Photo c/o Rob Farrell
“If you’re going to try, go all the way”.
Bukowski.
Mention DMC over a pint with friends and eyes NEVER glaze over. It’s one establishment people do not want to topple and one that people like to feign knowledge of.
As the dust settles on another epic UK Mixing Championships battle in September and with the 40th anniversary plans underway for the world title event in Japan next year; Loaded wanted to get deep - 12 inches deep - into the world of DMC and break it down for y’all. Integral to this was all the knowledge and wisdom received from not only Head Honcho at DMC, but all round top bloke Dan Prince, who kindly pulled the stage curtain back for Loaded.
“Cool as f***.”
“Why have I never been to see the live event?”
“I must go and see the live event!”
When you hear the words “DMC Mixing Championships”, if you’re anything like me you think: one/ some/ all of the above.
DMC is a diverse entity, so what exactly is DMC? DMC started life as the Disco Mix Club, founded by Dan’s parents in 1983. Back when it seemed the solar system was fuelled by 7 inch vinyl, 12 inch vinyl, and imports. DJs could subscribe and receive exclusive remixes from their in-house producers, many of whom went on to become famous such as Brothers in Rhythm, Tinman, Michael Gray and LA Mix. DMC is now many things to many people.
It all began in 1981 when Dan’s Dad visited the Bronx, checked out a block party, saw some kids in a DJ battle and wallop, the seed was sown. Four years later the DMC World DJ Championships in 1985 entered the ring swinging hard.
The mighty go-to bible that is Mixmag followed in 1983. Dan left college to work on the mag and before he was 18 he was living the dream driving round the UK interviewing DJs and reporting on sweaty nightclubs.
Back in the day DMC had heats all around the UK, so Dan’s parents let him and a mate tag along. Think free. Free beer and more free beer, free backstage access, free records, and all aged 14, what more could you want? The record companies would send UK and US artists out on tour with DMC to try and break them; “My earliest memories of DMC revolve around seeing artists like Monie Love, Beats Intl, Redhead Kingpin and all these great artists that we helped break, as well as the actual competition and seeing Chad Jackson famously win at the Royal Albert Hall in 1987”.
From an idea to Wembley Arena within a few years. It’s 1990, and every man and his dog wanted to go to that final. Dan is eternally grateful to the Boo Yaa Tribe… ”we had the Boo Yaa Tribe performing and if it wasn’t for them helping the security to stem the flow of people trying to blag and steam their way in we could be talking about a whole other story. So THANK YOU Boo Yaa Tribe!”. That was the same year that DJ David from Germany got on the turntables and span on his head! Safe to say that won him the title that year.
The DMC finals are wrapped in a cloak that reads EPIC and LEGENDARY. This is largely because they can be life changing. Simple as. In America huge rap stars would often be seen in the crowd, fishing, looking for potential new stars to become their tour DJ.
DJ Cash Money blew up after winning in ‘88; and going on to remix for heavyweights including Snoop Dogg, Busta Rhymes, Mantronix and PM Dawn. Public Enemy sampled his 'Scratchin' to the Funk' track on Fight the Power.
A-Trak ended up collaborating with Kanye. C2C won 4 of the team events in a row in the early noughties and went on to work with Madonna. “They were like magicians” says Dan. “People couldn’t believe what they were seeing. They'll perform at the Paris finals in October this year. first time on stage together for 15 years”.
Dan sums the live events as such “it’s an unpredictable entity and you just don’t know what you’re going to get. The level of performance and showmanship is off the scale. Proper DJs - not in it for the lifestyle - using vinyl, they know turntables and the tech inside out. They live and breathe it and they live and breathe DMC”.
When asked to sum the event up in just three words, “inspiring, exhilarating, groundbreaking”.
DJ Chad ‘86
Photo ℅ DMC World
DJ Chad ‘87
Photo ℅ DMC World
With any live event you run the risk of calamities and hiccups. The main situation that came to mind for Dan was in 1987; ”These DJs rehearse for a year. So technical problems can be a killer. For us and for them. In ‘87, Chad Jackson had tied threads from the decks to the top of the Albert Hall ceiling and this bit of vinyl was supposed to seem to levitate up into the Royal Box. Another competitor saw this being rehearsed and snuck in and cut the threads. I won’t name who it was! But, disastrous”.
DMC had blown up hard by this time. It was the biggest record company in the world and therefore it was attracting heavyweight bees to that sweet honey. A few that stand out are James Brown, LL Cool J, Janet Jackson, Whitney Houston, Eminem, Jay-Z, Dr Dre. “Everybody came out to see who the new kids on the block are, who they can work with etc” said Dan.
James Brown ‘87
Photo ℅ DMC World
Janet Jackson & Tony Prince ‘87
Photo ℅ DMC World
Dusting off your Best of Breaks vinyls already? So what about prerequisites for entry? Those would be just immense skills, knowledge of music and imagination. Age? Not an issue. In 2021, 9 year old DJ Michelle entered. Having double checked this age with Dan, he replied “Yep! She did enter in 2021 and went on to headline Tomorrowland, a huge festival in Belgium, aged 11!” You can be a nobody one day and stratospheric the next.
The beauty of DMC is that it keeps rolling out new and younger talent to the scene. There’s an incredible 15 year old from Spain called Ricardo, “a possible future champion” says Dan. “The biggest teen sensation is K Swizz, 17 when he won the World Title in 2022, he defended it in 2023 and is trying to win 3 in a row in Paris in October. He’s the man to beat. Look out for DJ Ride from Portugal and Fummy from Japan too”.
The future of DMC is on safe decks.
September 2024 saw the recent UK finals hosted at Colours in Hoxton, London. “For the first time we’ve got a UK Finals winner from the UK, going to the World Finals who could actually win it. He goes by the name of Tommy P Nuts” says Dan. A Shooting Stars George Dawes character title if ever there was one.
K-Swizz, 2023 World Finals Champion.
Mix Master Mike 2023 World Finals
Photo ℅ DMC World
I mentioned to Dan the legendary ‘butterfly’ story that is DJ Excel (more to come on that) and asked him how he sees that whole episode? “Heartbreaking. Absolutely heartbreaking that he came 2nd three times in the ‘90s. I got a phone call in 2023 from him, having not spoken to him in 25 years and he said ‘Dan my Mum passed away early this year, and she told me to give the UK Finals one more try’. He changed his name for it to Huw Wackman so that no one knew it was him. He came. He won. He did his parents proud. Such an incredible story”.
The future of DMC looks more than solid. With vinyl now beyond just enjoying a renaissance; clawing back ever increasing territory that it once reigned supreme over. DMC is also benefiting from new beginnings and its own renaissance. “I recently took over the reins from my parents” says Dan. “We currently have 20 branches worldwide and want to hit 60 within the next two years. The World Championship Finals are mapped out for the next 10 years. The Back to Mine brand which is under the DMC umbrella is stronger than ever, having had a successful Summer of residencies in Ibiza and hosting stages at Glastonbury, Boomtown among others. We’re organising Back to Mine parties across Europe, so that brand is a nailed on burgeoning one. But I’m most excited about the renewed push to highlight and spotlight DJ culture. DMC took bedroom DJs into stadiums within a year. We’re going to continue to change lives and create moments to remember”. I think we’re all down with that.
Dan has kindly given Loaded 2 tickets for the DMC World Mixing Championships in Tokyo 2025. To win, post a picture of yourself with your favourite old school Hip Hop vinyl and tag @loadedworld and @dmcdjchamps
LOADED SPOTLIGHT ARTIST: DJ EXCEL
When I was chatting to DMC boss Dan about some of the life changing stories the event has spawned, one story jumped out. That of Miaer Lloyd, AKA DJ Excel, AKA Huw Wackman. If you like an underdog who can’t quite hit the peaks, love and loss, 12 inches of tear jerking poignancy and a triumphant ending…read on.
Excel came from the valleys of Wales with a dream of winning the DMC title and flung himself onto that path. He entered six times and came 2nd three times on the trot in the 90s. This hit him hard. As it would anyone. The amount of work and practice required is insane. He gave up on his dream. In 2022, as his Mother was close to passing, she made him promise to enter again and a year later - aged 52 - he won the DMC UK Championship in front of 75,000 people! Someone get on the blower to Gnatflix.
Not lacking on the endeavour front, Loaded tracked down DJ Excel himself and his alter ego Huw Wackman and found him in Newport, Wales, to get his angle on DMC as well as that incredible 2023 UK Championship title after 25 years.
When hip hop hit the UK, it sent a lightning rod into a little town called Cwmbran. “There was a big crew of us in Cwmbran in Wales that were into Hip Hop” says Miaer. “Breakdance the movie came out and we rented that film at 50p a week, for months, to get the moves down! We were big into Electro. Hip Hop hit us hard”.
Miaer's Dad sadly passed away recently, and he was integral to the journey’s early effervescence “Dad was a miner and when he got made redundant, he bought me some decks that I had to pay off weekly. I’ve still got the signing book where I had to sign off my repayments to him every week. That gave me the impetus and the tools, kicking off with two copies of Marrs’ Pump Up The Volume and some Public Enemy. Of course”.
You might be wondering at this point, what the difference is between a DJ and someone who enters the DMC World Mixing Championships. This is the difference between a DJ and a Turntablist? Who gets served first at the skill bar? “Anyone can DJ, it’s just beat matching, you can do it on a phone these days, via apps, even via AI. A Turntablist is using the turntable as an instrument, like a violinist or a trombonist would, to create something new. It’s a far higher level of dedication and skill required” explains Miaer.
DJ Excel Turntablisming
DMC gave Miaer the initial opportunity. Something he is massively and obviously grateful for. “Every DJ who is a Hip Hop DJ or scratch DJ, without DMC they wouldn’t be where they are now. It gave everyone a platform and should be respected. Remember there were no videos of any of this stuff it was all audio, so we had to gather round, listen and try and work out what the hell was being done. Such as with Jazzy Jeff’s The Magnificent, and he was doing a ‘Transformer’ scratch. We couldn’t afford Technic turntables so we’d have to find ways around it. Once we discovered the DMC competitions then BOOM, everything else went by the wayside and it was all about practising, all hours”.
He first decided to take a shot when (IMHO the greatest band of all time) Public Enemy seeped its way into the teenage consciousness in 1987. “It was all very party-rap before the electro stuff hit, and then the flow changed with Big Daddy Kane’s ‘Raw’ and Public Enemy. When I first heard ‘Public Enemy No. 1’ in ‘87 and how they’d sampled James Brown’s ‘Blow Your Head’, my mate and I had all the batteries we’d nicked that morning from the shop, a big bit of cardboard to throw down n test our moves out on, we stuck that tune on and it changed everything for us. There were four or five of us, we looked at their album ‘YO! Bum Rush the Show’ and they were 16, 17 at the time and it was just so inspiring. I just practised and practised, holding up DJ Pogo and Cutmaster Swift as my idols, I’d stuck them all over my wall”.
DMC used to put out videos, teenagers all over the land would huddle around a VHS player and play, pause, rewind. “That was the only access we had. There was a mystique around it. We had to innovate. We were tucked away in Wales and I decided to go for it - for a shot at a DMC competition - in ‘87’, in Swansea, at a venue called Martha’s Vineyard. It was mainly just mixing back then and I mixed ‘Public Enemy No. 1’ with ‘Pinocchio - I’ve Got No Strings’ I mean what the fuck! But it was awesome. It worked. I also mixed Marvin Gaye’s ‘I Heard it Through the Grapevine’ with Afrika Bambaataa’s ‘Planet Rock’. DJ Random used to come down to those early competitions and always trounce us, and we wanted to beat the hell out of him! He was a judge actually in the DMC Finals in September just gone!”
Miaer - as his alter ego DJ Excel - entered the next six competitions and came close on three occasions “1987 was my first DMC experience and entry, then ‘88 and ‘89, I got through to latter heats. In 1990 I’d levelled up and I got to the UK Final. The events were massive by then. The Albert Hall was staging it and the production was huge! Janet Jackson and James Brown turning up. There were 40 people in each heat! You would watch the video from the year before and you just had to spend the next year trying to come up with as many innovative moves and ideas as you could to stand a chance of doing well in your heat”.
Imagine for one moment, the thing you love the most, pouring a year’s worth of time and effort and mind space into it, the sacrifices, only to come short, and more painfully, coming 2nd three times on the spin. Miaer's last competition of that era was 1998, and he then had a 25 year hiatus. “I came 2nd three times. I had been a finalist five times, and I felt the judges were slightly off, they were producers rather than DJs a lot of the time and I lost interest. ‘91, ‘92, ‘93 I won the regional heats and got to the UK final and came 2nd each time. It’s so disappointing as it’s not just a case of turning up; it’s a whole year of hard work, ideas, concepts, innovation, practice, and then you keep coming second. Especially when you know you’ve pushed the boundaries, and you know you’ve been beaten by someone else who has not pushed as hard, and the judges just can’t see it…very hard. Ten years I’d been at it and I had had enough. Coming second those three times, that shit’s hard to take”.
One thing no one can take away from him is the scratch that he invented in that period; ‘The Twiddle’. A bittersweet story within a bittersweet story. “I was in Japan at a competition and we went out with the bosses, went to a DJ shop and I just started doing this Twiddle and everyone went mad. Qbert and his crew all witnessed it, loved it and used it heavily which popularised the scratch”. A distinct whiff of honourable magnanimity. “There are only a few people who have invented a scratch and they’re huge names in turntablism. My scratch changed the way people scratched, I’m just happy this lad from Wales has contributed to that. I mean it’s even in the opening moments of CSI! Rockin’ my scratch man”.
DJ Excel was part of an increasing emphasis on showmanship and performance. He cites Chad Jackson in ‘87 as an inspiration. “Chad started using props and wore a World War 1 flight helmet for his show”, as well as DJ Pogo and Cutmaster Swift “they were my idols and when I met them in Swansea in ‘89, I got my photo with them and was telling them ‘yo I’m gonna be amazing!’, as you would when you’re a kid. Eventually I did get to that level and ended up in their crew The Enforcers. Pogo, Swiftie, Billy Business and me”.
DJ Excel with DJ Pogo and Cutmaster Swift ‘88/’89.
Photo: Rob Farrell
Miaer channelled one of the UK’s most famous and iconic adverts to achieve what is now an infamous and symbolic moment that captured the innovative nature of the DMC shows and the DNA that flows through the veins “In my ‘90s UK Final, I used the Air on a G String from the famous Hamlet Cigar TV ads. I pretended I’d messed up and then span that tune in the middle of the set, pulled out a huge lighter and sparked up. I could feel the reaction of the crowd, the air, it just hit me in the face like a wave, I knew I’d destroyed it”.
DJ Excel and the ‘Hamlet’ moment.
Part of Loaded’s DNA is to pay homage to the best of previous eras, whatever the art form. Enabling time travel of a sort. Miaer talks with fondness of those times “I miss the hunting-down and seeking out of records and samples. We used to find a gem and put stickers over it so people couldn’t read what it was. You’d wait and save and then you’d get the record you’d heard about. I could get (LL Cool J’s) Rock The Bells just like that now. You couldn’t get it then. It was impossible”.
Back to the 25 year hiatus, a devastating loss meant that the DMC and Miaer paths would cross again, but this time it wouldn’t be as DJ Excel, “25 years on from my last effort in ‘98, I’d had a kid, I stopped, life got in the way, I’d never done another DJ battle since. I started posting a video yearly on Insta during the pandemic and after, of myself under a different name so that no one would know it was me, doing this new trick on the decks, and out of the blue I received a message saying ‘you have reached the UK finals’. WTF! I only had three weeks' notice, I didn’t have any decks. What I did have was flu and a broken finger! I had to go and borrow turntables and make the show happen in three weeks, from concept to delivery. I thought ‘I’m gonna make myself look a right prick here’ so I went in under a new name; Huw Wackman.''
Miaer's Mum being a core influence in his life, caring, devoted, stepping in to hold the fort when he had to DJ, sadly passed before this last turn of events occurred, but it was her words that inspired him to shoot for the title once more. A title he believed should have been his previously.
“My Mum had passed not long before all this came around again and she had said to me on many occasions during her final years that I mustn’t give up, and that I had it in me to win. It gave me the incentive. And so I did. I listened to her. I went there, and I won”.
That moment. Waiting for a boat to the promised land, but that boat is permanently anchored on the horizon, with other people living it up on board. Many of us have been there, it cuts deep. An ache you can’t shift or explain to another. That boat finally came ashore, nestled on the sand and a red carpet rolled down the gantry. “Cutmaster Swift, one of my original heroes and now friends, was hosting and he shouted out ‘The winner…. HUW WACKMAN!!’. Easily in the top three moments of my life. In the year that Hip Hop was officially crowned 50 years old, I was crowned UK DMC Mixing Champion! Perfect. Hopefully my parents were looking down and proud”.
It was written.
What most of us might have in common is the feeling that time flows faster these days. That our bucket list should maybe be trimmed to a more realistic and achievable set of desires. It’s a young man’s game and all that. Well Miaer is the antithesis of that mindset. Following that triumph decades later, he received heartwarming contact from all sorts of people including older DJs, saying that they had thrown it all in but that this had inspired them to have another go.
“I’m the living embodiment of never giving up on your dream. I’m the Welsh Comeback King of DMC World”.
DJ Excel AKA Huw Wakman on his way to winning in 2022Photo: Rob Farrell
Huw with Mike L and Rvert.
Photo: Rob Farrell
If you’re feeling a nudge of loin love for this wonderful man, prepare for it to get a little warmer. Miaer worked in Great Ormond St Hospital in 2000, taking the bloods of the kids etc. It was during this year that he learned the power of distraction and its role in helping these kids forget their own pain for a moment in time “I used to graffiti their windows and do little shows for them. Myself and my friend Tommy Boost - a breaker - developed the Hip Hop Clowns project for hospitals, where we take innovative shows into the wards and let the kids get involved in mixing and scratching. We are searching high and low for funding for this, and I’ve also created a Hip Hop Culture Class which I’ve taken to over 25000 kids in the last 2 years as well as into skate parks under the name ‘Beats, Breaks n Skate’. We’re desperately looking for funding to maximise the potential of these projects. We haven’t had much luck with the Arts Council or Lotto, so any Loaded readers who want to know more, and maybe help with this next chapter, get in touch with me via my insta @huwWakman''
Photo Huw Wackman & Tommy Boost
Back to where we started, the wisdom of Charles Bukowski...
“If you're going to try, go all the way. There is no other feeling like that. You will be alone with the gods, and the nights will flame with fire. You will ride life straight to perfect laughter. It's the only good fight there is”.
Keep up with the intoxicating carousel of DMC - dmcworld.com.
