MUMBAI: The name Bill Brewster might not ring an instant bell to the recent explorers of electronic music or the world of DJs, but the chances do seem strong that a Brewster laid mix might have hit your aural channels at least once, in a club on a random night. Such has been the outreach of one of the leading examples of the music community, and while the Indian music aficionados gradually become one of the biggest consumers of EDM, it’s the 80s/90s underground electronic music loyalists who would rejoice with Brewster’s upcoming development: a four-city India tour.
Mumbai based artist and event management agency Mixtape’s founder Naveen Deshpande flew down to Glastonbury in June to witness one of the most-talked about music festivals in the world. The festival introduced Deshpande to Brewster’s live performance, and the former simply approached the DJ for a possible tour to India. “I have never been there before, so obviously I said Yes,” informed Brewster, also the co-author of one of the finest books ever written on dance music – ‘Last Night a DJ Saved My Life’.
With the debut tour to India, an educator of dance music, Brewster, joins the gradually-increasing list of European DJs sneaking into the markets of the East, and the DJ credits the internet’s evolution for the same. “I would not say the musicians are desperate to look to the East, it’s just the thirst for new ideas and sounds. Internet has opened up the world to try each other’s musical heritages.” Decades into the business, and Brewster still remembers the fundamentals of DJing, and remains fairly modest of the sheer unparalleled knowledge he possesses. “I am a DJ nerd,” declares Brewster, also a chef and football pundit. That he’s had a cross-generational age-defying impact on the three decades of aspiring musicians around the world does not only qualify him as a ‘guru’ of sorts, but an example to many.
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Popular British disc jockey and radio host John Peel performed a fundamental role in shaping Brewster’s understanding of music during the naïve teenage years, and while the then teenager evolved with time, a chunk of influences arrived from glam-rock, northern soul, punk and the Britian’s live music scene of the 70s. His idea of ideal gigging, too, continues to remain extremely ‘underground’. And he loves intimate crowds more compared to the festival ones.
Not only has he evolved with time, he is appreciative of the elements that have steered the music genre to greater listenership – internet. “I had no idea that there were so many funk records made in Turkey or that there was a disco scene in Indonesia or Surinam. The fact that a DJ from Finland can connect to a promoter in Australia stands as an example that the worldwide touring is a product of the internet era.
As a professional writer and a critic (to a certain extent), Brewster prefers the media’s minimum current coverage to the electronic music genre or underground culture and he has a proven reason for the same. “The danger of getting too much mainstream coverage is you can end up with a diluted club scene, so I think I actually prefer it to stay relatively underground and unseen. I’m not really interested in dance music crossing over into a mainstream audience, because when it has done previously it’s made the music significantly worse (EDM is a good example of that),” added Brewster.
The life-long Grimsby Town follower hopes to see the club promote at the end of the season, although touring and writing more continue to stay in his priority list.
Brewster’s tour is Mixtape’s IP Soul City’s newest edition that would begin in New Delhi’s antisocial on 17 November, moving south to Kormangala Social in Bengaluru on 18 November before heading home to a performance in Bonobo on 19 November. The tour will conclude at Pune’s High Spirits Café on the following night.
