RIP Mark Kamins

I was going to interview Mark Kamins yesterday. I had contacted him through email, set up a call and was already doing the requisite research into his lengthy and varied career. It seemed hard to pull everything together. On the one hand, here was a guy that was probably best known for getting Madonna a record deal. On the other, he has an enormous Discogs page featuring the always nebulous “Credits: Production” tag on records from artists like The Beastie Boys, David Byrne and Underworld.

That strange world where genre wasn’t even a word, let alone a dirty one, was the one that Kamins came up in and – perhaps more so than any other figure – embodied. Nightclubs in New York City in the ’80s were anything-goes musical free-for-alls, especially Danceteria, the venue where Kamins made his mark spinning. Electro, hip hop and house were Kamins’ specialty. But as Arthur Baker notes in a tribute, “Mark played every kind of music... his use of [Israeli vocalist] Ofra Haza samples and jet blasts and sirens were risky, extreme and revolutionary. Visiting Mark in the DJ booth back then was fairly hectic – it often included shots and lines and then the chance of getting my new acetate or cassette a testing before one of New York City’s best audiences.”

It’s hard to overstate the wideness of Danceteria’s musical remit. In an episode of The Tube, a very young Jools Holland and co-presenter Leslie Ash quiz the owners of the club about their philosophy. Music programmer Ruth Polsky mentions “oompah bands to Diamanda Galas to the funkiest thing happening on the street” while standing in front of a photo of Klaus Nomi. Leslie Ash appears in the booth a moment later talking to Kamins himself. He doesn’t really have a good answer as to the music that people prefer at Danceteria. “It’s whatever’s got that magic feeling to it,” he shrugs. Quando Quango, Afrika Bambaataa, Peech Boys. It’s not at all similar, he admits. Yet it all shares a certain something.

This intermingling of disparate creative types has returned to some degree in the past decade with the inexorable rise of the internet. But the shock that came in hearing its results is gone forever. There’s an excellent mix of some of Kamins’ best productions that was recently compiled over at testpressing.org. In it, you can hear Kamins’ wandering ear moving from synth pop to world music to whatever the hell you want to call his work with Karen Finley.

The mix only includes one Finley collab, an instrumental version of “Tales of Taboo,” which is a clear nod to their relationship, but seems to miss the point spectacularly. Even though it highlights Kamins’ strange synth sounds and innate sense of rhythm, you’re left without Finley’s confrontational and perverse lyrics. (“Get me off, get me off right now / Let me tell ya how I take the yams / Stick it up my grannie’s ass / She’s a really really nice granny / And I never touch her snatch / ’Cos she’s my granny”). All you get is a mess of Finley’s voice near the end asking you to pull her hair.

To me, “Tales of Taboo” and Finley’s other underground hit “Lick It” feel like the most fitting examples of Kamins the producer but also Kamins the person. While all of the headlines so far have invariably mentioned his championing of Madonna to Sire exec Seymour Stein, the single he produced for her – “Everybody” – sounds like a safe and polished bit of brilliant pop music. Exactly the type of thing you could take out of the clubs and sell. Finley, meanwhile, spent the ’90s fighting the US government when they deemed her art indecent.

Don’t get me wrong. I love “Everybody.” It’s an amazing record. But Kamins, as described by Black Book’s Steve Lewis was “exceedingly human... vulnerable but sure, brilliant yet lost, a good friend but often very much a loner.” Arthur Baker remembers “a charming companion who still loved living life to its upmost and fullest.” If you listen to “Everybody,” you’ll only get one side of what made Kamins so great. If you go a bit further, you’ll find the odd, the strange and the wonderful. That’s perhaps a better way of remembering what Kamins accomplished in his career and life. It’s not quite as clear-cut and obvious as you’d like it to be. But that’s what made New York – and Kamins himself – so vibrant.