The Spaghetti Techno Western.

I’ve been asked to write about this story, so Tosh you played a lot of my requests when I treated you like a duke box & not a DJ so this ones for you.

During the mid 90’s I PR’d for The Sub Club, Sometimes Cool Lemon at the arches, bar Miro for Stefan King, Club 69 Paisley to name but a few. For me once I’d finished doin flyers my favourite pre club warm up was to go to the Rock Garden in Queen Street.

I use ‘warm up’ loosely because as you descended to the heat hazed basement of RG’s you could feel the vibration of grinding basslines, round deep 4/4 kick drums & strobed shadows cascaded the stairs. This small basement was wall to wall people starting their night with the sounds of Techno & House from Detroit & Chicago provided by Alan Mackintosh AKA Tosh.

Tosh would duck under this camo ghillie netting over his decks & being so tall sometimes even get entangled in it. He would spend a fortune on the latest white labelled releases whipping up the crowd. It was magic I used to arrange to meet folk there before goin to the club. It would always be full to bursting with people with an atmosphere & buzz that most club owners would have givin their right arm to have with that kind of regularity & word of mouth status. Sometime you’d leave RG’s & go to a club only to have a come down because of the ambient dip.

Now I wouldn’t say Tosh was obsessed with his art as he always played for the crowd. I think that they, I say they, WE were lucky we shared his passion. But on one occasion lets just say Tosh was ‘focussed’ & nothing was gona shift that vision.

The place is heaving when I arrived this one evening & scrambled throught to the bar to get my bottle of Miller & crawled over to wee Smudge who was part of the Carmunock crew. There was a funny atmosphere & it was generating from these two ned arseholes who had sneaked under the bouncers radar 'Ken' who was chattin up a couple of girls. These two diddys where out their faces & slagging everyone. Tosh gives me the nod then waves me over. Now I can’t remember exactly the tracks I’m sure one was a Leftfield track but anywho Tosh explains excitedly he was gona mix two tracks but rather fade out fade in he was gona remix live & he would tell me when he was gona do this so I could listen. Now we’ve all seen the bar fights in westerns yes! Well I return to speak to Smudge who suffers no fools gladly & has now decided to tell the two nuggets to bolt. Needless to say in a very crowded basement it kicks off. It’s bedlam. Tables getting knocked over people running about glasses, bottles everywhere most people run upstairs I make for a space but a chair ment for Smudge! Well, I get over my back. I had those bruises for weeks on ma back. After a minute of two the guys are ejected & only a few folk remain.

Now in the westerns the music usually stops…..not Tosh. I glance over holding my back to see Tosh bobbin his head one eye closed, face screwed up listening intently to make sure he’s cue’d up these two tracks just right & mix perfect he looks up smiles at me points to the decks mouthing “yessss” & takes a chug of his bottle of miller with pride, head noddin. Two perfectly mixed 4/4 beats. The Battle was only in Tosh's way this whole time.....gees ja mind DJ at work for god sakes.

After about 10 mins the Basement filled back up & you wouldn’t have known anything had happened…..kina like Tosh really.

A few months down the line Smudge toured Iraq with the Desert Storm Crew entertaining the troupes with Hard Techno in some of the most dangerous places in the Middle East. Although I always thought Tosh was wasted there with his battlefield DJ training.

When Che Guevara said “Homeland or death” Tosh was in the background cutting it with Castro.

Commerciality is dead this is not!! Keep it underground kids.