YOU
CAN
GO YOUR
OWN
WAY
E
rol Alkan was 27 when he received his first album offer. Kylie Minogue had just performed his ‘Can’t Get Blue Monday
Out Of My Head’ bootleg at the BRITS. He and his club night,
Trash, were getting breathless write-ups in the nationals
(“He’s the man at the forefront of the recent wave of bootlegging, or ‘plunderphonics’,” gushed the Guardian in 2002,
“one of the most exciting musical adventures in a decade”).
Style bible The Face had even crowned him “the new Fatboy
Slim”.
But when a major label came knocking at Alkan’s Tufnell Park bedsit,
offering a £75,000 advance for an album aimed at exploiting the
burgeoning bootleg scene, he kept the door shut. It was a prescient
decision. Bootlegs quickly went from diverting experiment to laughable
cliché. The Face folded. “I wouldn’t be here now if I did that kind of stuff,”
Alkan says. “I was happy in my one-room bedsit. I could get by.”
Alkan’s career can be mapped in a succession of hugely hyped scenes he
fomented, then unshackled himself from before they hit their commercial
peak and artistic nadir. He’s like a combination of canary and Cassandra,
warning when a sound becomes stilted and steering the way, against the
crowd, to something more vital. In the process, he’s achieved that rare
feat of being, if not a contrarian, then at least willing t