sucked backwards into his skull through his eye sockets by a rare brain disease. If you were there, you know. The odd bod handed over the record with a scowl and I went back home to listen to it on my brand-new Gemini belt drive decks. It was then that I realised that if I wanted to be DJ, I had to buy more than one record. I went back the next day with my tail between my legs and bought Big Love by Pete Heller for £15.99.

The Launch still goes down well today and holds up when dropped. I remember Move D (pronounced Moved) dropping it at an Electric Minds loft party in 2011. The place went bananas. In November last year, Justin Robertson dropped it at The Social. The place went bananas. This morning, I opened the windows and dropped it in the living room. The bin men went bananas.

In the early noughties, I used to play the DJ Disco Remix out in the Pen and Wig’s Sunday night hard house night in Walsall. It had the “5 4 3 2 1 Ignition” vocal, a donk in between every beat, loads of scratching and those famous DJ Jean trumpets. Magical. You never get those days back.

I'll give The Launch by DJ Jean a solid 8/10 and Big Love by Pete Heller an impressive 9\10

The Launch 2022 remixes will be available to buy exclusively on Bandcamp in May. You're looking at just £2.00 for a squelchy 303, 808 and 707 acid workout with retro M25 vibes and icy rear-view window feels by Posthuman, a moody yet uplifting, forward-facing 105bpm chugger from the Holy Land by Moscoman and a full-on glittering shoulder-pad techno vocal edit by Jumpin' Jack Frost and Billy Bunter.

Pre-order here: The Launch Remixes