Memories Of DJing & Promoting At A Trance Club In The 1990s

I co-ran a club called Tangled in Manchester through the 1990s and into the 2000s – right through the trance boom years. I was a resident DJ and founder for 12 years, and recently I dug out a book the team made about the club to remind myself what those years were like. With our Ferry Corsten’s Trance Mixing Masterclass now imminent, I thought it would be a good time to share some of the best memories that the exercise jogged for me.

Tangled was a no-frills underground venue that held six to seven hundred people at a push, with a couple of rooms. Guest DJs started playing there – Steve Lawler, Andy Cato from Groove Armada, James Holden, Sander Kleinenberg, Danny Howells, Nick Warren, Agnelli and Nelson, Lange, Gareth Emery, and Above & Beyond to name just a few. Many made their Manchester debut there.

Here are five things that stand out to me from those years:

1. The explosion that happened in 1998

We’d been running the club from about 1993-94 onwards. Trance music was a thing – I was playing early Jam & Spoon records and stuff coming out of Germany. There wasn’t really a name for it at the time. We called it “melodic European music” on our flyers, but it was ultimately the music that turned into trance. We were setting the scene without really realising it.

But the explosion happened in 97-98. I remember so clearly one defining moment: I was driving along Wilbraham Road in Manchester on my way to Fallowfield, the student quarter, with a car full of posters and flyers. It was a Saturday, and I ran around Manchester every week putting up posters and dropping flyers in bars to get people to come to our event that night.

I had the radio on, and they played System F “Out of the Blue” (F stood for Ferry, as in Ferry Corsten, the track’s producer). All the hair stood on end on my arms. I turned it up and thought, “Oh my God, what is this record? We need to fill our boxes with records just like this and play them every single week. We’re onto something huge here. This has got the power of house, but the melody of European pop music.”

So that’s what we did. This led to an utter change in our event. We went from 200-300 people to 1,000 trying to get in every week. We’d spent five years laying the groundwork for this, without even realising it.

2. Learning on the job

As a kid, I ordered a book by Roy Sheppard from the back of DJ Magazine – “From Scratch to Stardom” (scratch meaning beginning, not scratching). The DJ’s Handbook, it was called. I read it, literally memorised everything in it. That was it, that was my education.

Apart from that, I just did it. I was playing end-of-term parties, I was playing with friends, we had a mobile disco, started playing in clubs and bars and working my way up. Making all the mistakes you can make – forgetting to bring my own headphones because I didn’t think you needed them. Every mistake.

Read this next: 10 Mistakes Beginner DJs Make (That Pros Don’t)

But I was DJing every week – that’s how you learn. And when it came to booking DJs, we were literally looking at the names in brackets on the label of the record, tracking these people down, ringing the phone numbers on the back of the vinyl, and saying, “Look, you made a great record there, do you want to come and DJ at our club?”

This led to some almost accidental successes. I remember one time we booked this little DJ called Tomcraft three or four months in advance because we liked some of his underground records. In the meantime, he released a song called “Loneliness” and it went to number one pretty much everywhere in Europe.

By the time he DJed at our club, we had the DJ who made the number one record in the land. You can imagine the attention that got us and the queue around the block.

Learning on the job was a lot of happy accidents, a lot of mess-ups, but so much fun. Understanding DJing with no fears, just coming at it and trying to bite off as much as we could.

3. One night, we counted down from 50 to number one…

After maybe ten years of running the club, we decided to do a countdown of our best and biggest songs. At this point, they were mostly big trance records because trance had made our club.

We got one of those long LED display things that they sometimes have in phone shops that scrolls around anything you type into it. This was before phone apps, so it had a tiny little keyboard. We hung it up in the DJ booth.

Me and my DJ partner, Terry, played from number 50 to number one, as voted for by our clubbers on an early forum. We’d type the title and artist into this little keyboard while the other one played the song, then we’d swap. My good friend Tony just watched us and laughed all the way through this, hours and hours of us trying to conduct this thing we’d chosen to do.

We pulled it off. It was quite stressful, but very funny. The number one song, by the way, was Delirium’s “Silence”, the Sanctuary mix.

4. There were a few, er, lost weekends

This was a lifestyle, not a job. That’s why I stopped in the end. In my mid-30s, I thought, “I haven’t got the stamina anymore. It’s going to kill me if I’m not careful…if I do it for another ten years.” That’s what made me stop and what made me (in the end) miss it enough to get into teaching it.

I remember one very big DJ turned up. A lot of these DJs didn’t know what to expect – they’d taken a cut in fee because we were a small club. Their mates had said, “You’ve got to go and play there, it’s great.” But it wasn’t the kind of place they normally played.

He turned up, didn’t really know what to expect, and he didn’t leave for about three days. He went from after-party to after-party. I remember going home, going to bed, getting up, having breakfast, heading out to collect a box of records I’d left at someone’s house, and there he was, sat on the bed with an entourage, having the time of his life, not been to bed yet.

After about three days, this unnamed but very famous DJ declared, “It’s been great guys, but now I’m going fishing.” And off he went. Absolute legend.

It was definitely a time of lost weekends, which gave it a shelf life, but what a way to spend your early years.

5. Playing trance for eight hours on vinyl

We often put on all-nighters – 10pm to 6am. Usually we had a guest DJ booked, but later on us residents knew our crowd so well that sometimes we’d just throw an all-nighter with only one of us DJing (because the other one couldn’t make it).

This happened to me a couple of times. I’d DJ from 10pm to 6am – eight hours of DJing on vinyl to my favourite dance floor and my favourite club, playing my favourite music.

You can’t just play the same trance bangers one after the other. You can’t even do that for an hour, never mind eight hours. These sets gave me a chance to properly flex my muscles as a DJ and still stick to the theme.

We’d start off with deep house, move into progressive house (which brought in those trancey journey elements), then move to what might be called melodic techno nowadays – still laid back, but now we’re getting rolly, keeping the melodies there, keeping that sense of yearning and space and always moving forward.

Then we’d move on to trance and techno and rave – there was a lot of crossover there anyway. Towards the end of the night, as it was starting to get light outside, we’d start to bring the tempo down, playing stuff like Massive Attack’s “Unfinished Sympathy”, which has definitely got big trance elements to it. That lowering of the BPM would just ignite the dance floor again.

Get the skills: Ferry Corsten’s Trance Mixing Masterclass

At the end, we’d quite often pull a real thing out of the bag that no one was expecting – like a big rock record, like “She Sells Sanctuary” by The Cult or something like that. Something that completely blew people away and got them walking home singing something they’d never thought they were going to sing.

Maintaining the vibe and the energy and the journey of trance music, but honestly taking it everywhere. I loved playing those all-nighters. It’s the DJ memory that goes with me all the way through my life.

• Phil Morse was a resident DJ and founder of Tangled in Manchester from the early 1990s to the mid-2000s. As you’ve probably guessed, he also founded this very DJ school, Digital DJ Tips where he has been teaching DJs since 2010.