Shitdisco DJ at Twat Boutique: TMC snuggles up for an interview

by Anna Leach

Joe Reeves guitarist and vocalist for Shitdisco DJed at the second ever Twat Boutique and got the girls, grrls, shoredykes and eastenders downstairs and dancing. He tells us how to throw a good party and why gay music is where it’s at.

Shitdisco like to throw parties. In fact the well known dance punk band and creators of I Know Kung-Fu and other freaky-jerky-shrieky discohits didn’t start off wanting to be a dance punk band at all, they just wanted to throw good houseparties.

And they did, in a giant but ancient house in Glasgow where the four of them were studying art at university, they launched a run of band-making, epoch-defining, police-baiting parties. And the sound grew from the houseparties. Darren the band’s drummer was the host and possibly the worst tenant in the UK. Someone is bound to make a film about this.

TMC asked Joe what does make a good party…

“You have to think about the lights” he says “Have the lights really low and music really loud so that it is unavoidable and people have to dance, invite lots of friends and that’s a really simple party. You can make it more complicated with bands.”

“Being English you also need a way to lose inhibitions – lots of booze. Booze and drugs and friends lubricate it. We used to sit down and try and work out the formula for a good party,” he explains of his student days.

A steady supply of electricity must also be up there on the party list, it’s not a problem that many in modern Britain face – but in Glasgow ten years ago in Shitdisco’s party house the electricity was organised on some top-up pay-as-you-go system which cut out when your credit died. Of course pumping speakers eat up the megawatts, so occasionally everything including the lights would cut out and Darren needed to sprint 15 mins down the road to the local charge up centre and top up the electricity bill. Old school.

“You always got police call-outs, power cuts and real dicks,” Joe lists the problems with parties “in retrospect” he says thoughtfully, “it’s a lot better than it is at the time”.

Though that hasn’t stopped them having squat parties in London, in the Toilet factory in Elephant and romping all over the Dalston scene where they’re currently based. Throwing grubby chaotic parties is probably the best and only training for a dance punk band – the ethos is DIY, anarchic, and about getting out of it on music.

And that’s how they became a band: DJ-ing at their parties led to DJ-ing elsewhere, which led to impromptu gigs and culminated in them releasing their album Kingdom of Fear in 2007. The tracks have a DJ quality too – like sound scrapbooks mixing everything from animal noises and traffic to tribal drums and academic vocab. Shitdisco get accused of being derivative, repetitive and pretending to be stupid but, hey guys that’s dance music. They make crazy noises rooted in the party scene they’re from. Not music to think to, it’s music to dance to, or have an epileptic fit to.

After four years in the electricity-deprived badlands of early 2000s Glasgow, the band now live in London. Giggly and boyish, Joe does the Dalston dapper look mixed with the slightly rumpled air of someone who’s been to a lot of parties.

Where does he go out in London? The Macbeth, Girlcore. And his affiliation with gay scene goes a bit deeper than just DJ-ing gay venues and general queerish Dalston night life.

“The music that I like is fundamentally camp – italodisco – that stuff is really gay. The gay scene picks up a lot of sounds before they go mainstream.”

While I personally couldn’t really distinguish italodisco from disco or from my own ass, I thank him for that on behalf of the gay community. Yes we are cutting edge. And Twat Boutique is the bleeding edge of that cutting edge. You should go to the next one.

Photographs by Holly Falconer