Danny Rampling: Shoom, Ibiza and Fifteen Years on the Radio

Before Shoom

Rampling was already playing London bars and clubs before any of the famous part happened. That matters, because the standard telling makes him sound like a punter who came back from holiday with an idea.

He came back from holiday with an idea, yes. He also already knew how to work a room.

Ibiza, 1987

In 1987 Rampling travelled to Ibiza with Paul Oakenfold, Nicky Holloway and Johnny Walker. The pivotal experience was hearing DJ Alfredo at Amnesia.

What Alfredo was doing was not a genre. It was an approach: house, Balearic pop, indie records, European electronics, anything that worked, played to a crowd that wasn’t sorting music into categories.

That refusal to specialise is the actual import from Ibiza, and it’s the bit that got diluted fastest once the London scene professionalised.

Shoom

Rampling founded Shoom with his then-wife Jenni in Southwark in autumn 1987.

It was small, sweaty, heavily fogged and famously difficult to get into, and it did more than almost anything else to establish the London Balearic and acid-house moment.

It’s important to be honest about the limits of that claim. Nobody invented acid house single-handedly, in Chicago or in London. Shoom didn’t create a scene from nothing; it gave a particular crowd a room and a soundtrack at exactly the right time, and the rest followed quickly.

The club’s reputation has since grown into something mythic. The useful thing to remember is that it was, at the time, a weekly night in a fitness centre.

Radio

Rampling hosted a regular show on Kiss FM before joining BBC Radio 1, and from 1994 to 2002 he presented Love Groove Dance Party.

Eight years on Radio 1 is a long stretch, and it put him in the position of explaining club music weekly to an audience much larger than any dancefloor. His Essential Mixes come from that world — broadcast sets, made for people listening at home as much as for anybody in a club.

That’s a different discipline from a four-hour room, and it’s worth listening with that in mind.

Stopping and starting again

Rampling retired from DJing in 2005, then returned in 2007.

Retirements in this industry rarely stick, but the gap is telling. He’d been doing it since before the thing had a name, and by the mid-2000s the scene he helped establish had become an industry with very little resemblance to a foggy room in Southwark.

He came back anyway.