The True Story of Acid House: Britain’s Last Youth Culture Revolution

By Luke Bainbridge

The arrival of a new style of music and a new type of drug in 1988 ignited a revolution. To coincide with the 25th anniversary of the second summer of love, this is the definitive story of the seismic movements in music and youth culture that changed the cultural landscape forever. Luke Bainbridge is uniquely positioned to tell this story, having connections both in the industry, through nearly two decades as a music journalist, and on the dancefloor, through two decades of dancing, promoting and DJing. Bainbridge has interviewed most of the protagonists who led the revolution, from the DJs and musicians to the promoters, gangsters and ravers, and built up a relationship of trust and mutual respect. This will be true story of acid house, from the DJ box to the dance floor. He examines the legacy and lasting impact of acid house, and how the second summer of love is viewed 25 years on. How has acid house been assimilated into mainstream culture? How did the change in drugs, away from ecstasy towards other drugs, affect the music and the party scene? Why has the free party scene never really been replicated, despite new technology greater capacity to organise events and disseminate information? Did the summer of 1988 leave us with a generation of drug users? Has there been any lasting effect of such an explosion in drug use? Who were the real winners and casualties in the story? Do the world's current biggest DJs Tiesto, Swedish House Mafia, David Guetta have any connection to the original scene? Where next for house and dance music in general?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Omnibus Press
• Release date: Feb 10, 2014
• ISBN: 9780857128638

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Introduction:

The Second Summer Of Love

The summer of 2013 marked the 25th anniversary of the zenith of Britain’s last youth culture revolution – the explosion of acid house, which became christened the second Summer of Love. A quarter of a century on it is clearer than ever that acid house was the UK’s greatest music revolution since the birth of rock’n’roll – a seismic, explosive movement which changed the face of music and youth culture irrevocably. The arrival of a new music and a new drug fuelled the biggest youth revolution since the Sixties, and altered the cultural landscape forever. Forget punk. Forget grunge. Forget everything. Acid house was the most spectacular and dramatic youth movement, and had an infinitely bigger, more devastating and far-reaching impact. Unlike punk, acid house transcended class, race, geographical and cultural divides – strangers and soul mates, black and white, straights and gays, girls and boys, north and south, football hooligans and doctors, cops and robbers, students and scallies. Acid house was truly egalitarian. It was also one of those moments of paralysis that happen perhaps once a generation, where barriers seem to fall.

Within little more than six months, the scene had gone from a few pockets of clued-up clubbers to a nationwide explosion and warehouse parties holding 20,000 ravers. For a while, the weak became heroes and everybody felt love. Every generation is desperate for something to call their own, something their parents don’t understand. Acid house was so new your older brother didn’t understand it, let alone your parents. The established industry had no idea what it was dealing with and those who couldn’t keep pace with the rapidly changing times looked and sounded like dinosaurs. It’s the closest thing to mass organised zombie-dom, frowned BBC Radio 1 DJ Peter Powell, the ‘nation’s favourite station’s’ dance-trend arbiter and roadshow veteran. I really don’t think it should go any further.

Powell couldn’t have been more mistaken. The acid house revolution, which started in basements, warehouses, under railway arches and outdoors in fields (and in one case, in a subterranean fitness gym), had gone much, much further than even the most evangelical early devotees could have imagined. It changed the social and cultural habits of a generation and every following generation, and the fundamental notion of a night out in this country. It challenged authority, prompting Parliament to pass new laws aimed at curbing the revolution, and the police to establish a new unit dedicated to stopping unlicensed parties. Acid house was the perfect storm. The shattering collision of new technology (samplers, drum machines and mobile phones) and a new drug (ecstasy) combining to produce a new musical and evangelical youth movement which swept aside everything that had gone before.

On the 25th anniversary of 1988’s ‘Second Summer of Love’, the time felt right to ask the key protagonists who led the revolution to tell the true story of how it all unfolded and how they view it a quarter of a century on. From the DJs and musicians in the limelight to the promoters and more nefarious elements in the shadows, to those on the dance floor who fuelled the revolution, this is their story.

But as well as telling the true story of the birth of acid house in this country, I wanted to ask them about its legacy and lasting impact. Why has the free party scene never really been replicated, despite new technology heralding greater capacity to organise events and disseminate information? How did the change in drugs, away from ecstasy towards other, harder drugs, affect the music and the party scene? Has there been any lasting effect of such an explosion in drug use? Who were the real winners and casualties in the story? How do the biggest DJs today view that time 25 years on, now that acid house has been assimilated into mainstream culture?

CHAPTER 1

The Foundations

People forget there was a vibrant early warehouse scene before acid house, and it was called raving too …

DJ Harvey

In and around London in the late seventies and early Eighties, there were two major musical scenes: the huge suburban soul scene at one end and the West End scene at the other, and the two didn’t mix much. The suburban soul scene was dominated by huge weekenders like Caister Soul, the flagship soul music event. The West End was the antithesis: a network of small exclusive clubs like The Blitz and the Mud Club, frequented by a glamorous, moneyed clique.

TERRY FARLEY, DJ/ BOY’S OWN CO-FOUNDER: You can trace it all the way back to 1976 if you want to – that is almost like year dot for me. There have been a couple of golden periods in London’s clubbing history, musically, socially and fashion-wise, and 1988 and acid house was definitely one, but so was 1976, and most of the people who instigated what was going on in London in 1988 came from that previous golden period. People like promoters Graham Ball, who did Westworld in 1986, which was almost like a blueprint for the later outdoor raves, with dodgems cars and fairground rides; Chris Sullivan who did Love At The Wag; all the Boy’s Own lot – most of us come from 1976.

Back in the late Seventies and early Eighties there was always two scenes in one. There was the suburban soul scene, which was absolutely huge – they did a National Soul Day at Knebworth and it pulled 25,000 people even though it wasn’t promoted outside that scene – and the West End scene.

When we started, you could go out seven days a week, but you had to travel. Monday would be Scamps in Hemel Hempstead, Tuesday was Scamps in Sutton, Wednesday was the Water Splash near Luton, Thursday was upstairs at Ronnie Scott’s, Friday was the lunchtime disco at Crackers, Saturday lunchtime was the 100 Club disco, Saturday evening was Global Village (which later became Heaven) and Sundays was Crackers again. I had a job as a gas fitter, and I had to get up at 7a.m. to cycle to work, so I couldn’t go out ‘til 3a.m. every night.

When I first started going out I was hanging around with Gary Haisman* and Johnny Rocca, who were real faces then. A lot of kids had to lead a slightly criminal lifestyle to be able to afford to go out seven nights a week. Tins of coffee were really expensive back then –kids would rob five tins from a shop and then knock on people’s doors and sell them for a pound each, so they had enough money to go out.

The one thing that did annoy me about the West End clubs back then was not that it was so exclusive but the fact they were all run by Welsh people like Steve Strange, telling us locals we couldn’t come in.

TREVOR FUNG, DJ: I started DJing in the late Seventies on the soul and jazz circuit, which was huge back then. Steve Walsh was a big DJ on that scene and I became his warm-up DJ. I also started going to Ibiza every summer from about 1979, although it was nothing like it would become later – back then, most of the British who went there were on Club 18-30 holidays. Nobody knew about the other side of the island.

I used to hang around with my cousin Ian St Paul all the time and I remember us meeting Paul Oakenfold on a bus to a soul gig in Slough one day. Paul was a chef then; he wasn’t playing music, although he was always interested and asking questions when we started hanging out together on that soul scene. I was on the circuit doing soul and jazz, with people like Pete Tong, Gilles Peterson, Chris Brown, and I also started DJing at a great little club called Rumours in Covent Garden – I got Paul Oakenfold his first gig there.

Then, in 1981, Paul and Ian St Paul travelled to New York for a few months as they wanted to find out where the music we were into was from, and I went to visit them. We went to a lot of the clubs, including Paradise Garage and Studio 54. Larry Levan* even showed us round Paradise Garage when it was closed, and he showed us the Richard Long sound system, which was incredible.

PAUL OAKENFOLD, DJ: I started out DJing in my bedroom, like we all do I suppose, and then I got to know Trevor Fung, who was a very influential DJ at the time. Trevor was very instrumental in getting me my first break. He was the resident DJ at Rumours in Covent Garden, which was a high-end club then, and I used to hang out there with him. One day he wasn’t very well so he asked if I would stand in for him and that’s where it started. So it’s all Trevor’s fault.

Ian St Paul and myself wanted to go to New York for a holiday because that was the source of the music for us. We were out there for three months and went to most of the great clubs of the time, but I’d have to say Paradise Garage was the most inspiring – it really moved the dial for anyone who ever went there. It was like nothing any of us had seen before.

ANDREW WEATHERALL, DJ/PRODUCER OF SCREAMADELICA/BOY’S OWN CO-FOUNDER: Growing up in Windsor, London always felt like the Emerald City. If you’re coming from the suburbs, London is this magical place – even if you’re only 15 miles down the M4, you might as well be a million miles away. So I’m glad in a way that when we first started going out in the West End we’d get knocked back on the door – some people moan about elitism but if we hadn’t have got knocked back, those places wouldn’t have felt special. I’m glad we had to make an effort. If I’d have just tipped up from Windsor and they’d gone, Hello, yes, come on in! I would have thought, "Oh, really? But I’m just some kid from the suburbs, I thought this place was special?" So I’m glad there was that elitism.

There was one decent clothes shop in Windsor called Catermas, run by a guy called Johnny Rocca. Terry Farley used to shop there and I also used to see Cymon Eckel [future Boy’s Own member] there and round town. The story of Boy’s Own is that common suburban tale of like-minded people gravitating towards the one decent clothes shop or record shop in town and getting to know each other.

I started reading The Face and i-D when they came out. There were gigs at The Lyceum on a Sunday and at the back of the venue was a room where a company called Better Badges sold fanzines, and I bought the first ever edition of Viz and the first ever edition of i-D. The first one had a picture of Boy George dressed as a nun, and underneath it said George. Location: London. Ambition? To be a pop star.

BOY GEORGE, CULTURE CLUB/DJ: I was living in a squat in Great Titchfield Street in the late Seventies and early Eighties. I loved soul but I was a punk rocker so I hated dance music, until I heard Donna Summer in The Sombrero [a gay club] in Kensington and I was like, "Oh wow, what’s this?" That may have been connected to amyl nitrate. Then I started DJing with Jeremy Healy in 1980 at Phillip Sallon’s club Planets. We would play lots of obscure, quasi-punk electronic records, like from You’ve Got Foetus On Your Breath or ‘(We Don’t Need This) Fascist Groove Thang’, all those early 12-inches. But there was no real structure to what we played. Sometimes we play a jazz record and people would be waltzing on the dance floor. I suppose it was kind of like the mixed bag Alfredo and Danny Rampling later played, which became known as Balearic, although what they played was obviously much more rhythmic and blended than what we were doing. Jeremy then later DJ’d at Choice at Subterranea in Notting Hill Gate, which was run by [now TV presenter] Davina McCall, then went on to start the Circus parties.

GREG WILSON, DJ: The most influential DJ for me in the late Seventies was Greg James at The Embassy club, near Bond Street. He was an American DJ who had been brought over to DJ at The Embassy and I used to come down from Liverpool to hear him play; he was hugely influential. He was the first guy to mix records in this country and Ian Levine says he taught him to mix. Froggy* always talked about Larry Levan and going to New York in 1979 and seeing Larry play and that blowing his mind, but I’m sure Froggy would have seen Greg James before that. James Hamilton had already started writing about mixing records in Record Mirror,** so we knew about mixing … we just didn’t have the equipment yet. Most nightclub managers at that time would have thought it was lazy for a DJ to just play records. For them a DJ was all about you getting on the microphone and your force of personality.

*

In between London’s West End scene and the suburban soul scene was a hugely vibrant warehouse scene. Since the Sixties, certain London councils had tolerated a number of hippies and drop-outs squatting in derelict buildings, usually neglected old warehouses or forgotten flats that had become unrentable to tenants. Some of them were death traps with exposed wiring, falling masonry, damp and asbestos. The opportunity to live in the capital on a shoestring, with like-minded creative people – artists, writers, musicians – helped build alternative creative communities and fuel a fertile, oft-overlooked episode of British counterculture, which continued apace until the late Eighties boom in property prices. Boy George and Marilyn lived in a squat as did, at various times, The Pogues, Ian Dury, Depeche Mode, My Bloody Valentine and The Shamen, among many others. They may have been lectured by the Tories, told by Norman Tebbit to Get on your bike! and classed by Margaret Thatcher as have-nots, but in a way they had it all, or all they needed. Darryl Hunt, bass player with The Pogues, fondly remembers that time as the last great flowering of the inner city.

Many of these squats were home to the first warehouse parties and/or those who ran them – from the DJs squatting in Battle Bridge Road, Kings Cross, to the art collective Mutoid Waste Company – and would prove an important foundation of the acid house explosion in London, as well as other cities across the country. In Manchester, the Crescents in Hulme were declared ‘unfit for purpose’ and so were taken over by squatters, artists and musicians. Bristol and Cambridge also had vibrant squat party scenes.

MARK MOORE, S’EXPRESS: In the early Eighties there were quite a lot of great warehouse parties going on around London. I used to go to the early Dirtbox parties and they were fantastic. It felt like they had just broken into the place, although I think they probably had hired it. The venues were quite dirty and a mess but that was normal at the time.

Soul II Soul also started doing things and Family Funktion, which was Judge Jules and Norman Jay, and Mutoid Waste were doing parties at the squats in King Cross. I played at a couple of those Mutoid Waste parties, which were absolutely incredible. You felt like you were DJing in a Mad Max movie – I just remember these huge metal sculptures, Mad Max-type bikes driving around and huge bonfires burning. They were crazy parties and I think there were probably around 400 people there.

The Battle Bridge Road parties were also amazing. Noel and [brother] Maurice Watson were playing this really electronic, hip hop-meets-electro sound, which was also quite dubby; it sounded like Kraftwerk’s ‘Metal On Metal’ but even slower, with a really stark drum beat.

ROBIN KING, PROMOTER: I had quite an eclectic upbringing as my father was a famous graphic designer who designed Jimi Hendrix’s record covers. When I was young, The Who and the Stones would come round the house. We moved to Amsterdam but I came back to London to go to Central St Martins [College of Art and Design] when I was 18. I ended up being voted president of the student union and started putting on parties and alternative fashion shows. The parties got more successful and more and more extravagant. We did one in Covent Garden, then one in Jubilee Hall in 1985, which went absolutely berserk – there were people climbing up drainpipes, trying to get in.

I also did a bit of DJing at Taboo and I first dropped Phuture’s ‘Acid Trax’ when I was playing there. I think there were only 10 copies of ‘Acid Trax’ in London at first, and I bought two. I thought the music at Taboo was a bit ‘poppy’, but it was closer to Paradise Garage [in New York City] in attitude than something like [acid house club night] Spectrum. We were going out every night – from The Wag to The Embassy, there was always something going on.

NOEL WATSON, DJ: Myself and my brother Maurice moved to London from Belfast in 1979 and got jobs where we could at first, in clothes shops and restaurants. Back then the most influential DJ in London for me was Steve Lewis from Le Beat Route*; he was my idol. There was a unique vibe in Le Beat Route and Steve was playing a lot of rare J.B.’s** and a lot of good rare funk and early electro. I saw Madonna perform there, just her and two dancers, in about 1983 or 1984.

Then my brother Maurice starting working as a tailor at a clothes shop called Demob [on Beak Street, in London’s Soho]. Harry and Chris Brick ran Demob and it was through Chris that Maurice and I got our first break. Maurice had run the first alternative club in Northern Ireland when we were in Belfast and when Demob put an event on at the Electric Ballroom in Camden, Chris asked us to DJ.

At that time, Maurice and myself had very little money so we had to steal most of our records from Virgin Records on Oxford Street – even back then an import record was as much as £5 or £6. Maurice actually got caught shoplifting in there and got two years’ probation, but I got away with it. I remember stealing ‘Hip Hop, Be Bop (Don’t Stop)’ by Man Parrish from Virgin Records and then playing it at the Electric Ballroom that night. It was the first time anyone had heard it and it fucking blew the roof off.

After that, Chris Brick and Chris Sullivan [of The Wag] said, Right, we’re going to start an illegal warehouse party on Rosebery Avenue and we want you two to be the DJs. Those Demob parties were about halfway down Rosebery Avenue on the right-hand side, if you’re going up towards Exmouth Market. During the day it was a sweatshop for the rag trade, and Demob just rented it from the owners. It used to be rammed in there; we would get about 500 people and have to turn about 200 away. We would get people like Sade and Neneh Cherry on the dance floor, all the trendy über-cool West London mob, plus Carl [Smyth] and Suggs from Madness, and Terry Farley and his crew. Don Letts came down and shot part of the video for the track ‘A.E.I.O.U.’ by Freeez there. It was a real cross section of groovers.

That was when Maurice started to veer into more disco and black music, and breaks started coming from New York. We would try to cut the beat on records like ‘Sucker MCs’ by Run-DMC, but the Technics SL1200s hadn’t even been invented yet so we were using old turntables you couldn’t cut on.

TERRY FARLEY: Me and my mate Paul McGee used to go into Demob and one day Steve Marney asked us to do some compilation tapes for the shop. They were mainly electro, Seventies funk tracks from ZE Records and Sleeping Bag Records. Chris Brick asked him who made the tapes, then told us they were putting on a warehouse party on Rosebery Avenue and asked if we would play. It was one of the first warehouse parties in London and there were about 500 people there and it was really fantastic, although I suspect we ourselves were pretty shit as we were hardly technically proficient and hardly anyone was mixing back then. But we ended up playing a few of those Demob parties.

NOEL WATSON: We then started the Battle Bridge Road parties with two guys called Julian Woolley and Sean Oliver, who was in Rip Rig + Panic with Neneh Cherry. Battle Bridge Road was a squat in Kings Cross in a disused school and we did a party there every week for about a year. Sean’s brother, Andrew, and Neneh Cherry would do the bar for us. We’d give them £500 on a Friday and they’d go to a cheap Indian store in Acton and get all the booze and set it all up. There were no real lights because it was an illegal venue. We were charging £9 to get in so we were making quite a lot of money, but that caused us a lot of problems as well because there were quite a lot of people involved who were all taking money out, so there was a bit of friction.

[DJ] Nellee Hooper and the Wild Bunch* boys would also come down to Battle Bridge, and Jazzie B from Soul II Soul and his lot. Joe Strummer was there all the time and even John Lydon would come down occasionally. The music was cutting edge because we had our own decks set up by then so we were cutting breaks properly, and Maurice was a brilliant cutter, mixer and scratcher.

By this stage we were properly crate digging and searching out records. Malcolm McLaren would come down and give us cassette tapes of Zulu Nation playing on the New York radio station Kiss FM, and we would listen to them and try and track down the tunes that DJs like Red Alert and Afrika Islam were playing. That’s also how we first started hearing house records, on those cassettes, because the Kiss FM DJs on just before Zulu Nation were Tony Humphries and Merlin Bob, and they would be playing stuff like D-Train and O’Jays but cutting them and extending them, and they would blend them with early house records, which was the first time we heard it. Maurice became obsessed with this music and he ended up shooting off to New York to find out more about it.

There was no ecstasy at the Battle Bridge Road parties. There was a bit of amphetamines and dope and a wee bit of cocaine as well, but the big drug there was heroin, which became an issue. The real problem we had was dealers dealing heroin in the girl’s toilets – that was one of the reasons we had to curtail things a bit at Battle Bridge, and why the police started to come down on us heavily.

DAVID DORRELL, DJ/MEMBER OF M/A/R/R/S:* I grew up in Bloomsbury in central London, so everything was a five-minute walk for me. When I was young, the Blitz club was happening in Soho and that was a five-minute walk from my door. Then when I started DJing we used to throw parties at the famous squat on Battle Bridge Road, five minutes in the other direction. There were quite a few great warehouse parties around; there were also the Demob parties in a basement off Rosebery Avenue, which were run by Chris Brick with Noel and Maurice. The Dirtbox parties were also around then and I got to meet Rob Milton and Phil Dirtbox. They were doing their illegal parties in various holes around London and they also had a legal club night on Oxford Street, which was on a Thursday. I DJ’d for them at various parties, including one in a disused power station near Battersea Bridge. Jay Strongman was a big DJ back then, as was Norman Jay with his Shake’n’Fingerpop night, and Steve Lewis at Le Beat Route.

NICKY HOLLOWAY, DJ: I first started DJing in the late Seventies at home. I would wait until my mum went to work and then sneak back in the house when I was supposed to be at school. She had one of those old box record players where the record drops down, and I had one the same, so I would get them and put them next to each other and practise playing two records.

I saw an advert in Record Mirror that said, DJs wanted, beginners considered, so I replied and got a couple of interviews with a guy called Mervin Thomas who ran an agency called Rainbow – I think he still runs a strip bar on Shoreditch High Street under the same name. It took me three interviews before he gave me my first job. In those days no one was interested in whether or not you could mix; they just wanted to hear if you could give it all Here we go, ladies and gentleman! and put on a good Tony Blackburn-type voice. I used to get £6 a night, which wasn’t bad money then, and sometimes I could earn as much as £12.

By the early Eighties, a lot of local villains in south London were spending their ill-gotten cash doing up shitty pubs into cocktail lounges and getting 2a.m. licences. I worked quite a lot of those and it was a learning curve, as I didn’t quite realise the sort of people I was working with at first. I even ended up DJing at the Krays’ associate ‘Mad’ Frankie Fraser’s coming out [of prison] party.

But I was more of a soul boy, and I managed to start to build myself up in the soul scene, which was dominated by people like Chris Hill and Robbie Vincent and the Caister Soul Weekenders. I became a bit of a thorn in their side because I started something called Special Branch in 1983, which sort of fused the two worlds existing at that time – the trendy West End boys and the suburban soul boys; Special Branch was somewhere between the two and it worked. I would take DJs from the trendy West End clubs, like Jay Strongman, Rob Milton, Jonathan Moore and Dave Dorrell, and the young DJs from the soul scene, like Pete Tong and Gilles Peterson.

Special Branch started at the Royal Oak on Tooley Street [on the southern bank of the Thames in Bermondsey], which was just desolate then: it was a No Man’s Land, just dead. We opened until 2a.m. because there were no neighbours. The resident DJs were me and Pete Tong downstairs, who would play rare groove, funk and soul, then later we would start to play early house records, and Gilles Peterson upstairs, playing more jazzy stuff. We had a really cool crowd, all in their mid twenties.

As it got better we started doing parties at London Zoo, which were called Doo At The Zoo, and also some great big parties at places like the Natural History Museum. We also did a couple of Special Branch holidays to Ibiza, long before acid house hit. We were doing parties in Café del Mar before anyone else knew it existed – back then, it was where the Spanish went to get away from the British in San Antonio.

TREVOR FUNG: Paul Oakenfold and I started a club night in 1983 at a place called Ziggy’s on Streatham High Street on a Friday. We had a guy called Carl Cox as our warm-up DJ – he ended up being with us for nine years – and guests like Gilles Peterson. The club changed its name at various times to The Funhouse (after The Funhouse in New York which we’d been to when we were over there) and, later on, The Project.

I was working for a guy called Felix who owned Fred & Ginger’s on Old Burlington Street, and out of the blue he came in one day and told me he’d bought the club Amnesia in Ibiza, and said, Do you want to go and work in Ibiza? So I went out there in the summer of 1983 as the resident DJ, but it was dead and in the end he said, I’m going to close it. I then starting working at Star Club, which was opposite [club] Es Paradis. I spent all summer out there and got to know lots of people in the bars and clubs. Then I came home for the winter and would go back to the soul circuit, and began playing things like Nicky Holloway’s Special Branch.

*

In the North of England, the musical climate was very different. The ‘rare groove’ scene that had a stranglehold on London hardly made a dent beyond the capital city, while much of the North’s soul music came from a more rhythmic, four-to-the-floor northern soul background. On top of this, the arrival of electro had a bigger influence on the underground dance scene in the North than it did in London and the South.

GREG WILSON: The rare groove scene was a London scene. It was very important, that whole scene, particularly the pre-acid house warehouse scene which was going on down there, but that wasn’t what was happening in the North and Midlands. There may have been the odd rare groove night, but what happened there was a direct continuum from electro into house and techno.

It annoys me a bit when people think there’s a straight link from northern soul to acid house in the North, the argument being northern soul equals dance all night, fast music and drugs and acid house equals dance all night, fast music and drugs. But there was a seven-year gap between Wigan Casino shutting and acid house taking off, so you’re missing a seven-year chunk of musical history, and what you’re missing out is the influence of the black music crowd in laying the foundations for acid house in the North. Black kids were never really into northern soul – check out any of those videos of Wigan Casino and you’ll only see a few black kids there.

I started out DJing in Liverpool, but it was hard to play black music there in the early Eighties after the Toxteth riots because club owners were wary about attracting that sort of crowd. So I spent a couple of years DJing abroad before coming back to the UK and getting a gig at Wigan Pier, which was a hugely important club then. We had a huge crowd from all over the North coming to listen to electro.

Then I moved to Legends in Manchester, which was an incredible club. There was a little 17-year-old sharp-arsed kid called Kermit, who was a great dancer, a jazz dancer, and a face on the scene even then. Kermit came up to me in Legends and told me he’d got a breakdance crew together called Broken Glass who were dancing in Piccadilly Gardens. So I got involved with them and organised what I called a ‘Street Tour’ of the Northwest. We’d go to shopping centres in Widnes, Liverpool, Birkenhead or Blackpool. We’d just turn up with a ghetto