HousePlanet.DJ - Your House Music News Portal - HousePlanet Distribution

  Ecstasy use is something Judge Jules seems to know all about. He has a house in Ibiza, where he has worked as a DJ for years and which he once described as “the party capital of the world”. Its hospitals treat more overdose victims than anywhere else and, in the summer, it is said that 40,000 ecstasy tablets are consumed each night. It was in Ibiza that Judge Jules made clear his shoulder-shrugging attitude. “There’s no point in me as a spokesperson saying ‘Don’t take too many Es’, because people will,” he once told BBC News. “Keep it at experimentation.”

A dark week. Two more digital stations, Planet Rock and theJazz, will fall silent (on March 28), on top of Oneword and Core, which went off the air last month. Two Classic FM presenters, Lisa Duncombe and Mark Griffiths, are also being axed – to make way for Helen Mayhew and Margherita Taylor from theJazz, who will be bringing jazz with them and playing it for the first time on Classic’s daily schedule.

But if life is bleak and upsetting in commercial radio, the BBC could hardly be happier, comfortably insulated from the economic problems that plague its rivals. Radio 1 feels especially chirpy, having put on 400,000 listeners in the past year.

What the station needs to do now is consider the acceptability of its 12-hour dance-music marathon, which runs from 7pm on Friday to 7am on Saturday. It offers “piping-hot tunes”, “hot mixes” and “remixes”, the sort of hypnotic music that people listen to when they go clubbing.

Normally, it is launched by Pete Tong. Sixteen days ago, however, Tong was in Brazil, at the Rio carnival, so Judge Jules sat in for him. At 7.20pm, after one track, he told his young audience: “The last time I heard that, I was chewing my face off in a field in the early Nineties.”

For those unfamiliar with this phrase, “chewing my face off” is almost certain to be a reference to the taking of ecstasy, the drug indelibly associated with clubbing. This is because it is famous for producing involuntary teeth-clenching and frenzied jaw movements (“One of the signs of ecstasy use is the possession of a baby’s dummy to relieve jaw pains,” the BBC’s website explains, pointing out that it is also linked to liver damage and acne). Some music fans may also recall the phrase on the opening track of the Darkness’s 2005 album, One Way Ticket to Hell, which includes the lyrics “ . . . chewing my face off and talking absolute rubbish”.

Richard Brunstrom, the chief constable of North Wales, caused a furore last month when he suggested that ecstasy was safer than alcohol or aspirin. That may or may not be true, though try telling it to the parents of teenagers who have died after taking it. In any case, it is illegal and a class A drug, and that is beyond dispute. There is something grotesque about a high-profile Radio 1 presenter using his position to make a comment that appears to make light of its use – especially at a time when 243,000 children are listening. Judge Jules is a 42-year-old LSE law graduate. His real name is Julius O’Riordan and, as it happens, he’s the nephew of Rick Stein. He should know better.

The BBC agrees with this. A spokesman for Radio 1 said: “The producer of the show spoke to Judge Jules after the broadcast and made it clear that this was an inappropriate comment to make.” Quite right too. Next time, he should get the chop.

source Times Online 

JudgeJules.net

Judge Jules @ Oceana, 2006

{myspacetv 3144637|400|316} 

Related Items: 

Judge Jules 2008 Interview 

Buzz Chart 16. January 

DJ MAG TOP 100 2007 Results