Kerri Chandler

The young Kerri Chandler.

Club culture is in Kerri Chandler’s blood. His dad was a DJ and broadcaster in New Jersey, where Kerri grew up in the city of East Orange. Numerous relatives were also DJs, musicians or sound technicians, and everyone had turntables. Even his nan had decks in her bedroom. Kerri has a childhood memory of being dispatched by her to the local record store to buy ‘Jam on It’ by Newcleus on 12-inch.

“Even now I can’t believe she was that damn cool,” he says, laughing. Small wonder, really, that Kerri became a DJ himself.

As a child in the early-80s he’d sneak into his dad’s bedroom — his parents had separated — to practise on the turntables when he wasn’t around. One day his dad, Joseph, caught him and, realising how accomplished his son had become, began taking Kerri to DJ with him in clubs. Thirteen-year-old Kerri would stand on a crate so he could reach the decks while Joseph passed him records to mix from labels such as Salsoul, Prelude and Philadelphia International, as well as European imports by the likes of Giorgio Moroder and Kraftwerk.

“I’d make it seamless,” Kerri says. “My timing was dead on as a kid. I knew how to cue things up, how to beatmatch, and how to run double copies to extend the songs. I wasn’t playing around — I wanted to be taken seriously.”

Word spread about his precocious talent, and Kerri became a clubland fixture before he’d even left school. “I was always the kid running around like a crazy person, sucking it all in like a sponge. I’ve had some incredible people showing me how things work.”

The most profound influence was his father, who tragically died after being hit by a car in 2017: “A lot of what I do is still inspired by him,” Kerri says. Other mentors have included Tony Humphries, Merlin Bobb, François Kevorkian, David Morales – who provided “big brother conversations” and schooled him in the art of mixing with reel-to-reels — and the late, great Frankie Knuckles, who also “gave the best hugs on the planet”.

Talking via Zoom from his house in New York, Kerri reckons that: “Growing up, I must have played every main club in New York and New Jersey.” These included Jersey hotspots such as Zanzibar (a suburban, straighter version of the Paradise Garage with a world-class Richard Long sound system), Club 88 and Club America, where he was the resident and where the young Queen Latifah and Whitney Houston hung out; as well as Manhattan’s Sound Factory, Red Zone, Tunnel, Shelter and the Garage itself. (True fact: one of his less starry gigs came in the mid-90s, when he did a guest mix on my Saturday night radio show on Sheffield’s Groove FM – a former pirate station that rejoiced in a temporary legal license for four glorious weeks. If the two-deck, four-channel-mixer setup on a rickety table seemed basic compared with the booth at Zanzibar, Kerri didn’t show it: he played a blinder.)

It was inevitable he’d start making music too. He’d learnt to play bass guitar and piano as a kid and served an apprenticeship as a sound engineer at Atlantic Records, the label that released his debut single, ‘Super Lover’/’Get It Off’ in 1991. Both are sublime house tracks that still stand up today, as do most Chandler productions. And there have been many — he lost count a long time ago but there are more than 3,000 singles, remixes and EPs listed on Discogs, plus four albums. You’d never realise it to listen to ‘Get It Off’ — all warm pads and sweet vocal snippets before the sound of a needle being ripped off a record introduces a tougher jackin’ groove — but the track was a tribute to teenage Kerri’s girlfriend Tracy, who had been raped and murdered by a jealous ex who was subsequently convicted and jailed. The needle rip symbolised that traumatic event, and the change of groove the fact that Kerri’s life would never be the same. It was an abstraction of course — but the process of using something horrific to inspire a thing of beauty helped Kerri to grieve. “She was my heart. I couldn’t imagine life without her. And I thought, this is how I’m going to express myself from now on, because she loved it [house music] so much. Every single song I’ve done since then, they all have a story.”

His dad Joseph DJing.

What makes a great house record? “I’d say if you can find a way to get your thoughts onto a record, and other people can relate to what you’re trying to express, and it’s heartfelt —that’s what makes it great.”

A gentle, equable, affable soul, Kerri is a lifelong audiophile whose eyes acquire a certain gleam whenever the subject of music technology crops up in conversation, at which point you’d better strap yourself in because, boy, does he know his stuff. He built his home studio — and his other home studio, and his other other home studio — and routinely constructs and customises mixers and effects units. His soundchecks at venues are so thorough, they have their own noun: Chandlerisation, a process that often entails retuning and rebalancing the entire sound system. He creates holograms of singers performing classic house tracks, which he uses for gobsmacking audio-visual DJ performances (check the footage on YouTube). He’s even sent a recording of his seminal deep house hit ‘Track One’ into space from a transmitter in Norway. “I’ve always joked that I could get so much more done if I cloned myself,” he says. But his output is so prolific, it can seem as though he already has.

Then again, maybe not: it’s been 14 years since he last put an album out — a gap he attributes to “touring all the time”. Now the wait is over with the release of his fifth album, ‘Spaces and Places’. Over 24 tracks he has skilfully woven elements of disco, soul, funk, Latin, Afrobeat, dub and jazz over his trademark powerhouse house beats. There is an extensive guest list of musicians and vocalists — Kerri also sings and plays keyboards — part of his “extended family” of long-term collaborators. Singers such as Troy Denari, Bluey Robinson, Sunchilde and Lady Linn, and musicians such as Italian sax player Mauro Capitale and Patrick Mangan (two-time all-Ireland fiddle champion, no less) are among them.

The tracks were recorded on the road by turning the world’s finest clubs into temporary studios — finally a solution to the “touring all the time” problem. The process began in 2018 and would have been completed faster but for the lockdowns; Chandler spent his time at home learning how to edit in Dolby Atmos: the album is available in this format on platforms such as Apple Music, Tidal and Amazon. Venues he recorded in included the Ministry of Sound and Printworks (London), Knockdown Center and Output (New York), the Warehouse Project (Manchester), Club Qu (Berlin), the Rex Club (Paris), District 8 (Dublin) — the list goes on. He would plot up in the clubs during the day with his laptop and an assortment of keyboards, sequencers, drum machines, effects and mics, and turn the soundcheck into a studio session, with singers and musicians dropping by to record live. Each club’s sound system served as monitors, meaning he could “tune each song to match the club… Monitoring is everything for me, how music translates in a room is the most important thing."

He's been a DJ for 40 years and is still at the top. What advice would he give to anyone starting out now? “Do the one thing that’s just you. Don’t try to follow somebody else’s thing. Add to the scene, don’t just take from it. It never used to be about being the big DJ guy. We were just trying to bring the whole scene up. We supported the shit out of each other. It was always let’s make this group together, let’s do this thing so the entire city can have parties — and we can all be part of it.” JACOB MUNDAY32_DISCO_POGO

Kerri and his dad, Joseph.