Henry Street Music — From the Record Shop to the Dancefloor

At the time, I lived in Sprockhövel, a small town in Germany. But once a week, I made the trip to Essen. One way took about an hour. The reason was Important Records.

I wasn’t a DJ yet. I didn’t need records for gigs or to fill a record box for the weekend. I was simply completely hooked on the music. And apparently willing to spend a ridiculous amount of money on it. A typical visit to Important Records cost me around 150 Deutsche Mark. Every week. About 600 DM a month.

Looking back, that was a lot of money for someone who wasn’t even DJing yet. But at the time, there was always another record I needed to hear.

Important Records

The new releases were displayed on shelves along the walls. The guy working at the shop was called Thommes. During my first months there, I still knew relatively little about House music, so I relied heavily on recommendations. Thommes would pull records from the shelves and play them to me.

After a while — and probably after I had left enough money in the shop — he knew my taste pretty well. He knew which records were worth putting in front of me. Gradually, I began doing more of the searching myself. I have always had a good memory for things like artist names, labels and catalogue numbers. Once I had found something I liked, I remembered the name and started looking for what else was connected to it.

A label led to another release. An artist name appeared somewhere else. A catalogue number told me roughly where I was in a label’s history. Without really thinking about it, I was learning how to dig. Important Records also had another connection to my musical life. The resident DJs from Rote Liebe bought records there as well.

That meant something happened quite regularly that I still love thinking about today: I would buy a record at Important Records during the day and hear the same record being played at Rote Liebe that night. The distance between discovering a record and experiencing it on a club sound system could sometimes be just a few hours.

Henry Street Without Knowing Henry Street

Strictly speaking, I had already heard Henry Street Music before any of this. I just didn’t know it. The Bucketheads’ The Bomb! was an early Henry Street release and became a commercial success in Germany. It felt as though the track was everywhere. Even local radio stations played it. I thought it was okay. Nothing more.

So my first Henry Street record certainly wasn’t the beginning of some great musical revelation. That happened later at Important Records. When Thommes started playing Henry Street releases to me, the sound caught me immediately. It was different from labels such as Paper Recordings, which I was discovering around the same period. A lot of the Henry Street records I liked were built around filtered Disco samples. They were energetic, uplifting and often had relatively few vocals.

The last part certainly didn’t hurt.

At the time, names such as DJ Sneak, Johnick, Mateo & Matos, Todd Terry, 95 North and Armand Van Helden meant very little to me. I didn’t know they were big names. I didn’t know whose records I was supposed to like. I only knew whether Thommes put something on the turntable and it made me want to buy it.

Der Funk War Da und Da

Armand Van Helden’s The Funk Phenomena was one of those records that seemed to turn up everywhere at parties. There was only one small problem. I had absolutely no idea what he was saying.

For years, instead of hearing:

The Funk Phenomena

my German ears somehow turned it into:
Der Funk war da und da.

Which makes absolutely no sense. But once your brain has decided that this is what somebody is saying, apparently there is no way back. Even today, I have difficulty hearing it any other way. Sorry, Armand.

Who’s Hoo?

Alongside records by DJ Sneak and Johnick, one Henry Street release became a particular favourite of mine:

95 North presents Da Hooligans – Who’s Hoo?

Especially the 95 North Club mix.

And apparently my musical weaknesses have been remarkably consistent over the years.The track begins to build, and then the bassline slowly pushes its way in. On a good system, it doesn’t just sit underneath the track. It pushes.Hard.

There are no vocals getting in the way, and on top of it are these horn sounds that work perfectly with everything around them. While writing this story, I put the record on again.

All these years later, it still gives me goosebumps. That probably says more about why I love the record than any attempt to analyse it ever could. Some records belong to a particular time and stay there. Others somehow survive the distance.

For me, Who’s Hoo? is one of those.

Coming Back as a Tribute

Many years later, Henry Street Music became one of the first labels I chose for The Tribute Mix Show. By then, the circumstances could hardly have been more different.

The weekly journeys to Important Records were long gone. I no longer needed Thommes to put a new Henry Street record in front of me. The names that had once meant nothing to me had become part of my musical history. I made the tribute in 2014, around the time Henry Street Music was celebrating its 20th anniversary, and posted the mix on SoundCloud and Facebook. Then something unexpected happened.

Johnny “D” De Mairo, the man behind Henry Street Music, contacted me personally. He asked whether he could use my mix to help promote the anniversary. We exchanged two or three messages. In the end, nothing actually came of it. And that was fine.

The mix had not been made to get the attention of the label. That has never been the point of The Tribute Mix Show. The music comes first. But I would be lying if I said moments like that don’t mean something.

When you spend years listening to someone’s records, buying them, playing them and eventually putting together a mix simply because you want to pay tribute to what they created, it is nice to know that the person on the other side noticed.

Even if it is only for a moment. Perhaps that is the small circle that closed for me with Henry Street. It began with records hanging on a wall in Essen, with Thommes putting music in front of me whose artists I didn’t know. Sometimes I bought one of those records, travelled home and heard it again that same night at Rote Liebe.

Years later, I was the one putting those records together and sending them back out into the world. Not because somebody told me what I should listen to anymore. But because I had never really stopped digging.