While you're biting into your pizza, please recollect the very first piece of writing about music you've done and gotten published.
too. And as of the last year or so I'm doing more and more industry stuff – compilations, A&R etc...
Well, I actually wrote a couple of reviews of imaginary bands as school assignments when I was about 12 I think, but that doesn't count, right? Then at university I self-published one or two tiny fanzines to go with really silly club nights I was involved with. But the first thing published that could be considered any way professional I think was for a free listings paper in Brighton, called Hype, and would have been an interview with either Carl Cox or David Holmes – I can't remember which came first. That would've been 1995 or '96, just after I finished university.
Exciting!
Is it still around? No I'm pretty sure it's not... There were a few of these listings papers. Brighton is so geared around the entertainment industry, and I worked for most of them at one time or another. I'm sure there's a whole different batch now.
I thought I was being really clever and insightful by asking, "What's your favorite animal?" as the final question. That's a good start – an interview with Carl Cox. Or David Holmes for that matter. Was it any good? The interview? No, I'm sure they were pretty lame. They were just phone interviews with me frantically scrabbling garbled notes in longhand. I thought I was being really clever and insightful by asking, "What's your favorite animal?" as the final question. Haha, They did get published nevertheless. Well yes, didn't pay though. It was all barter economy for me then – basically writing for guestlist places and free drinks, which, as I was out every night in those days, was no small matter. Is it much different now? Are you able to actually make a living by just doing musical writing – i.e. are you one of the few lucky ones? I get by, but I take on whatever other bits of copywriting or similar work are going
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Yeah, the recent stuff has been very exciting. It's really a case of putting my money where my mouth is. It's so easy to just have opinions as a writer, and not know whether it's actually having any effect beyond some tiny circle of blog commenters. But when people's royalties are riding on decisions I make, even on a small scale, it certainly adds a bit of frisson to making those judgments. And I've always deejayed on and off. Not necessarily the hip electronic stuff either, but playing Fleetwood Mac and Guns'n'Roses down at the local pub, because it paid and fit in with doing a day job. So I guess you were into music since at least 12. What was your first encounter with the "hip electronic stuff?" And how did you get turned on to bass music, dubstep particularly? My first encounter with hip electronic stuff, though I didn't know it, was probably way before I was actually into music in my own right. I mean, I used to listen to my dad's Beatles LPs, and wonder at the production. But then I discovered his stash of tapes of the radio series of The Hitchhikers' Guide To The Galaxy, which I would listen to on his enormous hi-fi headphones, and just be completely drawn into this brilliantly absurd but sort of plausible science fiction universe, not least by the incredible sound effects... I wish there was a photograph of that... I can almost picture your little head with a huge pair of headphones on. And you're wearing some plaid shorts. Haha, probably some velour sweatshirt too. I will have to ask my mum... But yes, with that and Dr. Who, without knowing it, I'd become obsessed with electronic sound. And in fact, no joke, the first album I ever bought: was BBC Sound Effects No. 26 – Sci-Fi Sound Effects, which if you listen to it now, is incredibly dub – all these laser zaps and stuff.
I was too poverty-struck to go to all the bling bling champagne garage raves, but I had the tunes.
It was totally a nerd thing. There was nothing cool about me. I went through the usual adolescent boy things of pop rock - metal - goth - indie. But I was 16 in 1990, which was the time of those early WARP releases – LFO, Sweet Exorcist, Nightmares On Wax – and stuff like The Orb and KLF... That was "my punk," the stuff that changed my idea of what music was and who could do it. So when dubstep came along it was a completely natural thing to love it for its huge subs and dub influence, like those early WARP tunes.