Various Artists - Disco Demands Volume One (2005)

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Various Artists - Disco Demands Volume One (2005)

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It's become a bit of a DJ cliche but Al Kent's (or Ewan kelly as he was known to his mum) love of music came early thanks to his dad's love of music. But while other DJs boast about their parents' love of abstract jazz and dub reggae, Al's old man was more into Don McLean, Buddy Holly, Abba; pretty much anything he could pick up in the reduced racks in Woolworths really. That meant gifts of kids' albums when The Jungle Book soundtrack was on special offer which the youngster cherished. He helped himself to piles of his old man's vinyl too. They might've been rubbish but there was something nice about having records to play. Once the boy was old enough to buy his own records he went a bit mad and spent his money on little else. The weekly shopping trip to Tesco always meant a cheeky half hour in the record department while the rest of the family stocked up on washing powder and cat food. Or when he didn't have money he'd swap toys for his pals' records instead. He became obsessed; one of those annoying kids who took records to the school disco because the DJ's weren't good enough.

Soon came northern soul. Another obsession. A serious obsession. And a bloody expensive one - you couldn't buy those records in Tesco. This is when the DJ bug got him too, putting on parties from a young age, loving the fact that people danced to records he chose. "Parties" is probably a bit misleading; a better description would be "Hiring a local function suite and playing rare-ish records to a some friends." One thing led to another though and eventually he was involved in booking guest DJs for events that didn't centre round his own record collection. Then he was asked to play in a real club. And got paid! Amazing. More money for records then.

That sort of thing (buying and playing expensive records, traveling up and down the country on a weekly basis for chewing gum weekends) went on until the late '80s or early '90s when he accidentally stumbled upon house music. Accidentally because he passed the house room en route to the toilet at a two roomed all-nighter. Someone opened the door and the volume, smoke and crazy lights got out and scared the shit out of him. But he was intrigued enough to check the scene out and, being an obsessive, soon immersed himself in that too. The records were cheaper and easy to find after all. And the parties were pretty bloody good too. He taught himself to mix on an old Citronic belt driven console and got himself some gigs that paid slightly more than the soul ones. Pretty soon he moved up from small local clubs to slightly bigger ones in the city centre. Sometimes even to other peoples' city centres. And then he got the urge to make music because it was all drum machines and keyboards that did everything for you and you didn't actually have to know anything about anything to knock out a tune and sell white labels from the back of a van. Unsurprisingly his first attempts were rubbish. Turning up at a studio with a crate full of records and asking if we could just sample everything (when technology only allowed 63 seconds sampling time) didn't work. But then Cubase invented "Audio" and suddenly some of those '70s soul records he'd acquired could be looped up and put on top of house drums. And people would buy the records. So the Million Dollar Disco label was created as an offshoot of Glasgow's Solemusic. It was all very exciting with some early minor successes like tracks being licensed to Azuli, Defected, Z Records and Hed Kandi, but after a while it got a bit boring. There's really only so much you can do with a disco sample. And when Phatts & Small are in the charts it all gets a bit embarrassing.

Al had found a love for disco a few years before when he started buying a few 1970s records that were big on the soul scene. He became obsessed of course and started buying everything that looked like it might be good, especially if it was a 12" with a bright sleeve and a DJ's name as remixer. Now that he was getting bored of playing and making house music he took things back to their roots. Inspired by his hero Walter Gibbons and people like Ron Hardy and co he began playing two copies of disco records to stretch out sections (Joey Negro even called him "Scotland's answer to Walter Gibbons" when he named him as one to watch in DJ Magazine). Then he discovered he could save all the hassle (and money) and make his own edits on his Mac. Which he did. A lot. The editing became a full time thing, not only for his DJ sets but for labels like Real Thing, Jisco, Kat, Stillove4music, Kojak Giant Sounds, Lumberjacks In Hell, Kalakuta Soul and too many more to remember.

The DJing picked up too - Al was chuffed to be asked by Dave Lee to play at Z Records' only party in London and honoured to be invited by Dimitri From Paris to play at Respect's Ete d'Amour afloat on the Seine, an inviation that followed Dimitri's legendary disco set with Al in Glasgow which Dim once described as "One of the best times of my life". In 2006 he played his first Southport Weekender where he's now played four times, more than any other Connoisseurs Corner guest. He's pretty much been round the world.. USA, Canada, Australia, United Arab Emirates, France, belgium, Italy, Holland, Germany, Sweden, Norway, Poland, Lithuania, Lebanon, as well as every part of the UK.

And then there was the Million Dollar Disco site. A real labour of love for Al. What started as little more than a few pages about MDD releases and such blossomed into one of the most comprehensive guides for disco nerds. The forum became THE place to discuss obscure disco records. Until Facebook came along and everybody pissed off. Al interviewed the likes of Tom Moulton and John Morales and searched relentlessly for mixes and info from DJs and producers of the disco era leading to him writing reviews and a couple of articles for Keep On and Faith magazines, he wrote the extensive sleeve notes for Dimitri's "Get Down With The Philly Sound" project on BBE with requests for more disco articles for magazines and sites in the pipeline. He's provided guest mixes for the likes of Six Million Steps, DJ History, Ministry of Sound, Galaxy Radio, SSRadio, Deepsoul3, Love Unlimited, Test Pressing, Keep-It-Deep, Inhale and a million other sites he's forgotten about.

By far his most ambitious project happened in 2005: totally bored with chopping up disco loops he had the idea to attempt to make music more like the stuff he listened to and got together a few musicians to play some parts for him. From humble beginnings in his spare room, the project soon grew wings and became the Million Dollar Orchestra, involving more than twenty musicians and taking the best part of three years to complete with the addition of string and horn sections and lengthy recording sessions using fully analog equipment. The project was finally released as "Better Days" on BBE in 2008.

In 2009 BBE released a second album, "Secret Sounds". Recorded without the timescale or budget of MDO, it was a more stripped down, backstreet kind of thing, recorded at home, but again treated to some full analog sessions.

Then they released "Disco Love" - a compilation of obscure 1970s soul and disco records, compiled from Al's extensive collection. That went down pretty well. So much so that they released volumes two, three and four with number five in the pipeline as we speak. "The Best Of Disco demands" came next, a whopping five CD and two double album set made up of reworked versions of the Disco Demands CDs Al had been selling under the counter a few years previously. As if that wasn't a big enough project, Al and BBE then put together "The Men In The Glass Booth" - a ten album, double box set complete with forty page book (researched and written by Al), telling the untold story of the disco era's unsung heroes.

His edits are still in great demand with more recent releases on GAMM , Culture of Soul, Cree, Rocafort and Razor n Tape, as well as a slew of remixes for the likes of Midnight Riot, Odyssey, The Far Out Monster Disco Orchestra, Joey Negro's Sunburst Band, Stanton Davis, Sandy Barber, Los Charly's Orchestra and Hokis Pokis.

Having thrown parties in Glasgow (and Manchester) for a good number of years, the Million Dollar Disco annual event, every January, is becoming legendary, with queues the length of the street, and getting longer every year.