Okay, well, the cheering is dying down now, and I think we have a new candidate and we
have a new favorite vegetable, which is asparagus.
Let's go back to the stage.
I moved to Manchester in about 1986 to go to university and just had more records than
anyone else, I guess.
So when I was at university I just did a lot of people's parties and get-togethers and
things like that and just annoyed the hell out of everyone by playing records to people.
Because I've sort of been in the dance music scene since its beginnings really as a kind
of fan and then as a sort of DJ, you don't really appreciate how far it's moved until
you kind of take stock and now because it's like 10 years on since 1978 and sort of taking
stock and going, my God, you know, how things have changed and how far things have come.
You know, early acid house records are just about roughly advanced from it, it is to some
extent still, but like you say, people became more mature and felt they could make albums.
City Delirious is like, it's an urban soundtrack.
It's an album describing certain specific anecdotes in Manchester and one of the songs
on the album called Canal Heist is inspired by this canal.
It's a tribute to the ingenuity of Manchester people.
The studio was built by the side of a canal with all the latest security arrangements,
metal doors, alarms, cameras.
However, they weren't prepared for scally ingenuity which involved building a raft,
rafting down the ship canal, breaking in through the back and moving the studio equipment down
the canal.
So I thought that was worthy of a tune.
My beginnings were working at Eastern Block really and that's how I encountered a lot
of people.
I started my musical career as well because they had a band on their label called the
Mad Jacks who are a little indie band and they wanted a dance remix doing of it.
This was the time when dance remixing was really a new thing, it was like the idea of
taking records apart and remixing them for dance floors was just starting.
And I just said, I'll have a go, I've never been in a studio in my life before, you know,
no idea how a studio works at all and that went pretty well and it was a series of happy
coincidences where their management was managed by the same management as a band called Yargo.
And so I did a Yargo remix and they knew the Inspiral Carpets and Inspiral Carpets asked
me to do a remix, also a Manchester band.
And they were signed to the same label as Erasure and then the people at Mute Records
that liked my stuff and I ended up doing an Erasure remix, this was about seven months
after my first remix I was starting to remix bands like Erasure so it was just like a rollercoaster
and that tends to be how, that's how my career started really.
I was running the Spice Club in Manchester and then subsequently the most excellent club
in Manchester, both of which became the focal point for a lot of people who went on to become
great celebrities, we'd have the likes of Tom and Ed, Chemical Brothers, Noel Gallagher,
members of the Inspiral Carpets, New Order type of people, all sorts of local pop celebrities
would come down.
Just because it was a real sort of time of abandon and it was a Babylonian period for
Manchester really.
I like music that's kind of quite raw and it's got a certain amount of passion to it
and kind of soul in the broadest possible sense, so you know, from people like Etta
James, Weldon Irving, soundtrack music.
So there's a lot of different influences, I mean on City Delirious there's obviously
elements of soundtracks, you know I'm trying to make it like a mini snapshot of certain
events in a kind of soundtrack way.
Wet Roads Glisten was a single released in 1997, it's like an urban blues record, it's
about post-club, post-pub, about Oldham Street actually, which is the road just outside where
we are now.
And it's an observation about that kind of late night street violence that people have
encountered everywhere, I'm sure everyone's kind of experienced that sort of thing.
Though our music sounds very modern in the very sort of 90s, it does have a reference
to the past.
The constant influence to Lion Rock has always been a reggae really, I mean there's Rude
Boy Rock on the record, and I'm very influenced by Studio One records.
At one stage I wanted Lion Rock to be like a techno version of The Who.
I did Rude Boy Rock was a conscious distillation of things I've influenced, I've always been
into 60s backbeat, ska, but it was updating that sound, it's definitely a 90s Rude Boy
record.
I've always had a fascination with the 60s and spy things, and somehow that's led on
to all things detective.
The first album had a Sherlock Holmes on the cover, and Sherlock Holmes is something that's
become a real fascination for me, and I think it's in his sharp suits maybe, that's what
I like most about him.
I'm very open minded about the future really, I don't want to make too many firm plans because
I think spontaneity is much more interesting.
We're going to play a few festivals between Creamfields, a Phoenix Festival, a few festivals
around Europe maybe.
We're also going to do a sort of sound system tour, it's more like me and Roger and MC Busby
taking a sort of reggae style sound system, taking decks and effects, provide a sort of
night's entertainment, more than a traditional live thing, but we will be doing live gigs
as well.
So I don't know, there's a lot of things we're doing, we've got a new single out in the UK
called Scatter and Swing, I'll be writing lots of new stuff, trying to get another album
together before the end of the year, I'll just keep myself out of trouble really.
Well sit children, let me give you the subject of the day.
This is the new Scatter, get ready.