Broadcast 001: Ruf Dug
Our guest mix and interview series
Our new Broadcast series is an opportunity for artists to write a love letter to the sounds that made them.
Through a guest mix and interview, we want to showcase their sonic worlds by deep diving into their taste.
There are few people in UK dance music with a CV as full-spectrum as Ruf Dug’s. NTS stalwart, label boss, rave system builder, listening bar instigator, heritage selector. Call him what you want; at the heart of it all is still a lad from Stretford with a record bag and a healthy wedge of grounded ease.
Calling me from his home in Manchester, Ruf Dug’s pleased with the weather. “When the sun shines, the whole city just takes a beat”. It’s a warmth that bleeds into everything he does: from his Balearic-schooled NTS sets, to his bar Rainy Heart which he built around reference-grade monitor speakers and a quiet philosophy of world-class culture on your doorstep.
As we talk about everything from Japanese listening bars to post-colonial pop psychology in Australia, Ruf Dug glides effortlessly between high-brow and pub chat. Whether he’s talking about the exploitative pressures of the music industry or playing ECM jazz to the mums from school and blowing their minds, his insights are funny, unfiltered and full of perspective.
This mix is exactly what you’d want from a Ruf Dug session: wriggly gear stitched with taste. It’s sonic hospitality at its finest.
Below, we run through the full conversation, which covers heritage, localism, discovering the next Happy Mondays, dream B2Bs and mental health in music.
Firstly, how are you? Where are you? Just to set the scene, I’m keen to hear about your surroundings & how they’re making you feel at the moment.
“I’m calling you from sunny Stretford. What’s magical about Manchester in the sun us all the Victorian red brick architecture and the blue sky. I sometimes wonder if that’s why the football teams here are red and blue. When the sun shines, the whole city just takes a beat.”
Congrats on the Rainy Heart pop up – ‘A Bar That Listens’. Could you touch on how this came into being, and what the vision/ethos is behind it? How has it been so far?
“In lockdown, I bought a pair of reference-grade monitor speakers that were designed to go in the largest studios of the BBC in the 70s. They’re enormous, really loud and beautiful. I started doing these little warehouse parties with Chemical Brothers DJ James Holroyd, and we began to expand the system to augment it with low-end reinforcement.
What I really wanted to do with the system was open up a listening bar. What I realised over lockdown was that it’s pretty mint staying at home, and that there’s a lot of things I really love about DJing, and actually a lot of things I don’t like.
I like being in different places, but I don’t like the time or process it takes to get there; I don’t like being away from my family; I’m 50 years old so I don’t like staying up late anymore. I’m a bit too old to be hanging around nightclubs anymore. I don’t want to be the tragically hip uncle dying his hair and wearing inappropriate clothing.
I had a conversation with a friend in my son’s school playground, who connected me with the developers of the mall over the road that was being redeveloped, and we managed to get an empty unit there. The ideology behind it is ‘doing world-class things on your door step’.
There’s no such thing as the best in the world anymore – polls are bullshit, sports too. Being number one is more pointless now than it’s ever been. But once you take that pressure away, you realise you can be world-class but you don’t have to prove it to the world – theres no reason to!
So, we opened a listening bar with world-class sound and world-class DJs. People come in and they just get it. Luke Unabomber described it as ‘like Amsterdam in 1984!’ It was a hit with the locals; there’s a very interesting working class community here with strong civic pride. That psycho-geographic mentality is still palpable, meaning you can do things here to hook into that, and they will be received well.
The developers shared our vision, which led to two raves in a disused Boots pharmacy that got written up by Dua Lipa’s website. It’s led to the latest thing, which is a prolonged occupancy in the centre of town surrounded by lots of lovely red-brick buildings in a former caretakers’ house.
The centre has become a bit of a cultural wasteland. It’s so expensive now, so the only kind of enterprises that are opening on the whole are venture capitalist backed things that are either money making facsimiles of something real, or people betting their lives on something and having to be really careful about their offering. We aren’t doing either of those, so we can do it.”
I think some listening bars/music venues can get it wrong sometimes, and end up feeling a bit snooty or navel gazey. Does a bar rely on the people of the place it’s in?
“Any cultural establishment has a lot of coding that goes around it that isn’t pertinent to culture, but is more to do with status, identity and insecurity. We did the world’s smallest listening bar; we took over an empty newsagents kiosk for a weekend; we blacked it out with acoustic cloths; we had six seats and a turntable. It sold out completely.
I sat down some mums from the school, neither of them music nerds, played them some really obscure ECM jazz, and they were both like ‘fucking hell, this is amazing’. There’s nothing snooty about minimal jazz.”
It looks like we were in Tokyo at the same time earlier this year. I’ve been describing it to the non-initiated as ‘like plugging your soul into a socket and loving the zap it gives you’. Would you agree with that?
“If ADHD was a city! Too much information, sensory overload everywhere, but also strangely introspective and mad about trains. It’s ADHD. No eating in public. Ichiran ramen is an ADHD dream. One of the biggest cities in the world by pretty much every metric, and perfect for introverts. How does that work? It’s amazing.
When I was there, I played at Shelter, which many people say is the greatest listening bar, which was a religious experience. The thing I learned after being in the listening bars in Tokyo is that there’s no such thing as one in the UK – nothing comes close. The listening bar in Tokyo is a cultural concept that’s over 70 years old. I found this realisation quite liberating: I’ve always harboured this dream of having a listening bar of my own, but I realised to create one, the only way is to be Japanese and live in Japan.
We went to great pains to describe Rainy Heart as ‘a bar that listens’, rather than a listening bar. It’s about going to a bar to listen, not to drink or dance or pick someone up. There’s a lot of interesting territory to be explored in creating a space that invites people to be in that state.”
You’ve got some Australian flavour on your CV – I was wondering if we could talk about Das Druid [a band that Ruf Dug discovered]. They sound like they’ve been plucked right out of the Stone Roses/Happy Mondays melting pot. Can you touch on how you found them, and maybe what this discovery says about Australia and its music scene?
“My booking agent Will sent me a mid-tempo, super Balearic mix from Korea, and there was this fucking brilliant track on it by Das Druid. It sounded like a tribute to ‘Step On’. The first thing I do when I discover someone new is see if anyone’s played them on NTS, but nobody had played Das Druid. Nobody was really playing Baggy music.
I felt like the Manchester sound might pop again, so we got in touch with the band and asked them if they had more material, which they did. Now, we’re a year and half down the line, I’ve produced an EP with them and it’s been signed to Rhythm Section. There’s something quite beautiful that it’s three lads from Brisbane and they’d never been anywhere near Manchester.
I’ve played it to so many people in Manchester who were at the Hacienda and who knew the Happy Mondays, and they’re all like ‘fuck me this is good’. There’s something beautiful in the circularity of the story: they’re an Aussie band being remixed by a Mancunian because they’ve got a Mancunian sound, and I used to live in Australia, now mixing an Australian band that sounds like it’s from Manchester. It feels really lovely.
It's difficult for Australians to get excited about Australian culture unless its been made famous somewhere else in the world first. It’s a post-colonial mindset, dealing with the insecurities forced on them by the empire. This is why Kylie is the queen of Australia, because she made it big overseas and came back.”
At Rhythm Section’s Future Proof workshop last year, you touched on mental health in the music industry – citing how ‘on one hand you’ve got these beautiful cosmic unions, and on the other, a brutal exploitative machine’. How do you make the two live in harmony? Do you struggle with it ever?
“I struggle with it all the time. I have a massive issue with the bit where art and commerce coincide. I find it really complicated to deal with. It causes me great problems. I’m fortunate that I have an incredibly talented wife that earns a million times more than I do. Maybe because I have the luxury to have a bit more creative freedom, it feels like a great privilege that I want to honour. I always feel like I want to come down on the side of art and authenticity. I care less about many of the factors that many of the people in the music business do care about.
Mental health is an issue for every single person, just as health is an issue. I’m much more conscious and careful with my mental health than I have been. I do yoga, meditation, my diet is good, my sleep pattern’s good and my personal relationships are strong. But it doesn’t take much to destabilise things.
There’s a lot about dance music culture that’s unhealthy. The celebration of debauchery and the way status is tied up with that, it’s not great for mental health. That’s something that bears deeper exploration. It’s difficult though, because it’s nice to get loose!
To be truly creative is to put yourself in a state of immense vulnerability. Not to mention the fact that so much great art is borne of such awful trauma.”
Now for some quick-fire questions. What's one track you wish you'd made?
“A Guy Called Gerald - ‘Voodoo Ray’”
Dream back-to-back (dead or alive)?
“Larry Levan”
Is there a scene, a crew or an era that's influenced you more than people might assume?
“Amiga Demo Music of the early 90s”
What's a label that never misses?
“Underground Resistance”
What's the most Mancunian record you own?
“Manchester City FC – Boys in Blue/Funky City”
What are your tips for a weekend in Manchester these days?
“Peste on Oldham Road – White Hotel’s bar. It’s weird, cool and Manc in its own way. If Boomkat was a bar.
Best record shop outside the UK?
Goulds in Sydney – no longer there sadly”
You're curating a festival stage. Who's on the bill?
“Me from start to finish. Everyone else can fuck off.”
If this mix was the soundtrack to a video game, what's the plot?
“Beachside cyber punk mystery at sunset”
Which one of the tracks in this mix would win in a street fight?
“Jim Ferraro – Remote Control”