ABSTRACT
My background is in visual art and I’ve always had an interest – my first love in the arts is really music, and for me I found music is the strongest and most immediate of all the forms. But if I had any sort of talent at anything when I was younger it was at drawing and painting and stuff so I ended up doing quite well at A Level art and then going on to art college. But I learnt a liĴle bit of guitar and stuff when I was younger in my teens, but what I could do on a guitar just didn’t satisfy me, I felt frustrated because what I could do on it wasn’t enough for me to feel like it was what was in my head, so to speak, and when I listened to other people playing guitar, it just sounded terrible I suppose, you know people that I like. So my way in was for the late 70s, I went to New York in 1979 and went to some clubs and stuff. It was good to go to discos and stuff and see people play records but it was the first time I’d seen people you know really mixing records, and not so much the hiphop stuff like Grandmaster Flash, although that’s something that I also enjoy, but what particularly got me were people like Larry Levan and Walter Gibbons. They would like extend just parts of records that were interesting to them. Also it was all completely dance based so it was preĴy well all round 4/4, you know four to the floor stuff, but I bought some twelve inches and stuff in New York that had been mixed by these people and bought them home then started hearing stuff anyway here in clubs and went out and bought a liĴle mixer and another turntable and started off like trying to copy, I suppose, those people and so that was the way in. That was how I sort of started using record players, and I did stuff with friends, but at that time I was living in London and the people that I was associated with were people that were involved in performance art and dance and also like music people around the LMC [London Musicians Collective] so I wanted to find a way of like what I did would work within that sphere. I was also doing performance work myself at that time which was an extension of my visual background, and trying to incorporate sound and stuff into it and I bought a couple of old record players to use. But also at that time I was working with a dance tour, this is the early 80s, and I worked with him right up until about 1990 I suppose, sort of just aĞerwards was the last time I worked. He had like management in Europe and we got loads and loads of gigs, loads and loads of work and he then sort of had a company that did work with us, and this was Laurie Booth, and so I sort of just played on the road.
