Cuffy

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First and foremost I am a clubber. I discovered dance music during the second summer of love in 1988/89 and I have been pursuing my passion ever since… clubbing all over the world and collecting vinyl, the progression to my first set of turntables around 1993 was a natural one.
I grew up in Bangor; home of one of NI’s pioneering Dance clubs – The Helmsman (later renamed Charlie Heggarties). This is where local legends such as Robbie Nelson, Gleave Dobbin, Marty C, Jacko and Sequel all earned their spurs, in the days when the music was relatively genre free…. It was all about the vibe, and I couldn’t get enough…. House, early trance and techno… it was all dance music to me.
A defining moment in my musical life came in 1992 when I attended NI’s first ever all nighter – Evolution. The music was harder and darker, and I was hooked… At this stage I was travelling all over the UK to party and I was heavily influenced by nights out at the likes of Hellraiser, Fantazia, Rezerection, Fubar, Metro etc etc but there was one club that topped the lot. One sound that was hard, yet fresh, exciting, and different than what I was hearing elsewhere…. That club was KELLYS in Portrush. In my opinion no club was like it, the music and the crowd, and nowhere has come near since…. The sounds being pushed by X-Ray and Sci influenced my entire DJing career, and still continue to do so today.
Up until this point, as a DJ I was buying everything from house to hardcore, but the Belgian/German hard trance sound was always my favourite style. I built up a decent following in my local area around the mid nineties with gigs in most of Bangor’s nightspots, and strong sales of my mix tapes in local record stores and clubs.
When the NI harder music scene imploded around 1997 I stopped playing hardcore altogether due to the English influence that the scene was adopting, although my love for the Kelly’s sound remained. It was around about this stage that I stopped actively DJing as nowhere was promoting the sounds that I loved.
Around this time most of my favourite clubs were forced to close, and I started attending Shine, where my love of techno began. Although I went to many smaller nights of many different styles, Shine quickly became my regular haunt over the next few years, and I continued to enjoy the darker, harder end of the musical spectrum in any form I could. Shine is still really the only club i go to on a regular basis outside my own nights these days, due to lack of options and time
As the nineties drew to a close I started to hear those old hardcore samples again in a newer form, and I was excited again… the old hardcore producers had mutated the sound, slowed it down, and UK Hard House was born…. I picked up the headphones again to fuse this sound with the hard trance sounds from the old skool, along with the darker, more techno based sounds that I had been clubbing to. The result was the early forming of the dark techy cross genre sound that I still play today, and I found myself gaining recognition again.
I started doing mixes again I my new style, and they were very well received in the burgeoning scene, and in 2001 I was awarded the DJ Of The Month award by the ENERGY UK, the pivotal NRG and hard house resource in the UK. This gained me a lot of exposure and recognition from the major DJs and promoters within the hard house scene, and bookings followed in England and Scotland in numerous venues from Aberdeen to London, Blackburn to Hull, and many other venue’s in between.
The pinnacle of 2001 was qualifying for the ENERGY UK DJ Of The Year Final, where I actually finished runner up. Despite a dead heat scoring finish with the eventual winner, I lost on a technicality (number of mix downloads, when I had handed out my mix on a CD instead 100 times instead of encouraging dial up downloading) . I was gutted as the winner was due to play the Frantic’s massive Hard House Academy @ Brixton Academy, London. Luckily I was noticed through this competition anyway, and within a month I had been signed up by Last Resort Productions in Holland for a year’s contract gigging in the Netherlands. Highlights of this included major gigs at De Waakzaamheid with Lucien Foort (Gatecrasher), Alexander Koenig and Per, and a massive open air stage gig on Queens Day behind Dam Square in Amsterdam (over a million people flood Amsterdam for Queens Day every April)
2002 seen the launch of my SUBCULTURE series of mix CDs, which were received to great acclaim across the hard dance scene. Things were looking good for me musically, but my work career was also taking off, and a promotion in work meant that I had less and less time to dedicate to my music, at a time when I should have been upping my profile. Work and family life of course came first and again it wasn’t long before I considered hanging up then headphones for a second time. The cousin of a good mate of mine persuaded me to help out with one final gig that he wanted to put on, so I agreed to do the one off to help him out.
Today as a DJ I rarely play my first love that’s now classed as ‘old skool’, preferring to concentrate on the newer sound that I feel encapsulates all my musical influences over the years, as defined by my musical journey…a Cuffy set these days is almost always dark, always hard, and never restricted to one particular genre… hard dance, trance, techno, acid….and anything in between.
These days the website now takes up more of my time than actually playing, I just love the buzz of the party, and hopefully we are bringing something slightly different to our local scene, both old skool and new… and I continue to define my sound…. So don’t try to pigeon hole it, just pop in, listen, decide for yourself…. And most importantly, DANCE!!!