“So science got me out of trouble.”

At what age did you get your first MPC?

I was DJing first…And there were these cheap little bundles they used to do, so I got cheap decks and a completely shit mixer. I remember trying to scratch on them and it was really hard, and I kind of got the hang of it. I’d fucked up my parents’ turntable about three times. I actually discovered how to repair it on the sly (laughs). It was a belt-drive turntable and I used to scratch on it and the belt used to get loose and fucked up. Someone at school in a science lesson said something about rubber shrinking in hot water, so when my parents were out I took the belt off, put it in hot water, dried it and it proper worked! So science got me out of trouble.

My mum had been putting a savings account together for me to go to college, so I knew there was some money there. It took me a while but bit by bit I managed to get her to give me some cash and I bought a proper Technics turntable and I got a Technics mixer.

How did you convince her to do that? She must’ve known you were quite serious?

Yeah, my mum knows me, she knows that if I do something it’s because it means something to me and I want to do something with it, I don’t do things for no reason. And from there, I was getting into scratching and hip-hop, and it was like ‘how do they make this music?’. I saw a really interview with Krush or Shadow, can’t remember, and they were talking about the MPC, so I was like ‘I need one of them’.

So you took making music quite seriously in the beginning? Did you have any ambitions?

Yeah, ambitions to create stuff- I didn’t think about it beyond that. I remember making my first beat on the MPC, I couldn’t figure anything out. I was just randomly doing shit. I’ve got it on a floppy disk somewhere. It was actually kind of ill, that beat- it makes no sense because I didn’t know about doing time signatures or even any BPM things, I was just trying to get it to loop up in really weird ways, just by pressing stuff and chopping things. It was just all over the shop. It’d probably be pretty contemporary now, I should bring that shit out (laughs). But yeah, my scratching ability paused at that moment, just been making beats ever since.

Has music been your full time pursuit in your adult life?

I went to Art College. I love art and really want to do more of it, but again it’s just time. The modern world isn’t very nice in terms of time….I toyed with the idea of going to Music College. I did a little trial there once and it was just so horrible. It’s probably completely unfair, but for me at the time it just wasn’t what music was about. We sat there with this proper old version of Cubase and we had to make a track using these MIDI sounds but they all sounded horrible to me and I was trying to get the guy to let me record audio….and anyway that was just my experience at that point in time, I’m not trying to say it’s not a good thing to do, it might well be. But for me personally music always had to be completely free and completely on my terms, that way I enjoyed it. Whilst I was Art College I was pretty much doing music all the time and it started to take shape.

When you say take shape, do you mean you were getting your first album together?

Yeah. The first album’s funny, it’s just like I had old beats sitting around on my MPC and it seemed a shame to not use them. Aly, who I’d been DJing with for years, setup First Word and I gave him tracks and he was like ‘yeah let’s put this out’. It was all a little blasé on my part, and then we got a good response and I actually freaked out, because I’d not thought about it in that way. I’d had a vision for the piece of work but beyond that had no idea what to expect. So putting it out was kind of interesting and encouraging.