Q. What was the first rave you ever went to? What impressed you the most at that time?

I am not sure I remember much about it other than it was in the late 90s and a cross between techno, drum and bass and psy-trance, somewhere in North London. I remember having a lot of fun and strangely, I can also remember exactly what my girlfriend at the time was wearing, mainly because her trousers were mental! The rest is a wonderful blur of crowds, lasers and bass.

Q. When did you start music activities? What did you do first?

I started out as a drummer sometime in the 1987/88 school year. I spent my childhood and teenage years playing in rock and metal bands. It wasn’t until I went to music college in 1995 that I fully embraced jazz and funk. I then went on to play in jazz quartets, big bands and show bands, doing musical theatre and small jazz sessions. By the time the year 2000 came around I was fully submerged in electronic music and that was the year I bought my first ever music-making computer, my trusted G3 400MHz PowerBook! I loved that machine. I wrote and performed live on it for many years. It’s crazy to think that was all possible on a 400MHz processor. You can’t even run a phone on processing power that low these days! Until the purchase of that Powerbook, my entire recorded music work had all been on tape. Four and eight track tape machines for home demos and 16 or 24 track tape in the professional studios I have been lucky enough to work in over the years. I am grateful I didn’t start writing electronic music until we could use computers as samplers, rather than the old hardware units. I appreciate their place in history and I have lots of respect for those producers that made pioneering records using them, but if I had to deal with only a few seconds sampling time and editing on a tiny lcd screen, I probably would have just stuck to metal and jazz!

Q. In which cities was hardcore techno popular in the UK at that time?

I can’t really say much about the years prior to the late 90s as I wasn’t part of any electronic or dance music scene during that time. I just wasn’t involved in that world. From the 2000s onwards some cities have had some preferences for types of dance music, but as the UK is quite small, most styles have eventually permeated all across the country.

London and Bristol were definitely the front runners for jungle and drum and bass; London and Manchester for dubstep. Techno, being one of the older genres, has been popular across most of the UK for some time, but London and Birmingham have been its strongholds for many years now. Hardcore techno had its roots largely in the north of England, North Wales and Scotland, with events like Steam, North and Species leading the way with that style. As for breakcore, despite its very early UK origins in London and its brief takeover in Brighton due to Wrong Music, Bristol was its true UK home and remains so to this day.

2021.05

MDC Interview#48 " Babyshaker "

MDC Interview#47 " Scheme Boy "