Colleen ‘Cosmo’ Murphy talks to us about her early musical life, clubbing in New York in the 90’s and the Loft before she heads our way for Romjulsfestivalen.
Colleen ‘Cosmo’ Murphy is one of the last connections to New York’s clubbing heyday. Alongside the likes of Tony Humphries and Louie Vega, she’s part of a vital link connecting the origins of club culture and dance music to the modern dance floor.
She might not have been there right at the beginning of it all, but by the mid nineties, she had played an integral role in connecting the dots between club music’s roots in the late 70’s and its eventual legacy. Through her work at the Loft alongside David Mancuso, she never lost sight of those original club music ideologies set forth by her mentor, and today continues to be a beacon for the culture.
She had been a “music obsessive” since a teen and had her own radio station by the time she turned 14. Broadcasting out of her local school in a suburb of Boston, she shared her music obsessions with her local community before moving on to New York and NYU radio where she continued to disseminate her musical infatuations to ever larger audiences.
Her career would go from broadcasting to DJing to remixing and include working for the legendary record shop and imprint Dance Tracks owned by Joe Claussell. She would mark Francois Kevorkian and Adam Goldst0ne amongst her friends and peers, and play in what would become some of New York’s most legendary clubs and parties.
Always with an open mind, there was nothing in terms of music that didn’t pique her interests, and even before she could define it, dance music played a role in her life. New York would introduce her to this underground subculture, with a friend opening the door to that world for the impressionable DJ and music fan.
Where at first it was a mere curiosity, it eventually bloomed into a life-long dedication when Murphy found the Loft in the early nineties and struck up an enduring friendship with David Mancuso. DJing at the Loft, she became familiar with Mancuso’s own obsessions with sound, influencing and expanding on her own musical infatuations.
Eclectic would be an understatement when describing Murphy’s musical reach as a DJ, broadcaster, musical curator and remix artist today. Besides helping David Mancuso catalogue the sounds of the The Loft compilation series they co-produced together, her own Balearic Breakfast compilations marked its third release in June and her Classic Album Sundays has been syndicated as far as Norway.
Everything Colleen ‘Cosmo’ Murphy touches in her work has an almost compulsive perfectionist nature to it. Channelling all that into Jaeger’s DJ booth next week will be one of the highlights of our Romjulsfestivalen this year. So we took the opportunity to call her up to find out more about her most seminal experiences.
In our conversation, we linger largely on New York; her earliest experiences with music; and her time with Mancuso, before our time eventually ran out, but through her first-hand experiences during one the most impactful times of club culture, we find an enlighteningly unique perspective.
Where does your musical obsession stem from, did your parents influence it?
My parents were not obsessed with music and usually only played it in the car. They only had a few records and 8-tracks and it was very normal.
I got my first transistor when I was 7 years old. I remember plugging it in and turning it on and “Fly Robin Fly” by Silver Convention came over the airwave.
My aunts and uncles were quite young and I was closer in age to them than my dad. They were cool teenagers and started to influence me with the power of music. My aunt gave me my first record, which was Elton John’s ‘Greatest Hits’ which at the time had a cool cache for an 8 year old.
I was innately obsessed with music and Boston radio was the biggest influence. There was a wide range of music and it was so much more diverse than most of the other cities in the USA at the time. The radio was the only place you could access new music; a portal for discovery.
Was there a particular radio station you would always tune into?
There were many… There was WCOZ that had the Doctor Demento Show on Sunday night, which was a syndicated show that played novelty tunes.
There was WAAF, which was hard rock. There was Kiss 108, which was a Black radio station with dance music and Funk. WBCN was the station that I listened to most, which started the year I was born and it was very edgy. As a teenager I would listen to a show called Nocturnal Emissions and that is where I first heard artists like Brian Eno and New Order.
Then there were many college radio stations on the FM dial from 88 – 92 and I started checking those out as I got older.
You mentioned Kiss FM there. Was Tony Humphries already on the radio by that point?
No, because Tony Humphries was in New York and I’m talking about KISS 108 in Boston. I would hear things that I later discovered were on Prelude records – songs from D-Train and Unlimited Touch. If I had lived in a different city, I may not have heard those songs.
So was there a bit of a scene for that kind of music in Boston?
Yes, there was. There was actually a party called The Loft. There was a guy called Bruno who was a little older than me, and had this shop called Biscuit Head records. It was a small dance scene. Boston is mainly a rock town, but don’t forget people like John Luongo, Arthur Baker and Armand van Helden are from Boston.
John Luongo stayed in Boston, but the rest, like me, would go to New York, because there wasn’t as much going on in dance music as Boston is more of a rock town.
I have this image of America in the eighties with kids in schools being very cliquey. I imagine you had groups with skate kids, hip hop kids, rock kids etc. Where does a person with your eclectic tastes fit into all of that?
My town was a very conservative New England town and I didn’t have access to MTV and of course there was no internet. You discovered new music through the radio and your friends. Unless you were looking for something new, it was a steady diet of classic rock and top 40’s.
When I was in High School in the early eighties, the whole preppy thing was in and it drove me crazy, but I basically got along with everyone.
There were two older guys from drama club that turned me onto different music like B-52s, Lene Lovich, The Sex Pistols, and then I became that person myself, turning people onto music through my radio shows and working in record shops. I had a lot of gig buddies and then they would go wherever I wanted to go which was nice.
You had your own radio station during high school. Did the kids in the neighborhood tune in for that?
Yes, that was the other big influence in my life – our ten watt high school radio station WHHB. Some people listened to my shows, and it went to the border of the next town and I was able to discover and share music that belonged to subcultures rather than the mainstream. If I hadn’t done that, my life would have been very different.
Why did you end up moving to New York?
I did well in school and got into New York University. It was a big deal as I was the first person in my family to go to university (most of my family are trades people). Also, it was a way to get out of where I was as for me Boston had become too small.
This was the pinnacle of college radio and WNYU was one of the biggest college radio stations in the country. That is the real reason why I decided to go.
When you arrive in New York, it would’ve been the height of club culture there. For those of us who weren’t able to experience it firsthand, its legacy has been built up into this legend. What was clubbing really like at the time you arrived in New York from a first hand perspective?
In the eighties I wasn’t really clubbing, but I was going to live gigs. Some friends brought me to a few clubs but I had never been completely transformed by the experience. I loved dancing, but I wasn’t as intent on collecting those records. In the 80’s I was more into the psychedelic sounds from the sixties – that was my passion. I was delved into stuff like garage rock, psychedelic rock, prog and krautrock. That was where my head was at.
A friend of mine, Adam Goldstone, was a club kid and he would bring me to different spots around New York. He’s the one that brought me to the Loft in ’92 and that was a transformative experience.
However it wasn’t a club, it was a party and it made me realise “there’s a whole world of music that I don’t even know and apparently I love it.” I immediately grasped the ideals behind the party and that got me into club culture.
Was that the 2nd iteration of the Loft?
That was the 3rd. It was at 647 Broadway until around 1974-5, and then 99 Prince street, and then David bought the place on East 3rd in the mid 80’s.He took a hiatus, but reopened in 1992 and I was there on the first night.
And you hadn’t known about the Loft before then, in its earlier guises?
Most people in my early 20s like myself didn’t know about it. Unless you were a die-hard underground dance music fan, there was no way to know. There weren’t any books and The Loft was not the word on the street. Plus David’s parties had lost a very big part of their attendees after he made the move to Alphabet City.
The Loft was hugely popular until 1984, until he had to leave 99 Prince street. Then he moved to Alphabet City, which was where I lived. It was a really rough neighbourhood, with crack and heroin dealers and doers on every block.
For somebody like me it was fine; I looked like a raggamuffin, I was young, and I had no money. But the people that had gone to his parties at 99 Prince street had grown up, perhaps they had moved to the suburbs and had kids. They didn’t find Alphabet City too welcoming in the 1990s which is understandable.
Did you know anything about David and his legacy then?
I was aware of his history and what he had done was important, but it wasn’t talked about that much, and never by David as he was not the kind of person to revel in his accomplishments. When I started going, the parties were not that well attended and it was apparent this guy was struggling. Purely because I loved what he was doing, I got involved to help and David and I became friends.
Some people had told me he was a legend, but the story was still evolving. The Paradise Garage had closed down in 1987 and Larry Levan passed away soon after I began going to the Loft. There was not a detailed written history of The Loft – it was told via word of mouth.
You had been DJing on the radio, but had you been DJing in clubs / parties before you had met David and started at the Loft?
Through the radio in the eighties, we hosted WNYU nights in different places and I used to play at CBGB’s Record Canteen. In the 90s when I was hosting radio shows Soul School and Club 89, people asked me to DJ and one of the first places I played was an African street festival in Brooklyn.
At that time, the lounge scene developed in Manhattan’s Lower East Side and the East Village. There was a crew of DJs like myself and most of us were friends and we would play these small bars and lounges. We even lugged sound systems and threw parties on the roofs of the tenement buildings where we lived.
What kind of music were you playing then?
I was playing a mix of dance music – house, disco, and dancehall. I would carry my milk crate of records many blocks over to 11th street, between avenues B and C, where I had a weekly residency. The sound system and turntables weren’t very good but it didn’t matter as my friends would show up and hang out while I was squeezed in a cupboard off to the side. But I was able to develop my sound as my weekly residencies were 6 hour sets.
You would carry around 6 hours worth of records in milk crates. That is incredible.
I didn’t have a record trolley bag until the 2000’s. Yes, we used milk crates and sometimes I couldn’t afford a taxi, so I would have to carry it across town. I was strong!
My gigs would go from 10 pm to 4am and I would play a wide spectrum of music. I learnt how to read a crowd. Sometimes I would play records at a trendy Soho lounge where there were Europeans who were clued up to House music. The majority of Americans didn’t know house music and this included New Yorkers. The music du jour at that time was R&B and Hip Hop.
Even at that time in the mid nineties, it was still an underground thing in New York?
Yes and some listeners told me they discovered House music through my radio show, just by scrolling along the FM dial. When I was DJ-ing, some would ask “what kind of music is this?” even though much of the music had been created in New York.
When I moved to the UK I was surprised how ubiquitous house music and dance music was – it was part of mainstream culture thanks to the Acid House movement. I was always surprised that Europeans had a better understanding of American underground dance music than most Americans.
There were very few house music shows on the radio at that time. Tony Humphries had Saturday nights; John Robinson did a lunch time mix of popular disco; and Red Alert had a great hip hop show. DJ Disciple, Jeannie Hopper and myself had a show at the lower end of the FM dial, and we were about to play the more underground records.
Were you getting and playing things from Detroit and Chicago at that time too?
I was more into Detroit than Chicago. I loved Larry Heard and stuff like that, but a lot of the stuff coming from Chicago was too bumpy and loopy for me. Coming from the east coast, it was more about arrangements. You had Philadelphia and New York, where the songs had melodies and arrangements and musicianship. I preferred Detroit, because I thought it had a lot of that but it was future facing; more souring melodies and drums. Carl Craig was one of my favourites but I also love Underground Resistance.
You would delve that deep into Techno that early on?
Yes, I loved deep Detroit techno and still do. Sometimes I also played the more ‘progressive’ sounds of producers like Deep Dish, and Danny Tenaglia, who was one of my customers when I worked at Dance Tracks. I also loved the European sounds of Basic Channel and Laurent Garnier’s F-Communications label.
I played a spectrum of dance music, and could also churn out a pure New Jersey gospel set. I was one of the few white people to play at Blackbox in Newark, New Jersey. It was a pure gospel vocal house and the club didn’t serve alcohol and the crowd were Church-goers. On the flip side, I also played more tracky deep house in the small rooms at raves around the USA.
When you’re playing at a rave it’s just you and your records, but at the Loft there was a very strict set of parameters we would later learn. Was there a music philosophy there that David Mancuso would insist on when you played?
Yes, there was, but David did not go through it with me in great detail. So, I was quite surprised when he said; “hey do you want to play some records with me” when I was only 25. It was more concerned about the equipment rather than the music.
David was financially suffering at the time. He had an amazing sound system including two Koetsu moving coil cartridges, but he did not have a back up. At that time these cartridges went for around $3000 and they are fragile. They sound incredible, but you have to know how to handle them properly and for some reason David trusted me. He was very trusting because if I had damaged one of those cartridges, he would not have been able to replace it, as he didn’t have the funds. He was living hand to mouth at the time.
As our relationship and friendship developed I learnt more and more about the sound at David’s insistence. A few years before he passed, I asked him why he trusted me to musically host when I was so young and before I knew the ins and outs of his sound system. And he replied, “it starts with a vibe long before one even hits the turntable.” He said he felt something about me right from the start.
We do a tribute to the Loft night every year at Jaeger, and recently I was surprised to learn that there are actual lists online of what was played at the Loft. Were there ever tracks you just wouldn’t touch if you were playing there?
When I began musically hosting I definitely played some of the songs I would not play now, but it was because of the sonics – the sound of the recording, the mix or the pressing. Musically, I was usually spot on as I had a good ear and had worked at record shops and had hosted radio shows for over a decade by that point in my life.
When you are playing on a great sound system, the mix and the pressing are vitally important. Certain pressings and mixes sound incredible, and that’s probably why they get played more and become Loft classics
When we started the parties in London together, David was at my house four times a year. We have Klipschorns and a Mark Levinson ML-1 preamp and class A amplifiers in our listening room. David turned me on to records and I turned him on to records. He would critique the sound of the records, pointing out if there was too much bass that was eating out all of the mids. I learnt a lot from David during our listening sessions in my home.
There are so many nineties house records that suffer from a bad mix with too much bass. I would play him something that everyone was playing because another famous DJ played it and it was uber cool and he would say; “it’s kinda clever but it’s not lifting my spirit”. He didn’t care who was playing what or how cool a record was. One of my favourite critiques of his was saying that a particular record ‘was like one long intro’.
You have to remember one doesn’t mix at The Loft. When DJ-ing house, you could play a track and mix out in 2 minutes, but not at The Loft. You had to ensure a song actually evolved and was great from beginning to end.
It sounded like you and David and the Loft were on a roll by the time you left for the UK. Why did you make that move?
The main reason was that I was with a British guy, but it had always been in the back of my mind. My grandmother was English and she was a war-bride, but I also loved the music scene here. Also Mayor Giuliani had wreaked havoc onNew York nightlife, so by the late nineties, I felt it was time to move along.
It was hard to leave David and difficult to leave my weekly radio show, but by then David and I had begun work on The Loft compilations so I knew we would continue to work together. We actually became closer and often played together in different cities and spent more quality time together. David had less pressure when he was out of New York and he said our house was like a centre of calm for him.
Besides your continued efforts with the Loft and David from the UK, you also started doing your Balearic Breakfast shows when you moved to the UK. Was your first introduction to the balearic thing you would adopt for your radio show later on?
I had heard about Ibiza in the early nineties as a friend of mine was a DJ at Pacha. We sold loads of Cafe Del Mar compilations at Dance Tracks and that is what turned me on to the Balearic sound. There were many likenesses with the music Jose Padilla played and what David played at The Loft, in terms of the feeling of expansiveness. I bought all the Cafe del Mar compilations and played them out at my lounge gigs. Later, as I found out more about that Balearic and sAcid House scene, I found they played many of the same records I played on the radio in the eighties, or records I heard David play.
In a recent show, you said something like; “whatever this thing, Balearic means.” Are you closer to a definition yet?
I would just say it’s very open ended, and that’s what I like about the term Balearic. That’s why I like jazz too. I could not define jazz, but the whole approach is about being expansive and transcending boundaries. Other musical forms are more contained within definitive boundaries.
For instance, with house music, it’s four-to-the-floor. There are templates that are formulaic and worked within and that is fine. But that isn’t the case with the term ‘Balearic’ – it’s really a genre that isn’t a genre.