2. The Roots - The Seed 2.0
3. Sleepy Brown - Margarita ft. Big Boi & Pharrell
4. Nelly Furtado - No Hay Igual
5. Timbaland & Magoo - Vulnerable ft. Pharrell
6. Art Of Noise - Moments In Love
7. Mariah Carey - Say Somethin' ft. Snoop Dogg & Pharrell
8. Nelly Furtado - Promiscuous ft. Timbaland
9. Busta Rhymes - I Love My Bitch ft. Kelis
10. Terror Squad - Lean Back
11. Trick Daddy - J.O.D.D.
12. Ladytron - Oops! Oh My...
13. The Vines - Gross Out
14. The Raconteurs - Steady As She Goes
15. Muse - Super Massive Black Hole
16. Blink 182 - Feeling This
17. Babyshambles - Fuck Forever
18. Matt Willis - Up All Night
19. Paul Oakenfold - Faster Kill Pussycat ft. Brittany Murphy
Matt Willis was the patron saint of Gilmore Heights. As such his picture, drunk and obnoxious, sticking his fingers up at the paparazzi, had pride of place on the wall there. Along with all the other idols, heroes and rebels we chose to mount. Having gone on an almighty bender when his absurdly popular pop group Busted had called it quits in 2005, he was constantly photographed falling out of nightclubs, drunk, with different women, looking disheveled. Having, what looked like, a great time. But even before that he looked like the beating heart of the Busted party. Which is why Luke and I always said he was the celebrity that we'd most like to party with. Of course later his 'good time' got the better of him and required a stint in rehab to sort him out, but that was later. In 2005 he was still a legend. If only to the two of us.
Luke, George and I moved into the first floor flat on Gilmore Place somewhere between November 2001 and April 2002 (accounts vary). I remember definitely living at my dad's when watching the September 11th attack on TV there, so it definitely happened after that but I do seem to remember it not being full on Scottish winter at the time either. Regardless it was, for the three of us, our first time living away from home. We were excited. At the time I was working full-time at the newly opened Ster Century Cinema in the Ocean Terminal and one day a week at The Waterfront Wine Bar, waiting tables. Luke was about to drop out of Uni and start working at, and later running, nightclubs and George was book selling or cheese-mongering part-time, I forget which. He did both.
The place was a good size and Luke's parents were our landlords. At the start I was in the small 'box room' in the flat. Just enough room for a single bed a chest of drawers and my CD collection but I paid less than the other guys and I'm a small dude. Luke had the big room, in which you couldn't see the floor for clutter and George had the next biggest room, which he kept in an orderly fashion, full of books, magazines and CDs, most likely alphabetised. The livingroom was big enough for a sofa and a sofa-bed and a breakfast bar. It was home to the large Bush TV and the many videogame consoles we had. Also, not long after moving in Luke and I decided to build a massive joint collection of VHS tapes, mostly old cartoons and classic movies, that we would find in second-hand stores and car-boot sales and they would be displayed there. The walls were three different shades of blue if I remember correctly. Red walls and a fusbol table in the hallway.
Sully and Mike from Monsters Inc. moved in not too long after we did, in standee form. It took some effort to get them home from the cinema in my Dad's car. They took up the main wall in the livingroom. And from there the room turned into a shrine to our cultural icons. We stuck up pictures cut from magazines of everyone from Vinccent Gallo to Christina Aguliera, from Arnie to Elliot Smith, From Harmony Korine to Chingy. Later there was a large wooden cable-spool that we rolled home after a night out and used as a coffee table. It became similarly adorned with images from magazines.
Prior to the move, we'd all been living in different corners of Edinburgh. I was in Granton at my dad's, Luke was in Colinton at his parents and George was with his mum in Newhaven. We'd spend between 3 and 6 nights of the week drinking in Rush bar in the Cowgate in the middle of town with a whole rotating cast of others, before heading on to one of the many different clubs we would frequent. The Establishment for our RnB and Hip-Hop fix, The Mission at Studio 24 or Genetic at The Citrus Club for our Metal and Rock fixes, and Stereo or Gaia or whatever it was called at the time for some cheese and incredibly cheap drinks and The liquid Room for the Indie disco Evol and of course, every Thursday without fail, for The Snatch Club.
Rush was our home from home. A sanctuary where drinks were cheap, we were friends with the management and bar-staff and had influence on what music was being played. We also won the Pub Quiz every week with it's prize of free drinks. Later we took over the writing of the quiz. We were geeks who liked to party. Snatch was a similar deal, we got to know the guys who ran it and so before long the entry fee was waived. The drinks were cheap and we often took part in the silly games they would play on stage to win more 'FREEEEEEEEEEEE BOOOOOOOZZEEEEEE!' as compère Harry Ainsworth would scream excitedly. The club would always end with a hearty rendition of I Could Be So Good For You the theme song from Minder performed by Dennis Waterman (which, just FYI, has one of the creepiest music videos of all time, playing like a #metoo PSA). And then after the clubs we'd usually try to find someone's flat to go to to keep the party going before wandering home.
After the move not much changed. Being located so centrally in the city meant that our flat was an ideal spot for pre-drinks and after-parties. And just parties in general really. It also meant that now it was easier for us all to get together, so the biggest change was that we were partying even more. Pre-drinks would usually involve bottles of red wine and maybe some bourbon while we'd play videogames (Pro-Evolution Soccer and Mashed, primarily)and watch movies and MTV and play fusbol or Scrabble, and eat Cosmo's pizzas. Oh how we loved a Cosmo's. There was always music playing. After-parties were frequent and boisterous. It didn't help that at some point Luke had started working at the newly opened Honeycomb nightclub on Niddrie Street. Widening the social circle and party options even further.
Gilmore Heights also became host to some of the most epic Halloween and New Year parties I've ever attended. One time Nick rode a child's BMX, that we'd found in the street, around the party but came off it on a corner knocking a massive radiator from the wall. All the "men" at the party stood round holding our faces not knowing what to do, leaving it up to Katie, the daughter of a plumber, to be fair, to turn the water off to stop the place from flooding. Utter carnage. We often launched things out of our windows, like eggs or water bombs. We were always quite badly behaved. But in a nice way. There was always fun to be had, and sometimes there was drama, there were girls and drugs and more alcohol than was safe (thanks Carlos for the Sloe Gin), there were accidents and arguments. And there were laughs, a great many of them. And all the other good stuff that life is all about.
The rotation of the occupants in the flat was regular. Luke went to live in Australia for a year at the top of 2003, leaving just me and George in the place. But to be honest George's girlfriend Lucy and his best mate Sod were round so often they basically lived there too. Katie also was a near permanent fixture. Malcy was round a lot too. Luke got back from Oz around Christmas time. Then early 2004 George moved out, he got his own place on West Nicholson Street. I took his room and that was when Nick moved in to the box room. This was the first of what has ended up being many times I've lived with Nick. In 2006 Luke moved to Barcelona with his long term girlfriend and future wife, Hollie, when she went there to study. At that point Nick moved into Luke's room. Chris, who started out as a random guy with pink hair who joined our pub quiz team and who shared our enthusiasm for partying, and eventually ended up becoming Katie's other half, moved in at that point. Having snapped his Achilles in a bizarre skipping accident, he was couch-bound for a long while.
I moved out around summer '06, around the same time I made the Déjà Vu mix and this mix would be from a similar time to that. I wasn't in a good place mentally and holding down a job at the time was not easy for me, which made paying rent a challenge. After a period of extraordinary leniency from Luke's folks I decided to go back to my dad's and stop being a burden to them. Luke and Hollie came back from Barca and shared the flat with Chris for a while before he moved in with Katie. Even when I wasn't living there, I was round all the time, kipping on the couch.
The flat stayed in our circle of friends for 13 years. It began as a den of debauchery and ended as the place that Luke and Hollie started their family. It was a backdrop against which we grew up. I am equally glad and sad that it has been traded out of our view. I will remember it fondly, as Luke put it it 'was quite a ride indeed'.
This mix still holds up pretty well. I could take or leave the Paul Oakenfold dance single with the late Brittany Murphy on vocal duties. And the Busta Rhymes/Kelis/Will.I.Am track is a fine bop but unspectacular. Aside from them the rest of the tracklisting is solid. It is split in half, with the first half being RnB and Hip-Hop leaning and the second half being more rock focused. In the first half, all three of the Timbaland produced Nelly Furtado numbers are smackers. Maneater, a manic stomper, sounded like nothing else at the time and the same can be said for the wild Spanish-language No Hay Igual. Promiscuous remains a typically smooth Timbo jam. Three great singles from a suprisingly great album from the Canadian songstress.
One other Timbaland appearance on the mix comes in the shape of a rare collaboration with fellow Virginan Pharrell. The two of them were in a band together at high school called Surrounded By Idiots along with frequent Timbo foil Magoo, who also features on Vulnerable. P is doing his best Curtis Mayfield croon on it and that gets me every time. Pharrell, naturally shows up elsewhere on the disc too. He's on the summery Sleepy Brown track Margarita with Big Boi and on the wonderfully stuttery Mariah Carey single Say Something ft. Snoop Dogg. The new wave electro masterpiece Moments In Love by the peerless Art Of Noise also appears here because I'd discovered it when I'd heard Pharrell and Chad Hugo selecting it on a radio show. A truly beautiful piece of music.
The Roots covering or expanding on Cody ChesnuTT's killer The Seed with The Seed 2.0 remains a classic. As does the Terror Squad's Lean Back which is the best Fat Joe has ever sounded and also features a verse from Remy Ma that is an all-timer. Trick Daddy and Khia combine for an excellent piece of complete filth on J.O.D.D. Then to transition from the 'Urban' side to the Rawk side I included Ladytron's punky cover of the Timbaland produced, Missy featuring Tweet gem about masturbation Oops! Oh My... It's a fun novelty but isn't a patch on the bullet-proof original.
When I asked Sod when he thought we moved into Gilmore he said 'well The Vines album came out in 2002, so sometime around then', which goes to illustrate again how much my friends and I think about things in relation to music. The Vines show up on here with the lead single from their third album Vision Valley. Gross Out is more or less what we'd come to expect from them, which is to say a sub-two minute Nirvana-aping grunge song that I honestly don't know why I still get such a kick out of.
Steady As She goes by the Jack White side project The Raconteurs still gets my toe tapping and Supermassive Black Hole was the last really good Muse song, and is probably only really good because it sounds exactly like Do Something by Britney Spears. I still love Blink 182's Feeling This, the way the vocals are layered and manipulated is so great. And you know what? I even still love Babyshambles' Fuck Forever. Sure the verses are a mess but that chorus is undeniable.
Finally, when Saint Matt Willis released his debut solo single Up All Night I was happy to find it was a trashy, poppy, banger and a fitting tribute to those all-nighters that were so regular at the esteemed Gilmore Heights. Thinking about it, Vulnerable is a somewhat ironic title under which to talk about the place because when we were all there, we felt invincible.
