Funk, soul, disco, and boogie abound in episode 88 thanks to Manchester DJ Rev. Austin Sherman. His infectious selection is sure to get you on your feet with an expertly crafted hour of groovers. Catch our interview with him below.
Hello Austin, I’ll start the interview by saying thanks so much for putting a mix together for us and coming on the AMF blog. I always like to start my interviews by asking my guests to tell us a bit about their DJ journeys up to this point. When did you get the DJing bug and how has that initial passion led you to where you are today?
Thanks very much for getting me involved! My answer to how I got into DJing is always quite long-winded so apologies in advance.
I’ve always loved music and playing instruments. I learned piano, guitar, and clarinet at school, and was in various local bands with friends, a metal band, a pop punk, a folk band where I played banjo, ukulele, and cajon depending on the song. So yeah I’ve always been into a bit of everything really but around age 17/18 I started getting into more chilled-out electronic music via the likes of Mr. Scruff, Lemon Jelly & The Avalanches. I got a pair of Numark turntables mainly to start trying to get into sampling but when I went to university I realised I could use them to play parties in my halls as everyone else in my halls only seemed to have acoustic guitars with them.
Around this time HMV used to have a 3 for £10 deal on 12” singles so I used to just grab whatever was going to try and get my collection started and to practice mixing with, so I have a lot of weird pop crap in my collection like Put Your Hands Up For Detroit and Call On Me, but at the time that stuff went down well and was useful to learn to mix with very basically.
I very quickly realised that this was going to be a ridiculously expensive hobby, but I had no idea about CDJs or Pioneer being the “industry standard” at the time so I ended up buying one of those weird little Numark iDJ2 mixers and playing parties but using music from my iPod 
it feels ridiculous thinking back to that now but to be honest it wasn’t a bad little controller, you could beat match and scratch and loop, etc. and the source of the music could either be a USB drive or iPod so it was fairly convenient, it just looked a bit ridiculous turning up to bars and clubs with this thing trying to squeeze it in around their professional setups. I got some weird looks from other DJs, and rightly so.
Anyway, I ended up entering this competition ran by Kissy Sell out if you remember him, he used to do the 2-4am slot on Radio 1 Thursday nights and played wonky electro/fidget house/speed garage. The competition was to create a 15-minute mini mix and you could win a support slot on his UK tour, so I entered and won a slot warming up for him in the main room at Sankeys alongside Jack Beats and local legend Will Tramp.
At the time I’d never played on a Pioneer setup before so I befriended some local DJs and managed to convince them to let me come over and have a practice on their equipment in exchange for guestlist to the gig. I was a bit cheeky and I had quantised and edited all the tunes I wanted to play in Ableton, so I when I went over to practice on their equipment I blew them away and they ended up making me a resident at their club night and we’ve been best mates ever since! The gig at Sankeys went amazingly well, Kissy loved the set and invited me to a couple more dates on his tour as well as getting me to do another mini mix for his radio show and a little phone interview, and then I started to get a bit of interest from local Manchester club nights and started to get fairly regular bookings coming in and I realised I could make more money DJing rather than splitting much smaller fees between band mates so ended up leaving the band I was in at the time and pursuing DJing more seriously.
And I guess I’ve been trundling along ever since haha!
Your mix is a really lovely mix of boogie, hip hop, funk, and disco (amongst many other genres) what is it about this fun eclectic approach to DJing that really appeals to you?
Well as I said I’ve always been into a bit of everything when it comes to music so I’ve always considered myself open format or eclectic or whatever. I think I get bored of the same sounds after a while, like when I first started we were playing all this electro/fidget house stuff but I think what made me stand out was that I always tried to find hip-hop tunes around the same bpm that I could fit into my sets, Forgot About Dre and Ludacris – Rollout were big favourites of mine as they always felt like they broke up the monotonousness (if that’s a word?) of the standard 4 to the floor beat that tended to run throughout the whole night. Or I would try and bring some shuffly garage or dubstep in to try and switch up the vibe a bit, but always mixed and blended as smoothly as possible.
I think being so heavily influenced by the artists i mentioned before has a lot to do with it too. I remember before I really understood what a DJ mix even was, I used to listen to the Breezeblock mixes by The Avalanches, Lemon Jelly and Mr. Scruff and was always blown away by how they managed to blend and merge so many different styles of music together in such a coherent way. I think those guys being my first introduction to “DJing” meant that whenever I listened to mixes that were strictly house or techno or dubstep or whatever, I’d very quickly get bored.
Would you say you have any inspirations when it comes to DJing whether in Manchester or further afield? Do you look to any specific DJs for a blueprint for your sound or are your influences more diverse?
I mean these guys are the best DJs in the world so this should come as no surprise but Jazzy Jeff, Skratch Bastid, and A-Trak are probably my biggest DJ influences, they’re all incredible and although they all come from a hip hop background they’re all very eclectic. Skratch Bastid for me is the best on the planet, he’s not like listening to any other scratch DJ, his timing is perfectly smooth and he doesn’t do too much either like he knows how to show off with the scratching and juggling but it’s never too much and he always keeps the crowd moving. Jeff is obviously the OG, untouchable. A Trak is also on a different level, I love how he keeps dipping in and out of the disco/house vibe too, and the recent stuff he’s been doing with Dave 1 as the Brothers Macklovitch is wicked.
More locally I’m gonna once again mention Mr. Scruff as he’s an all-time fave, and shouts to Will Tramp again. This is gonna sound like a bit of a cop out but tbh I don’t have much chance at the moment to go see local DJs as I’m usually DJing myself, note to self: take some time off and scope out the competition!
Can we dive a little more into your mix? How did you put it together? When you record mixes are they meticulously planned events or do you take a more free and easy approach to DJing and does this ethos extend to your sets playing live?
So it’s actually been a while since I recorded a mix but I do tend to do a fair amount of planning. I’ll usually have a general idea of where I want to go with it, I’ll have a few jams and put a playlist together and start to figure out the running order of the tracks, then I’ll start to tighten it up and really start planning when I want to mix in and out of certain tracks.
Live is completely different it’s much more of a free for all/see-what-happens kind of vibe. I have a fair amount of “routines” or playlists that I know I can dip in and out of if I feel like I need to bring the crowd back on side or something or even if I’m just feeling a bit lazy, but generally when I play out and about it’s not planned and I just see how I feel at the time and see where the flow takes me.
I think you have to be a bit looser when playing live as there has to be an element of reacting to the crowd, if you turn up with a meticulously planned set and it’s not going down well then you’re stuck playing that mix to an audience who doesn’t want to hear it, you have to be more flexible live. As I said it’s always useful to have those routines and playlists ready but it’s best not to rely on them too much in my opinion.
Are there any stand-out tracks you wouldn’t mind sharing with us? Any killer records that never leave your bag, anything you really like at the moment, or anything with a unique story attached to it?
To be honest this mix is made up of some of my faves at the moment. The Zach Witness remix of Prince and the Marcel Vogel remix of Jail are two of my absolute favourites to play out, they just make me want to disco stomp! They’ve both got such a groove. Anything by Bosq at the minute too I love that tropical disco flavour. Oh, and that Obongjayer tune is killer! One I didn’t include but have been playing a lot is Kaytramine – 4Eva, love that track!
I also can’t wait for this next Jungle record, all the singles so far have been right up my street there’s no one making music like them at the moment, or if there is please let me know because I love it and want more!
Lastly, I’ll wrap up by asking you where you’re playing next. Where can the people catch you around Manchester or further afield?
So I can generally be found playing around the Northern Quarter on the weekend, Fridays are usually Wolf At The Door, Refuge, Albert Schloss, Wilson’s, or somewhere like that, I do every Saturday at Trof and I do a few Thursdays, and the odd Friday at Exhibition on Peter Street.
I’m also going to be providing the soundtrack for my friend’s art night Overdrawn at New Century one Thursday a month, that’s a really fun event where they put paper down on the tables and anyone can come and draw anything while there’s a live artist doing a piece on stage and there’s also a portrait artist doing pay-what-you-feel portraits. That’s a really fun event and I love DJing at it as it’s something a bit different, there’s no pressure to make people dance so I can play a different vibe than my usual.
Other than that I played at We Out Here festival with my good friend Nam on the Melodic Distraction stage. We were on early on the Thursday afternoon that was a big one!
