Ian Taylor Rejekt (Interview)

by Helen Jones on 20.08.09

International travel, 24 hour parties in Ibiza, and celebrity sleepovers – it’s just another day in the office for international DJ Iain Taylor.

Judging by the amount of times his phone rings during the interview, it’s fair to say that Iain Taylor is a busy bloke. Having recently been made Resident DJ and Joint Head of Music at top Manchester venue Area 51, whilst simultaneously running his own label, Rejekt Music, and juggling a fully booked diary for the Ibiza season, it’s clear to see that Taylor is a man who thrives off a hectic schedule.

It’s an enviable lifestyle that’s taken Taylor around the world, and that all began in arguably the best international city there is, in a little-known Manchester club called the Hacienda…

In classic ‘in-the-right-place-at-the-right-time’ style, Taylor describes how he got his foot in the door at Manchester’s most famous (or infamous?) club:
“I was knocking out mix tapes and just doling them out, do you remember mix tapes?? I had a proper metal cassette player, with a double cassette recorder doing high speed dubbing. A friend of a friend was doing mid-week student nights at the Hacienda that were going really well, and one of the DJs dropped out, he listened to one of my mix tapes and thought it was pretty good and so gave me the spot. In typical Taylor fashion, I stepped up. It was the first time I’d played in a club though, I was that nervous that I couldn’t drop the needle on the first record…in the end I had to drop it in the middle of the record and spin it back.”

Not a bad place to cut your teeth, and it was sheer graft that then progressed Taylor’s career: “From that I made a few contacts and started doing a few nights…doing a few gigs at Sankeys and the Music Box and it just snowballed from that.”

Illegal Warehouse parties also feature on Taylor’s CV – after-parties for the likes of El Diablo’s and Electric Chair, which continued until he was told by the police to basically stop or else get arrested, as Taylor fondly recalls: “Yeah, we pushed that avenue as far as we could”. It was around this time that the Paradise Factory was starting up and Taylor was brought in as a monthly resident doing Rejekt parties.

The experience at Paradise Factory was short-lived though, when complaints about the amount of noise started flooding in. Problems with the sound system were causing the windows to shake in nearby flats – an understandable aggravation for the neighbours. So, following a six month stint there, Taylor was back doing the rounds in Manchester bars and clubs, getting his name out there and building a reputation that would eventually take him to China, throughout Europe, North and South America and of course, to party central itself – Ibiza.

It was whilst launching the Rejekt label in Ibiza that the ‘villa parties’ started. Taylor describes them as: “very much in the same vein as the Warehouse parties, we did villa parties that started at six in the morning when all the clubs shut and ran through to six in the evening. It was amazing, Kate Lawler like lived at our villa for two weeks, Fergie was there a lot, but then all the Residents from Manumission were coming down…just loads of people tipped up after their club nights and did a set. It was really good.”

The Rejekt Music imprint is a showcase for talent, and Taylor has been busy signing more people to the label for release in time for this Ibiza season. Releases from Gamal Kabar (aka St Sebastian), Darius Syrossian & Nyra and new kid on the block Curious George are all in the pipeline, there will also be at least one more Rejekts release and remix before Ibiza gets into full swing.

And so what else does the future hold for Iain Taylor? “I kind of have two things now, DJ Iain Taylor which is indicative of what I did at Tribal Sessions which is a mixture of house, breaks, techno, just good solid stuff. Then the Rejekts is the more kind of heads down, deep house and techno…which follows suit with what we do with the label. It’s a little bit more out there as well, so trying to buck the trend a little bit with it…I’m not gonna say it’s an art project because we all make our music to go to the dance floor but we try to be a bit different, a bit forward thinking or have a message in the music…”

Whatever the project, it seems that forward thinking is what Taylor does best, and it doesn’t look like he’s going to be stopping anytime soon.