Fergus Alexander: 25 years of Raving through the shadows of Brisbane

It’s close to 2pm when Fergus Alexander pulls up outside my hotel in Brisbane’s inner north, engine idling, a faint pulse of Selador sessions leaking through the speakers. I climb in. He has in mind his destination, but first, mapped out ever so craftily in chronological order, we begin our journey  through the old haunts of town. First stop West End. 

Fergus has been playing in Brisbane for over two decades, a progressive house and techno selector with a taste for the hypnotic end of the spectrum. The CV runs through most of the rooms that mattered in the city’s dance music history, Barsoma, The Empire, Family, Brown Alley, La La Land, and widens out, at festival scale, to Future Music, Earth Frequency and Creamfields. He has shared bills with Joris Voorn, Henry Saiz, Dave Seaman, Patrice Baumel, Jamie Stevens and Gui Boratto, which tells you what kind of company he keeps without this reserved man having to say so himself.

The work outside the booth matters just as much. Logic, the party series he co-founded with Mike Redfern, brought a sustained run of international talent into Brisbane across its lifespan. Ctrl, his current project, sits deliberately at the smaller, more focused end of the scale. Fergus has never been especially interested in the biggest room. He has been interested in the right one.

What follows is a three-hour circuit of a city that has, in the main, been rebuilt on top of itself. Fergus drives with the easy familiarity of someone who has taken this route, in various states of consciousness, for the better part of thirty years. He points things out as we pass them, a running commentary delivered in the low, amused tone of someone who has watched most of his scene get knocked down, making some kind of peace with it.

“That was a warehouse, that whole corner, for about three years in the late nineties,” he says, slowing down at an intersection that has since been zoned into something you’d describe as mixed-use. “Now it’s a day spa.” A beat. “Might pop in for a massage actually.”

We go past a shopfront that used to be a record store, past a hotel bar he remembers for reasons he won’t go on record about, past the site of a warehouse night he still, on occasion, dreams about. We slow down outside a block of apartments and he stops the car properly, both of us sitting in silence for a moment. “Big nights in there,” he says. “Biggest. Beats that would resonate echoes through the laneways.” Then we hear a shout out. “Ferg”. We turn around to see an old familiar face poking his head through the old heavy doors of an apartment, immediately followed by an all embracing hug. He used to run one of the old venues Fergus speaks so highly of (Barsoma).

This is the thing about Fergus. He is, by most reasonable measures, one of Australia’s most under-represented progressive house artists, a name that tends to come up, quietly, whenever Brisbane’s underground history is being mapped by people who were actually there. He has never been particularly interested in the part of the job that requires shouting about it. You have to drive around with him, at night, to get it out of him. And even then, you have to be extremely patient!

He started in 1998. The rave that did it for him (Time Tunnel) was held at The Arena in Fortitude Valley, Brisbane, the kind of room you had to be told about twice before you found it. He was in his early twenties, curious, looking for something he didn’t yet have words for. “I remember the bass more than anything,” he says, taking a corner a little faster than he needs to. “Low, dirty, rolling. I’d never heard anything like it. And I remember thinking, very clearly, this is the future. This is where everything goes next.” I ask him if he knew, standing there, that he would end up behind the decks himself. He laughs. “No. Not that night. That night I was just trying to stay upright.”

What followed happened the way these things usually happen. A group of friends formed around the same obsession, the same late-night conversations, the same sense that they’d landed on something. Those friendships, for the record, are mostly still intact. Thirty years on, most of them are still on speed dial. Someone, at some point, mentioned DJing. Someone else agreed. It became, as Fergus puts it, “less of a plan and more of a gravitational pull.”

The practical problem was equipment. Proper decks cost money. Money was not abundant. What solved it, as is so often the case in scenes like this, was community infrastructure dressed up as coincidence. In Brisbane’s West End, a Uniting Church had, for reasons that nobody involved seems to have fully interrogated, started hosting open deck nights. “I love that detail,” Fergus says. “A church. Records. You couldn’t plan that.” He thinks for a moment. “Although, churches have always been about getting a room full of people to feel something, haven’t they. We were just using a different kind of hymn.”

The church nights were where technique got built. Not in any polished performance sense. Practice rooms, essentially, where a DJ-in-formation could live with the vinyl, make mistakes in public, and learn what a record actually does in a room rather than in a bedroom. Fergus arrived at those sessions with something a lot of his peers didn’t have yet, which was a collection. “I’d been buying records carefully for a while,” he says. “Not a lot of them. But the right ones, for me. I was already thinking about journeys. About what happens when you put this track after that one. The technical stuff came later. The sensibility came first.”

Alongside the church, there was Beatsville. The name does the work, as anyone who passed through it will confirm. An old Queenslander in the eastern suburbs, high ceilings, timber floorboards worn smooth by decades of foot traffic, a Technics system installed with the seriousness that the occasion demanded. It ran every other weekend. It became, over time, an institution. “The house shook,” Fergus says, genuinely grinning now for the first time all afternoon. “You felt the bass through your feet before you heard it. That’s not me being romantic. That’s physics. That house was vibrating.”

Beatsville, in the eastern suburbs of Brisbane, was where he DJed under the name Oracle, where the friendships he still holds were forged, where the kind of constructive, slightly mouthy peer review that defines healthy scenes was doled out in abundance. “If you played something ordinary, someone would tell you. Gently, mostly. Not always. It made you better. You had to bring something.”

I ask him what he was bringing. He pauses for longer than usual. “Records no one else had, hopefully. Or records everyone else had, in an order no one else had thought of. Those are the two jobs, really. That’s still the two jobs and I see that as my job to pass it onto the people that don’t even know they need to hear it yet!”

He tells me, with obvious fondness, about the afternoon he was booked for a gig with no car and no lift available. He packed his crate of records into a shopping trolley, wheeled it to the train station, rode across the city with it, wheeled it back off the train at the other end, and rolled it into the venue. “I was on time,” he says. “That’s the bit I’m proud of.”

We are, at this point in the drive, somewhere near the river, and Fergus has eased into the kind of reflective mode that these late-night circuits tend to produce. He is not nostalgic, exactly. He is too old for nostalgia. But he is aware that the thing he was a part of never really made it into the official record, and that the scene survives now in fragments. “Nobody wrote this down,” he says. “Not at the time. There were no streaming platforms. The only cameras people had were disposable ones. Most of what happened happened in rooms that no longer exist, between people, some of whom are no longer here. The records are still in collections. The memories are still in people. That’s about it. That’s the whole archive.”

He mentions, almost in passing, the old Inthemix forums as one of the few places where any of it ever got written about in anything approaching real time. Otherwise, the preservation has been informal, personal, haphazard, reliant on the fact that a handful of practitioners happened to care enough to keep their records, their flyers, and their memories roughly intact.

The records matter to him. They are not, for Fergus, tools. They are documents. A personal archive of a moment that nobody commissioned and nobody funded, and which nobody will reconstruct if he and his contemporaries don’t do it themselves. “I don’t think of myself as a preservationist,” he says carefully. “But when I play a record now that I bought in 1999, in a room full of people who weren’t born when I bought it, and they feel what I felt, that’s the job. That’s the whole job. The music carries it. My job is not to get in the way.”

We end up, inevitably, outside a building that used to be a club and is now something unrecognisable. Fergus cuts the engine. We sit for a while without speaking. The street is empty. Somewhere in the middle distance a bus hisses past. “I still play,” he says, after a bit. “Better rooms, sometimes, than the ones we’re driving past. But nothing has ever felt like those ones. Nothing ever will. That’s alright. You don’t get to keep that. You just get to carry it.”

With twenty-five plus years of memories and melodies buzzing through our bodies, we jump back in the car. He turns the key, and as the engine hums to life, sounding like the final fade of a track we never wanted to end, we drive off back the way we came. But something is different. The energy, the desire not to stop here, this musical journey has not yet finished. 

Tracklisting

1. Shoges – The Far Aways (Ferg’s Decoded Intro Edit) [Vapour Recordings]
2. Paul James Nolan – Transmute (Four Candles Remix) [UV Music]
3. Shoges – Melt [Vapour Recordings]
4. Amháin, Joe Miller – Yggdrasil (Jamie Stevens Remix) [Balance Music]
5. MiekeJames – String Theory (Original Mix) [MNL]
6. Redspace, Olven, Atique – Thread (Atique Extended Remix) [Univack Records]
7. Matt Oliver – Obsidian Pulse (Redspace Remix) [Plastic Fantastic]
8. DJ Ruby – God Sigma (Original Mix) [Warung Recordings]
9. Mike Bentley – Sastruga (Doug Crawford Remix) [Affiliate]
10. Tobi Amuchastegui – Spectral [onedotsixtwo]
11. Hobin Rude – Mirror (Jon Towell Remix) [Brisbeats Records]
12. Elliot Moriarty – Halo (Leandro Murua Remix) [Nightcolours Recordings]
13. Emmanuel Dip – Bacab [Mango Alley]
14. Ewan Rill- Avio (Original Mix) [Plastic Fantastic]
15. Stereo Underground – Above the Clouds [Vapour Recordings]
16. Guy J – No Drama (Original Mix) [Global Underground]
17. Ranj Kaler, Fauxplay – Call of the Cosmos [Forensic Records]
18. Boraa – Frozen Memories (Matt Oliver Remix) [Suza Records]
19. Kasey Taylor & Stereo Underground – Lose your mind (Original Mix) [Vapour Recordings]
20. Miro – Paradise (Quivver Extended Remix) [UV Music]
21. Quivver – Keep on Runnin’ [Bedrock Records]
22. Yunus Guvenen – Archive (Original Mix) [Bedrock Records]
23. Cass (UK) – Grey Skull (Cass 4by4 Mix) [OurSecretLab Sounds]
24. Aubrey Fry – Eternal Moment (Jody Barr Remix) [Sudbeat Music]
25. Sander Kleinenberg – My Lexicon (Jaap Ligthart & Greg Ochman Remix) [White Label]

by Tameaka Roach

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