BIOGRAPHY

It didn't seen right for London. One of the world's capitals of dance music but all you got in the clubs was "funky" house, with parties that didn't disco and music that didn't jack. The music coming through from elsewhere was way wonkier and more electronic and there had to be an audience for weirder sounds - and so Big Daddy and a couple of friends started a club night, Playtime.

Playtime's tagline? "Look normal. They must suspect nothing". It was a combination of what TimeOut correctly called "metrosexuals, scruffy fags, lipstick lesbians and giggling straight women - all dancing round their handbags just as fast as they can" - alongside strange and unusual dance music, and that first experience brought in a hell of lot more dedicated clubbers than the founders had expected.

With DJ mag calling Playtime "one of clubland's finest inventions", TNT "the best mixed club in the capital" and the Guardian saying "terrific ... one of the last truly mixed parties left in London", the party went on for five years, giving the first-ever London slots to now pivotal figures like Claude vonStroke and Abe Duque, and earning its two residents, Big Daddy and Mike Monday, gigs in Russia, France, Asia, Australia, the States and all over the UK.

Alongside Jesse Rose and vonStroke, of course, Monday is now one of the three most pivotal producers in wonky electronica. But even that has a lot to do with Playtime - but in this case Playtime Records, the label started and run by Big Daddy on which Monday released many of his best-known tracks and his first album, Smorgasbord.

That label's combination of committment to a wonky electronic sounds and, like the club, a refusal to take anything but music seriously, led to Playtime Records being called "one of the reasons house music still rules" (IDJ) and "one of the best labels to come out this year" that "sounds like nothing else around" (DJ).

One Week to Live, meanwhile, called Playtime's debut album, the already mentioned Smorgasbord, "a classic" and it was an IDJ album of the month and the year - following a run of 5/5 smash singles including What Day is it?, the top-10-in-the-German-dance-chart Tooting Warrior and releases and remixes from acts from Luke Solomon to Style of Eye to King Roc to Cass and Mangan / Deadset.

But that was only phase one of the music. Having branched out into new genres, Big Daddy is now also a key part of two new UK labels. First is Process Recordings, which focuses on live electronics and released the recent albums from Abe Duque, King Roc, Rebotini and Toob. And then there's Tim Sheridan's dark and strange Veryverywrongindeed. Playtime, meanwhile, is now featuring new artists from Andre Crom to Riva Starr to to Dinamoe to Hannah Holland to Dirtybird Records hero Worthy, as well as more up-and-coming artists like Lost Cowboy and Yankee Zulu...

KEY TRACKS

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