I was there. In the basement party on the Lower East Side the night James Murphy first took ecstasy. Murphy was handing round Juicy Fruit gum to the ravers and David Holmes dropped “Tomorrow Never Knows” the instant he came up.
“[My friends] were all around me chanting my name and pointing at me and I was losing my s*** to my favourite song,” Murphy told Lizzie Goodman for her 2017 book about the post-2000 New York rock scene, Meet Me in the Bathroom. “I had a revelation. This is actually me. I was fully me.” Holmes, the renowned Belfast DJ manning the decks at that bacchanalian early party thrown by Murphy’s fledgling label DFA Records (standing for Death from Above) around 2001, saw a light come on in him. “I watched his life completely change in that moment,” he said, “and it was beautiful.”
