The Emperor Machine
Inspired by his love of British synth pop, house and electro, Andy Meecham’s teenage fascination with analogue gear led him to work as a sound engineer at Blue Chip Studios in Stafford. It was here that he joined forces with Dean Meredith’s techno outfit Bizarre Inc, which crossed the club/mainstream divide to score numerous top 10 hits in the early ’90s including Playing With Knives and I’m Gonna Get You.
Jaded by label interference, Meecham and Meredith disbanded Bizarre Inc in the mid-’90 to record as Chicken Lips, founding Lipservice Records for their own productions. Born out of his love for vintage samplers and synths, Meecham then focused his attention on his solo dance project The Emperor Machine. Sharing Llama Farm Studio alongside avid synth collector Richard Hale, the producer’s rarely lost for inspiration.
What first got you hooked on electronic dance music?
“It’s mainly down to my sister who bought the John Foxx album Metamatic. Amongst her 7-inch collection was also a Kraftwerk single that was absolutely bizarre, and one of my earliest memories is the start of the track Reflections by Diana Ross. It’s got this weird delay on it that kind of got me hooked. My uncle was also a collector of instruments He had an HH mixer with a delay on it and I used to plug a guitar in and make these weird Doctor Who-type noises. As I got into my teenage years, Afrika Bambaataa’s Planet Rock blew me away.”
You had a string of mainstream hits in the early ’90s as a member of Bizarre Inc, which must have been quite an exciting period in your life?
“It was a great time during a period where there wasn’t a lot of dance music being played on Radio 1. I remember doing an interview with Lisa I’Anson and saying you need to play more dance music, at which point she gave me such a dirty look []. Bizarre Inc went up really quickly and went down the same way, so it was a bit of a ride.”
