The Carleton and the Morecambe tapes

Morecambe sits at the far end of the Lancashire coast, a resort town whose clubs serviced both locals and a holiday crowd that arrived every summer. The Carleton — Carleton Sounds to its regulars — was not a superclub. It was a small, loyal venue with a resident DJ, Andy 'Ducky' D, who kept a tape running through the Evolution nights of late 1989 and 1990.

The surviving recording is a single long set, only partially transcribed — Gershan Jackson's 'Y'all Be Easy' is the one track identified on tape — mixing house, techno and hip-house in the way small-town residents did at the turn of the decade, when the records arrived in ones and twos and every one had to count.

It matters because it is a record of the scene's edges. The big rooms — Manhattan Heights, Shelley's, Shaboo — are documented because they were famous. Morecambe is documented because someone kept the tape. Twenty years later, that tape is the difference between a footnote and a memory.