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So tell us how are you today ?<br />
We are loving life at the moment.<br />
How was your week?<br />
We’ve had a great week to be fair. We signed up<br />
another 2 eps for Analytic Records and Aquamelon Records.<br />
We’ve been getting some great press which is amazing at<br />
such an early stage of our production partnership.<br />
Were did you grow up?<br />
We both grew up in and around the Portsmouth<br />
area.<br />
Were are you based?<br />
Richie lives just outside Portsmouth and I’m up in<br />
Winchester<br />
What is your first musical memory?<br />
We both grew up with single parents. Richie with<br />
his mum and me with my dad.<br />
Richie: my mum was a bit of a disco diva and she loved<br />
Neil Diamond. She loved music and would dance around<br />
the house - much to my embarrassment. The first music I<br />
got in to myself was in the late 70s early 80s - mainly dub<br />
reggae and roots like Mad Professor and Bob Marley. <strong>From</strong><br />
there I moved in to the early electro sound. I was heavily<br />
in to BMXing and the local skatepark always had<br />
underground music pumping out.<br />
James: My dad played the piano. He also had a very wide<br />
music taste from classical to disco. I grew up listening to all<br />
sorts like The Beatles, Abba, James Last and general pop<br />
music. My dad was a big Radio 2 fan. He was also a teacher<br />
at the school I was at so I spent a lot of time in the car<br />
listening to pretty easy listening Radio 2 vibes. I think the<br />
most influential album he had was Jean Micheal Jarre's<br />
Oxygene - I was instantly drawn to the electronic other<br />
Worldly sounds of the synthesizer.<br />
How did you get into music DJ'ing<br />
and production?<br />
Richie: The Djing came first like most people I guess. I got<br />
in to buying records quite early on. I first saw a ‘proper’ DJ<br />
in a programme about block parties in America and was<br />
immediately drawn to it. The first decks i got were some<br />
belt drive decks. I had one that would go +/-6 and one that<br />
would only speed up...so when I finally got some Technics<br />
it seemed easy to mix.<br />
Because I had decks people would ask me to play<br />
at their house parties. As the house music scene hit the UK<br />
I got heavily in to it from the start. Some friends and I<br />
were doing free parties out in the woods. We always<br />
managed to pull a good crowd. We had a favourite spot and<br />
every summer we would do 5 or 6 parties there. They are<br />
still some of the best nights I’ve ever been too. Sometimes<br />
the police would show up but they were always ok and we<br />
never got shut down. As clubs started to embrace the<br />
house and techno scene and we were known to have a bit<br />
of a following we started a number of events.The most<br />
successful one was called Sunday Sessions. A lot of the<br />
time we just had the best local djs playing but we did some<br />
specials and had guests like Mr C, Colin Dale, Bushwacka,<br />
Terry Francis and errrr oh yeah James.- he played for us a<br />
couple of times. That’s where we first met. By the early 90s<br />
there were a few locals starting to make music - well, try<br />
to. My mate Leo had some gear and we messed about with<br />
it and released a couple of tunes as Nu Logic. By the mid<br />
90s I’d moved away from Portsmouth and lived on the<br />
outskirts of London. I managed to land a slot on Point<br />
Blank FM and did a weekly show for 15 years. In that time<br />
I had a few well known guests in for mixes. I was clubbing<br />
a lot in London at events like Wiggle and Subterrain at The<br />
End. My house would often be the after party venue. That<br />
place could tell a few stories!!<br />
James: As I became a teenager I was into the hip hop. I<br />
still have a love of beats and rhymes from that era or in the<br />
style of that era. Modern Hip Hop is shit - FACT. Anyway,<br />
Radio 1 had a show called Jeff Young's Big Beat Show on a<br />
Thursday or Friday. He fused Hip Hop, Soul, Funk, Disco<br />
and this new sound - House Music. John Peel used to be on<br />
after him and I always listened to the first 15 minutes of<br />
John’s show as he did play some early techno. I'd been<br />
listening to house before I even knew it was called that.<br />
Then the various US House Sound albums started<br />
appearing and I fell in love with acid house. I started<br />
buying 12inches - my first was Tyree Cooper "Turn Up The<br />
Bass". At 6th Form I met a guy Tony Jones who was buying<br />
imports and he introduced me to some underground record<br />
shops in Portsmouth. After that it was weekly trips to buy<br />
European and US imports and random white labels. Then<br />
we started going to London for days trawling every shop we<br />
could find armed with lists of tracks we'd ID off mixes and<br />
radio shows.<br />
I had Technics from the start. Those early mixes<br />
were terrible ha ha. A local guy Robbie Long who was a<br />
couple of years below me at school showed me the basics.<br />
I then tried getting gigs anywhere I could. I played a<br />
terrible set of heavy Euro techno at an empty new djs<br />
comp night. Did some gigs at 6th Form which went ok. I<br />
did crack the mixing and in 1992 ish Mixmag did a big<br />
national competition for new <strong>DJs</strong>. I was a runner up in the<br />
Ministry of Sound section. I did a 1 hr mix that went<br />
flawlessly from garage through progressive house, techno,<br />
trance to drum'n'bass. That got me in a few more doors.<br />
I've always been able to move through genres effortlessly.<br />
I played a lot of warm up slots and was well used to stadily<br />
building a set readyfor the main DJ.<br />
Production started at Uni. I choose a local college<br />
because it had a recording studio there. I bought an Atari<br />
running Cubase and a couple of synths and started trying<br />
to make something. It took about 5 years to get anything<br />
any where near releasable.<br />
By now I was living in London and hovering<br />
around Swag Records and going to parties like Wiggle and<br />
Subterrain at The End but funnily enough never met Richie<br />
there. My first release was on Leftfield's Offshoot label as<br />
Subfunk. I sat up listening to Mr C's Kiss FM Show after the<br />
promo went out and he played one of the tracks - I was<br />
jumping around my bedroom like a loon almost crying. I<br />
started my own label Scientific Funk Recordings and<br />
hearing Mr C play one of the tracks at Subterrrain blow my<br />
head off!! Richard Grey was next to me and he went to ask<br />
C what the track was and I was screaming "IT'S MINE IT'S<br />
MINE!!". Those early tracks were played by Laurent<br />
Garnier, Dan Curtain, Murf and Jamie Anderson. I never got<br />
in to the drugs side of things back then and I found it a bit<br />
of barrier when trying to make connections.
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