The Courier & Advertiser (Fife Edition)
Éclair Fifi DJ set
Slessor Gardens, Dundee, September 14
World-famous and wellestablished in the field of club and electronic music, Clair ‘Éclair Fifi’ Stirling has had so much more of an influence on the direction of Scotland’s underground music scene than just the quality of the music she plays.
Born and raised in Edinburgh, Clair is of a generation who can identify with their parents’ own clubbing experience.
Her mum and dad used to go to raves like the fabled Pure in Edinburgh and Rezerection at Ingliston Arena, and where many of her peers might have listened to their parents’ old Beatles or Abba records, she was growing up on a diet of house pioneers like Derrick May and Juan Atkins.
“(My parents are) both arty too, and they always encouraged me to study at art school,” she told Clash magazine in an interview.
“Never strict and pretty lefty, couldn’t ask for better.”
She followed the route of an artist and went to Edinburgh College of Art, and this background served her well when she joined the LuckyMe collective with a group of like-minded friends based in Edinburgh and Glasgow.
Although their cross-generational appeal is limited, anyone with an understanding of the dynamics of international club music in the 2010s knows that LuckyMe are both groundbreakers and superstars.
They released their first record in 2008 and their roster includes such cult artists as Hudson Mohawke, TNGHT, Machinedrum and Jacques Greene.
The sound their artists created fused house music and hip-hop beats to create a new aesthetic which has bled its way into the mainstream thanks to high-profile copyists; most notably, Hudson Mohawke produced music for Kanye West at one point. “I always feel grateful for what LuckyMe has done for me,” she told music site The Ransom Note of those beginnings.
“I was doing stuff before I met them (she started DJing hardcore music in the early 2000s), but they were the first crew to really put me on and believe in me.”
A DJ on one of the world’s first internet radio stations, Interface, Clair now has a slot on the go-to online club radio channel NTS, and has also broadcast as part of BBC Radio 1’s In New DJs We Trust series. She also modelled for H&M in 2014 but her celebrity isn’t the reason for this show.
A trained artist, her design work for LuckyMe has given the label and its artists much of their identity – indeed, it’s not unlikely that her own work will appear in the V&A one day.