DB's No School Like the Old Skool: Rob Playford

DJ DB has been a fixture in dance music through every renaissance the style has experienced. His archive of DJ mixes and flyers from the '90s rave era are a time capsule of electronic music's first worldwide explosion, and in NO SCHOOL LIKE THE OLD SKOOL he shares some of these treasures. Get out your notepads…

For those who don't know, it's hard to explain how important Rob Playford is. And I don't mean just to me as a DJ but to underground music as a whole. In the '90s, he pushed studio technology far beyond what people thought was possible and today still remains active at the mixing desk. Rob started his label Moving Shadow in May of 1990 at the tender age of 22. It started out as pure hardcore but as jungle developed and split, mostly into either extreme darkness—distortion and doom—or into the more uplifting and atmospheric stuff, Moving Shadow produced and released the best of both ends of the spectrum.

Rob and I are linked as far back as I've been in the music business. When I first started working for Profile Records, we were licensing some of his first UK releases for American distribution. Then when I got to do my very first mix CD, The History Of Our World, Moving Shadow was one of the five seminal labels I went to for the tracks.

His DJ alias was Timecode but most ravers on this side of the pond heard him via his collaboration 2 Bad Mice with Sean O'Keeffe (aka Deep Blue) and Simon Colebrooke. We produced and released a slightly cheesed out mix of 2 Bad Mice's "Bombscare" in 1994 and actually had a bit of a radio hit with it.

What a lot of Americans may not know is that Rob was the engineer/producer (and, many believe, a big reason why it was so incredible) for Goldie's mega breakthrough record Timeless.

Goldie of Metalheadz and Rob with the gold record of Timeless.

I dug up the flyer for the first Voodoo Magic, which was Moving Shadow's legendary club night:

On a visit to London over Christmas in 1995, a bunch of us—including my then gilrfriend (now wife), Wini—went to the thirteenth Voodoo Magic rave, a night that quickly turned sour. We were dancing and having fun when all of the sudden there were people running all over the place, a couple of fights had broken out and you could hear girls screaming.

People were throwing around words like "gang war" and "shooters," so we thought leaving might be the best idea. The police thought otherwise and locked all the doors from the outside, forbidding any of the 3000 or so people going anywhere. "Apparently there were two rival gangs," Rob tells me. "One from Birmingham and one from Manchester, that had planned a rendezvous there. I had never ever heard of such a thing at a rave, especially all the way down in London, but we were quite popular then—I guess it was the place to be. Most of the bad stuff happened outside as the gangs were desperate to try and get in. The police were called once our security could see it was something more than disorderly ravers. I thought the tear gas was a bit over the top, but I guess they knew what they were doing," he says drily.

Here's the flyer for the thirteenth Voodoo Magic (unlucky for some):

Another slightly less extreme (but still kind of mental) memory I have connected to Rob: We were DJing some West Coast dates with Dom & Roland and one of the raves was meant to be in LA. It turned out to be miles away in the fucking desert on a Native American reservation and it was freezing!

Not what one would call ideal DJ conditions: our fingers wouldn't respond because of the cold and we had to deal with sandstorm-type weather at the same time. We survived with makeshift masks. When I got home, I had to take every record out of its sleeve and dunk them in a full bathtub to get the sand off. When I play certain records now and they have extra pops and crackles, I know exactly how they got there.

Here's a photo of Rob, backed into the amps to try and get some warmth, even though most of the amp tops were missing and the transformers and capacitor tops were exposed. There's Dom with the Terminator laser eyes, DJing in a sandstorm. You can actually see the sand on the decks and mixer!

In recent years, Rob has chilled on the rave front but has continued to be a master behind the mixing desk, working on sound design and music for James Bond movies (and one of my favorite films, Hot Fuzz).

Although we've never talked about it, I have a suspicion he's not happy in the spotlight or, like me, doesn't like having the camera on him; he's much happier behind the scenes creating.

Rob became a solid mate and if I needed something, he always came through. When we were releasing Breakbeat Science's first CD, I asked him for a quote to go on the CD to help it sell:

Here's Rob and a friend at my wedding in '98:

If I had to pick a favorite dance label of all time, I think it might be Moving Shadow. Over the years I've edited down my collection of what was once 6,000 records. Even if other shit "has to go," I'll never sell off the first hundred releases of the label.

This is not exactly a DJ mix but it's dead cool and you've probably never heard it before. It was only given away to labels outside of the UK, to showcase Moving Shadow's catalog. And I do remember Rob being super proud of his digital editing on it.

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And check out their discography here.