Obviously, such a remarkable vessel isn’t going to find the kind of fuel it needs at your local Shell servo. Instead, it relies on the revelers themselves for power in the form of ‘hot dub’. “Hot dub is a top secret carbon neutral energy source generated by dance floor energy,” explains Loud. “So in order for the time machine to keep moving through time it needs ‘hot dub’ which is produced by people dancing, yelling ‘wooo’ and chatting up the people next to you.”
It sounds nuts, but rather than getting him sectioned by the men in white coats, Loud’s unique creation has in fact earned him and his Hot Dub Time Machine a huge amount of success and a growing fan base. It’s gone down a treat with crowds both at home and over in the UK since he took his maiden time travelling voyage just over a year ago.
“I came up with the idea a few years ago,” explains Loud. “I’ve always been a hyperactive DJ. I’ve never really liked just playing one style of music or the songs from a certain era, so I wanted to find a framework that we could have a party where you could get The Beatles, you can hear some dubstep, some Led Zeppelin and say Coolio, you know.”
A sound designer for TV shows including Underbelly, although now fully committed to his new venture, Loud has been involved in various festivals for the past five or six years and would often DJ at the after parties of both the Melbourne comedy and fringe festivals. This connection led to the first performance of Hot Dub Time Machine at last year’s Sydney Festival. However, it wasn’t until a run at this year’s Adelaide Fringe that the project really took off. “We smashed Adelaide so hard,” laughs Loud. “The first show we did we broke the floor of the venue (the hundred-year-old Spiegeltent) and the police ended up being called. From that point on we sold out every single show. We ended up doing extra shows and selling 120 per cent of the tickets.”
Good news travels fast and it wasn’t long before somebody from the Gilded Balloon – one of the largest fringe production companies at the Edinburgh Festival – invited Hot Dub over for to Scotland for a run of 15 nights in August. “Edinburgh was fantastic,” enthuses Loud. “There’s so much competition over there, so it wasn’t an immediate success but once the word got around that there was a proper party on, people got into it.”
Those heading along to the Hot Dub parties here can expect to dance hard to old favourites, forgotten gems and era-defining anthems spanning everything from rock to hip hop, dubstep to grunge. “1954 is where we start because that’s when Rock Around the Clock was released,” says Loud. “That seemed like a good place to start. It’s a great song but was also kind of a turning point for that early rock‘n’roll. From that point onwards you’ve got your great iconic songs that everyone knows like Great Balls of Fire and Tooty Fruity and you start getting into this rock music that people know and love and it’s awesome. I tell people it’s a song a year but it’s not. Some years we might play five songs, some years we completely skip over. Like 1983 for some reason – there’s like five or six songs from that year that are just absolutely fucking killer. But 1981? Not so much!”
However the tracks are selected, the music policy is very much based around having fun and dancing hard but Loud is certainly aware of the possible pitfalls of playing retrospective tracks for near on three hours. “There’s a fine line between kitsch and cheese,” he admits. “So the real fun for me is finding these songs that may have been cheesy when they came out, but are now just fucking awesome. Like Eminem’s Lose Yourself, which at the time did kind of have cheesy tang to it, but now I just realise that’s a classic, awesome song.”
As well as finding tracks that can be played in order of their release, Loud also has to find ones that go together well in the mix. One example he gives is Coldplay’s Clocks, which apparently works particularly well with the thumping electro bass line of Benny Benassy’s Satisfaction laid underneath. However, despite doing a few of his own edits to merge selected elements of one track with another, Loud doesn’t consider himself to be a mash-up DJ in the same vein as Girl Talk or Too Many DJs. “I think the mash up and remix culture has kind of reached a point now where it’s like ‘just play the fucking song’, you know what I mean? So I actually try to play the original version as much as I can and let people dance and have a good time.” Amen to that.
BY RICHIE MELDRUM
