There are people out there – and if you don’t know one, you probably are one yourself – who think everything was better in the past. You know the sort. They’d have you believe not a single decent dance track has been released since 2000, or that life was better in the days you could leave your front door open at night.

And they’ll no doubt tell you that dance music journalism in the past was brilliant and the stuff today isn’t a patch on it. And whilst I agree that what consists of journalism in dance music today is mostly terrible, the idea there was some kind of golden age is a fantasy. It might have been less bad, but that doesn’t mean it’s good.

Journalists suffer typically from having to retain a certain closeness to their subjects, because they need to be able to talk to them in the future. Dance music, being still run by quite a small community, suffers from this problem more than others – hence why dance music magazines almost venerate those they write about.

Of course, complaints about this aren’t new. Here’s one from the letters page – remember those? – from Muzik Magazine.

This letter was published in the May 2001 issue. I’m not exactly a pioneer…