Nigel Dawson: Renaissance, The Cross and the Darker Resident Sound

Six hours, twenty pounds

He first had a go at DJing around 1981 and started properly in 1985. The first paid gig, at Sutton Scarsdale Country Club, was six hours for £20.

It's worth sitting with those numbers. Six hours means no set-shaped hour and a quarter with a tidy arc; it means learning what to do at 9pm, at midnight and at 2am to a room that is never the same twice. That's an education you can't get from a festival slot.

How the Renaissance residency actually happened

He was warming up at Renaissance's sister club when the call came: the scheduled warm-up DJ hadn't turned up. He went, and it turned into a long-running residency.

Which is a very ordinary way for a significant career to start, and a useful antidote to the way this era usually gets told — as though everyone involved was executing a plan. Mostly they were available, competent and standing nearby.

Ten years at The Cross

He recalls roughly ten years at The Cross in London, which is a decade of playing the same building to a crowd who will notice if you repeat yourself.

That's where the discipline of opening a room gets learned properly. You have to build without spending your best material, keep the tempo honest, and leave the headliner somewhere to go. Do it badly and the night never recovers; do it well and nobody mentions you at all.

Dominion, and disc two

Dawson produced as Dominion, and “Lost Without You” turns up on his own disc of Renaissance Presents… Volume One — a DJ playing his own record without making a fuss of it.

That disc is the reason he's here. Released on 14 June 1998, CD2 opens with two versions of Miro's “Paradise” back to back, then works through Dominion, Human Movement and Dos Deviants into a properly trance-facing final stretch with Corfu, Agnelli & Nelson and Propulsion.

It's the darker half of the release by a distance, and it complicates the tidy story that Renaissance was all warmth and melody until the trance boom arrived. Some of it has dated — the late-90s trance more than the deeper material — and reviews at the time were mixed rather than reverent. It's still the most honest surviving picture of where a resident was taking that room in 1998.