This week’s Flashback Friday features another much beloved artist from the trance scene who is no longer active in the genre but whose place in the pantheon of producers is indisputable: Doof.

Producer Nick Barber was in Goa in the early 90s and strongly inspired by what he correctly sensed was a burgeoning global movement of personal growth and celebration. He had made some tracks for fun, including a very early mix of the linked track with the sample ‘Mars Needs Women’ that he had picked up in an old movie called ‘It Came From Hollywood’ – as Nick states, ‘I taped the movie off TV when I was a teenager and that clip always made me laugh. Then when I started making trance music and I was looking for samples I remembered that movie.’

Years later after his early mix for a friend’s birthday party got circulated, Dick Trevor told Nick about having seen the words ‘Mars Needs Women’ written on the wall of a house in Manali, so Nick states, ‘I decided to write a track to feature it properly, and that became the track that’s on the first Doof album.’

Some of Nick’s early tracks were produced with Simon Posford – and it should be noted he also worked on Simon’s tracks, notably co-producing the amazing Hallucinogen track Angelic Particles – and recently his groundbreaking album Let’s Turn On was reissued by Dat Records with an entire parallel album of alternate mixes of each track from the album, some of which Nick (and the producers, myself included) prefer to the original released mixes.

The video here of the great ‘Mars Needs Women’ original mix (there are at least three mixes that exist and which have been issued) was seen widely on MTV – the first trance video of its kind that I know of (it’s a shame that not many more such videos appear to have been made, though Prana’s Boundless was of course an important one) – a bit low-budget by today’s standards but of course a revolutionary concept, particularly for the American MTV network. You can see a long-haired Nick in big bug-eye sunglasses (which he eventually removes) dancing in the spaceship together with our mutual friend Julie (who is decked out in fluoro Hikari clothes, whose design was produced by Organix, who had created all the Matsuri artwork). The audio features the remastered track from the recent Dat Records release. Julie added, when I posted this video on Facebook, “Wow, nice surprise to see this circulating once again… I remember when Nick asked me to come and dance in the video…I was really flattered, to be a woman that Mars needed. 😉. We had such a blast filming…. And Nick was always so sweet & inspiring … Wonderfully talented guy…. “

Incidentally, the name ‘Doof’ refers to the Australian term for a forest party, where ‘doof’ is the sound of the kick-drum …

An influential, all-time classic track by one of the most heart-centered and appreciated artists of the 90s!