HYSTERiA LiVE PRESENTS:

ARTIST..[ Tom Stephan
TITLE...[ Tom Stephan-Dasding Plattenleger-SAT-06-17

RELDATE.[ Jun-18-2006
AiRDATE.[ Jun-17-2006

TRACKS..[ 01
LENGTH..[ 62:23 min

NR.  NAME.                                   TiME:

01.  Dasding Plattenleger-SAT-06-17-2006     62:23

TOTAL: 62:23 min

You need a sense of humour if you are to survive
in this lark and anyone who names themselves after
a brand of petrol could reasonably be described
thus. (For those of you not fluent in Portuguese ?
and shame on you if you aren't ? Superchumbo
roughly means Super-unleaded petrol in Portugal,
something that has caused outbreaks of uncontained
mirth among the Iberian Peninsula DJs.) Still,
it's an improvement on Tom Stephan's previous
moniker, Tracy & Sharon, which caused such
confusion over the years that folk kept asking,
"So if you're Tracy, where's Sharon?" There never
was a Tracy or a Sharon, only a Tom.

It's the sort of twisted outlook on life that can
only be attributed to someone raised on a strict
diet of John Waters movies and Nitzer Ebb records.
Born and raised in a teeny town, Olean, outside
Buffalo in upstate New York, Stephan's path from
there to here has been strewn with the detritus of
a life lived on gas mark 11. Having resisted
house's winsome charms in favour of his beloved
Nitzer Ebb, Depeche Mode and other electronic
bands of that ilk, he was lured to the Sound
Factory in New York by a friend. "I wasn't very
keen on it," recalls Tom, "because I didn't really
like the idea of house music. Anyway, he took me
to there and I was totally converted overnight
into a house head."

Shortly after his revelatory experiences with
Junior Vasquez, Stephan moved over to the UK to
study. "Bizarrely, the first day in class I was
sitting next to this girl and we got talking and
she was like chums with Nitzer Ebb and they were
doing a show that weekend at Subterania," says
Tom. "So the first week I was here I was hanging
out with the band. I thought, 'right, I like it
here.'" The studies were less successful, though
Stephan eventually graduated from the London
International Film School. His Factory experiences
had given him a thirst for house, something that
was largely sated at Trade, though he readily
admits there was still something not quite right.
"I realised that there was something I got at the
Factory that I couldn't find here," he recalls.
"It was a different thing, going to hear Junior. I
guess that's why I wanted to try and bring a
little bit of that flavour here. On the gay scene
at least, no-one was trying to do that."

It was shortly before graduating that he got his
first single deal with Paul Cons' Flesh label,
'Filthy Hetero' by Sharon & Tracy, which did
pretty well in France, though it fell short of a
Top Of The Pops appearance here. On graduating,
without a UK work visa, he had few options. "I
thought, 'I can be a drug dealer, a rent boy, or a
DJ'," he laughs. "And, as someone pointed out to
me later, 'they're all pretty much the same
thing'." Fortunately, he invested in a pair of
decks and quickly secured his first gig, a bit of
a dream date, in fact, at the Ministry of Sound,
opening for Danny Tenaglia ("apart from the fact I
only played for about 20 minutes?"). More
importantly, it was the start of a friendship with
both Tenaglia and Tribal America head Rob Di
Stefano, which continues to this day.

A compilation ? Drag Addict, a collection of New
York-style bitch tracks ? followed, a debut single
as Superchumbo ('Get This') on Twisted, while a
five year a residency at Substation in London
confirmed a growing reputation, as well as
providing a solid grounding as a DJ. Says Tom:
"That gave me a lot of experience of different
situations. Like trying to get three people in a
room on to the dancefloor, or being given the
opportunity to build up a following. Although
SubStation was small, I really pushed for a weekly
spot where I could play for five hours and it was
great, because it's hard to get an opportunity
like that."

Fast forward to now and the sound that Tom has
persistently championed in the UK has at last
found favour on dancefloors here. "I feel like I'm
in a good position because suddenly the three Ts
(Tenaglia/Twisted/Tribal) sound is very
fashionable at the moment, there are a lot of
people jumping on it and having been playing it
all along, I feel I've got a great back catalogue
to draw on." He's not wrong. The new single on
Twisted, 'Revolution', has of course been causing
a kerfuffle on dancefloors worldwide and has led
to bewildering array of remix offers, bolstered by
his genre-twisting house?reading of Missy
Elliott's 'Get Ur Freak On', though Stephan still
sees himself as a producer more than anything. " I
can see the appeal of it ? people offer you loads
of money ? but it's not a direction I want to go
in," says Stephan of his remix offers. "But I
don't want to become a remixer." There is the
small matter of the Superchumbo album, presently
in gestation, and his collaboration with Danny
Tenaglia ? 'Ova' ? that has taken longer than an
elephant's pregnancy to come to fruition, though
an end is apparently in sight. Not bad for a bloke
named after a type of petrol!

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