Le billet du jour (de la semaine, devrais-je écrire, vu que mon emploi du temps me permet peu de me consacrer à playpause) se lit d’abord en anglais, pour satisfaire mes quelques nouveaux lecteurs dans la langue de Matthew Herbert, alias Doctor Rockit.
A part ça, ma fierté du jour, c’est de te proposer ma première capture de vinyl, un maxi tout noir comme ils ont, les vrais DJs.
Désolé pour le son un peu pourri, je vais m’entraîner à nettoyer tout ça bien proprement pour les prochains. D’ailleurs, si tu peux m’aider à trouver une courroie (aspect élastique de slip qui s’est gouré de cycle au sèche-linge) neuve pour mon antique platine Toshiba stereo music centre sm-3500, ça sera déjà ça de gagné sur la vitesse de lecture, un peu mollassonne à l’oreille, et je t’offrirai un café, au Flore…
I used to have a friend with whom I shared a lot on music.
One day, she came to me with a little bit of a song recorded from an unidentified radio show broadcast in South Africa and she told me : Listen to this, you have to find this track, I think it’s amazing…, and, sure, I loved it, but even if I knew I had heard it before, I couldn’t tell what it was nor find any clue to name it.
She then flew back to the country where she had settled, without the song she wanted.
For months, I investigated about it, I asked everyone but nothing could help.
Luckily, I heard it again on the French radio. It was Charles Webster‘s remix of Doctor Rockit’s Café de Flore. Of course! This song had been quite a hit on the Parisian scene, and the remix had started to have a success of its own.
So I looked for a CD, for a vinyl, for an mp3, but I couldn’t find it anywhere… I searched again and again, in shops, on the web : the song existed in its original version but not Webster’s remix, out of print.
My friend was soon to come back to Paris and I wanted so badly to find this record for her.
Then came June, 21st, la fête de la Musique day: my friend was coming back to celebrate summertime. In the morning of this day, I finally found a webpage with nothing but an e-mail address for a DJ called Charles Webster. I wrote to him, asking if he was the Charles I had been looking for and if he could help me unearth this special remix. A few minutes later, I received an answer:
yes i can get u one.
do u live in paris ?
i will b in paris today, thursday 21st.
i am playing at a thing at hotel de sully in the early evening and at a small club called pulp at night.
come down and i will give u a copy.
charles.
(Am I not the luckiest guy on earth, sometimes?)
So, I met him in the evening, with my friend who had just landed in Paris a few hours before, he offered me a copy of his maxi and we had an unforgettable time in the small gardens of the Renaissance Hotel de Sully.
Afterwards, the remix came out on lounge compilations, but it was never featured in its full length version, unmixed, with real Café de Flore hum. Oh la la, ça, c’est Paris !
Today is also a digital premiere on playpause : my first vinyl rip! Sorry for the sound quality…
Doctor Rockit – Café de Flore (Charles Webster’s Latin Lovers mix)