Soul & Surf Sunday Sessions

Rewind.

If you’ve visited any of our Soul & Surf venues you may well have been disturbed by a track or two that popped up on our playlists. 

You what!? It doesn’t sound like a great advert for our playlists does it? 

But that kind of reaction is exactly what I’d hope for when I compile our playlists. 

Why? you might ask.

Because I go out of my way to avoid the cliched, sanitised, professionally compiled hospitality playlists called things like ‘smooth’, ‘cool vibes’, ‘funky dinner’ and other such nonsense.

Instead, whilst working at my laptop, I search out amazing, unusual music from the last 6 decades or so from all four corners of the earth (if it has corners). And that means some tracks seem odd to some people (and sometimes I make a mistake and put something on that really jars the atmosphere).

Why? You might ask again.

Because there’s so much incredible music out there that I continue discovering day in day out that I feel a responsibility to share it - and at Soul & Surf I have a platform to share it. 

And because I have a DJ's instinct to dig and share. 

And because as Nietzsche put it: “Without music, life would be a mistake.” 

And because listening to music – and even more so, dancing to music – is another one of those wonderful ways of being in the moment without even meaning to.

Rewind.

It took some time for me to figure out why I love all the things I do, and when I did the wisdom (I use that term loosely) of age allowed me to see that the things that make me feel most alive all have an ability to draw us into the moment, into flow.

So that’s why placing music alongside yoga, mindfulness, surf and massage makes sense for Soul & Surf.

In fact, just before we started Soul & Surf I wrote a piece for the wonderful, but now defunct, Surfers Path magazine. Ostensibly about the surf ashram in Karnataka, India, in the article I rambled on about how I got there, to surf at an ashram in India, via my acid house days… 

"The mridanga drum beats its complex rhythm, the Krishna devotees chant, sing, clap and swirl, enrapt. Self-conscious I mumble and bumble and shuffle. Willing. Trying. Doddering. Those hard years mining the night-shift at the coal-face of disco in London and Brighton counts for nought as my ancestral British reserve refuses to release my body from it’s cloying, smothering, maternal grasp, the spirit of Uncle John at my cousin’s wedding consumes me as I awkwardly scuff my feet from side to side and waggle my elbows, a duck desperate for flight. My overly occupied mind disrupts the connections of sound to soul to body. Those subterranean East End nights fuelled by intoxicants of varying legality once connected me briefly, albeit artificially to the now, to the moment. Cares, worries and mind-chatter dissipated as I plugged deep into the sound, my body responding intuitively, drawing shapes captured stroboscopically by my fellow dancers…. ErrrmmmAhmmm-Hum… But the spirit’s left me, the intoxicants worn off leaving only their grimy corporeal decay in their wake… HrrrriKshhhh — leftflap/rightfapslide — KshhhhnnhKshh — slipdodder — Hrrrrryuhhhry — AhhhhHrrrrrr — slide/waggle…. It’s truly wonderful to witness such worship yet frustrating to be an observer, on the outside looking in.

… It’s a peculiar path from illegal raves to an ashram in India, but one I can trace using surf and yoga as marker points and my resolute, yet impatient pursuit of presence, nowness as the pathway. Each step along the way forms a purer connection to the soul than the last; rave, surf, yoga, meditation...music/poison, adrenaline, body, mind. Each one important, intertwined. And so I googled my way to this ashram, to this small temple room and to this Bhajan with a small group of Hare Krishna devotees, lost in devotion, tucked away from the madding crowds quietly, passionately, assuredly introducing surfers to India, introducing Indians to surf whilst worshipping Krishna, as the “Absolute Truth or Super Consciousness that is the cause of all things” in servitude to their guru Swami Narasingha who now teaches a spiritual path to his devotees in two Ashrams in India, whose 4700 miles of coast he’s surfed, mostly alone, since the mid 70’s."

Surfers Path Magazine - 2010

Compiling Soul & Surf’s playlists for the last decade or so had been my main DJ gig since slowing down (to an accidental stop) my DJ career in my early to mid 30s. A few years after opening Soul & Surf we began to throw some staff parties and either me or Raff (our old manager and ex-Bombay DJ) would play tunes from a laptop or phone at a bar in Varkala or Ahangama.