Leeds Hip Hop Scene

The mix started with no direction and no theme. I just started throwing mixes in and out, so after watching the movie Scratch for the 200th time and taking note of the advice Z-TRIP gives regarding marking all your records with a BPM, I thought it a start and got on it.

This did start the ball rollin’, but, I thought, this could just turn out to be any old mixtape, and had to think of something else to give it meaning, and that’s how the ‘CHARITY SHOP TAPES’ came about.

It started with the name ‘Oxfam Tapes’, but that could land a man in trouble if people thought that by purchasing the mix it was gonna help the sanitation problems in the 3rd World so C.S.T. was born.

I went through the whole of my record collection and pulled out all the stuff I’d bought from charity shops and second hand shops, put a BPM on them all and lined them up in a big brown box. I have worked from this big brown box for just over a year and it has lead to me not playing most of the 12’s and LP’s I have continued to buy in the meantime. It has spawned some mixes that probably wouldn’t have surfaced, like, the Andy Williams & Lionrock mix near the end, also, the Stanley Clarke & Lords of the Underground mix where I looped a track full of bass called The Dancer.

I know people are going to look at the track listing and think, there’s no way in this world he got KRS-1 or DE LA SOUL in a charity shop and they would be right, but, I was at work one day and got a call from someone and they told me about a shop that had opened in a market town called Morley in Leeds. So I took the next afternoon I had available and paid this little shop a visit.

I got in the place, which was run by an old musician, named Stuart. Flicked through the obvious stuff filed under Soundtracks and Blues but there were no sign of anything from say the nineties onwards so I took a plunge into the massive dance section he had and struck Gold. On that day (after spending three hours plus), I spent £84, ended up with a stack o’ wax I could hardly carry and walked out with a ’shit, I just robbed that man blind’ look on my face. He had no idea of hip-hop so put it all under dance. I got Jeru ‘ playin’ yaself, Roxanne Shante ‘ Have a Nice Day, Akinyele & Yvette Michelle ‘ Hangover, Kid n Play ‘ Last Night and a boat load more for a quid each and the likes of Nas ‘ If I Ruled, DR. Dre ‘ heads ringin’, and Doug. E. Fresh ‘ The Show/La Di-Da-Di for 2 and 3 whole English pounds, and all on vinyl. I picked up a Sugarhill 3 CD box set with two inlays missing for a couple of quid too. There was a small downside to this fortunate visit though, due to the fact he had no clue of their real value he wrote the prices directly onto the top right corner in biro! So o.k., it was no charity shop, but I had been blessed with the visit to a small shop that just sold bits and bats and some ‘dance’ records. I moved to Morley and ended living round the corner but even my obsessive buying couldn’t prevent it from closing down. See the inlay for the empty shop. SOUNDS and STUFF’ R.I.P.

When I finished the mix I remember feeling a sense of achievement, I also felt that my carbon footprint was looking good, that was until I realised that I have eight plugs running at one time when all the equipment is on.

God Bless and keep counting beats,

esSDee