Beauty and the Beat was born in 2005, when our beautiful house parties started bursting at the seams.

The three of us had become friends during the previous couple of years, whilst working together to help put on the famous ‘Journey Through the Light’ parties at the Light bar in London. These are regular parties presided over by the legendary New York DJ and musical host, David Mancuso. David has been holding ‘The Loft’ – New York’s longest-running party – since 1970, and for most of that time it was actually held in his home, always striving to replicate the atmosphere of a perfect house party on a somewhat larger scale.

It was no surprise that we should all have been drawn to the Loft. For years before we respectively got to meet David (Cedric when he was living in NYC, Jem on David’s first visit to London in 2001, and Cyril on the occasion of the first Journey Through the Light parties), we had been putting an unusual amount of effort into our own house parties, which had certainly acquired a legendary status amongst friends, if nothing more.

Once we met, our affinities were obvious – a shared love of music, a commitment to the house party as a collective art form, and a healthy disrespect for the clichés and assumptions of mainstream club culture. It wasn’t long before our crowds of friends and party-goers started to merge and grow, to the point where our lounges just couldn’t take it! It was time to go public.

By the summer of 2003 it was clear that we had a big enough crowd, and had acquired enough high-quality sound equipment between us, to put on a smallish club night. Ideally we would have liked just to move into a giant flat and invite everyone in London to a party every weekend, but that ain’t gonna happen any time soon. So ever since then we’ve been doing the next best thing: putting on a regular party which feels as much like that as possible, and opening it to whoever wants to come. We nicked the name ‘Beauty and the Beat’ from the Edan album of the same name (a great record), but we weren’t sorry to realise that it had already been the title of a classic album by the Go-Gos! We were a bit nonplussed when the name was used for a Goa trance compilation – we are not fans of psy-trance and its superwhite, funk-free version of ‘psychedelia’ (although we respect the positive spirit of the global trance-party scene) – but you can’t have everything.

This wasn’t an entirely new experience, and working together for the party turned out to be remarkably easy. We’d all been hosting big parties for years, and Cedric was already an established DJ. Jem is a noted cultural and political theorist who’d spent years thinking about what made the perfect party. Cyril was an old friend of Cedric’s from France whose outlook on things – from thoughtful left politics to a wide-ranging passion for music – was perfectly in tune with the other two. Still, it could all have been a disaster, but it wasn’t: our first party was a real success, with about 120 people dancing all night in a basement in Waterloo. Since then we’ve moved venues but the parties have gone from strength to strength in terms of numbers, energy and sheer dancefloor enthusiasm.

What is it that characterises one of our parties? Well, a number of things. We try to bring together a diverse crowd and we try to play tunes that pretty much anyone can dance to without ever boring the more discerning music-lover. When it really works – which it nearly always does – then the atmosphere combines hands-in-the-air party ecstasy with serious down-on-the-floor dance action. Ideally, we like to surprise our listeners constantly, moving from electro-pop to reggae to space-jazz to disco to deep house to acid-rock and back again in no time, but without ever jarring or losing momentum on the dancefloor. Our audiophile sound system is a big part of that: it’s amazing how much easier it is for people to get into a wide range of musics – familiar or unfamiliar – when they can hear them on a really great system which brings out all the musical detail without ever tiring your ears out. The overwhelming thud-thud-thud of a normal club system, even a pretty good one, just can’t do that. We don’t often mix records because that can’t be done on our audiophile turntables, and we want to be free to speed things up and slow them down in the course of a set, but we will bring in an ordinary DJ turntable and mix when the moment demands it.

Some people would say that our music policy is ‘eclectic’: in generic terms that’s true, we do play records from a very wide range of genres and periods. On the other hand, in aesthetic terms, it’s not really true. Our aesthetic may be trans-generic, but on its own terms, its quite rigorous. The records we play are always very carefully selected to combine melody and complexity, rhythmic interest and catchy basslines, uplifting tunes and hip-driving funk. Almost all of them are derived from a broad tradition of ‘psychedelic’ sounds which includes the acid-funk of Miles Davis, Sly Stone and Fela Kuti,  the deep disco productions of Walter Gibbons and Patrick Adams, the electronic energy of Moroder and his many followers, and the wide spectrum of house, techno and dub. If we play a tune that doesn’t obviously spring from those currents, then that’s because we think it belongs there anyway. When we play the Smiths ‘There’s a Light that Never Goes Out’, we hope our audience can hear the same echoes of Dan Hartman and African High-life that we can hear in that record, and they certainly seem to. We’re very proud of our programming – that is, our ability to put together a sequence of records that’s surprising, but always make a kind of sense in the context of the party, and which keeps the floor moving all night!

We often describe our sound as 'psychedelic', but our idea of 'psychedelic' music is not the same as that of most people who put on dance parties in London these days. We don't play trance or banging techno. We might play Miles Davis and we might play Madonna, we might play King Tubby and we might play Soft Cell. We'll play reggae or acid rock or funk or electro-punk or pure shimmering pop if that's the right thing to lift up the party or deepen the vibe.

Is there any purpose to what we do beyond having a really great party? Well, yes and no. It’s important these days to keep open some spaces for creativity, collectivity, and fun which aren’t wholly colonised by corporate culture. We don’t claim to be making any great inroads against international neoliberal capitalism, but we are creating a little bit of space in which people can be together. We live in a culture where it's increasingly hard for people to enjoy being together at all, as we're constantly encouraged to compete with each other, fear other, or to desire each other only as objects, commodities or lifestyle accessories. If we can create a bit of space where people can come together to enjoy each other's company, then that's something good. In particular, we aim to be a place for real music lovers, but not just for chin-stroking trainspotters: somewhere the real music lovers can bring their little sisters and expect them to have a great time!

Putting on the parties is hard work, but we love doing it, and so far the vibe at them is just getting better each time.