Warm up was a strange business because it wasn't really acceptable to play the biggest tunes going around, those were reserved for the big name DJ. (This was especially true of playing their records. Sash got upset when another DJ played his tunes to help build him up. "What am I suppose to play now?" asked Sash, not unreasonably.) However, most of them wouldn't actually take over unless you had filled the floor with people happily dancing.
DJs are commonly booked for two hour slots but it wasn't unusual for them to vanish early -which I always thought was cheeky when you are getting several grand for the job. That meant I often needed to hang around to fill the awkward 2.30-3am gap if they went. At that point you have a major problem since you are not the DJ everyone got excited about. When you stick on a record and 800 people leave the dancefloor it kinda crushes your ego! So I kept a stock of absolute killer records. Tunes so good that you couldn't not dance to them or feel like they were something special to top off the night. These were the records that kept people dancing when the house lights came on, the sound got turned down, and security started dragging people away.
So, in that spirit, I give you Blue Amazon's No Other Love. It is one of the most perfect dance records I know. The original 12" mix is 12 minutes long and which makes it feel like the last record of the night (although you can use it earlier since it builds so nicely). You can pitch it up or down quite a lot to suit the tempo of whatever came before it. Happy listening:
BTW: Lee Softley is still performing Blue Amazon DJ sets. I really like his work. You can hear lots of it on SoundCloud.
