Well I suppose we'd better start at the beginning of my musical pathway then.
Guess my Mum was the first person to introduce me to music. I've got early memories of her & her friends, in the 70's, dancing & singing round the house, either cleaning or getting ready for a night out. Me old man's a guitarist but regrettably it's something I never paid much interest in myself, & his record collection is about as eclectic as my Mums, which again back then I had no interest in but nowadays I'm chasing them down for them records, you'll understand why as you read on.
By the time I was 8 years old, (1980), early forms of Electro & Rap Music had started to filter into the UK via the US & continued to over the next few years. A lot of this was only available on import vinyl or cassette. I got mine on copied C90 cassettes, some through my cousin, (Clifford, Big you up man), & some through other friends who were into it. This music, I thought, was amazing, a whole new sound. My folks didn't know what to make of it, to them it was just a bunch of jumbled noise & as far as scratching went they couldn't believe someone was actually doing that to a record. At which point I was expressly forbid to touch the turntable in the said fashion. Of course I didn't listen, & my first scratching lessons, self taught of course, were performed on a early 80's flip-top stereo system while my Mum was out doing the shopping at Sainbury's on Saturdays.
Break Dancing came hand in hand with Electro & Rap Music & over the next few years I became an able & competent breaker going by the name of Chilli. Why you ask, coz my style was cold but could melt you down, Sucka !!
Equipped with permanent markers, as well as breakin', I was also taggin' up Hastings town with my boys, so you could see our names anywhere you walked in the town from the Old Town, right through Bottle Alley & up to Bulverhythe. I weren't a graffiti artist, although I did turn my hand to it once or twice, & even made a bungled attempt to spray a train in the Hastings Train yard but was seen off by staff & the Police. Guess I should be writing rhymes instead of on trains....
I must have wrote my first rap at about age 9. No, I don't still remember it but I can guarantee it had something about how big my dick was & that fools should stop riding it & let my girl get on it. Trust me, back then that's what it was all about, not that I knew what having a girl on my dick meant at age 9 but a few years later I found out & my rap suddenly had such clarity....
By age 12, (1984), things were heating up, me an my boys were Breakin' non-stop & if I weren't Breakin' I was writing raps. Every break time at school we'd push the desks against the walls & have popping, locking, up-rocking, top-rocking & floor work battles against each other. Man we couldn't wait till break time, & it really was Break Time, ya get me !! In Hastings there was an older group of teenagers who were breaking & from time to time we'd all meet up for training & some friendly battles & on some occasions we'd battle against rival crews from other towns. I can remember going up against youths from the Brighton & Tonbridge crews down in the subway on Hastings seafront, Big you all up, those were crazy days.
1985 spelled another defining point for me, mainly coz I saw the film Beat Street, a classic released in 'June84'. It featured an actor named Guy Davis who played Kenny. Kenny was a DJ trying to get gigs around New York but back home in his bedroom he had an array of gear that just blew my mind. He was doing some crazy mixes between what he had on vinyl & some of his own stuff on tape. As soon as I saw it I was like "I gots to be doing that." Kenny ends up in a professional studio at one point making tracks on some wow'd out keyboard & by the end of the movie is dropping beats on his DJ set at a big nightclub in Up-Town Manhatten. I knew which direction I wanted my life to take from that point but due to my families financial circumstances had to face the fact that I wasn't going to see a set of turntables for a long time, in fact not until I was 21.
Still, I wasn't about to let that affect me & after a brain wave begged my folks to get me a desktop tape recorder for my 13th Birthday in June, not a turntable I know but after what I'd seen in Beat Street my brain was flying with ideas.
A mate of mine had a ghetto blaster & I figured I could play a beat off of one tape, say in his blaster, & record it onto another tape in my tape recorder. I figured that if I used the pause button on the recording tape, I could record the same beat again & again, from the playing tape, until I've got a long enough loop of the beat to start to do stuff with. Once I'd recorded about 3 minutes worth of drums I'd go to work on my sample track.
For this I'd need another blank tape in the recorder. I'd get sounds, voices, instruments literally anything from tape, vinyl & sometimes my own voice on the built-in mic, & using the same technique with the pause button, I'd record myself another tape with these sounds on. Then the fun began, I'd playback both tapes at the same time, one in my mates blaster & one in my machine. To be honest it must have sounded awful as nothing was in sync, but to me as well as the hilarity of hearing all of the samples playing with a beat behind it there was a certain amount of pride that went with it too. At the time I'd looked at this as a primitive form of DJ'ing & that it was, but looking back on it now I can also see it was a primitive form of sampling which is now an everyday part of my life & something I didn't even know about back then let alone understand.
This behavior went on for a couple of years & I grew as the culture of Hip-Hop grew. I ended up on my 14th Birthday, (1986), getting a Toshiba Hi-Fi with twin tape decks, you can imagine what I was doing with that, right? But needless to say it meant I could finally record the results of my two tapes playing together.
At this time Rakim had popped up on the scene & was making one hell of an impression, at least on me. I'd never heard anyone rap like that, he was funny, conscious & more to the point I could feel him. This made me take a whole new approach to writing rhymes, I was no longer rhyming about my dick & ended up writing about things that had happened to me & the things I was seeing go on around me.
In 1987 I got hold of my first keyboard, I think it was a Yamaha PSS-470. Now I can't remember whether this was a Birthday or Christmas present or just a hand me down from my cousins, I think the later, either way it was mental. It gave a whole new dimension to the tapes I was putting together.
1988 was the year I left school & the year I linked up with DJ Colossal. Colossal was a friend of a friend & I really got to know him through working together selling kitchens, which was my first job after leaving school. Colossal loved his Hip-Hop lifestyle as much as I did so musically the two of us gelled. This was a good chance for me to start dropping my rhymes with a live DJ on the cut & believe me Colossal could scratch. In fact he was the only DJ I ever knew in Hastings who could. Thing was Hip-Hop was never really taken on in the Hastings clubs so we found ourselves gig-less as far as Hip-Hop went. The Hip-Hop music scene was changing as well, what with NWA dropping the Straight Out of Compton LP & the emergence of Gangsta Rap & although UK Hip-Hop had it's own scene, what with Overlord-X, Silver Bullet, MC Duke & the like, the big thing in the UK was the Acid House & Rave scene.
Towards the end of 1989 Colossal made a switch in his DJ'ing in an attempt to get some money & began DJ'ing Hardcore. I too followed & started MC'ing in a completely different fashion to what I was used to although we both continued listening to our Hip-Hop.
Over the next three years Hardcore steadily evolved into Jungle & the UK was swamped by the Rave scene. I spent my time MC'ing with Colossal, converting my Breaking steps to fit with Jungle & dreaming about days in a studio.
In January 1993, age 20, I moved to Cambridge for educational purposes, although I didn't get into University until a couple of years later. Musically I found myself completely detached as I was in a town where I didn't know anyone & after spending the previous 5 years around a DJ I'd been used to keeping up to date with current releases. There was only one thing for it, I needed to get some turntables.
By the September of 93 I did just that & bought myself a pair of Technics SL1210 Mk2's & a Made2Fade GM25 mixer. I was chuffed to bits. I gotta say scratching came pretty naturally, I reckon the time spent watching Colossal had had an effect on me, so as well as refine my scratch technique all I had to do was learn how to mix.
I must have been picking it up pretty quick because within six weeks I was performing at a friends party. It was here I met a couple of local up & coming DJ's & an MC, who are still good friends of mine today, DJ's Freedom, DG Select & MC Shukout, big up every time Fam!! From then we all used to hang out, buy records & practice mixing. Within a couple of months we were playing in some local clubs which lead onto the Cambridge Corn Exchange & various colleges & Universities around the town, which I continue to do today. We were also involved in the foundations that built the club night Warning, UK's most popular & longest running Drum & Bass night, then Jungle!!
During the summers of 94, 95 & 96 myself & MC Shukout were appearing on Cambridge Community Radio (CCR FM) where we had our own Jungle Show on Friday nights. We'd have special guests whilst dropping the heaviest mixes with the latest white labels, taking calls & delivering the latest news from the scene.
Still having the urge within me to be making music & in an attempt to get myself in some studios, in the September of 95 I started a Bachelor of Science Degree in Audio Technology at University. Unfortunately this course had a massive interest in teaching you the electronics that go into building studio equipment rather than using it, saying that though we were given studio time & you can believe I spent every minute I could in there practicing techniques in sampling & getting my head round some sequencing software called Cubase, which now plays an everyday part in my life. By the time I was part way through the 2nd year, 1997, the studio time was out weighed by the mathematics & electronics so I called it a day & knocked the course on the head.
From 95 to 98 as well as DJ'ing I was also spending time in various studios around Cambridge & surrounding East Anglia picking up further skills on making beats using computers, samplers & synths. By mid 97 what I knew as Jungle had fully progressed into Drum & Bass & I flipped my DJ'ing gig work over to Hip-Hop, although I still did & do, to this day, D&B shows, playing strictly from the Jungle Era.
By mid 98 I'd bought my first sampler, an Akai S2000 & managed to pick up along the way an Atari 520ST to run Cubase. I began educating myself in the building of tracks & general studio operation picking up bits of kit as I went.
In 1999, my son Ashley, then aged 10 had started showing some interest in DJ'ing, & like father like son we soon found out he had a natural talent for it. After spending just over a year on & off the turntables in the studio, on his 12th Birthday I decided to move them into his bedroom, something I'd wished had been done for me back in 1985.
In early 2000 I landed a job at Digital Village selling studio equipment to the masses nationally & internationally & I'm still there today. In late 2000 I linked with Big Trev from a Nottingham based Hip-Hop Crew, Out Da Ville, who asked me to come & help out DJ'ing when the crews DJ couldn't make it.
In early 2001 I linked with 3 Cambridge rappers who'd formed as a crew called Word Association, they had a rickety old demo floating around that I could hear so much potential in. After linking up it was nothing but good vibes & natural progression lead to us becoming a Hip-Hop crew intent on keeping that old block party vibe alive. We used my studio, then known as The Funny Farm now as Warner Bedrooms, to write & record tracks.
Now by June 2001 I linked with Shiggz, formerly a Co-Promoter of Mudlums, & hit it off with him in a way I hadn’t with anyone for a long time. I had an interest in bringing him in on a show I'd been offered at a club in town. Unfortunately that show fell through but Shiggz told me he had some other plans for a larger show at a venue called the Junction & asked me was I in. Judging from Shiggz's previous work with Mudlums in London & The Bridge in Cambridge I had a feeling this thing was gonna be big & something worth putting my heart & soul into.
On August 16th 2001, alongside the rest of the Dirty Stop Outs (DSO), we launched the club night Rawganics. This soon became the most well known & popular Hip-Hop night in the UK, being voted best Hip-Hop Club Night in the land by Hip-Hop Connection Magazine readers after only six months on the scene. Rawganics was never about money making & let's face it with 19 team members we'd have probably ended up with a couple of quid each. Sadly in 2002 my sister Rebecca, aged 14, & a very close friend of ours Jobug were diagnosed with cancer. From that point on Rawganics adopted the title of a Non-Profit Based Organisation raising funds in the name of Cancer Support & continues to do so today. By July 2002 we were asked to bring the show to Switzerland & perform at the World Grand Prix Skateboarding event, an opportunity we couldn't turn down. Rawganics ran for four & a half years during which time we performed alongside some of the biggest acts in Hip-Hop from the UK & Worldwide. Acts such as Ice-T, Ghostface, Pharohe Monch, Pete Rock, DJ Q-Bert, Non Phixion, DJ A-Trak, Roots Manuva, Skinnyman, Blak Twang, Phi-Life Cypher & DJ Skully to name but a few. Although the shows now over the name lives on & is revered in the industry as the heavy weight of showcases, constantly begged for its return.
Without a doubt though, 2002 saw my greatest musical achievement of them all, my son Ashley ( DJ Crispy aka Crispa Crisp ) now just turned 14, entered the Young UK DMC Contest. After several battles against some very competent DJ’s over a period of months, he done me proper proud & grabbed the 3rd place title in the UK, & in the words of Cut Master Swift “He was beaten by a 18 & a 16 year old, making him the Number 1 DJ in the UK under 16.†Dam right he was!! & I remember that every time I see him play. It was only natural that in 2003 DJ Crispy became the DJ for Word Association.
In March 2003 Word Association released our first EP on 12†vinyl through Long-Playa Records, my own label, which contained 4 of our finest tracks. We received multiple reviews in magazines such as Hip-Hop Connection, Undercover, etc, got Radio 1 & 1 Xtra air play & gigged up & down the country off the back of our efforts & continue to. From then we worked on our album.
During 2005 whilst holding down my day job, dealing with Rawganics, moving house & working on the WA album, I turned my hand towards being an agent for acts such as Skinnyman, Klashnekoff , DJ Skully, to name a few, & still continue to source gigs for them today. I also took a little time out of the studio in 05 & learnt to play the drums, something I wanted to do for years but never made time to do.
The WA album, Words, didn’t get released until 2006 due to multiple upheavals with landlords & ramrods. Again we received reviews in magazines & received air play on radio. I’m even getting told by various sources that one of our beats is getting used in some episodes of MTV Cribs, I need to chase that!! There’s also a video that came out alongside the album that got air play on Channel U & is now available to view on the bands My Space. We are still writing tracks today & have plans for some new releases shortly.
Right now in the 07 as well as getting these new WA tracks together, I've done some recording work with SWAY & have just mastered DJ Skully's soon to hit the streets mixtape "Gully Breaks". I’m also continuing to DJ & Compare at various venues, pop up on open mics here & there, work with some of the most talented recording artists in the UK & have plans for some incredible stuff in the near future……Peas, Loftie !!!