What's the tea on Mr Scruff's miniature tour?

In the battle to secure the future of independent music venues, Ninja Tune beat juggler Mr Scruff is doing his bit.

Tickets for Mr Scruff's upcoming tour will have a £1 levy designed to fund the grassroots music scene. As far as add-on costs go, better this than the bottomless black hole that folks like Skiddle call "administration fees". Charging to generate an e-ticket? Are you (s)kidding me?

He's calling his tour the Miniature Arena Tour, which is cute. His chosen arenas include Cosmic Slop in Leeds, Wylam Brewery in Newcastle, Sneaky Pete’s in Edinburgh, and the Snoggy Snotbucket in Lytham St Annes. One of those was made up by me. It's the Snotbucket one. But it definitely sounds like somewhere he should play.

The UK live music scene is in a bit of a pickle. Tonnes of places have stopped running events, and dozens are closing. The scene is woefully underfunded despite contributing squillions of smackeroonies to the UK economy and providing a social glue that stops a lot of things becoming unstuck during difficult times.

Mr Scruff's support for grassroots music is a good move, and it makes up for my one massive bugbear about Mr Scruff. He likes tea. He's always going on about tea. Tea this, tea that. Tea, as every right-thinking person knows, is horrible ditch-water that tastes like disappointment. I'd rather suck on Elon Musk's damp underpants. Yuck.

In the distant past, Mr Scruff was a shelf-stacker at a Kwik Save supermarket. My theory is that this job seeded his tea obsession. So beloved was tea to him, I reckon he stacked the tea bags extra neatly. Lined up those corners of the boxes nice and flush. The coffee shelves were scattered and wonky, and the hot chocolate section was a clutter of broken jars. But the tea bags? Those shelves were spotless, and if a customer dared take a packet of English Breakfast off the shelf, he'd bat their hand away. "My tea," he'd hiss. "My precious tea."

Anyway, he's a wrong-un when it comes to tea, but he's right about small venues.

While you're here, have a nosey at this old video about Mr Scruff (screenshot from Selectors: Mr. Scruff, above). You'll see his dog and his record collection and the concrete he puts under his decks and his iconic cartoons and lots of shots of Manchester.

Further Fats: There goes the hear: Manchester has enough gigs (2011)

Further Fats: Why did the Fat Roland cross the road? (2017)

Album reviews: Shlohmo's clunky knobs, Ambient News's sepia hue and Mark E spluttering all over your face

Right then, enough about Autechre's leakiness for now. Time for some slap-dash album reviews.

Ambient News

The recent self-titled album from Ambient News doesn't push the envelope so much as snuggle inside it to avoid disturbing the postman.

The busy little beat smothered in vocoders on Moon On My Forehead is as energetic as this album gets. It will appeal to those who like looking at their ambient music with sepia-hued retinas: think Tangerine Dream, 1990's Plaid in simmering mode, or particularly the Feed Your Head compilations.

Hiding behind the Ambient News moniker is Cylob, the man who brought us a superb subversion of rave culture in Rewind. This alternative guise gives him the chance to mess around with harmoniums and gamelan-style 'earth' ambience.

Ambient News sounds incomplete. If it was BBC Ambient News 24, at the top of every hour, it would have about 15 minutes of newsreaders filing their nails. It's almost as if Cylob had been gathering ideas together for a long time, but never quite realised his vision...

Mark E

...unlike Mark E. This hypnotic house music peddler has also been hoarding tracks, but his resulting Works 2005 - 2009 compilation is a much grander affair than Ambient News. I wouldn't normally delve into disco house on this website, but this album splutters quality all over your face, licks it off with a big lizard tongue, then spits all the quality back in your face again.

You see, for someone who's made his diminuitive name giving us his take on Janet Jackson and Diana Ross (now there's a duet I'd like to see), a lot of these tracks are a bit too slow, a bit too subtle and dangerously hypnotic. And that's a good thing.

As for individual cuts, I'm not mad on the funkiness of Sun Shadow, even though Mr Scruff has been pummeling away at that track like a Daily Mail reader who's just discovered a hammer for the first time. But Mark E's reworks of Slave 1 and Plastic People are house music at its most sexy and sublime.

Shlohmo

Finally, us IDM fans have been dropped a cracking album from Los Angeles beat scientist Shlohmo (pictured above, not to be confused with the beatboxer with a similar name).

Shlomoshun Deluxe is an album of brittle lo-fi beats in the Hudson Mohawke / J Dilla vein. And when I say lo-fi, I'm not kidding. He plugged a mic into his laptop, along with his dad's ancient Jupiter 6 (an old Roland synth with clunky knobs) and, somehow, expected to produce a good album.
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He did: it's my favourite album this week. The emphasis is all on the groove, and it has a David Holmes wideness to it - which is a remarkable achievement considering he made the whole thing from sellotape, string, splittle and sausages. Well, maybe not the sausages.

Ten absolutely fascinating facts about Rephlex Records

- Rephlex Records began in the same year Chesney Hawkes, Hale And Pace and The Simpsons scored their first and only UK number one hit singles.

- The middle name of Richard D James, co-founder of the label, isn't Delia Derbyshire, although it would be nice if it was.

- Drill 'n' bass mentalists Squarepusher and Mu-Ziq released some early stuff on Rephlex. Junglist cohort Luke Vibert, who invent drill 'n' bass, once exclaimed, "what the fudge is drill 'n' bass". Or words to that effect.

- No-one can spell Rephlex signing Bogdan Raczynski's name from memory (pictured).

- The music newspaper NME called Rephlex "the coolest record label in the world." They also called U2 the greatest rock band in the world, so shove that in your pipe and call it Alfred.

- Rephlex started out as, basically, a vanity project for Aphex Twin. A bit harsh, but essentially true. Edit: This bit is absolute crap. "Not true at all," say Rephlex, and, actually, they're right.

- Label co-founder Grant Wilson-Claridge found his feet in a club called the Bowgie, which is Cornish for 'cattle shed'. Mr Scruff later made a poster with DJ tips for chickens, dinosaurs, snakes and elephants, but not for cattle.

- There are 13 people on Facebook called Richard D James. There is only one Grant Wilson-Claridge.

- Rephlex calls IDM music 'braindance'. 'Rephlex' can be rearranged into 'help Rex'. 'Braindance' is an anagram of 'a nice brand'. 'IDM' is an anagram of 'mid'. Make of that what you will..

- There are only nine facts..

Mr Scruff's dried rabbits, LD's deep woofs and Mujava's drained drums

Here are some tracks that ought to be caressing your pretty ears right now.

Potato-drawing tea evangelist Mr Scruff (pictured) has teamed up with preacher's son Roots Manuva for a track called Nice Up The Junction. It's a solid piece of dub skank with some meaty "wooh" action, and the video features a jumble sale flogging used tea bags and "dried rabbits".

Dubstep label Hyperdub lit a really slow fuse when they let LD loose on new 12" Traumatic Times.  With its deeply woofing bass, the title track is so low-down, it's doing the limbo underneath your carpet. Flip side Woodblock is a slap round the chops in comparison, and is worth hunting out for its simmering, insistent, rolling techno.

And while I'm a techno tip, if you come across Boy 8 Bit's remix of Mujava's Township Funk, it's worth stopping to say hello. I should point out that Township Funk is minimal house music's version of Rihanna's Umbrella: it's simply massive. Boy 8 Bit magnifies the moodiness. eliminates the tribal drums, and uses menacing synth lines to drain any possible happiness from the track until the glass is indeed half empty. Stupendously, stunningly stern.

A ticket to ride: bumbling into MC Tunes and putting the green suit away

She bounces up to me like Tigger on catnip and starts squatting on the dancefloor. Her bum is pointing in all directions at once and, with alarm bells clanging in my head, I scan the room for a precautionary mop.

She says to me, "You need to dance with your hips. Like this."

For a scruffy haired loser who shuffled around in a painful green suit and wine red tie, a dancefloor was very much like a barbeque is to a penguin; it was a new thing to me and the heat was causing chafing.

It's the Herbal Tea Party in mid-90s Manchester and I'm being taught to dance by an enthusiastic stranger. I must have looked as stiff as a door if I needed a punter to dive in and rescue me from complete humiliation.

The Tea Party stands now as a monster club night in darkest Hulme that has never enjoyed the continuing exaltation of its bigger counterpart, Manchester's Megadog. It's a shame, especially for HTP's very own Dr Frankensteins, co-creators Ian and Rob Fletcher.

Thanks to them, electronic music bowled me clean over, especially when:

(a) I bought Orbital's brown album purely based on an amusing review in the NME;

(b) as a hack, first interviewing one of the Fletchers (I forget which one) but being drawn by a One Dove record playing in the background. I'd never heard proper, creative dance music before, barring the KLF, The Orb and assorted chart rave bands.

There isn't much about the Tea Party on the internet near me. A few forum mentions, but then this gem of a photograph (above).

It's a ticket, posted by Armcurl. It shows (then) South Manchester's finest DJ Justin Robertson lined up beside Charlie Hall and his Drum Club. And there they are. Resident Rob Fletcher plus Inner Sphere Space which, if I remember rightly, was his brother Ian.

Okay it's just a ticket, but this photo represents my bumpy (and grindy) ride into the clubbing world.

I never really became 'cool'. I was frightened by the owner of Birmingham's Beyond club once because he offered me a beer. And I once bumbled into MC Tunes, who threatened my very life just by casting me what he thought was a casual glance.

And I never got into tea either, despite the best efforts of Mr Scruff to make it the tipple of choice for Manchester clubbers.

But I did learn to dance a bit, and the Herbal Tea Party turned a scruffy haired loser into a shaven-haired loser with a penchant for Higher Intelligence Agency, Drum Club and Sabres Of Paradise. Thank goodness I never needed the mop.