Colleen Murphy – aka DJ Cosmo or Cosmodelica – was a shoo-in for this Substack. She perfectly embodies our theme of individualists who exist in close interaction with collective subcultures, who may not adhere to any given group identity but are nonetheless materially involved in the evolutions of particular, important movements. She’s our first American subject, but plugs into the cultural networks we’ve already covered as an adopted Brit for almost quarter of a century. And she’s all about soundsystem culture, albeit not in the directly Caribbean-influenced UK sense: rather, via her work with the late David Mancuso1 and then preserving the legacy of his Loft parties, she transmits a particularly New York worship of ultra high fidelity party rigs as a vehicle for blissful and spiritually nourishing music.
This manifests in the Lucky Cloud parties that she co-founded to bring Mancuso and The Loft to London in 2003, in the Love Dancin’ soundsystem tent with sprung dancefloor that she and husband Adam “Daddy Ad” Dewhurst2 created for We Out Here festival – and in the Classic Album Sundays events, which centre around getting an audience to listen to an album together on a kick-ass soundsystem, usually accompanied by talks by the artists and/or experts. Full disclosure: I hosted a couple of these – on Spiritualized3 and Fleetwood Mac4 – when they went online in Covid lockdown. She also has an online radio show, Balearic Breakfast, which has now spawned two compilations, and which expertly joins the dots from Mancuso’s Loft aesthetic through the decadently psychedelic ethos of Ibiza and surrounds in the 80s to the present day.
There’s more, lots more, besides – but a lot is covered in the interview, and more is there for you to discover if you dig. This was an interesting one to transcribe, because I had more “like”s, “kind of”s and “you know”s – and words repeated while she looked for the next one – to edit out than in any other of these interviews (which is pretty much the only trimming I do of these transcripts). It was bizarre, because I hadn’t registered them at all as we were talking: Cosmo is fluent as anything, and in the moment this grammatical furniture disappears into the background as the torrent of ideas comes out - and indeed as you’ll see, this was the most conversational of these conversations yet. So here it is: as we spoke on Google Chat, her surrounded by vast shelves of vinyl as she almost always seems to be, we kept circling around certain themes about work, satisfaction, art-and-artist – but again and again, it came back more than anything else to the moment of listening and delight in sound. So here you are…
OK, so what's taking up your time at the moment?
Everything! You know we are relaunching the loft in London, there's remixes, gigs, touring classic album Sundays, Balearic Breakfast radio. It's the ever shifting juggling act really....
Do you thrive off a big workload? Do you do you do you feel like you do best when you are juggling?
I... well, I identify with northerners. I really do. Because I think being from New England, there's a really intense work ethic. And I've always had an incredibly strong work ethic: I was working through a very young age, working long hours. Even at the age of 16, when I was in high school full time, I still worked in a record shop and I had a radio show three mornings a week at 6.30 in the morning! I think I embrace life, and I don't take it for granted. And and I also have a pretty intense creative fire in me, like I have to create things, I've always wanted to create things. Even when I was young, I was always making things or writing things or playing piano or whatever. So I've always had that kind of creative kind of spirit. But I think it's that combined with the work ethic. I was watching the show on David Hockney yesterday, you know, being a Yorkshireman, and I... not that I have the kind of body of work that he has, by any means – but I identify in that that I get up and I work. Me getting up and maybe reading a book or doing something for myself is very rare, although I am trying to do more stuff – you know, like more more relaxation things, more things for myself that aren't necessarily related to music. Because pretty much everything I do is is related to music, it's my entire life, which is great, but I do have other interests and I try to carve out some time, so hopefully the older I get, the more I get to pursue those interests as well.
Interesting – that got me to thinking that in underground music, there are people who are super focused on work and building, and those who are in it for the pleasure principle, who love leisure, and there's a kind of balance in how each contributes to the whole...
Well that's not the reason I got into DJing you know – just for the fun of it! I can't imagine any women DJ my age got into DJing that much for those types of hedonistic pursuits, just because they weren't necessarily always available to us, you know? Or, or if you did indulge, then you were kind of compromising yourself in some way. Yeah, it was never really about that pursuit. Also in America, we didn't have the acid house movement. We had disco in the 1970s, which of course, when it went overground was very hedonistic, we had certain subcultures, but my generation didn't have the acid house movement, which was, I feel, based more around hedonism first. America was never as much about bragging about how many drugs you take, I think that's been a very big difference. If you look at the American DJs from New York, there's very few like that, that I can I can think of – and those who were, they didn't really last.
So I think for the people who are really into it for creating and the rewards that brings, it wasn't necessarily about that, not that it's completely divorced from it at all, but it wasn't the be-all-and-end-all, and it certainly wasn't for me. I know there's a lot of guys where he's just like, “Yeah, I just wanted to get sex, get laid, take drugs,” But you know, I don't think I think I went to one after party the whole time of DJing in New York, unless it was like my boyfriend's house, like my inner circle in New York. Or one, maybe – I think I only went to one and that was because I knew the people. But generally, I just wouldn't as a woman alone, I wouldn't do that. I wouldn't put myself in that position. You get wasted, then someone takes advantage of you – I just always kind of had I always had like a little voice, an off switch. I've been in a lot of dangerous situations, like travelling alone and things like that, but I wouldn't willingly put myself into that into a situation like that, as well.
This is such an important thing to remember that those hazards directly form our culture by limiting opportunities. But on the on that topic of working and building it really struck me how much actually you echoed – actually an acid house person – the late Andrew Weatherall: when I've interviewed him, “I like making things” was a common refrain5, and he took that ethic back to having worked on a building site, on understanding that work means work.
Ha, right now I'm making a peach cobbler, even while we're talking! When my daughter was little, I had the biggest arts and crafts cabinet, we'd keep everything to make arts and crafts, and I've always enjoyed just the act of creating, painting and all that. If all of what I do was for just commercial pursuit, I would have been making money, but with different things and playing very different music, that's for sure. I'd be involved in very different scenes. But it's the act of doing the thing that makes me what I am, it's just my raison d'etre. One of the huge focal points of my life is creating. I was thinking about this last night, watching this David Hockney, who's just a complete inspiration. And he's in his 80s, and he still works every day. And I thought, wow that could be me – if I if I'm lucky to live that long. What it would be I don't know, would it be commercial? I don't know. I mean, would it be something that somebody would be able to sell? I don't know, but I will. I'm always making things and doing things like that and I hope I always will. I think my problem has been, there's too many things I want to do. It's hard for people to find their place when they're like that.
With Andrew Weatherall it's kind of similar in a sense of – well, I came from indie rock, I came from psychedelic rock I didn't come from the jazz / soul background. I went to hardcore punk shows and was part of a lot of different scenes simultaneously... and actually, that's another reason why I like his mixes when they come up on Mixcloud, like oh fantastic you have The Fall or The Cramps or... He was kind of hard to figure out and I think it's very similar for me in terms of you know, some people say, oh, you know, she's a disco goddess. That's not necessarily true. You know, disco is one thing but I started in very different scenes and Balearic Breakfast is different and Classic Album Sundays is different. And some of my remixes have nothing to do with disco or house or anything at all. And I did an album with Gary Lucas from the Magic Band6, and Captain Beefheart was not disco, you know? So in some ways, it's been maybe a detriment to my career, because I'm not easily pinpointable. And it's not like a thing where you know exactly what you're getting. But at the same time, I have to please myself first, and in terms of creative fulfilment I just have too many interests to narrow down to one and there's always more – I always found it strange that people don't have hobbies, there's a list of things that if I had time, I would do too, but I don't know what I'll get the time to do!
Mentioning Weatherall and Hockney in the same breath really makes me think how kind of solid graft approach to life creates really surprising things by happenstance – like, I don't think either of them ever expressly set out to revolutionise anything but both of them made radical discoveries or inventions, by virtue of their constant working.
Exactly. That's what happens like when I started Classic Album Sundays. I had never heard of the little audiophile jazz pieces in Japan and I had lived there in 1989 as a radio DJ, you know! I never heard of anything similar – I just had an idea, like “Why hasn't anyone done this? Okay, I'll do it.” You know? That got this whole ball rolling of clubs and listening bars and all these kinds of things, but it was literally just a eureka moment. Like, I need to share this, you know, like, it must be done. I lost money. It wasn't even a commercial venture. I was like, my husband and I were loading up the Klipschorns7 on, the Quad Monoblocks8, and had a babysitter. And I think four people bought tickets for five pounds the first time – I lost money – but it was just more like: this has to happen. It has to happen. It wasn't like a long vision term plan, you know. These ideas are seeded... not as an object for commercial gain or starting a movement, it's because you just completely believe in it, that it has to happen. And that's it, you know?
So I'm guessing from that then that as a kid, or teenager, getting into music and being into creative pursuits, you didn't have a big vision of where it would lead you. Or did you?
I didn't. I never had an ultimate goal. And I still don't. Which is just crazy. My life has been like an evolution that just has kind of one things evolved into another. And I would look for immediate goals sometimes. You know, there might be like a short term goal. Like for instance: I want to get a job at a record shop, but I'm in high school – like that would be the goal. But nothing beyond that. I had a radio show on the, like, 10 Watt, high school radio station. So when it came time for university – I did well, scholastically, so I was able to get some help to go to university, none of my family had gone right after high school – when it came time for that, I went to the place of the best radio station! Which was NYU – with WNYU. And again, it was like It's like the more I carried on the more I drove myself to do these things like show up the first week at the radio station, I say “I'm here to do whatever,” you know, immediately became the Public Service Announcement director. Actually that was one time that in my head, I said to myself, “I want to be programme director one day,” – and I did I eventually became the first female programme director. But that was still like a short term goal, like, “I want to graduate from university” or whatever. It wasn't a life plan, put it that way.
But the thing is, is the harder you work, and the more you put yourself out there, the quote-unquote luckier you become. And it's always upset me when people say, “Oh, you're so lucky that you can do that.” And yeah, there's some advantage of being a white middle class woman that if I was grew up literally on the streets of India, truly poor, of course, they're not going to have the life that I have – or it's very rare. So there is some luck involved with all of us, you know. But in terms of creating these opportunities, you know, when I've lectured at UCL before about, you know, musical entrepreneurship I have always said whatever job you have, make yourself indispensable. Don't just do what you're told, do more. And then something else is offered, I think I have applied for like two jobs in my life. And they were mainly waiting tables, because I was also doing that in university. But all the music jobs I've had, I'm trying to think through all of them. I have been asked to do all of them. Even the record shop was a guy I met him at a gig and I'd seen so many gigs that week he said “You should come by the record shop, because I think you know a lot about music and we need some Christmas help!” This was when I was 16. So you know, there was always an intro, there was always someone bringing me in or the boss was asking me to audition or whatever it was never... I mean, the only time I looked through the Village Voice in New York for jobs was to wait tables. So that was that. But yeah, that's that's how that's how it goes. I say that to everybody. Just make yourself indispensable and you'll be surprised. You get ready to leave one job and someone's standing there waiting to offer you something else because your reputation precedes you,
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