Biography
In the mid nineteen-nineties, as the acid house boom began to become codified and regulated - much like the period of systematisation experienced by the wandering tribes on their return to Israel, a period in which much that was free and liberating about their movement became closed, much that was improvised became subject to rules and much that was transcendent grew clogged with analysis and discussion - many clubbers became disenfranchised. Among them was Mick Jagger, who, having read an excoriating satirical editorial in Tatler about club culture in the late eighties, had decided to try it himself, and had scoured the fields and fens of England in his Lamborghini Marzal searching for the beat, and had found it, and himself, over and over again, repeatedly; dancing out there in the darkness, the sky above him like a vast platitudinous canvas, the colour of hot Vimto.
But Jagger, like so many others, saw what he had loved done down by the rise of superclubs, pills stamped with Mitsubishi logos in sweatshops by German children and the glut of records designed by men to make other men take their tops off and nothing in their frequencies or rhythms that connected the listener to any one of the four cosmoses. Jagger though, whose Spenglerian view of history allowed him to see all human history as a series of cycles of transcendence and codification, did not mourn the decline of acid house, but saw in that decline an opportunity for a new rebirth, a chance to turn the wheel again. Out of that thought came a new alias and music project, Charly McLion.
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McLion's official biography states that he was an illegitimate child of DJ Beppe Loda, and that, in nineteen eighty-seven, aged fifteen, he snuck off from a family holiday to see Alfredo play, even handing the great DJ an NM 7" of Cliff Richard's 'Wired For Sound', which was played, and brought the house down. From there he moved seamlessly through the acid scene, creating edits and remixes which he would play at a tiny after hours club in Birmingham, to a crowd which included a young Anthony Child, later known as Surgeon. He was an early hours DJ at Shoom, playing sets that veered between the 'Afro' and 'cosmic' styles of his reputed father and the trippy 6pm sound that comes only when a Steve Hillage guitar line is played over the water drums of the Baka pygmies of Cameroon. None of this, of course, was true. In fact, McLion was a fiction, yet another beautiful, damaged young man dreamed up by Mick Jagger. Another young man whose blankness functioned as a node upon which and out of which Jagger was able to replay yet again the trauma of his own lost youth: to be beautiful, to be talented and successful and for it not to last.
The records that McLion released are related only tangentially to the false history that Jagger created for him. They suggest a misreading, whether deliberate or accidental, of the mid to late eighteies dance music scene in the UK. One photograph, now in the collection of Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett, has emerged of Jagger recording as McLion. Though grainy, the image shows a man sat cross legged among banks of synthesizers, effects pedals and drum machines. Hanging all around the man are amethyst crystals attached to pieces of string. As Jagger played, gathering energy from the crystals that surrounded him, he thought back to the early sixties, the feel of the guitar in his hand and, simultaneously, saw himself, older, decked out in loose fitting dungarees and a huge yellow bucket hat, striding across an expanse of field towards a soundsystem, the Vimto sky and the lights, and he played as if to defile those memories. The records that emerged profaned acid house. For Jagger knew that only by euthanising what had come before could a new reality emerge.
Biography text from Last.fm, available under CC BY-SA.