Roger Sanchez: 'Leeds has always had a part of my heart'

FAC51 The Hacienda Open Air gathers an array of DJs and producers who played at the club in years gone by, including Dimitri From Paris, Todd Terry, Derrick Carter, Graeme Park and DJ Paulette, for one night at new Leeds venue Canvas Yard, in Holbeck.

Headlining the bill is Roger Sanchez, the Dominican-American house DJ, best known in the UK for his 2003 chart-topping single Another Chance.

Speaking to The Yorkshire Post from New York, the 55-year-old fondly recalls the first time he DJ-ed at the Hacienda in 1993. “I remember when we first walked in, it was a rectangular room and the DJ booth was in the middle of one side of the rectangle, so rather than looking at it from one end all the way down, you’re centre on above the dancefloor,” he says. “It was either Mike Pickering or Graeme Park who was on right before us. The first time I played, I was playing with Frankie Knuckles and David Morales and it was absolutely rammed, the energy was amazing.

“The access points to the booth and around the club were dark, the dancefloor was brightly lit from above, and it reminded me a lot of New York clubs like The Tunnel in the rectangular long layout but just the orientation was a little bit different. But it had the UK feel. I don’t know how to explain that feeling other than the fact that I knew I wasn’t in London but it felt familiar, like a New York-type of vibe.”

Sanchez had heard about the club’s reputation at the heart of ‘Madchester’ from magazines such as DJ Mag and MixMag. “Frankie had already played there and at that point in time we wound up living in the same building, but I’d also read about how important the venue was in the press,” he recalls. “As us DJs do, we tend to name mixes after the vibes of clubs that we’re creating for them to be sold out of, so a lot of the Hacienda-style tracks that I was picking up at shops like Vinyl Mania, Rock and Soul and places like that had a very piano-based, soulful, euphoric sound to them, and that was really my interpretation, not having been there yet, of what the Hacienda was like.”

He found “more piano-oriented” playlists went down well in Manchester, particularly tracks such as Devotion or Sueno Latino, along with Frankie Knuckles’ remix of Electribe 101, David Morales’ remix of Peace by Sabrina Johnston and local heroes M People. “The Strictly Rhythm one by Luv Dancin’ went down really well when I dropped it there,” he says. “The New York sound really connected and blended well with a lot of the Italian piano type of sound.”

Sanchez has maintained an ongoing relationship with the Haçienda in its various forms for the last 30 years. What keeps bringing him back, he says, is “the love that the Haçienda fans and devotees have for the vibe that was created is very genuine”.

“It’s similar to the people who remember the Paradise Garage, for years they really championed the sound and the movement, because if you were there you experienced this kind of community through music,” he continues. “The Hacienda community has a very similar approach and genuine love for the music and not only just that period of time, but the way it brought people together, that kept me very connected to the Hacienda.”

He is looking forward to the open air show. “Leeds has always had a part of my heart,” he says. “I used to play at Hard Times, so I have a strong connection. The audience have been really supportive to me over the years, so I’m really looking forward to getting back to that. I think the combination of doing that with the Hacienda makes it very special.”

Sanchez’s own musical roots go back to the hip-hop and house party scenes in Queens, New York, where he grew up. “From the early 80s through to the 90s, hip-hop was just connecting with the scene. At that point in time I was a very young DJ playing everything from disco to funk. With the creation of hip-hop, people used to take breaks from records – it could be a funk-soul record, a disco record – and cut it up and extend it to make the break. That led to the development of sample-based hip-hop. And coming out of Chicago in the 80s going into the 90s was this revival of disco but done in an electronic way which turned into house music.

“Very early on I was playing that kind of music, not only Latin hip-hop, which was called freestyle, which was very big in New York and Miami and a couple of pockets of other states, then house music came in. There were clubs like Paradise Garage that I used to go to in New York City and a couple of other places that were really bringing in that sound. There was this mixture of the gay audience which really championed the sound and then the straight audience. Certain nights at Paradise Garage were either very gay, 100 per cent hardcore, or an integrated mix. I started making my way through the scenes and understanding music that was coming from Chicago and integrating that into my set.”

From there, he says, “inevitably hip-hop and house started colliding”. “For me it was a transition, I started to develop my own tracks to play out, house music-wise.”

Sanchez’s shift from playing other people’s records to producing his own was a means of ”having music that nobody else had” that he could play in the clubs. “At that point in time I was playing reel to reel, so we would cut dubplates or acetates before they were signed, so I would like to have something in my sets that would make people go, ‘Hey, what is that?’ Or take a track and create my own version to play out.

“I started going to a friend of mine’s basement in Queens where he had a little set-up and that’s where I started getting into production to have things to play out. From there it developed into me learning the equipment to start up my own production set-up. The first record I got signed was for this label called Quark, I’d done this production that had a 24-bar break in the middle and the owner of the label, Curtis Urbina, said ‘I like that, why don’t you turn that into a record?’ That became the first record that I released under the name Egotrip, which was called Dreamworld.

“They were in the same building as the Strictly Rhythm label and Gladys Pizarro heard that record and put me into the studio to create an EP for her. That’s when I came out with my track Luv Dancin’. That was what really started propelling me to the production scene.”

In the mid 90s Sanchez was introduced to Thomas Bangalter of Daft Punk by a friend at Soma Records. “He said ‘Here are these kids that have been sending me stuff from Paris, these are going to be big. I can’t handle it on my label, maybe you can with (your label) Narcotic,” he says. “I had no idea at the time they had already been in talks with Virgin. I was going to Paris on tour and connected with them and Thomas said, ‘Let’s have dinner’. So we did, at the restaurant at the top of the Eiffel tower. He was this really young kid. I said, ‘Look, I really like your stuff’, he said, ‘Thank you but we’ve just signed a deal. Let’s just stay in touch.’

“Then when Da Funk dropped and the whole machine went into putting out the Homework album, Thomas reached out to me and said ‘We’d like to invite you on tour. We’re doing a very rock ’n’ roll bus tour.” They’d formed this little collective with myself, Junior Sanchez, Armand Van Helden and Basement Jaxx. With had this whole things that Junior made up called the Mongoloids and Daft Punk became part of this kind of Wu Tang crew for house music.

“That was an interesting tour because I was at a certain place in my career and to jump on a rock ’n’ roll tour was something different but a great experience. I got chance to hang to hang out with Thomas and Guy-Manuel (de Homem-Christo), they asked me to do a remix for them of Revolution, which I started on the back of the bus on the tour. We did the UK and Strasbourg and Paris. it was very informative to see how they came up with their stageshow and seeing it develop over the years from that tour.”

In 2003 Sanchez topped the UK charts with his track Another Chance, which featured a sample from Toto’s song I Won’t Hold You Back. It was, he says, the last track he created for his album First Contact. “On tour I used to always go to different record shops if I was in Japan or Canada, and I had this little portable turntable on which I would listen to tracks to sample beats or what have you. Toto was one of the tracks that I brought back,” he says. “As I’m making my album I was going through different tracks and I happened upon the vocal track. I really liked the melancholy feel of it, so I took that sample from the vocal and built the entire track around that. I chopped it up and reconfigured the chords a bit.

“It had this interesting juxtaposition between a euphoric type of thing and something very melancholy, it had this bittersweet feel. I thought it was an underground track and put it at the end of the album, but then the thing just took off. The first time I played it at Pacha in Piccadilly I had a bunch of girls around the booth going ‘what was that song you just played?’ and I thought, ‘Ah, this could be something’.”

As well as branching out into podcasting in recent years, Sanchez continues to DJ. He feels the house music scene has “come full circle” in the past decade.

“The cyclical aspect of it was in the 90s people going out to the clubs was a big thing. It kind of took a nosedive at the end of the 90s, going into the 2000s, as I think people suffered from fatigue​​​​​​​, there was a lot of legislation, people wanted to make clubs the boogeymen for the drug culture. It tends to happen politically in every city that has an active club scene – people have to hang their hat on something to try to get elected. I understand how that happens, they’re very tied into the social and political climate how clubs do,” he says.

During periods of recession, “as we did ​​​​​​​in the 2000s, going into the 2010s”, he believes clubbing “came back as an escape”.

“In the 90s it was an escape from Thatcherism and all the crazy cr** that was going on in the United States, so the upswing was we wanted to get on and forget about our troubles. (In the 2010s) that coincided with social media starting to take root and be relevant​​​​​​​.

“It has gone full circle in that now, if anything, clubbing is bigger than it was ​​​​​​​in the 90s because now it’s not just in the UK and a couple of places in the US,” he says.

“It exploded in the US with the whole EDM movement, the clubbing scene was also highlight by social media, people sharing these clips of confetti cannons, festivals, people going ‘I want to be there, that looks like a hell of a lot of fun’. That has propelled that dive into the club culture that has broadened and it’s now like the new rock ’n’ roll. ​​​​​​​Instead of going to a concert you go ​​​​​​​to a festival with your glow sticks if you’re a kid​​​​​​​.

“The sound, however, has cycled ba​​​​​​​ck, as it inevitably does, because once you’ve burned through the high octane but very little content, especially very little soul for some, ​​​​​​​you go back to nostalgia.

“People that were teenagers or early 20s back in the 90s are all grown up and the new generation starts getting interested in what they did, because it always looked more fun back in the 90s​​​​​​​ than it does now. Now I believe clubbing is much bigger than it ever was.”

The accelerant, he believes, is social media. “What is very important now, however, is as opposed to these very homegrown pockets ​​​​​​​that would develop, everything is on fast forward because social media puts a spotlight on it,” he explains.

“Sonically has come back around. Glitterbox did a fantastic job of getting that ball rolling for the disco movement, the same thing with the more soulful, organic house, and African vibes, all these different forms of dance music that have grown exponentially in this diaspora ​​​​​​​of dance music is so much greater now than it has been​​​​​, and it’s global now because of communication.”

Sanchez reveals he plans to release a new album of his own soon, featuring “a lot of UK talent”.

“For the last two years I’ve working on my next album,” he says. “I have a title for it and a concept for it, but I’m probably going to drop a couple of singles first. I’ve got one with a vocalist named Katy Alex that’s going to be out around May.

“I’ve got a couple of collaborations, there’s a remix I just did for this artist called Betoko, and then I’m getting into my next artist album. I’ve been working on a few things, I’ve collaborated with a few people – Mel C, Low Steppa, Mica Paris. There’s some really interesting collaborations and a lot of new artists. It’s definitely on the house vibe, a lot of soulful stuff. Kele Le Roc I’ve worked with. There’s a lot of UK talent on this album. Over the past couple of years I’ve been basically based out of London during the summertime, really connecting with a lot of artists. I’m excited about it. I’ve been taking my time and it’s almost ready.”

Hacienda Open Air takes place at Canvas Yard, Leeds on Sunday April 30. www.fac51-thehacienda.com/hacienda-open-air-city-one-leeds/