Blogging with Fuji Rock: Don Coglione: Don't bust my balls

As a DJ, Don Coglione is as surprised as anyone else to find himself playing at Fuji Rock Festival this year. In fact, when he received an email inviting him to play at the festival after a gig at Super Deluxe a few months ago, he was sure it was "a bit of a wind-up. I mean, there's better funk DJ's in Tokyo than me..."
But perhaps none so pure.

Don Coglione, otherwise known as Nick Coldicott, has been playing old 60's and 70's funk around Tokyo for the past six years. The unusual stuff. The stuff that finds itself sampled and mixed in newer, bigger, much more famous tracks—without the rest of that famous track. As he says, it's "the real dance floor stuff. Not the George Clinton grinding type...the rare stuff that people really don't know until they hear it in a Fat Boy Slim track."

Nick came to Tokyo eight years ago from South Hampton, UK, just to do something different. He taught English (as we all have at some point), has written for AP, and started spinning records purely by accident. At a noise show one night in Kamata, he was very disturbed at what he saw—a beautiful venue with terrible music. "The only instruments were a Theremin and a typewriter," he recalls, "and people were nodding to it, you know, pretending to 'understand' this bullshit." Since some of his friends were DJs, Nick asked the woman who ran it about putting on a party.

"Are you a DJ from London?" She asked.
"Well I can be..."

And so Don Coglione's Rhythm Night was born—along with Nick's DJ moniker.

"We just wanted something daft for the title. And the only phrase in Italian I know is 'non mi rompere i coglione'. 'Don't bust my balls.'" He laughs about it, saying he doesn't really care about what DJ's call themselves, "but now I'm stuck with this stupid name."

Far from being just his taste in DJ material, funk is the music he loves. One look at his iPod shows it is almost exclusively funk-soul-blues. He haunts the Disc Union in Shinjuku every week, searching out rare vinyl for his collection. The discs he buys used to cost him between \1,000 and \2,000. Now he finds himself shelling out around \15,000 at a time.

Bring your muddy d-d-d-d-d-dancin' shoes down to the Crystal Palace Tent at Fuji Rock Festival and catch some of Don Coglione's rare grooves on Sunday night from 11:30pm to 12:30am. And don't bust his you-know-what...

Jeff

Don Coglione: Don't bust my balls

Comments

Post a comment

Recent Posts

Categories

Archives

Search