The Life and Lines Of Brandon Block

THE LIFE & LINES OF BRANDON BLOCK - The Official Biography by Matt Trollope Brandon Block, the joker in the pack, the Ibiza ‘nutter’, the party animal who single-handedly created the Caner Of The Year category, was literally lying on his death bed. And despite the chronic situation that he found himself in, with drips attached to his ravaged body as he battled jaundice and tuberculosis, he was still trying his hardest to shovel as much cocaine as possible up that famous hooter of his! The result of a spiralling drug habit which, at its peak, saw him take an ounce of coke a day for months was his bewildered doctor telling him that he would die within two weeks if he didn’t stop pronto. But that wasn’t going to deter Brandon. He pleaded with friends to bring coke to the hospital and they duly, if reluctantly, obliged. If he was on his way out, then he was going out on a high, at least that was the twisted and warped way he looked at it. However, by then he had to take so much of the stuff for it to actually register that it almost defeated the object. Clubland had snorted him up one nostril and blown him out of the other. A haunting shadow of the livewire DJ who leapt on to the house music scene in the late ’80s, Brandon somehow managed to drag himself out of the mire and lived to tell the tale. With his astronomical coke habit - and the complex network of dealers who fuelled it - now fortunately in the past, he is able to look back (through somewhat hazy spectacles) on a 25-year-career which spans the highest highs and lowest lows. His own success and turmoil has weaved in and out of the so-called acid house generation and seen Blocko, like no other DJ, crossover mischievously into mainstream celebrity too. Brandon’s pioneering residency with Alex P on the Space terrace in the early ’90s took club life in Ibiza and throughout the world to a whole new dimension. Meanwhile, away from the world of underground dance music, he famously stormed the Brits stage, scrapping with Rolling Stone Ronnie Wood, ending up splashed across the front of the tabloids the next day, with Richard and Judy appealing for his whereabouts later that night! The Life & Lines Of Brandon Block looks back at the career of a DJ who was there from the very start of the modern-day club movement, who had grafted as a pub and mobile DJ during the mid-’80s, a few years later finding himself in a prime position when, like many, he discovered the drug ecstasy and house music quickly followed a love of disco, soul, jazz funk and hip-hop. This biography charts how a groundbreaking decade or two of clubbing became a national and global phenomenon and how Brandon was intrinsically linked to it all, headlining an era that changed the lives of millions, but also becoming a symbol for its excess.