15
Zed Bias

Going back to your question about samples: working in a record shop, I realised a lot of the breaks I'd started to collect – Paul Winley Super Disco Brake's, Ultimate Breaks and Beats¹⁴⁹ – were being used as the backbeat in these jungle tunes, and the tunes coming through from people like Wax Doctor, Doc Scott, Roni Size, DJ Krust. Even the Amen ¹⁵⁰ and Hot Pants and Soul Pride ¹⁵¹ that were used by everyone in jungle, all these breaks I had in my collection, I could hear them being sped up and chopped up. So this set off this whole process, listening to new stuff and thinking “Have I got that break?” and “I could use this record to do that.” It started throwing up questions – and as a collector you could feel part of this exclusive little thing. So that's how I got the bug, chopping up my breakbeats. My inspiration to do things like that was people like Krust and Roni Size. Rob Playford was a massive influence.

But the thing that opened my eyes to the jungle and rave scenes, that melted my frozen heart, was the Sanctuary. It was the Haçienda of the south, and I worked the door 1995-97. I saw some mad, mad things there. More than anything, something that will never leave me, was walking Shy FX – quite a young Shy FX – to the decks, four or five in the morning, through a busy crowd of just complete gormless, brain-dead zombies. You know what people are like in a rave at that time in the morning.

Gargoyles!

Yeah, heh. But I took Shy FX to the decks, he put the first record on, and I saw 3,000 shambling zombies turn into frenzied animals like that. It was the first time he'd ever played ‘Bambaata’. He was late so he literally just set the record box down, pulled the first record out and whacked it on, and I had to tap him on the shoulder and go “What is THAT?” He went, “I just made it last week”. I couldn't believe it, 3,000 people going from bobbing a little bit to standing still in shock and looking at each other to absolutely exploding. At that time in the morning, that was quite something.

Then there was just a couple of tunes that used to completely tear the arse out of the place regularly, one being Origin Unknown ‘Valley of the Shadows’ – that was just too big, and well ahead of its time – and ‘Ready or Not’, the DJ Hype [actually DJ Zinc] mix of the Fugees which sums up three years of my life.¹⁵² It's not my favourite tune, but every time I turned up for work that was played without fail four or five times in the night. But yeah, jungle was my intro into the music world. It caught my imagination.

I remember some friends introduced me to 2 Bad Mice just as it was becoming jungle, around 1992-93. They were going “This is the first ever British working class music of the modern age,” and my reaction was “What, really?” Because I was 18 and I thought “It's just more rave music, isn't it?” But after thinking about it a lot, I realised that everything before that – R&B, rock, ska, even punk – came from American or Jamaican music, but hardcore and jungle was genuinely new, and it was British and nothing else

That's right, but it was also made up of loads of different influences. Like our cooking, the English don't really have a tradition of original food or original music, but we do other people's music really well. And we can do our version of it, our music that's a pile-up of other people's sounds. That's one of the things I love about this country, that you don't have to go too far to find a bit of inspiration.

And we don't have ghettoes to the extent America or even France do. There are areas that have different character, cut off by social group or race, and perhaps this is getting worse, in terms of economic segregation. But to a big degree we do mingle. The estates and neighbourhoods are relatively small and close together, so we can't help but have cultural leakage

Yep, and no raised eyebrows if you fuse elements or vibes together – or very few, anywhere I've ever hung out. I dare say there are some nasty places where you are only allowed to do it one way or another. But especially Manchester where I live now, it's a great mixing pot of vibes, I love it.

So you were into the jungle and drum’n’bass scene, but garage tracks made your name. Was that from disenchantment, or just trying your hand at something different for the sake of it?

Well, I was never part of the jungle scene. I used to bug people there to hear my demos, which weren't very good. I was in awe of it, certainly enough for me to get off my backside and learn how to use a sampler and computer. When I started to do my own thing is when things started to get better for me – but I suppose my early foray into jungle was my training. My beat-chopping pressups.

I was very, very fortunate that one of my best mates then was in Foul Play, Steve Gurley. He taught me a lot when it comes to chopping the actual beats, the software intricacies, little tips, the practicalities of it basically. Not just “You need make a tearing beat, mate,” and more, “Here's all my Octamed samples on a floppy disc,¹⁵³ with the ‘Amen Brother’ break chopped up on it and a load of 808s, find yourself an Amiga and have fun.” I got the bus right the way across Milton Keynes to sit with Steve and have him nod or shake his head at my demos.

So you'd had this practice in the finesse of beat-making and production, but you weren't getting anywhere with the jungle scene

It was a sound-quality problem. If anything a young producer today will have too much quality, it's too bright, too nice-sounding, so you somehow have to dirty it up using plugins. Back in the day you didn't have a full big studio setup where you could achieve that quality. It would cost maybe £20,000 minimum to get a setup for the quality you'd get today off a demo from Cubase or Logic. It's crazy. Back then I didn't have a sampler, I was on the dole. Steve bought the Akai S2800, and in 1993-94 that cost him £3,000. You could get that for £50 now if you can be bothered to seek one out.

And you could get a £3 app for an iPhone that would do the same thing

Yep, and the iPhone's got a hell of a lot more memory on it. Unbelievable. My problem wasn't necessarily that I couldn't do it, or wasn't good enough. But I didn't want to bug Steve, he was busy doing his own thing, so I'd go over once a week, play demos, get samples off him and general encouragement. Then in late 1995, my dad sent for me – he was working in Germany as a bricklayer, and he got me a job there hodding for him. So I saved up, and in 1996 I got a sampler, an Akai S2000. I then stayed in my bedroom doing nothing but listen to music and playing with this sampler, probably until 1999, just learning! My first record was in 1997 on DMC, an offshoot label called Stress-Related, a track called ‘Leone’ by Almighty Beatfreakz. But it never went anywhere, an ashtray-in-waiting that one [laughs]. I'd say I was pretty much just learning the craft until 1998, which is when I started to do the first Sidewinder records with DJ Principal. Even that you can hear the quality is pretty rubbish. But it was a first attempt at making something that's got a sort of swingy, 2-step groove.

Had you kept track of how the garage scene had developed? Those very earliest AWOL things is where it all started, where they were playing the American garage

No, I'd not kept tabs at all. Basically what I had heard was Steve making tracks on Social Circles with Jason Kaye – Ordinary People I think they were called – and I said to him “How do you get that shuffle?” And he told me about 16T programming.¹⁵⁴At the time I was doing this stuff for DMC, this big beat, breakbeat sort of sound, and I wondered what it would sound like with a 16T rhythm, and that's what it was really. Just programming in a 16 triplet. So through no fault of my own I started making UK garage. I took one technique and bastardised it, with my own frustrated drum’n’bass textures in there, just a big mish-mash of things, frankly.

Was it exciting to feel you were stepping into the music industry?

Yes and no, mate, yes and no. Quite quickly I got to see the good and the bad. You can really see how old-school record labels became so big back in the day, essentially because they were just out to shaft people. While the real test of time for record labels to stick around these days is whether they've been able to be honest and having good relationships with the artists. I've only ever come across a couple that were on the up-and-up. In my cynical view, most people were doing it out of ill- gotten gains, or to put their own material out. If another producer wants to put your material out there's only one reason for that on the whole: they want to make money out of you. There's only one way to make money out of selling records, and that's not pay the artist.

Something never made clear enough is that it takes severe tenacity as well as talent to make a living. These are the hazards people have to deal with. And very often you will get ripped off

I've put out well over a hundred records, with lots of different people, and there's possibly four or five labels where I've actually enjoyed the experience and got something out of it, and I'm proud to have something on that label. Even if it's not always ended up sweet, there've been times I've been able to say that was a really good relationship. Andy Lewis, who was at Locked On, signed me, The Streets, Artful Dodger's ‘Moving Too Fast’, Shanks & Bigfoot. He had five or six top tens, he did the Sound of the Pirates [albums] – and now he works at the company that publishes me. He's someone I know I can trust. That certainly helps, when you've got a good relationship with one guy at a label who's looking out for you, that's a good situation to be in.

What about the positives?

The club nights made clubland friendly again. If you're in a bit of a ghetto club, the likelihood is that whatever the musical style you'll walk in and it's just drugs, air stinking of crack smoke, and you want it all to be over as soon as you're there. But a lot of people ended up liking garage, and in that four-five year window it ended up touching everywhere. And going from commercial clubbing to UK garage clubbing, it was a vastly different experience. The MC would create more of a communication vibe, an interaction. Suddenly you've got a face, and you can communicate with the DJ through the medium of the MC, the whole thing of shouting “BOOOO!” meaning the track is great, all of that.

It made it into a get-together, rather than the total mania of rave or the mindless get-pissed-and-pull mentality of a commercial night?

Yeah, just that, it was bringing back the party vibe. Proper dance moves, too. And even though people began to dress up, and there were a lot of posers which got on my wick a bit, as long as people weren't shooting each other or beating each other up, as long as they're having a good time it doesn't matter if they're Moschino types or a total Swampy.

And there was this soul-funk thing coming back, which had gone out of drum’n’bass. That must have appealed to you

Yes. It had absolutely gone out of drum’n’bass. All the big drum’n’bass guys, Bad Company and Ed Rush & Optical, were just hammering it out – and they had lost a lot of ladies from the crowd. I know a lot of my friends weren't enjoying these sausage-fests, and the drum’n’bass was just two kicks, two snares and a motorbike bass. They were lusting after that heavy 808 and Amen thing. A lot I knew went over to the garage scene because it was a friendlier clubbing experience, but also because the soul, the rare groove, the synth lines, the Fender Rhodes samples, that was all there.¹⁵⁵

Now there's a fine line between a funky bassline and a well-written melody. and a cheesy, nasty, horrible bassline or nagging melody that could easily cross over but it's no longer soul or funk, it's just pop and nothing else. And that line was constantly being blurred for a while. But I think my favourite period was 1998- 2000. Millennium eve was probably the start of the big cash-in: clubland going crazy, charging £100 a ticket to get in, and DJs really getting above themselves. There was a lot of tunes going in the charts in 1999-2000 – really good stuff, like Groove Chronicles and ‘First Born’ by Crazy Baldheads, one of the first 2-step tunes ever, fucking amazing, using Anita Baker samples.¹⁵⁶ I was bitterly jealous that they'd done that because I am the biggest Anita Baker fan, and if anyone was going to do that it should've been me.

But that tailed off very fast. So what went wrong?

A lot of people began to drift away. The 40-50-somethings of today, the 30-somethings back then, who'd experienced a bit of the good music, the soul revival of the 80s, gone to blues parties, really did know the score about that sort of music – they were quite a solid force behind it. And the garage scene was the last real going-out experience before their mid-30s collapse of the social life [chuckles]. I'm still in touch with these people now, and they still hark back to the garage days like it was the soul revival.

Having lived in London and listened to pirate radio it was really funny to me that when the interest in 2-step came back around in “post-dubstep”. I just thought, “Garage never went away, did it?” Half the radio stations were playing it non- stop right through the 2000s. Every weekend there were raves out in Luton, Southampton, Kent and Essex: ladies free before 11, no trainers, same vibe. The same people going out who ever did, even the same people making the music: Wideboys and Agent X still making straight garage tunes

At the time I remember thinking that the guys that made it commercial in the first place were no longer anywhere to be seen. It had just been taking the money and disappearing. But people who continued to make that kind of music – like Wideboys and MJ Cole, who I have utmost respect for – definitely helped created the climate for the resurgence of this kind of music now.

A lot of people into the soulful, vocal side that we're talking about were so turned off by the youngsters like So Solid – and everything that came with that – that they backed off into R&B. And it's not a matter of “nice” versus “gangster” either – if anything the soulful side ended up with as much problems as what became grime!

Yeah, I remember that happening with So Solid and Pay As U Go and Heartless Crew. It was a complete metamorphosis – and a lot of people were blaming me and other producers making more bass-led stuff. There was this “garage committee” formed. I was named as one of the people making tunes that encouraged the sort of MCs to do their thing that they said shouldn't be booked, and these tracks shouldn't be played. Fucking crazy, very Nazi really [hollow laugh]. And as soon as I heard about this, I lost my interest frankly. Coming from Milton Keynes, and never really pandering to the Londoners anyway beyond this or that gig or getting dubs cut, I was just “Well if you want to be like that, fine. It's just life as normal for me, not like you're inviting me down anyway, so whatever.”

So you weren't really accepted into the scene?

At the time I didn't feel particularly part of any garage scene, no. I would get reports that my tracks were being played on pirate radio, but that was not part of my daily life in Milton Keynes, where there wasn't any pirates. Getting reports from London saying people had been surfing the FM dial and they'd hear tunes of mine in 1999, that was really nice. I had 12 singles in 1999, so that part was good. But I wasn't really getting booked in London, so I was enjoying spreading the word further afield, from 2000 especially. I was being booked to play Europe, then I was one of the first to bring UK garage to Japan. And the first garage artist on a compilation from an independent label in Japan.

You described the vibe as being really good out of London. Was it not the same in London?

So for instance, around 1999 I played Cookies and Cream in London. I played a dubplate version of the ‘Super Sharp Shooter’ remix,¹⁵⁷ other remixes I'd done like the ‘Celebrate Life’ remix,¹⁵⁸ all dubplates, and had the crowd a good few rows back from the decks just standing there looking at me, like “Who are you coming down here playing these sort of things?” A month later everybody's playing them, they're on all the tape packs and everything. But it was that clique-y, horrible response when I played. Who's this fat ginger boy playing black music? Then I'd go somewhere abroad and almost get lifted arms and shoulders, congratulated. It was just a real wide range of responses. And outside the scene, the music itself at the time, it was like Marmite, people either really loved it and loved the culture of it or they thought it was awful. Couldn't mix it, couldn't see where the energy came from.

It spans from very underground to pop, from when garage first broke out. There were pop hits but there were underground versions all the time. And your music spanned that range as well

I had one foot in each side, but the commercial side reluctantly, via ‘Neighbourhood’. Very unplanned but a top 30 record is a commercial hit, isn't it? So I can't blame people for tarring me with that brush, but anything else I was doing was extremely underground. I considered it to be avant-garde and not in any way mainstream, so when I did get booked at places expecting the more commercial stuff at the time, ‘A Little Bit of Luck’ ¹⁵⁹ or some Sticky, they were disappointed. If I went somewhere like Japan, where there was no industry in-crowd around this, they'll be listening to the music and the general vibe, and it was no longer about being slagged off for being too commercial.

But you did some major label remixes. Who were the highest profile acts? Was it mostly American R&B acts they wanted to give a British twist to?

So in 1999 I was working the Phuturistix project with Sefton – DJ Injekta – and one of his best friends from school was a young chap called Semtex, who was part of the Sony street team, putting stickers and records in mailers. So he went to his A&R and got us this series of remixes: Destiny's Child ‘Bills Bills Bills’, Jennifer Lopez ‘Waiting For Tonight’, Black Ivory ‘I Do’, [‘What'd you Come Here For?’] by Trina & Tamara. One day I was rung up by A&R down at East West, they said, “We've followed you, we know that you've sampled our record,” Eric Benet, ‘Screw Tipping’. I'm like “Fuck alright, is this a see-you-in-court moment?” They said “Nah don't be silly, we'll turn a blind eye to that but you've got to remix Richard Blackwood [‘Mama Who Da Man’] and we'll give you £3,000.” I suppose the most high profile I did was Whitney Houston and Faith Evans ‘Heartbreak Hotel’. I'd been approached on my own but I was adamant to get Steve Gurley involved.¹⁶⁰ I was feeling bad he was being overlooked. Everyone else was getting paid out the garage scene except him.

And he was doing his own incredible bootlegs of American tracks

He was the one who set everybody's palette to that. ‘Walk On By’, some great stuff for Public Demand, the Lenny Fontana ‘Spirit of the Sun’. I spent a good year or two since getting a sampler trying to get those Steve Gurley claps out, I used to call them the “snooker ball claps”. Like two snooker balls hitting. I needed to bring him in. So I brought him in on this remix we did at my house, sent it off. Two weeks later we got a response from Nick Raphael, we went down to Arista BMG, and he sat us down, looking kind of dizzy, and said “Right, I've just been on the phone with Clive Davis and he says this is one of the best remixes he's ever had of a Whitney record and he wants us to go forward and make this into the main version for the single release.” So I then went to UB40's studio in Digbeth and re-recorded it with Steve and that was the one we ended up using. It went in the dance charts and everything, but they didn't use it for the single release. The only Whitney Houston record that landed outside the Top 20 in her whole career.

That point about the snooker-ball click sound. One of the most interesting things about garage is how clipped the sounds were, hi-hats and snares all clipped short. Did you have any sense why? Did you ever analyse the effect of these sounds, or did you do it because that was the norm?

Because of the swing involved, it sounded better to anybody's ear clipping two sounds that were so very close together. If you're doing a normal straight 16th hat rhythm on a drum machine, even with the release set on the hat to release the whole sound, you're going to hear every sound. But if you do the same thing and you programme a 16th triplet – which garage had – you get a huge overhang between the lagging hat and the preceding hat after, because they're so close to each other. So for cleanness of sound, for better fidelity, it makes sense why we used to do it. I think it was very instinctual.

Was it also a reaction against the wildness of jungle, that really dense pile up of the Amen breaks?

I was using the Amen as well, Apache and Amen. I used Apache in ‘Neighbourhood’ but Amen in the ‘Super Sharp Shooter’ remix and the ‘Celebrate Life’ remix. I was known for putting breakbeats into garage so I wouldn't agree with that side of it so much, I was letting certain things be legato. But in the overall picture of UK garage, I can see why people truncate their drums so tightly: it just sounds messy if you didn't.

Have you got any sense of why it never became the UK version of R&B in commercial terms? It came so close it almost felt like it could reach out to America and they would understand, and Mis-Teeq and Craig David might become international stars

I think the people that had the talent and the chops to go forward and make an R&B career didn't need garage. Maybe as a vehicle to move into the public, but beyond that they didn't need it. As soon as there was a sniff of money around in the UK garage scene, especially the people at the top of the tree, the tastemakers bringing the youngsters through, everybody got a bit greedy and grabby and it became a very very hostile environment. If I was the management of a singer or a songwriter trying to get an R&B career back then, I would have never ever chosen UK garage as the vehicle, because of the greed and the animosity and the politics surrounding it.

But there was another side to garage, which was the deep instrumental dubs. How separated was FWD>> and that scene from the vocal garage and big industry shenanigans?

Well this is the point. FWD>> was born out of this toxic environment we all found ourselves having to operate in. We decided that there had to be another way of presenting it to the kids, especially in the clubs. We would play the dub mixes of, well, of some of the pop records. For example Ms Dynamite had had a few singles out, and some of us had remixed them, and mixed them straight for FWD>>. There was so many tracks around 2000 we were making specifically to play at FWD>> and it really was a collective thought, you know? We had a meeting: Oris Jay, J Da Flex, El-B, myself. Unfortunately Steve [Gurley] wasn't there, he's always a very private person. We said this is the way we want to present garage, still garage but playing dubs. It's not rocket science, that's how it started. Anybody who wants to say they were talking about dubstep in 2001, they're waffling.

So it was you lot that coined the name?

What, dubstep? Nah nah nah. I'm just saying anybody I've read saying they were talking about dubstep in 2001, well, no one was talking about dubstep in 2001. We were playing garage, playing dubs, there was nothing deep about it. We would still want to play the pop vocals in the club, but we found it easier to mix and we could have MCs over it without. Because the big thing about having MCs back then, they couldn't bar up. They couldn't actually find enough of a record without vocals in to let off over – so this was a great breeding ground for some of the best MCs in my book. Especially when dubstep did become dubstep. And from that point onwards, it was the perfect MC music.

Were some of the East London MCs coming to FWD>> early on, people like Jammer?

First time I heard of Jammer he was working for Sarah Lockhart down at Ammunition boofing boxes around. So he was definitely aware that it was all going on, but I can't remember him being down there. But it was so fucking dark, literally I couldn't see a thing in there. Velvet Rooms was great where it started. The thing I do remember about the Velvet Rooms, as soon as a tune came on that anybody loves, instead of doing a “Boooo” that the garage people did, everybody, especially Sarah Lockhart, would come and slap this perspex screen that surrounded the decks. They had to jump quite high, because it was a raised level. Every time I see Crazy D we reminisce about those early days at FWD>>. Probably my strongest visual memory of that night is Soulja running up and slapping the screen to bits. I remember the tune as well, it was a Mark Pritchard remix of ‘Carambola’ by Azymuth. It's funny because no one thinks of that as dubstep or garage. But it's a tune innit?¹⁶¹

It crosses over into broken beat as well. How close were you to broken beat?

We were a day apart in our clubs. FWD>> was originally on a Thursday in the West End, then Friday was Co-op in West London. Then we both moved to Plastic People, where Co-op was either a Thursday or a Saturday and we ended up being on a Sunday. It was a completely different crowd. The West London crowd was a clique-y sort of jazz and soulful house scene, with the patriarchs being Phil Asher, Afronaught and youngsters like Domu and Seiji coming up the ranks. The moving parts were very similar to the FWD>> scene, but we came out of different scenes in the first place so our activities were a bit different, and our musical activites were a bit different. They still had that really jazz discord, slightly avant-garde thing about their sound, and ours was still a little bit rudeboy, you know?

And an emphasis on the jazz-dance element, whereas the FWD>> sound was drum’n’bass boys hopping on one leg

We had some movers and dancers in the early days, when you drop a whole sound to halftime. When Hatcha was coming through as the big name at FWD>> was after I left really. I know in the 18 months I didn't play, it changed considerably. Not for the better or worse, it just changed.

Which is when all the Skream dubs and Digital Mystikz dubs started coming

That was 2003, me stopping playing at the end of 2001. I'd gone to Soulja and Neil Joliffe at their office and confessed to them that I didn't really understand what was coming. I didn't understand why there was a huge lull in what I was making being accepted. I went down there with Injekta, we both said we don't want to be a part of it. We couldn't get our heads around music being made on Playstations. It was a very honest thing, it wasn't meant to insult anybody or hurt any feelings. it was us making room for someone else to come through. And what I needed to do for the next part of my journey was learn how to use a mixing board properly, record strings, horns and really nice vocals.

The absolute opposite direction to everything that was happening in music at that time

Yeah. So it's all about your own personal development at the end of the day, not what people around you are doing. If you can come together with people and enjoy a moment in time where you're all on the same level, that's a beautiful thing and it should be loved and you should grab it. If you find nothing around you is resonating with you, and people aren't resonating with what you're doing, you've got to think about your next move.

So what was your focus at that point?

It was the first Maddslinky album.¹⁶² I started working on it in about 2001, and simultaneously the Phuturistix album.¹⁶³ Which was intended for Locked On, but they dropped us and we went to Hospital Records, so they both came out around 2003.

And how was the reception?

At the time, not much. But internationally I still get people messaging about old Maddslinky tracks. I did some great collaborations with some great people. Skream, Loefah and Mala have all come up to me at raves back in the day, with hushed voices, saying, “That Phuturistix album really showed us another way we could go with our shit.” I've never heard any of them make anything like it, mind. The fact we dared to be that different at a time when it was all going one way, it might have inspired people to do their own thing. Not necessarily what we're doing, but just to step out of that box.

Totally – and to know they don't exist in a vacuum. They can connect with a more soulful, eclectic, Gilles Peterson-world, if you like

That was another thing. Gilles’ support from that moment was solid, up to this day. I did a remix on his show of a track called ‘Hook and a Line’ by Two Banks of Four, which was another name for Rob Galliano, Rob being one of his oldest mates, still is. And he played my remix on his show and called it “proto broken beat”, which is a huge compliment. And also back in the day I had Arthur and Hatcha from Big Apple ring me up one day asking me how I got my snares to sound like that on one of my Maddslinky records, ‘Future Chicano’,¹⁶⁴ and to this day Hatcha still plays that and the ‘Hook and a Line’ remix. There are dots I can't see sometimes joining all of these little vibes together.

Mid-2000s your profile dipped. Was it a struggle?

Yes. So around the time the Phuturistix album came out, 2003, I decided I didn't want anything to do with garage again. I didn't want ever to be Zed Bias again, and I was very very militant. Even my mates couldn't call me Zed. We went back to “Dave” and I went back to basics, the soul and funk I'd come out of. I became a student of music. I was spending whatever money I made building a studio and recording albums: lots of them, all the parts, all the vocals, many many hours recording with strings, horns, whatever. And I'm so glad I did, because there's no way you can live in both worlds at the same time. I'm glad I stepped out of garage and started really teaching myself and learning from other great minds how to do what some people maybe learn at college. Basics, very effective recording techniques, all the way back in the 60s, 50s even. I was very very lucky that I had good mentors, and I was still able to learn the analogue way of doing things at a time when VST was dominating everything. I suppose if you learnt music technology since 2005, you wouldn't have learnt what I learnt. It cost me about £100,000, from 2003-06. But money well spent, buying the kit, setting up the studio, paying the musicians whether I used their work or not, getting musicians in to record overdubs, producing albums for artists that maybe never came out, trying to bootstrap it all myself but learning so many lessons along the way. So now I feel comfortable stepping in the studio with literally anybody. There's no star in the world I would feel, “Ah, I'm not worthy to be here,” because I feel like I learnt enough to be able to deal with any recording situation.

And this was when you'd moved to Manchester

I moved to Manchester and set up the Future Lounge studios, very close to Sankeys Soap Factory in Ancoats. We had a 500 square metre space on the second floor of an old mill, and we transformed it into a huge studio one, then five or six studios out back, which we rented out.

Why Manchester?

Sefton – DJ Injekta – lived in Manchester, and so did Jenna G, Mister Jay, and Marcus Intalex, and a few others I'd met round that time. So I thought, rather than them coming down to work with me, I'd work up there with them. I'd already spent £100,000 on the studio in the house I'd bought in Milton Keynes, and I'd just split up with my fiancée as well, so the whole place was bad vibes. So when Sefton came and said, “I've found a place, it's huge, it's amazing, it needs a bit of work, but we could have your studio in a room 10 times bigger than this and with all my stuff in it and my keyboards.” He had lots of analogue stuff, and about 20,000 records, which looked great all the way round the room. So I went from a little cellar studio you couldn't swing your cat in to a huge place with a drum booth, three different types of Fender Rhodes, a Wurlitzer, 20 different types of analogue synths. It was a big move up, and in that studio I recorded some great people. It just wasn't garage, so for anybody that knew me for garage I disappeared off the face of the earth – and at the time that was my plan. I didn't want anybody mithering me about garage. Garage had changed, I couldn't recognise it, there wasn't a part of it I wanted to be part of so I upped sticks and moved to Manchester and carved out this other way.

Where any of these records successful, and not just part of your training and development?

None that were released. We tried to set up a label and we'd spent thousands on it, and two distributors on it, that had all our stock, went down at the same time. It was a terrible time.

That was happening across Europe. Distributors were crashing, that was the death of vinyl happening right in front of our eyes

2005-06 we had real real trouble. Distribution companies like Goya going down. It was a really bad time for broken beat, for anything remotely fringe jazz-y or soulful. Even house was struggling, that soulful house. The only things that weren't struggling were the really commercial things, and things that could sell downloads, which was starting to come. It was a real transitional time. We fell to a load of other companies falling, like dominos. But the records that I made still exist, they're on my hard drive. We didn't realise what we had. I do now, I've gone back in, and I've dealt with a few of the tracks, and re-produced them basically. One is with DJ Spinna, and I'm bringing it out really soon. Basically there's no records released at that time because we didn't want to just throw it out. We must have spent £3,000,

£4,000 on CDs and vinyl trying to get Phuture Lounge albums out there, just to be told that we couldn't get our stock back, it was getting liquidated blah blah blah. And because we were owed so little and there was loads of people in front of us in the queue, we ended up getting nothing. So probably about 2006, I went bankrupt, because I spent all the money and accrued a lot of debt setting up the studio and running it. Then I moved to Manchester MIDI School, they rented me a room there. It was a portion of the size I was used to, but incredibly cosy and I could calibrate my ears to the new room very easily. And being in a music college environment meant if there was anything I needed or people to get involved, I'd knock on somebody's door. The way you'd ask a neighbour for sugar. Can I borrow your whatever machine? It was very good like that.

Did you still have your mixing desk and stuff?

Yeah I kept my mixing desk, got rid of that in about 2009 I think. I had to make a decision and create the end of this period where I was teaching myself, this learning period. Learn how to set up a proper label, learning to record legitimate live musicians, all this had come to an end – and cost me dearly – and now I had to use what I had learnt. Not only there but in the garage world as well. Go back to some of my old contacts and make records using everything I knew.

And in 2007 you reconnected with the dubstep world, which had matured at that point

Yes. That year I put out an album on Sick Trumpet called Experiments With Biasonics as Zed Bias, really focusing on the live instrument stuff – and sold about 350 copies. Which tore my confidence right up. But then two things happened. One was I got back into house in a big way, did some tracks with Phil Asher, absolutely loved it. And the other is I got asked to go and play FWD>>'s birthday party in Curtain Road. They have this dodgy big illegal party in a warehouse on Curtain Road and I went there, not knowing why I was being asked, not aware of any kind of dubstep world. Literally not aware, because I'd immersed myself in another world. So what I found when I got there was quite shocking and very exotic to my ears, like “What the fuck is this?” Like what we used to do but through some mad exotic lens, like it was made in outer space. I had no reference point other than what we used to do, some ragga samples or dubby sub bass in there somewhere.

Lots of sub bass

Lots at that time. Digital Mystikz played after me and Youngsta before me, playing his first ever show at FWD>> warming up for me. And his first ever tune that he played, he didn't know at the time, was one of my tunes, ‘Crazy’, Seven Wonders. Probably one of the first “wub-wub” basslines in garage at the time. So I got big hugs all round and it was lovely, a homecoming of sorts but also a complete eye- opener. It showed me how much I'd cut myself off, and a point I could jump back on as well. Hatcha asked me down for his Kiss show a couple of weeks after, so I kipped on his couch and listened to what he was doing, I absorbed lots and lots of stuff.

Maybe a year after that I got Skream to come up and make some tunes. That was my way back in, but also a great reference point for what I'd done, the good stuff, because I've done so much good stuff, and bad stuff in equal measure.

I was so busy in the garage days, knocking out 10 tracks a week. Not all of them are going to be bangers. So this was a great way of me seeing what had lasted, because people were still playing these old tunes. At FWD>> in 2007, my music was still existing. I'll be honest with you, I went on cueing up a couple of records playing what I thought the crowd would want to hear. I thought I'd been booked for this dubstep thing, once I'd done my homework, so I turned up with a few dubstep things in my CD cart. I played them, got a bit of a sway going, it was alright. But I had Simbad there, for moral support and he basically whispered in my ear, “Bruv, just play some of your old records, play some FWD tunes.” So I played a Daluq track called ‘Supafine’ that came out on Soulja, and it fucking took the roof off. There's nothing dubstep about it. Maybe the bassline if you halftime the beats and kept the bassline where it was. Very little I was doing at that point had anything to do with dubstep, but being pulled back at that moment, and being to be able to see what was going on, had a huge effect on me.

That was just as the international explosion was happening, all those lads were getting on the rollercoaster that would take them through the next five years. I read there was a point in 2011-12 dubstep was rivalling hip hop on Google Trends for number of people talking about it globally. 2007 was when that curve started going steeply up. So it was the right point to reconnect with it!

Whether I liked it or not, I was there at a time where the top people in dubstep were directly inspired by what I did back in the day. You can't rewrite that. They've said it in press and they've said it to me. And there was a need for me to feel part of a clan again, and it was never going to be garage because there was no garage to talk of then. Just a few guys playing old school gigs in Southend and Margate.

Shiny shoes, no hats no hoods, girls free before 11

Yeah, that was a step backwards for me. I wanted to be among the cutting edge, to feel I'm looking forward and pushing forward rather than backward. So being able to bounce ideas off of Hatcha and Artwork and Skream at the time, and getting to know people like Chimpo in Manchester, who was a dubstep master at that time. John Miller and I started a dubstep night called Dubspot in Manchester around that time, 2008, in The Music Box.

Chimpo would have been as big as Skream and Plastician and Mark One if he hadn't have stopped to be sensible, at that point

True. But this is the thing, life gets in the way sometimes. We get to a crossroads and choose the wrong direction, and it can land you in a place you wouldn't expect to be. Doesn't mean it's always a disaster. I can anecdote so many things that have happened to me, fantastic things that people would love to have in a career, but one person having a good top ten hit at any point in my career would have earned more money than me, because I've chosen certain things over money. I'm 44 now, I can maybe philosophically go back and say, “It wasn't the wrong thing to do, maybe it wasn't the obvious thing if you wanted to make or keep some money, but you want to be where you are now. You wouldn't be able to do what you do now if you hadn't taken that turn.”

And about that time, you made the connection with Tru Thoughts

I played a night my friends called Askew, and they had a long running night at the Jazz Rooms in Brighton, so I used to go down there, and they used to tell me about Tru Thoughts and Rob Luis. Obviously I'd heard of Quantic, Quantic had done really well for them. They were reputable and I knew that we could do business. My mate Byron initiated it, Manny who'd just come out of a long stint tour managing Mr Scruff and a band called Fingathing. He was their tour manager…

They were amazing, that was the scratch DJ and double bass band, right?

That's right, yeah. Really good. Byron was probably one of a couple of people aware of the tracks I was amassing on my hard drive and he offered to link us up. Around that time I got my first publishing deal in years, with Johnny Kyte at Union Square Music. Since then they've been signed to BMG. So having a publisher and a record label behind me at that point made things so much easier. I didn't have to go personally knocking on doors. I had ways of earning some money. It was around then I got my agent as well, Naomi at Earth Agency, or Elastic back then. I bugged Naomi regularly from 2004-08, emails saying, “I need an agent, I know you like garage, please help me.” Eventually she took me on, I think my first show was Southport Weekender.

I was doing all sorts, I was probably more into house production at the time. I was doing collaborations with Phil Asher and tracks with Jenna G, all very in the vein of where UK garage would go if it went soulful house, bouncy 808s, but lots of nice chords. The musical aesthetic of broken beat but with a stomping 4/4 kick is what I'm saying. I did a mix of these tracks on my Mixcloud last month and they sound better now than they ever did then. So it's a very very hazy few years between 2007-14, say. I was still trying to throw as much stuff at the wall as I could and see what sticks.

But you getting back on the straight and narrow in terms of having a lot of music out there

Absolutely. I was focused. In 2009 I became a dad. I'd spent maybe four-five years with my partner convincing her I would turn this all around, from the bankrupt bum that she met to being solvent and able to support a family. I worked my arse off for 80 hours a week plus, for a long time.

Since then, you've had fingers in all of the pies that sprung off bass music. The Autonomic style, the Swamp81 style, we no longer give them genres, we just name them after the label they're on

It got to a stage where I had thrown so much mud around and created so many experiments that I had this real thing in my head. Everything I've ever done has been an experiment because of my lack of formal education, my lack of knowledge how to make things sound a certain way. Everything's been gut instinct. And I got to a stage where I come to the studio and can look back at what I've done and cross- fertilise what's going on now. These side genres, it became a world where I could legitimately add to each of them. I worked within it, just by chance a lot of the time you know. Does that make sense?

That's been the story of the 2010s, that some people sit around waiting for a new dubstep or a new grime – but a lot of the most interesting people are saying, “I work at 150bpm” or “I work at 110bpm.” That's the closest they come to a genre. Plus a lot of these new young South London jazz guys, the 22a lot, have no boundaries between electronic production and jazz playing and live playing. And that sounds like your way of working anyway

In 2017-18 a lot of people gravitated to me from the UK jazz scene for that reason. Like Skream or whatever earlier, they discovered my music on the internet on YouTube, and it resonated with them because it had more of a free approach, with maybe horns or flutes, but it still had the low-end bollocks. It had the melodic approach to music that they like and respect, so people like Henry Wu, Yusuf Jamal, before they split up both of them had been up to my studio and recorded stuff in the last 12 months. I've just completed the pre-masters for Gilles Peterson's Brownswood Future Bubblers. They've given some funding to a guy called Blind MIC who's making a bridge between the urban trap world and the UK jazz scene. He's got IAMDDB on the album and some fantastic players and I've just produced that. Every year I take an album on and produce it for nothing, because that's one of the things I want to do and it helps to keep me relevant.

Do you feel safe knowing that you've spunked loads of money and made it back – or is it always still a bit of butterflies in your stomach when you engage in a new project?

I've never ever felt safe in this job. Everything's built on quicksand. Every few years, technology changes and shifts and some people fall off and some people do well. It's all ebbs and flows. I think I've had to change my expectations a hell of a lot. I see what I do more as a hobby, an obsession but a hobby at the same time. My hobby is making music, my job is playing music. As I'm able to earn very good money playing music, I find the music that I make is no more than a calling card, a point of interest. People can go on YouTube or their favourite streaming site and search for my work and see what I'm doing right now, to check that I've still got the crunk and not completely gone into dad mode. Before, DJing was a way of promoting your records. So DJing and music have opposite roles to me from when I started, my earner then was the ten remixes I'm doing, and selling 10,000 vinyl of one release. The moment you start to feel safe, you stand still. If you stand still, you're moving backwards.

Do you still get the thrill of being next to a big great speaker and hearing a tune kick out?

Yes. Yes I do. Last week I was in a festival in Poland with Slay, a rapper from Manchester who's on my album at the moment,¹⁶⁵ and we went out and played after MJ Cole and before Nicky Blackmarket. So knew I had to take it from easy-going garage and really sexy tunes to a bit more rugged, then take the BPMs up to just underneath hardcore D&B. As soon as I got off the stage, I was out there raving to Nicky Blackmarket – who plays more of a role than most people realise in this whole fucking thing you know. I don't know if you ever went back to Blackmarket records in Soho, down in the basement. On a Friday and Saturday it was like an auctioneer and I'd be at back of the room just there for a buzz, knowing I ain't going to buy no records. Even if I wanted to I couldn't because everyone was so far in front of me, they'd be grabbing these sought-after white labels before I get a chance. I felt so connected to back then, and really happy right there, proper raving. Honestly, being a punter again is so much nicer in 2018 for some reason. I think it's something in my brain allows me to enjoy it more these days.

You never got the bug when you heard ‘Acid Tracks’,148 then, or other early techno tunes?

You never got the bug when you heard ‘Acid Tracks’,¹⁴⁸ then, or other early techno tunes?