Defending the Indefensible: David Zowie's 'House Every Weekend'

Defending the Indefensible is a semi-regular series which sees us trying to find merit in the abject, the terrible, and the deathly dull. We don't believe that there's such a thing as "guilty pleasure", so this series sets out to prove that even the most shocking and schlocky corners of dance music can find a home in somebody's heart.

I like house music. I really like house music. I spend most of my waking day listening to house music. Its great, house music, isn't it? It's the best. Like I said, I can't stop listening to it. House, hard house, normal house, shallow house, deep house, tech-house, outsider house, insider house, hipster house, minimal house, microhouse — if it's house then you can guarantee I'm going to listen to it. Every day I find myself listening to the stuff. I sing house tunes in the shower, blast it on the bus, eat my cous cous to it at lunch, get into bed with a few house records of an evening. And that's why I like "House Every Weekend" by David Zowie.

Yeah, go on, laugh at me, pour as much scorn on me as you're able to muster. Parade me down the street on a carnival float made of Huaraches and depleted nos canisters into an afterparty. Passive-aggressively favourite my tweets and send my Facebook profile photos to your WhatsApp-banter-with-the-boys group. Yes, vilify and ruin me, all because I like listening to "House Every Weekend".

I suppose that if I'm providing a defence of the song, it makes sense to make a few statements on behalf of the prosecution. "House Every Weekend", they say, is rubbish, a generic, inert lump of provincial-club chart-cheese, a joyless trudge through the backwaters of post-2012 UK "deep house", a pinpointedly perfect example of everything dull and stultifying about the kind of house that the real heads recoil from. It is, they continue, spittle lolling round their lips, temples throbbing, is a tune for sixteen year olds from Bracknell to shuffle to in the carpark of the local Lidl. When asked to explain themselves and their criticisms, they — with backpacks stuffed with Numero Group reissues and Clone Royal Oak 12"s — stutter and splutter. "It's leaden! It plods! It's not as good as the Zenker Brothers record we just bought from Hardwax!". They are laughed out of court and I laughed the hardest and heartiest because I like "House Every Weekend".

Why? Because, put simply, "House Every Weekend" fucking bangs. Seriously, it is absolutely massive. Sure, that bassline has been used in literally every single deep-tech-deep-house-interzone bubbler since dubstep swallowed so many wobbles that it's corpse washed sadly down the Thames, beaching itself in Tilbury where a few disinterested dockers prodded it with a dogshit-smeared stick and everyone started listening to house again. Yes, it sounds like it was knocked together in fifteen minute in FL Studio. True, the verses are pretty shonky. But so what? Who cares that it's incredibly derivative? Who cares that in a month's time the WKD-addled teens blasting it in every souped up Nova from Fazakerly to Frome will have spat it out like a spitty bit of Extra in favour of whatever fresh and flash stick of housey-Juicy Fruit's been passed their way? I don't. Because I like "House Every Weekend"

I like "House Every Weekend" for the following reasons.

1) It sounds like being at the funfair. This might be because I heard it about fifteen times at the Lambeth Country Show this weekend and everytime that chorus bounced around the artisan burger vans and the bumper cars, it sounded next level. Seriously, this is the waltzer anthem our generation deserves. If you haven't puked up a hot dog or three to this after a whirl on a terrifyingly cranky ride with an airbrushed collage of Michael Jackson behind it then you've royally fucked the summer.

2) I know nothing at all about David Zowie apart from what I've just skim read on his Wikipedia page. This is a good thing. I am able to separate the artist from his art.

3) House records about being house records — which accounts for about 63% of all house music ever recorded — are always good house records.

4) It's got a good hook. A great hook. A wonderful hook. You can sing along to it. You can hum along to it if you're the kind of person who doesn't like singing along to things. You can enjoy it internally and silently if you're a joyless husk of a man like me and the idea of humming, let alone singing, is about as appealing as taking stinging nettles to a festival in lieu of babywipes.

5) The lyrics are great. I think it is about a bloke who literally can't get out of the house. He's trapped, physically, metaphorically, within both himself and his house, so this song is his cry for help, a pleading, yearning, howl into the void, a desperate attempt to vacate the prison he's found himself dwelling in. It's a terrifying prospect. Imagine it. Imagine being stuck in your house every weekend. Every single Saturday and Sunday forevermore, stuck there, pacing from room to room, ambling into the bathroom for want of anything else to do, itemizing everything in the drawer of shit in the kitchen over and over again, fluffing pillows for hours on end, eating dust and washing it down with tears. Think of that next time you're raising a luridly coloured alcopop in the air at 2am to "House Every Weekend". Think of that.

I like "House Every Weekend".

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