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BORN
North London, in the year the man walked on the moon.
FAMILY
My Mum`s a teacher, a lecturer at university level, and my Dad`s done all bits and bobs. I wouldn`t call them musical really, no. They like music but they don`t play anything. I`ve actually got my Mum`s records now, which is great. She had some classic 60`s pop music in her collection, like the Beatles White Album. She had some Stones` albums, I remember we used to dance around to them when I was a... Read moreBORN
North London, in the year the man walked on the moon.
FAMILY
My Mum`s a teacher, a lecturer at university level, and my Dad`s done all bits and bobs. I wouldn`t call them musical really, no. They like music but they don`t play anything. I`ve actually got my Mum`s records now, which is great. She had some classic 60`s pop music in her collection, like the Beatles White Album. She had some Stones` albums, I remember we used to dance around to them when I was a kid. As for my Dad, he`s a straight up classical head.
MUSICAL ROOTS
They wanted to get me into music for sure. Like everyone else, I started on a recorder at school. Then I played the Trumpet for a bit but I hated it - it felt like I was just forced into playing an instrument. I ended up throwing it down the stairs one time - it was a £50 trumpet, which was a lot in those days so that was the end of that!
What really changed for me was when I got into the drums. I had a friend who got a kit; once I got on there that was it, I had found my instrument. I was a drum fanatic from 11 or 12. Yeah, an absolute fanatic. I would go to my room and maybe play for 4-6 hours a day. I got my own set when I was 14. It was a really nice 4th or 5th hand in psychedelic tortoise shell blue, 60s wooden pearl kit and I bought some rotatongs and added some symbols and hats over the year. By the time I was 18, I had a pretty fat kit and I could play for 5 to 6 hours a day sometimes, I loved it. It was drums drums drums for me.
I was in a physcabilly band, like a cross between a psychedelic and rockabilly band. There were all these bands happening in London, The Stingrays, The Meteors kind of came into that scene, all these garage punk bands. I was into that but we never had a songwriter, so we just did covers and played for school friends and did house parties, so it never really went any further than that.
FIRST PROJECTS
I went to Leeds to go to college and from that point was really into music. I didn`t really know much about it from the electronic side, but I started to get taken over to Manchester to meet people. Manchester was completely happening at that time, it was going off. It was a really amazing time and I remember the first time I went to the Hacienda. A story that`s been told a few times, nothing special, I just ended up in the Hacienda. As soon as you walked through those plastic curtains and heard the boom boom boom and just saw what people were like well, you either get really disturbed people who hated it or you really loved it. I obviously was one of the latter. We`d go over to Manchester every weekend, as there was nothing in Leeds – and so we got to thinking we might as well start our own night in Leeds. We had a night on Wednesdays in Leeds called `Clear` and I had Carl Cox up on a Wednesday night for the first time in Leeds. I remember I paid him 80 quid and he had about 25 people in the room but we all absolutely loved it, he even had 3 decks out at one point. We also had Weatherall, Justin Robertson, John Kelly. Honestly, I think our biggest night we had about 100 people and we were like `yeah we`ve got 100 people - we`re massive!` But from that, a guy called Alistair Cook came down to the night with his mate, Dave Beer, and they told me they were going to start a club on the Saturday. They asked me to come and be a resident on Saturday with Ali. And so I played the first ever record at Back To Basics on November 23rd 1991. I thought “This is fun,” and I still fucking love it! It still runs every week and, as far as I know, it`s the longest-running house night in the world. Some people kind of misuse the term `residency` when they play there once every 3 months – I`m there every week. It`s just a real part of my history, Back To Basics, Leeds. The whole sound has been very influenced from that club for sure.
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DJING
The thing that really happened to me was in 1992; Dave and I went to New York and went to the Sound Factory (which later became Twilight) to see Junior Vazquez. The whole way the Americans had done house music - from the soundsystem to the co-ordination of the lights, to the one DJ playing all night, to the way they work records and break records they have to be on their game every week because they`re playing to the same dedicated crowd every week. You`ve got to bring something new to the table every week and it just totally blew my mind – and that along with very strong LSD, it really was an acid house experience for me! I wont go too into drugs but it was really was an hallucinogenic experience for me and from that point on, I based myself on what I thought was a proper resident. I play every week and I couldn`t play all night because, in a town like Leeds, you have to have to guests in to bring the people in but I would always be the only resident on that floor. Ali was killed in a car crash though so I became resident. I played 4-5 hours, which is long before you would see on flyers `Sasha 3 hour set!` This was before `97, `98, when long sets became the norm. We weren`t doing these 12 hour New York marathon but we were doing longer sets than the rest of England. It gives you kind of scope to play different music, it`s not 2 hours bang bang bang, there`s room to go to more places; it`s more based on the house music journey. We would make sure we had good sound as well and give people a really good clubbing experience, the same that fabric does, but obviously on a much smaller scale. At our height in the 90`s, we had a place called the Pleasure Rooms and it was 2,000 people through the doors so it got to a substantial size. It was never a job, it was always a party. For quite some time I never went out of Leeds. I lived in a farm house in a place called the Rhubarb Triangle, which is the best place in Europe to grow rhubarb. It was a mad place to live, as rhubarb grows to 7-8 foot tall and there are fields of it, really trippy. We had a studio in there so when Basics would finish, we would all go back there and DJ all night there, the guest DJ would always come back with their crew as well. God knows what happened. People would leave by Sunday night and we`d come round Monday morning and just make music in the studio all day. That studio became 20:20 Vision studios, which gave birth to the record label.
LABELS & PRODUCTION // 20:20 VISION LIVE
Live sets came about really recently, started in 2003. That came about just by being really bored. I thought clubbing was really boring, all the DJs around at the time were really boring, everyone was playing it safe, everything was really repressive, there was no experimentation, there was no real leftfield, it had become such a boring mass-produced economy. For us in Leeds, Fabric being an exception, most of it was being fucking tired. It got to the point when I just thought I might go and do something completely different - and then it just all fell into place because I got asked to do this mix for Fat City Records, a down tempo label from Manchester who were much better known for being leftfield. I still wanted to mix it but the records weren`t cued up and synced. A really good mate called Double D told me, “I`ll drum the breaks then you can drop the beats over my breaks.” I knew he was tight, but to play with an electronic kit you`ve got to be shit-hot. Still, I thought we`d give it a go, so we booked some studio time in Manchester and it worked in one afternoon. It would start with me playing the records and he would drum the drum bass and he was so tight on the BPM - click for click - as soon as I would drop a tune, he would get in synch and we would do the mix drums. So that was the natural thing that came out of that project, back in 2001. He started dropping some percussion on a few tracks I was doing – and then I got a special demo tape sent to me. Although I still had the idea in the back of my head that this could progress from this idea - drums and tracks, bass, keys, vocals – admittedly, it doesn`t take a genius to come up with that kind of idea, but it is hard to find the right people. But when a demo came onto my desk at 20:20 from a band called Silver City and I could tell immediately that they could play live. I called them up and it was these Argentinian guys and they couldn`t speak very good English and they were like `Ah, we move to England and we want to do music` and they just seemed really nice, a guy called Fernando and Julian. I ended up meeting them when I played at fabric actually in fact, that`s clicked as how important Fabric`s been in my time. A little while later, they came up and we did a small show in Leeds at a place called BRB Bar and everyone went nuts. From that one gig, I saw the energy I missed, people excited, people buzzing, everyone jumping. I just put all my energy into 20:20 soundsystem and doing a live show so I`ve just been really dedicated to that for the last 3 years.
From day one, it was just one of those ideas that everyone really loved and it wasn`t forced, it developed over time. At first it was me just mixing tracks, we would keep on jamming and before we knew it we were making our own tracks. I think it`s important to realise as a person when you`re making your own music to have a philosophy and stick to it. The rule we`ve made for 20:20 is that the track comes out of a live jam. We might jam for 40 minutes and for 39 we might sound horrible, but for one minute we might hit something good - we take that idea and run with it. You have to have a spontaneous spark to start it; after the spark, I don`t mind where it goes. We`re always getting better and people like to follow that progression. If we`ve got 5 people watching, we rock them, and the same with if there`s 25,000 people. We have done just that - we played to 25,000 people in Argentina supporting Underworld in Creamfields. We`re quite happy to go from playing a bar to a big stage; no matter the gig, if you give them energy and fresh sounds, they`ll respond.
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FABRIC
fabric is now the most influential club in the world without a doubt, and it`s also the best club in the world. Everyone looks to this club for all the right reasons. fabric started at a time when it was competing with Home Nightclub, or at least people thought it would be. Basically there was really room in London for one more big club, the whole super club thing was fucked, Ministry was on it arse fabric and Home set up at the same time in `99. I was really good friends with Darren Hughes, who was running Home, and got asked to play there but I was also really good friends with Nikki Smith, who was the first person doing bookings with Keith at fabric. I was kind of doing Home a bit with Basics but really wanted to come and do fabric. Nikki asked me to come play here in 2000 and it really was my home (no pun intended), it was kind of chalk and cheese. Home just didn`t work - and fabric just did. It was the right venue, the right people, from day one it the right everything. I just noticed it was attention to detail with everyone at fabric. I`ve never met anyone unprofessional or anyone who wasn`t enthusiastic - even the doormen are nice. You enter the club and everything is organised, the taxi home is organised, you get a decent drink, the sound`s great, it`s on late, the people are cool it`s back to being a really good clubbing experience. People come here for a really interesting, exciting night. It`s just gone from strength to strength. If you clubbing anywhere in the world and you say “fabric,” they know what you`re talking about.
THE FUTURE
I`m still gonna continue with the live stuff and Soundsystem, we`re halfway through an album. Also I really want to document my time at Back To Basics` over the last 15 years, I want to do it in our own Basics style. This year I really want to get it done because it`s late! I`ve pretty much got a tracklisting together but its massive; again, I`m gonna take this experience from fabric and not get too stressed about it - if it has to be on 3 CDs, then so be it, but id really love to get that done this year. I`ll be using classic tracks but it will be the way I put them together that will make it fresh. I`ll take loops out of old tracks and that`s the aim, that`s the next project.
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