When considering the iconic Australian DJs of the last 30 years, it's hard to go past Groove Terminator.
After starting off spinning records at the community radio station his parents founded in Adelaide, the ARIA-nominated DJ has been shaping the course of the dance industry for 35 years now, bagging appearances on Ministry Of Sound's esteemed compilations, managing an international career, and creating 'Ministry Of Sound: Orchestrated', the incredibly successful live show merging the best dance mixes in Australian history with a live orchestra.Up is the only way Groove Terminator aka Simon Lewicki considers going, so when his manager posed the question: 'What would be next if the sky's the limit?', Groove Terminator naturally chose teaming up with one of the world's greatest gospel choirs, three-time Grammy winners Soweto Gospel Choir, for History Of House – a sonic lesson through the ages of house, soul, disco and everything in between.
"It's an absolute joy to be part of this and put it together with the choir," Simon says. "I miss them when I’m not around them actually.
"Dance music is all about the vocals and the message of letting go and being free, and I thought the best way to convey that would be with a choir. My manager said, 'The world's your oyster. Who do you want to work with?'
"So, of course, in my top three was Soweto Gospel Choir. He said, 'I can get you a meeting with those guys'. So I went and caught their show at the [Sydney] Opera House, and it was such an incredible show. It's really moving.
"Afterwards, I came backstage with my manager and the senior members of the choir, and their Australian manager Andrew said to them, 'Simon's got this idea for a show that he'd like to talk to you about'.
"And they're all looking very serious like, 'who is this guy?', and I said, 'I've got this idea that music's incredibly healing, and we can play the greatest dance songs ever made and combine the message of the show with inclusiveness and coming together and freedom to live your life as you choose it, free from prejudice'.
"And they went, 'that sounds great', because it's very much what their show's about as well. And I said, 'it's the history of dance, the history of house!, and they went, 'great, that's a great idea'.
"I spent the next three months working on what that was going to sound like, decades and decades of dance music, and you can't talk about house music without disco and soul. So we dive into the defining tracks of each decade.
"For 90 minutes, I cram as much as possible in there. I think I've got about 65 songs. There's some really great moments, it's pretty powerful. And they're all incredible singers, just locking the perfect harmonies, and everyone's doing mad choreography, which I jump in on and look incredibly whack.
"It's an incredibly uplifting and joyful experience. There's a glow on people after the show, everyone's just beaming. I find it very healing."
The show had big plans across the world before COVID stopped it in its tracks, however the prestigious duo are back with no signs of slowing, touring across Australia throughout spring.
"When we workshopped the show for the first time in 2020, the Choir learnt all these songs in three days. We've got to this great point where it isn't so much me and the choir, it's become us now.
"There's this really great musical shorthand happening, we're locking into this next level of performance, and it feels really organic. There's multiple goosebump moments in the show for me. From the first time the Choir sings behind me, I get a full charge."
Song selection proved a monumental task, but Groove Terminator is up to the challenge. "I've been a professional DJ for 35 years now, I was DJing high school radio before that. So when I was choosing the songs, I broke it up into decades. These are the songs that moved the needle, so to speak, in a cultural way or are a really important artist.
"Songs like 'Blue Monday', New Order, the biggest selling 12-inch [vinyl] of all time, that's a defining song. And 'Le Freak' by Chic. The backstory about that is, they wrote it because they couldn't get into Studio 54 one night. The original lyrics were 'f... off, f... off', instead of 'le freak'.
"We have Sylvester, an incredibly significant queer producer, songwriter and artist who tragically died during the AIDS epidemic in the '80s. We have this part where we're singing 'Respect' over the top and he's talking about making you feel mighty real.
"It's all about being positive, they're really powerful messages. There's a record I like in the '80s section, 'I.O.U.' by Freeez. I think I must have been 11 when that record came out, and I remember going, 'I want a BMX! Why can't I spin on my head?'.
"Any DJ in Australia of a certain era, you start off being a complete music man. You spend a lot of time reading album covers and scouring record shops. My nickname in certain parts is Le Wikipedia. I can chart a journey from James Brown to The Prodigy, connect the dots musically, which is what we do in the show. That's what I've always done."
Music has always been about connection for Groove Terminator, a way to immerse himself in the culture of the day.
"I came up through the first generation of hip hop culture in Australia, it was all about graffiti and beatboxers and spinning on cardboard. And I was really terrible at graffiti, I was a really terrible break dancer, but I had access to music and I made the mixtapes.
"It was always about sharing music. And I get to talk about songs people may have overlooked or present them in a new light, and while I'm doing all that mixing, I have the greatest gospel choir in the world behind me. Just the sheer energy of live vocals mixed with the doof, doof, doof of a very good dance record, it's hard to beat."
As someone who has seen music production technology evolve significantly, Groove Terminator welcomes the latest technological advancement, AI, as another tool, however bemoans the lack of practical uses.
"I think we haven't even begun to understand what AI's capable of. What's happened in the last 20 years is the democratisation of music. I can make a track on my iPhone now, which is pretty amazing.
"There used to be this real barrier to entry, and it was easy to keep on top of new music. It's now 50,000 songs being uploaded every day to Spotify. There's just so much noise and I think with AI, what I'm seeing is people feeding 'I want a Top 40 record', and if you're feeding mediocrity into it, you're gonna get mediocrity out of it.
"There's a lot of content creation and copywriting stuff that is probably going to go out the window. But I think good writing is good writing, it's always gonna come through.
"My mother is a professor in an English university, and it's a really big thing at a doctorate, PHD level. There's a great Instagram account I follow called There, I Ruined It. I think it's absolutely great, Johnny Cash doing N.W.A. lyrics. That's what it should be, do it for fun.
"Why are we getting AI to do all the fun jobs like music and art and writing, and why aren't they cleaning my toilet? Give me a robot to clean my toilet!"
History Of House 2023 Tour Dates
Sun 10 Sep - Brisbane Festival @ The Princess TheatreFri 6 Oct - Night At The Barracks (Sydney)
Fri 20 Oct - Theatre Royal (Castlemaine)
Sat 21 Oct - Brunswick Ballroom (Melbourne)
Sat 28 Oct - Forum Melbourne
Fri 3 Nov - HOTA (Gold Coast)
