Pete Gooding & Phil Dockerty (Futureshock): The Ultimate DJ Collaboration. Brum as F*ck.

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Pete Gooding & Phil Dockerty (Futureshock): The Ultimate DJ Collaboration. Brum as F*ck.

Both of these gentlemen have a wealth of knowledge and respect in the industry and it was an honour to capture their stories.

Phil Dockerty began as a DJ in the 80s, moving on, into the 90s, to produce and remix for some of the biggest names around as one half of Futureshock. He has toured the globe, playing at major festivals and clubs alike and boasts an incredible remix and production discography.

Pete Gooding, in the early 90s, was a mainstay on the Birmingham House scene, whether behind the decks sharing the best in underground sounds, or behind the record shop counter. He went on to hold down one of the longest standing residencies at legendary Mambo in Ibiza, before conquering the rest of the world in pretty much all areas associated with the House scene.

 

foreign [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] good evening welcome along it is inspiring Be Inspired uh coming to you live in directs on YouTube this evening thank you for being here today my two guests are two of birmingham’s most famous Sons they are cherished exports and it’s going to be my pleasure to find out all about Mr Phil Dougherty and Pete Gooding uh broadcasting Live on YouTube so I will say as I always do if you’re with me live then please do feel free to comment ask the guys any question let me know you there and when there’s a break in the conversation I will bring your comments up without further Ado let me introduce my two wonderful guests and say good evening thank you Mr Phil Daugherty and Pete Gooding how are you gentlemen good evening mate yeah thanks for having us on my more than welcome mate more than welcome that’s my absolute pleasure uh always a tentative start as we settle down and make sure that everything is working fine uh two guys who are definitely no strangers to having technical issues here and there all the time so we we’ve known each other for some time but this isn’t about our relationship this is about the uh accolades that you’ve achieved down the years and I guess as always I’m sure you won’t be offended when I say age before Beauty let me say hi to Phil and uh welcome you along tell us exactly where you are as we talk this evening mate I’m sat in a room in in my house actually um so yeah not so much an export I’m still very much in Birmingham for my sins um yeah this is a room actually my wife does a lot of hairdressing in so it’s not really a studio so I don’t have my records behind I need to be set up somewhere else to do it it sounds quintessential records behind is the shot I really need it well you sound impeccable and you look wonderful so thank you for taking it uh so Pete uh below do you tell where you are my friend uh yeah I’m at home in Ibiza uh just up in the north in the countryside all my records are at my mom’s house in Birmingham so I’ve got one box in the corner and you see the case behind you as well definitely need more records in this I’m not plugged in well I’m sure I’m sure they’ve seen more than in a faction down there yes okay so let’s get to this as you know the uh topic of conversation is Brahm as [ __ ] we are proud brummies and uh we are going to be celebrating everything that you’ve achieved in your hometown and we’ll talk about some of your escapades and about as well and anything that crops up in between so I’ll start off with Phil you began uh well actually before you began DJ and tell us a little bit about yourself you can be precise with the year you were born or roughly when you were born and tell us about life growing up for you what area are you from to begin well I was born over in smethwick in in so technically we’re only sort of back back in the day and and my dad moved us to um Sally Oak when I was about eight years old so I kind of did most of my growing up in Sally Oak and um not a million miles away from where I am now and I guess um in terms of like getting into music it was just as we all do you inherit your dad’s records and then you start to figure out some bits for yourself and me and my mates were big time into UB40 I’m going to see them loads um and I think that opened up a lot of music through that you know some some sort of like Roots reggae and sort of early bits there some mates were into and then very much gravitating towards Funk Soul disco Without Really knowing why you know I can remember getting loads of grief for being into Michael Jackson when I was at school you know my mates were into like tougher stuff and metal and stuff I was just like it’s just a great record I like Quincy Jones so shut up it was an education you know it was you know it was um it was just gravitating towards those records and of course in the 80s it was all about that sort of diverse music scene that the top 40 was full of alongside Phil Collins and those Elton John and those kind of established guys you’d have like a lot of bands from this you know the beat and and sort of uh coventory lights you know the specials and stuff like that so it’s a real cultural mix of music I think was a good time you know I left school sort of 8283 so it was a really interesting time to be sort of getting your sort of um group on in terms of adulthood and and figuring out who you are saying that’s a massive part for me it is it is the same story time and time again we hear from the uh late 60s 70s kids music and fashion was very much what defined you back then very different to uh Society now stat in the very obvious so your your path is extremely similar to my own I think we’re roughly of the same age um so Pete I think we probably have a couple of years on you uh what area are you from no just a couple I was born in 73 okay um I I remember distinctly hearing lots of Elo and Phil Collins I think in my dad’s car maybe going fishing to Welford near Stratford that’s kind of my first memories when I look back of hearing music but I think I I think it was 1980 when I was seven I got a little cassette tape for Christmas a cassette lamp like a little handheld one and I I think I had Nick Kershaw’s album The Riddle remember and a Bon Jovi album but so I liked music but I wasn’t obsessed with music okay and then um my sister gave me a tape to listen to when I was doing my homework which was about 1986 which was the house down in Chicago and I heard Mr fingers Can you feel it and uh what else no music is the key Marshall Jefferson or these I mean they were all on there obviously all those all the tracks from that era and that blew my mind I was then utterly utterly obsessed and pcrl my sister listened to as well so that became I was too young to go out so I wasn’t you know I was 13 12 at this time so for me it was things my sister recorded on pcrl and maybe music she was feeding me because she was older so that’s how I got it got into music basically wonderful wonderful okay so um I I heard you say 73 I’m not sure if you mentioned what area you’re actually from oh yeah I’m from I was born in solihull okay yeah that that uh that Rings familiar so Phil how did you uh get into the big bad world of putting a piece of vinyl onto a turntable that was a bit of a journey I suppose it probably I mean I first met you through radio and I think radio is very much a big player for me I just discovered radio when I was a kid really and for a long time I thought that was something I wanted to head for and and I remember volunteering for for hospital really I thinking yeah this is this is a weigh-in but I kind of learned more on the technical side when I did that and I think at the same time I discovered the thing yeah the Pirates were out there and we were stumbling on some of those and Tony Prince used to do a show late on um I think it was a Thursday night it’s not about midnight and it was one of those classic sort of under the covers listening to the radio at night and he was doing this thing it was all about mixing really yeah I think he’d been out to New York a bit and was sort of celebrating Levan and those kind of the heritage of sort of 70s New York and he was a pro it was it’d start that subscription company um DMC that started in about 83 I think 84. and he got people like Alan coolside and Les Adams were doing these mixes and I was just blown away at how how you could put those records together so long before I’d been anywhere near a club I was listening to this and at the same time I think Robbie Vincent was on radio one and uh Peter Powell used to do that evening show on Rodeo one and he’d have froggy and Pete Tom coming in as alternate guests there was a guy who was on Beacon 303 Mike Baker I think his name was in Wolverhampton and he had Tony the villain as a guest quite regularly early on in the early 80s and so all this music was kind of emerging and um that’s where that’s I just thought this is what I like and of course like a lot of us I got the the electro Sands compilations yeah the Morgan Khan Street Sands compilations I was fascinated with that and seeing clips of uh of guys DJ and DJ culture coming out of New York the graffiti stuff and the and the sort of classic image of the guy doing a block party it was just completely blew me away I was just so fascinated with that culture and I just knew I wanted to get involved in that I didn’t know how when how I was going to do it but I can remember literally starting to save up to buy some Technics turntables I’m like I want those turntables what what are they I think the first time we saw those in this country was probably Malcolm McLaren’s Buffalo um was was um was the Supreme Team wasn’t it and they and there was some pictures of the GLI mixer and the Technics I’m revealing my geeky side quite early on I was just so fascinated with the gear more than the fashion more than anything else it was just like what what do I need what bits of gear do I need to get involved in this this is really really exciting amazing well I’ve got a question for you before I do I just want to draw a reference to the people who are now commenting good evening thank you for letting me know you’re there big man boy respect uh and also to Taz they were helping me test out earlier Craig Ward says I remember seeing both of these Legends back at roses in Sally Hall every week it’s great to see what you’ve accomplished and it gives you both a thumbs up I love that to Craig and uh Cliff Williams says good evening as does Emily she says she’s loving the chat her big brother got her into house music early in the 90s so before I come to and keep the comments coming guys we love them thank you very much before I come to you Pete Phil so you must have had the uh the electronics kit at some point then as a young kid big time um it was just I saw it I mean the only way to get information about that kind of equipment back then was Electronics magazine and I was sort of I got into that I was just fascinated with um the technology the idea of um I mean I remember you know seeing seeing the first sort of affordable drum machine something like the tr-707 not affordable to me at the time because I I could I didn’t buy one but um but it was just it was just a really you know the technology enabled things just as sort of a bit later on Samplers uh allowed records like Pump Up the Volume to to exist and and sort of you know that’s that and of course the revolution in hip-hop I just I just got I fell in love with with the technology around it really as as I was discovering the music because obviously you know as as certain bits of kick came along it changed the music yeah I mean later on we could talk about the 303 and the sort of 999 and stuff and that they’re a big sort of punctuated moments where these bits that kit came along that changed the way the way it’s sound I just I became a student of it really I think it’s quite funny as well just that that shorts that short span of time um technology moved so quickly so coming to yourself Pete by the time you were starting to get into the music and getting out and about it things were so far Advanced so you probably wouldn’t have had the same kind of um you know the same kind of mind-blowing experiences for someone three or four years younger than older than yourself yeah I for me I that’s very true I I think the first time I even saw a studio was Phil’s um that was the first Studio I even went to I I didn’t probably share that Fascination um of it looked too complicated to me I’ll be honest I used to see like x amount of audio Channels with automation on each one interesting really wow yeah yeah yeah so so for me yeah I I guess I my mum and uh my mum and stepdad and brothers and sisters we came here to Avita on holiday in 1987. so I’m like 13. and I was too young to go out but my sister did so she I think discovered clubs like s parodies that year and the the most I got was the hotel disco and the guy who was playing in our hotel disco is actually a good DJ who I kind of knew later on so he would play um that early svenvath record electric salsa by off and uh jungle fever these very valerical more alternative sort of Indie weird I don’t know how you described them but and they fascinated me I think being from Birmingham uh you know and in relatively industrial built up City to go somewhere that was kind of exotic looking and hear these exotic records like sung in foreign languages a sort of very Euro sounding was really that enticed me in that in an amazing way um and we met some guys uh you know on that holiday kicking around with some kids who were older we were really into that we had this like mixtape that was like the tape of our holiday and it had Loose Ends Joy Sims that bat band some very early house and that seemed like a very normal combination or everything I was hearing just somehow made a lot of sense um but at this point I’m I don’t even you know I’m not buying music I probably I think I’d bought a Public Enemy album uh nation of millions which I was obsessed with and I had like a little Sanyo you know midi High fight and actually I remember once pulling my sisters into my room so I had two of them and I didn’t know anything about DJ culture at all but I used to get a cassette tape I’d record a record and pause it at a point I thought was significant and I changed the record and then wait for a significant point to unpause it so as if almost simulating Crossways yeah and it was all recorded I guess I’m either my sister’s tapes of pcrl literally so in a way editing bits without knowing that was a anything I was just playing around so yeah but that still didn’t come to much and then I remember another a more significant holiday two years later was in the B3 in 89 when I was 15. um and we sort of sneaked out the hotel and my sister took me to Amnesia and S parodies and I heard Alfredo play French kiss and experience for the first time a club and I was like wow this whatever this is I’m doing this and um that was my moment because we came home and again my sister was very much responsible for me getting into music and taking me to these clubs and then when we got home in that summer she was like there’s this club called the hummingbird and we went there and that and then that’s when I got into as a weekly thing and it became a part of our Lives I guess so for me it was Ibiza you know it’s that was that was the Catalyst Yeah you mentioned the hummingbird we’re probably getting a little Advanced you saw the conversation that we had with uh jock and also with Lee as well uh the guy is responsible for those great times but that’s going to take us uh probably forward before you were already involved in the music you say we met in radio Phil did you actually get involved you wanted to do Hospital radio did that actually come too much I did um a worked us for radio as a presenter and then I worked at bhbm which was a network they had 19 stations and I kind of gravitated towards the technical side I went and I kind of became a technical operator I’ve done bits of radio we do you remember Buzz FM we did with me and me and Adam Presley did a show on Buzz FM for a while which was interesting um and certainly a lot of the content we were making was Finding its way onto radio um but I just moved more towards the sort of I don’t know I I wasn’t a natural I was more interested I thought I was a presenter but I was more interested in making music and then eventually getting out into clubs and playing it when it’s interesting hearing people because I didn’t have that same sort of moment of course 88 89 was big for all of us in terms of wow look at where we are now but I think when I got into DJ and I certainly the first couple of times I played in a club I was saying this to Peter the night it wasn’t a particularly cool thing to do it was it was like you know you’re the guy in the corner playing the tunes carpets yeah you know so you know I I sort of cut my teeth DJing for Eddie funeral down down there you know Edwards uh boogies and Edwards I mean I made it my own I developed a music policy unofficially and and kind of built my little crowd but it was very much accidental and very much well these are the records I think sound good and you know and it wasn’t um it didn’t come with the same sort of Kudos that that eventually gained but in a way that was good because it was more innocent time it was just like I’m only doing this because I love it you know and uh Brian is commenting he says good evening he has fond memories of Raphael’s in Paradise uh Paradise parade was it or Paradise Circus yeah by the Golden Era he’d look forward more to those Friday and Saturday bar nights drinking talking and listening to the music and clubbing and uh he then goes on to talk about the commission Mega mixes uh and asks were they DMC related we’re getting ahead of ourselves um so yeah you know those classic 80s 80s times Ed was number seven Zed was number eight boogies uh most this will be very birmingham-centric you know fun memories of being stood outside chatting up at the lady asking for your taxi uh just after you’ve got you oh God yeah yeah sitting on your records or whatever it was uh the great times so uh yeah how long so before I come back to Pete how long did did that keep you around uh what was that John Bright Street wasn’t it that was that was John Bright Street yeah I can’t remember exactly when when that would have been but it would have been sort of around oh I’m guessing sort of a 83 84 and I would have I was I was at College when when I got up when I blacked my first gig at Bugis Brasserie that was the one on the corner and then I got to know the lady but um boogers the club I played for him and he was kind of like he’s like yeah you can mix man you put me on in the main room and I ended up playing at Edwards number eight for a spell um but these were different times like I say it was like you know the incredible I I just hearing those names again very birmingham-centric anytime anyone mentions them it’s just like incredible really you know we they would have been our formative years my formative years how you got into a club at 14 15 years of age you know trying to sneak past knobby on the door and uh he’d let you in and not get you in kicked in by all the Zulus you know it was a writer passage right every night it was it was funny because when I when I stopped working at Edwards I went back in I was like I’ve got this Grim in there in it but I didn’t see that from where I was from my perspective I was so into the music and so focused on the dancers and learning my craft that I didn’t really look up and see that there was a fight over there more than one yeah you know it was like it could be a bit Grim but uh and there was no appreciation I mean you mentioned people like knobby you know they didn’t give a monkeys about what the DJ was doing the hierarchy went doorman glass collector bar staff you know somewhere down the bottom was the guy in the corner playing the records it was it wasn’t it wasn’t about you and that’s fine that that that’s kind of taught a bit of humility I guess but um but I was learning stuff I was buying records and I was sussing out which ones worked together well and that that kind of works with that and you know there was some great records around and um and it was and I just made it my sort of Mission to build sets really nobody told me to because it was a pop music sort of era in many ways but I just carved out well these are the records I like I’m gonna figure out how to put these together you know so what’s that period just before what night I was there I did most Fridays and Saturdays for about a year and a half for Edwards I did bits in all the venues that Eddie owned for a while but Edwards was my thing but all night long you didn’t share I mean there were five hours sets weren’t they five five and a half assets but again great you do your own warm-up you play your main thing um the guests you know scene hadn’t really started then you know it was sort of early days for that so you know and uh but that’s how you learn say you later cutting your teeth uh two gentlemen saying hi Mr Richie Roberts you say it’s great to see everyone hello mate and uh Pete Sheriff says good evening gents so uh welcome along don’t forget guys if you’re watching do feel free to leave a comment and and of course uh on the recording as well let the guys know if you uh relate to any of their stories okay Pete so um I mean I’m still I’m still Keen to to bring us up to the back end of the 80s and the 90s so bear with me as we continue to grill Phil here uh how how does it progress for you then we’re all engrossed in this story right well I think um I heard a mountain mine was at University in Manchester and he and he came back with some Greg Wilson mixes Greg Greg used to do mixes on Piccadilly so this is 8283 as well I suppose and and that was another thing that was happening simultaneously this idea that you could put music together like that I mean he did it on New Year’s Eve and he put like he’d done a sort of best of 83 live in some club and recorded it I was just like wow he’s like built a Tempo from sort of SOS band this sort of chuggy stuff right the way through to I don’t know whatever it was at the time D train or something and and again it was just okay I wanna I wanna do that I want to learn how to put something together that that works at that level that is as smooth as that and DMC of course was happening and we started I just you know I joined DMC and started receiving their people don’t know what DMC was it was a subscription service for DJs and you’d get albums that’d be vinyl and a little booklet that became mix mag and um and that would be mixes that you could play so it might be it might be a mega mix of a particular artist and they put all their hits together and you could sort of play that at a gig or it might be you know what what’s happening at the moment the current sort of final records or whatever mixed together so again learning those was like an education you’d play them and think have they done that how has he looped that and got that to work with that there was no YouTube there was nothing you could Google there was it was just listing and trying to figure out what tools they were using and eventually when you meet some of the guys who who put those things together um asking them I went on to enter you know the Technics DMC competition a bit later sort of 86 87 I got involved a bit more confident to go out and enter that competition which was all about cutting really but what the the thing that happened that was significant for me is that I took part in that and I I’d written down how far I’ve got to um sort of second place in the heat I think the first time I entered it was at 87 and um although I didn’t win it was someone like cut Master Swift it went on because he was really you know magical in terms of his turntableism a couple of the judges did spot that what I was doing in terms of blending was working and I got invited down to to DMC studios in slang to sort of get involved and sort of learn the studio craft a bit more which was when I was working with another guy Adam Prezi and together we formed the commission so we started doing some mixes as a commission and getting bits on on radio I think we blagged a little bit on brmb and stuff early early divorce that’s where Brian T says tight and Innovative fat as [ __ ] with with two two ph’s fats on this book right okay yeah so that was the sort of next little bit and of course um that that became that opened a few doors because we we got um Jeff young study planamix’s quite a lot and uh and then when Pete song took over sort of like in 91. he actually called us up and and I’m jumping ahead a bit now he called he called us up and said um I know Jeff plays your mixes we want to formalize that you guys to be up for doing a weekly mix because I’ve got the Friday Night Show and I’m doing this thing on a Sunday and I want to feature like a sort of half hour mix are you up for doing it we were like yeah so for for quite quite a period of time we were doing these regular Sunday mixes on so in your own words it was the precursor really for yeah I mean he then called and said we’re gonna we’re gonna keep that format going but we’re going to get different guests in to do it and we’re going to feature clubs and stuff and it yeah it became the Essential Mix so so I invented the Essential Mix let’s go that’s what I wanted to get out of your own words I needed that same advice remind me and I am coming to your p uh remind me then because I was a huge fan of Jeff young back in the day but the the the dates are very blurred blurred for me I recall that Jeff was on a Friday before Pete took over his show is that correct is my memory correct that Friday night show was Jeff’s show and it became pizza and it was around the time that I think Matthew Bannister went into radio one and he got rid of all this sort of you know dinosaur DJs and started turning it around a little bit and put the focus on new music and and one of the changes that happened behind the scene everyone talks about it being you know Chris Moore’s coming in but behind the scenes was dance music had a massive influx of Reinventing radio one and obviously peak time was at the helm of that so um yeah it just coincided with us sort of being good enough really to put that sort of stuff together well in 1991 the only reason that would have been able to happen was because of the foot soldiers like myself and Pete week in week out on those dance floors tell us about your hummingbird memories please make making house music the the phenomenon that it was it’s really interesting hearing I guess because i’m when I came in to DJing and stuff right even even experiencing clubs this sort of big thing that had happened that wasn’t there that then emerged I didn’t know it that it wasn’t ever there so for me I came in and all this these sort of big moments that you guys had I was a few I didn’t see them so I just took it for granted that you could mix records I didn’t understand this huge like Breakthrough to them so it’s actually really interesting hearing it but when we were going when we were going to the hummingbird then the uh you know the acid house movement 89 into 90 when you your sister took it there because it was uh very early days and in a very short very short period of time you would have people on the dance floor in there acid Smiley tops and then the next week everyone’s like proper football casual it kind of the scene changed really really quickly you know yeah again I I was never that much into the fashion side of it either I mean I think again we my sister would take us down to London and we’d buy these really baggy you know jogging bottoms with 20 inch bonds and kickers like tops with like purple on logos on them and uh so you know I guess it was like the an earlier version of being a gay Crusher kid really wasn’t it it was like a late version of the same thing and so we would go to like 49ers for a drink and hear people obviously I now know them but I didn’t at the time but people like Nathan Gregory who was a massive inspiration musically because he would play you know Lonnie Liston Smith expansions uh atmosphere dancing in outer space Rock Creek Park the black birds and Jackson sisters but mixed with early acid house and Lee Fisher also played I recall as well um and then we go to the hummingbird and that for me I mean that was you know it was incredible because really I mean you know Amnesia in 1989 in Ibiza isn’t like Ibiza today it wasn’t that busy it wasn’t you know the you going to the hummingbird was like oh my God and you know I was obsessively into the music so you would know a lot of the records I wasn’t that aware of who the DJs were um I knew jock played I looking back maybe I didn’t know at the time but John slowly from Tempest I know he’s playing but it didn’t really I wasn’t aware of who DJs were probably you know in the in the early part of that year but it was incredible and you know records like I guess the the remix of things like strings of life that came out in 87 Frankie Knuckles Your Love which actually missed my business that is GCSE final exam because don don Christies was raised to buy a lot more records and and he was getting nope sorry it was Summit actually it was where I got it from friends so friends she said he’d save me a copy and um to me it was doing my business studies exam or by Frankie Knuckles who I love so obviously there was no choice um I have a a nice story about that because many years later I got to know Frankie well and my mom was at Mambo and Frankie came in and I said Mom this is the guy with my mum for about half an hour and signed my copy which I had there um which is funny um but yeah so it was like incredible like Unity of the people who were there and again I wasn’t aware of I guess what had happened before you know more segregated thing with football violence and I didn’t know anything about it all I knew was this amazing togetherness this unbelievable atmosphere and again at this stage I I was obsessively buying records at this point so I would I was a glass collector a pub in solihull and I would spend all my money on going to Don Christie’s uh or um it was a shot down in spark Brook near my Nan’s house I can’t hear what it was called now my sister didn’t tell me yesterday I actually made some notes but I I can’t remember what it was called and um so Summit Don Christies and I would spend all my money obsessively on just Emma is saying don’t forget to ship me those records you promised oh my sister’s there um so so yeah basically I would just spend all my money on on records and obsessively listen to them but I never I don’t I hadn’t considered being a DJ it wasn’t I was a kid I didn’t think I could do that you know I didn’t even picture that I was I probably just left school um but then when I think late 89 um then early 90 would have been or maybe maybe even in the middle of 1990 um some friends of my sisters were saying there was a a new club in in Stoke and the DJ was like incredible so we went up there and that was Sasha and that that was the the moment for me when I was like oh my God that that was the beginning of thinking I want to be a DJ that was so inspiring to me that was like a on a different level to anything I’d even experience the way he could put records together was just for me like mixing wasn’t getting a way of getting to the next record the high point was her what happened when he put two records together for us was and all our friends were just like wow so that was my real moment of I need to do this wonderful well let me say thank you Emma for uh brilliant backstory from you both thank you very much we want to I want to focus now on the actual the actual you know when we get into this because it’s really difficult for both of you to give us your uh you know your full life stories or I always say it’s impossible to really to capture that in this conversation but we want to focus on your time in the music industry and all that you’ve achieved so uh Phil let’s talk about the the first significant apart from of course you know getting to submit your mixes to radio one uh what would you say is the next the next major the major step in the journey for yourself but I think the next step’s probably going from because we’re essentially DJs putting records together and it’s like hang on we need to figure out how to make records really and that that came slowly from because this is back in the day when you know we’re not talking a laptop and a pair of speakers you’re talking about a room full of gear you know mixers compressors um outboard um equipment maybe Hardware Samplers drum machines and all this stuff needs to be learned and you know there was no courses to go on so we learned a lot a lot of that stuff slowly and I think probably the transition was doing what we’ve done for uh radio and for people like DMC for the labels so the next step was to create sort of artist mixes where so we did salt and pepper for Pete song I think we did we’re Run DMC I think we did um the island catalog for for Ireland where we’d take their records and kind of create these montages we did one for um Mark archers alternate for for Network records that was a good one it really lent itself to to what we were doing in terms of chopping up and creating this Montage of all their music I don’t I don’t want to like uh lessen what you were doing but the The Jive bunny of Birmingham kind of thing well I mean we were aware of time probably and it did In fairness become quite a Nast thing to sort of make it you know it did I remember once talking to Pete song and he was saying that yeah it’s becoming a bit now for this thing now where you kind of create this thing but we obviously tried to do it with a with a bit of flair in the courtroom and style yeah but but it did outgrow itself it did become a sort of marketing tool for labels to rinse a bit more out of their catalog you know um when you when either the artists moved on or they didn’t have a release they’d stick out a Megamix so it became a bit enough 100 but it had its role for us in terms of learning our way around the studio and then of course it’s it’s a small leak from there to say well why don’t we take that Loop and kind of program something new on it and so you know it was a very slow process for us learning because again there was no use the engineers because you must have had Engineers who really would have known it ourselves really right we’d literally you know we bought we bought a couple of acai Samplers the old s950s and we had an Atari our first computer was a Commodore but then you know we upgraded to the Atari and that was great for Midi and and so we learned how to use that how to sequence how to trigger the Samplers how to mix what they were doing on the board so that you don’t learn that quickly it takes time and um uh and and yeah the first couple of Records we made they weren’t great but and of course we desperately tried to get them out probably before they were ready and it’s like you know we were figuring it filling it figuring it out really and doing our learning in public and some to some degree but it take it takes um it took a long time back then to to one stylistically position yourself somewhere and then technically as well you’re learning both those crafts at the same time um so I mean that was my and that was that you know we did a couple of releases as the commission but really the commission were we’re like a hot mix five or a sort of you know a sort of Latin Rascals crew that were just making these sort of mixes which is great it’s a great place to be and you know I love I love going back and listening to some of that stuff and it was um it had its role in learning the next bit of course of course so Pete do we need to skip forward to the mid well early 90s actually because that’s when our paths were depressed um you met on your radio show actually me although that was mid 90s that would have been me and Laura and Jeff Jefferson I think I knew you before then but yeah I was going to say I’m sure we met at Marcos before I was on the radio oh of course right well I guess my my first DJ Gig was um I remember it I have a really acute memory for this stuff but um like it was the day I bought Papua New Guinea from select a disc in Coventry I think um it was New Year Christmas Eve and it was me Lola Our Friend wash another guy called Mark Armstrong and another guy called Mark and he had a sound system and we set up in the function room of a pub in Boston Common and played to about 10 of our friends I think there was there were belt drive there was no pitch controls and there I was pretending to be Sasha playing acapellas probably really badly at a time over everything like a precursor to Crazy daisies kind of thing basically so for me that was that was the first gig and we did it a few times and then I think 1992 started and a friend of mine Greg who lived in a little village called Knoll near solihull I think his mate said that the DJ and the wine bars canceled tonight you know a DJ and Greg said look my mate’s not a DJ but he’s got a load of records and we like those records so if he can come and play him that’ll be great so I hired a sound system from this guy in Coventry I would drive there come back set it up play for six hours take it back down drive it back to Coventry and I used to used to cost me a 10 or more than I got back yeah I mean the first time I did it I couldn’t even set the equipment up and thankfully my might wash it was also producing at this point could actually work out you know literally I’d only had my bedroom set up so I did that every week and it was brilliant I absolutely loved it and then I was the glass collector I was a bar maybe a bar and I was a Barman the guy I was a glass collector for was a guy called Danny company who ran the barley mope up in soliton and then he moved to kind of the the one nightclub in solihull which at the time was called Rosie’s and um I was a Barman at the time and I was talking to Danny about the fact that I’ve been DJing and stuff probably he was almost you know like we were gone very very well and he said you know you should start a student night or a night whatever he said why don’t you come and meet this guy who plays on a Saturday he’s into all that stuff you’re into which was Phil so basically um I met Phil and came and heard Phil DJ and he was playing all these great records again the kind of Records I’d heard Nathan Gregory playing these sort of David Jones I’m glad you said that imagine if you’ve got he was playing all this [ __ ] all these Mega mixes [Laughter] um a lot of jazz funk rare Groove disco um again I loved early hip-hop I didn’t like hip-hop much after about 1990 but great early hip-hop and um and then house and to me that was fantastic so we got chatting gotten really well and just decided to um I was you know I think Phil’s idea was that let’s bring in an extra sound system so before went really overboard I bought this like huge rig in and I knew this is in the bar isn’t it in the bar and I kind of knew a lot of people in solihull I was very outgoing and had a lot of friends in all the different schools so the way I saw it was all I’ve got to do is get everybody out of all the other bars into Abba and within about a month it was rammed like 500 people every week so and me and Phil would just share the DJing and and then from there we just sort of you know there was a club upstairs that held about 400 and there was a big room that held about 800 so we were like well let’s book a DJ so we booked a DJ I think Angel was the first djb book okay support and then it just went for seven years booking you know Marilla Tony Humphries what was the full name Rosie’s Rosie O’Brien’s was Rosie O’Brien’s right on the High Street in Sully Hall the topic exactly yeah and you know it was really good you know all the big promoters from Birmingham like Lee Garrick and Jim and other people appears they’d come down and sort of see what we were doing wondering how I guess how we’d build this club but it was just I think Solly had them people were really into dance music in Seoul it was like a big thing everybody I knew was into house music by this point and I guess where we where I live just needed an event like that so and it just worked very well so that that’s how I met Phil and I guess that was my my first proper kind of regular gig really and also you know we’d be designing the Flyers I’d be out three or four nights a week with my first girlfriend Hannah handing him out outside every Club in Birmingham basically just handing the Flyers out and that was part of it you know that was just part of the job you mentioned you mentioned very briefly you just snuck in uh Lawler you actually went to school with Steve Lawler right yeah I mean I didn’t know him at school bizarrely but I did go we went to school from the age of five but I think my parents were away on holiday and I think we’d been to amnesia your house and um I think we invited everyone we knew back to my mom’s house that was Emma’s fault that would have been ever small um you know you’ve been up all night partying and then you know you just think about your best friend so and Steve was there and we realized we’d sort of been to school we’ve been to the same school and I think Steve is the one kid in his year into house music and I was the one kid in my ear into house music can we basically because I failed all my all my exams like I got fails and everything and then I kidding myself it could be academic and I retook them and Steve was at solihull college and we didn’t really go to any lessons I’m used to hang out smokes Bliss talk about music in the canteen and I repeated this for about three years constantly failing every time but I wasn’t I didn’t really care you know it was it wasn’t really of any consequence to me in my head I you know I was never gonna kind of get a job um so that was yeah that’s how I met Steve and then Steve then started DJing with us Steve was I guess also doing a few bits around that time I can’t remember he was sort of playing early hardcore stuff I think around that time as well so yeah we just we did a lot of things together generally so we all would have we would have met uptown at Marcos as I say uh I was right at DJ I was resident at Marcos we’ve with Steve so Phil um uh well Saturday Sundays as well you know for quite a while Sunday mornings we were doing it for a bit Sunday but yeah Pete mentioned about Rose is how you got into roses I guess you you need to uh he’s given us that you know they’re over overview of here or but how did that come about how did you get in there um I think I just I mean I my um I kind of gave up my day job in 89 as quite a few people probably would have done it was in in music and and just so but I was at the time working in in corporate clubs really when I was like I was resident at Pagoda Park then but luckily there was another guy there who did this sort of hen party stuff and and um I was able to go on and play past music sets it was that time you know so they were embracing it a bit but that was a big old corporate Leisure firm it was never going to be a proper thing and it was the other shirt you still had to have your shirt and tight and together it was still very much a nightclub it was very much of that era you know like sort of you know you know what it was like in the 80s in those places my mate the other half of the commission was resident at pahas Adam so between us we had that little corner going on um but again I learned loads being there but I think that introduced me to that world a little bit and let’s not pretend roses wasn’t um particularly underground Place either that was very that was owned by a big Brewery and we were in there to do a job you know um and I just got asked I think I can’t remember how it came about I just got off of it because I was doing something over there and I cut the mates of mine said oh that stuff you play you’ll never work there okay and um but but Danny blessed him he was quite Forward Thinking in terms of um just letting it happen and and only could see that there was a demand for it so whereas traditionally it was quite a sort of safe I don’t know how you describe a place like that now that sort of High Street Club it for on some nights we were able to very much go and of course a bit later on we we were all playing a bit of this and bit of that but there wasn’t there was a moment where we kind of went house wasn’t there there was a moment where we said well we play house now let’s let’s get on with it and and from from opening until closing it was pretty much a house house music thing and um so it was an unlikely spot for it to come about and that that night was was it was first and foremost for student night but with me and Pete’s involvement it became very much led by by dance music it could equally have been with other people running it it could have been an indie thing or it could have been something else but there were I think Pete was very instrumental in identifying that there was a crowd that were into what we proposed we did I mean I’m certainly not promoter and without Pete’s involvement you know telling you know getting people along it might not have worked as well as it did but it was just a nice right place right time sort of situation really that’s great uh Cliff says here Clifford Williams says I remember driving down to Rosie O’Brien’s some great nights were in there and then a young Chapman by the name of Jeff Jefferson pops in and says good evening gentlemen um okay so I think it’s not unfair to say Phil uh in the midst of all this while you were doing amazing things yourself you never became in those early days you never became sort of like the headline DJ in the big clubs that were sprouting up in town you know yeah I think Miss money pennies that actually was going by then the steel room I was going uh wobble things like that you never really got to to guess at those places you were forging your own path sort of away from it right yeah I don’t know we’ll chat about this tonight actually I mean Pete and I think to something to some degree I mean I was obviously very aware of of those things but I was also DJing for a living so I had to be if I didn’t have that um that meant that I couldn’t go to those places so unless I got booked I weren’t going and and I wasn’t going because I was busy DJing somewhere else I was I was a job in DJ in that respect yeah um by choice but it meant that I couldn’t sort of um cultivate friendships or break break into some of those things and they were quite established as well I think I realized um and because the next thing I did was start a label Urban hero and um I realized that my route to any kind of success was going to come through a different route I’m not a natural promoter so it was like let’s let’s do it through the music let’s hustle to get um to build a following around a label and a project that’s recording based did you create the label and then Alex came along or did Alex come along and then you create the label um so we ended up working and we need to actually uh clarify who I’m talking about as well in case people yeah Alex Tepper is my partner in what became Future Shark um he was an extremely talented guy still is and still very much sort of actively involved um he was uh working as a as an engineer on various sessions in a studio in cellular called rich [ __ ] not the minister PC name these days but it was very much a rock studio so he got lots of great experience around you know miking up drum kits and sort of recording vocals and things and and me and Adam kind of landed there we hired an office in a studio and we were based there for about 10 years um one of the first things we did was set up a label and we didn’t work weekends because we’d be out DJing and I remember literally saying to him listen the studio is not in use at the weekend if you want to like go in there and do stuff and on a couple of Mondays I turned up wow he was he was it’s really good stuff so we just it was the natural thing for him to get involved in the label so he’s thigh enough we signed a few of his bits and then sort of made him a full partner in the label really and um off he went and that and and that that whole story was make a record decide what we’re going to call it who you know we had six or seven different artists one of them being ex-presidents diamond rings which was quite a big record on the on the sort of garage scene because around at the time was it was very much based on Alex’s uh first story would be coming into our studio and seeing me and Adam there with a desk labeled with 25 Todd Terrace samples you know Todd kick Todd snare Todd are we doing what you just get Todd we’re like well you know we’re trying to be tired you know it’s like tonight Matthew we’re going to be Todd Terror um but that’s how we learn from copying the the the the greats really that that’s how you learn and then eventually you you inject your own sort of um originality don’t you so that was that was what we we did then we got we and around sort of a bit later um 97 I’d say we I kind of I literally announced one day I went you might get anywhere Reinventing this an artist every time we need to be one thing and um I’ve got this concept for this act it’s called Future Shark and this you know and we and we kind of talked it up and and and and we we’re in Alex chat and we were like yeah yeah let’s let’s do that because we could see at the time that there was a new path for for you know artists DJ’s becoming bands if you like we’d watched underworld and um left field and Groove Armada and basement Jax becoming these acts you know and and that was that was the thing let’s go somewhere else with this let’s see if we can do that Daft Punk as well okay put a pin in there of course yeah put a pin in that uh moment in time good evening Tracy uh thank you for your your comment she’s mentioned in progress in Derby so Pete uh We’ve we’ve skipped forward a fair bit there my recollection and and when I was putting the blurb down I I mentioned to you and you didn’t correct me so I while I’m sitting here listening to the conversations I’m thinking no I’m not actually sure if Pete did work in a record shop but I’m fairly certain you did right yeah I mean basically what happened after I guess after Rosie’s was that bill I think Phil landed Raphael’s for us basically so I think I did Fridays maybe or Saturday me and law but I invited Steve so me and Steve did Friday so you and Alex did Saturdays maybe yeah yeah and um which was amazing I mean because we used to go to Rafael’s anyway they used to like play loads of great old Sasha tapes or tapes from chuff chuff and we loved going there so we’d go there before maybe go into you know whether wherever we were going you know whether it snobs or steering or whatever and um so I started to DJ there a lot and then I guess we got to know a lot more people and at this point Steve was really trying to convince me to stop pretending that I was ever going to pass an exam or have a job and just come and work in global groups record shop with him so I remember in my head if I pretended I was academic or trained to be um I could I guess in my head I could blame failing to be academic on the fact that I was wasting my time as a DJ and vice versa I could blame failure in DJing on the fact that I was taking up a lot of my time with college I think the biggest boldest decision I made was I get it I’m just gonna let whatever this is gonna be I’m gonna do this and I’m just going to jump in it was obviously quite a scary thing to do but of course it didn’t have a mortgage it wasn’t married um so in that respect it was never going to be an easier time so I went to work at Global grooves so that was with Matt Booker then I met Mark and piers and Adam and Graham Fisher and all the guys that were around that and that was great fun you know I really thrived in being in a place where I could spend even more money on records even when I was getting them vinyl yeah um so that was so then I guess I was in the community and Steve was right you know he’s like you’ll meet all the promoters you’ll get into the scene so you know we kind of did that and of course then you got to know people like Barney and Carl and all the other promoters that were kind of I guess around also as a younger kid I was buying record buying clothes actually in the depot again pre knowing anything about the club scene I just so I was quite friendly with Mick and Derma who were always so lovely to me I mean such nice guys um so then I’d start seeing them about so you know you suddenly you were able to become friends with a lot of people and I remember once Adam um Johnson from from uh Global groups was going on holiday and asked me to make him a tape and I in a previous uh holiday in about 91 in in the B thread went to Cafe Del Mar and heard Jose which was a huge moment for me um that was like a real wow this is that was my main thing musically in a way and um so I was got really into more alternative I guess Bel airing more chilled stuff and I made Adam a tape and he loved it and he said we’re opening a new bar called Circo why don’t you come and DJ there so I did Saturdays there for a long time which was great um so that and then I guess that ledwards worst DJ booth in the world it was gone behind the bar I don’t need a drink some time for me um but but it was great because someone like Jose would play that Jose was like my idol and he would play monthly and I would literally be nagging him saying Jose take 22 third track side B and I start singing Bob James records I mean he’d just be like if Bob James Leave Me Alone um so so it was great and then yeah I used to play it I guess at night like Crunch and steering wheel I used to play a cream for Barney and Carl [Music] but I used to go to it maybe I warmed up there once maybe I did it’s hard to remember you know I used to play I was very versatile I was always very eclectic so I’d play like at a drum and bass night at Subway City and I had I played everywhere you know I didn’t really sort of know what what my real Direction was I guess but um but that’s how I kind of got into into it actually Adam prezd Phil’s old partner he wanted to open a record shop so I ran that record Shot me and so Lawler would um sell basically we sort of accumulated thousands of Records we wanted to get rid of a lot so Steve was selling a lot of old records upstairs and I was running the shop downstairs so again I would meet you know Mark Gillespie would come in who was starting to run God’s kitchen and all these different people so again you just got more and more integrated into the scene really and that whatever that was off right it was so cold I remember being Steve used to sit around a little gas there was a lovely coffee shop there was a coffee shop or he turned into a coffee shop after or it wasn’t comfortable I looked for years because I’ve never I’ve not really spent much time in Birmingham for like 20 years but I did go and look once I was like oh wow it’s not there um so that’s I guess how I started to get into but you know in reality I found it I never felt I would be taken that seriously in Birmingham not that I thought at that time I would be anywhere else I just I felt like it had got started there was a close-knit group of people and I’ve always felt a little bit on the outside of that so I hadn’t I didn’t see a way to to get any uh to really be able to progress I couldn’t see that um and then again you know from 89 once we got to 1990 me my sister and brother we would go to Ibiza with our friends by the time it got to the mid 90s like we kind of go at the same time as Lawler and other friends and and and you know we used to I I guess obsessively going to Cafe Del Mar here in Jose buying all these tapes and sometimes it was so busy in there you couldn’t get a drink and we saw this little bar next door called Mambo which never heard of just opened and it was quicker to get a drink in there um and then we’d start hanging out in there sometimes and the music was good and me and Steve would always be asking Jason by the name of the records he was playing and Steve was a bit cheeky than me probably a bit more outgoing and he blagged to play there in 95. and then he called me in 96. and said what are you doing tomorrow this is like obviously pre-mobile phone I’m at my mom’s house and I said well I’m coming to a bathroom holiday tomorrow and he said well I’ve got you a job at Mambo you start tomorrow I was like so I got there and that’s you know he said look don’t get drunk don’t start messing about they start scratching just take it because I get really drunk I’m standing under that scratching every record the job and kept it for a couple of decades basically but incredible that’s yeah I didn’t I wouldn’t say I did that much in Birmingham it got me started but it it wasn’t I don’t know if it was a career research I remember I have very fond memories because yourself and I weren’t so close we communicated a lot as you say bringing you on the radio and whatever but uh Steve and I used to talk a hell of a lot with him being resident with myself and I remember sitting on one of the legendary Sofas in there and him talking about his frustration that the music that he wanted because it was getting to that point where the music was uh not so much commercial but it was it was more of like a comedic age at certain venues at times and and yourself and Steve were very much underground and it was like okay we’re probably we’ve probably outgrown Birmingham now I think in hindsight that is exactly what happened would you would you say yeah yeah there wasn’t a market no I mean I was really inspired by I guess after 91 we we were so such big Sasha fans like everybody in solihull was that Renaissance home so Steve arranged like a coach and a load of us went up there and that was that was really incredible and I dreamed of playing at that club that would be like how could I ever get to play here so we were into I guess what would have been those sort of early Morales Red Zone dubs and I guess early Progressive house gorilla records that I was really into that that was my the club sound that I was into and that didn’t really exist that much in Birmingham I don’t to my record not so much so uh Brian T is still listening and he says Pete did you used to scratch Blue Boy remember me about a year before it broke at Rafael’s probably yeah uh yeah I yeah I mean I I have a really amazing moment I remember doing it yeah great okay uh Phil so let’s roll back to where we got to eat in your part of the story uh running concurrently to all of this uh Urban um uh launched a new Future Shock is born um and by this time you’ve created quite a few a few good Connections in the industry right yeah I mean I think that running that label just became a sort of day-to-day passion really that figuring out the music industry how does it work how do you do how do you sign records you know we’ve got these offer from a compilation here how does that work um you know just just sussing it out as we went along um you know because putting records out is a kind of slow messy old business really it was all vinyl back then of course um you know timelines and sort of working it out but you could make money you could if you run it well and you watch your costs you could just sit there in your own little cottage firm and and and do it so by the time we got to sort of inventing Future Shark and then becoming a bit more focused on the things which is very sure what we wanted to do musically then um but self-analytics agreed that the big sound at the time we we appreciated Sasha digweed and the big the progressive thing but we always thought when those records kicked in from these beautiful euphoric moments that the drums were very lucky and it was very sort of kind of European standing and we just thought why can’t the drums come in and be like fat like like somebody’s strictly record you know and we that was the sort of Manifesto really let’s take the electronics and the sort of the programming of some of those records and the emotion and and fuse that with what we love about sort of U.S house and and and techno and sort of you know put them together I mean the closest we could find were people like deep dish deep dish we’re doing that to some extent and some are taglia’s mixes and bits of techno that we liked and um and so it was side by side developing a bit of a sound and also figuring out how to DJ with that sound I’d heard um well we’d all heard people like danitino slowing down techno records and playing them in a sort of house set and how it made it sound really sort of unidentifiable as this sort of weird what is that you know so it was techno but but at a house Tempo that the kind of first incarnation of tech at us and um so we knew where it was going to live and you know I said before that our Focus was all about making records and knowing that was going to be our route to any kind of success we probably over engineered that because I literally had a phone call one day from well a two really significant phone calls one was from Terry Farley at junior boys own who who said uh well actually somebody worked with Terry Farley but it was it was by terrifying and and said that record you just put out an urban hero that that Mars Attacks dancing love that Terry’s battering it they’re all playing it down here okay cool and followed by another call a couple of days later saying you guys got management because we want to manage you so that was that was an important one and then the other call was was Amy Thompson who was married to Darren Emerson at the time and she said when are you guys going to do some DJ because you’ve put a few records out you’ve done a few remixes here and there and uh and we were like okay well do you think you could get us gigs and she was like yeah yeah and like literally the first three gig she found us were were like Renaissance cream Ministry we went straight in at that level because we’d sort of over engineered the build really I I somehow got a contact in Rob DeStefano who ran tribal and and that Twisted label and we’d done a remix for him on a club 69 record we’ve done a couple of other bits and we literally just had a moment where the phone just started ringing remixes and um because we were now being looked after by Junior that meant we could do underworld they had relationships with Chemical Brothers and we would get in these really big hitters in completely random what were Chemical Brothers called before they were called the Dust Brothers for their first album there’s an American act called the dust brother so there which is why that album was exit Planet dust that’s why they went on to leave sorry I mean so that those are yeah I mean you know there were big profile things and it meant you know we instantly had an interest in in in a DJ thing so did that make you feel good did it make you feel I mean you probably never doubted yourself as a DJ anyway double double prong question was there ever any resentment the fact that you never did get to play those gigs in Birmingham and then when you’re doing these things was it like two fingers up to Birmingham or not no no I loved being from this city still do I think people were doing what they’re doing probably at the time maybe one you know played money pennies once did a did a bit of this and a bit of that and obviously was respectful of the of the of the guys but I think it was just it was just a different route for me got to get taken seriously out of your hometown yeah it’s kind of like you have to go yeah I’m sure there are a couple of raised eyebrows going what the [ __ ] what you know but but it was it was um it was just everybody’s got their story and that was mine you know I I knew the ultimate that I didn’t think anything was more important than the music I thought it’s not really about who you know it’s not really about what you’re wearing it’s not really about you know any other image stuff if you make a great record it will find its audience I really truly believe that I still think that’s true I mean Pete Works in management now and obviously there are a lot more sort of and I’ve done bits with Pete you know in that capacity and I know that there’s obviously a lot more there’s a social media world and stuff and and content creation and stuff but nothing replaces whether whether the music you’re making is any good or not because it will just win friends and what was fascinating for me is we could be in that little room in cellular can make a track and dub file ring up and go that’s a tune I think wow you know it it we would just go out you’d release these things that you’d sort of worked on and they’d release them and they’d sort of flutter away and find their you know so because we we all realized that our scene wasn’t just our scene there was a little you could find your counterpart in Tokyo you could find your counterpart in Moscow and and they’d know the sound it has some of the same references as you and that that became really apparent very very quickly especially when we started getting on planes and going to some of these places so it was a meteoric rise to Superstar demerit we’re not maybe not super starting but actually you were 15 minutes I was going to say uh a little bit more than 15 minutes you know some of the real off some of the uh some of the the most um treasured remixes that that you achieved some of the biggest artists that you that you got to work with well we you know we did underworld Chemical Brothers Groove Armada Moby and Etienne New Order you know that that you know lots of lots of sort of uh super super high high level as well as well as so we ended up our manager at the time said oh we’re not doing tracks anymore we’re doing acts and I quite like that as a sort of because we were getting offered things you know we’d get offered the hot tune that Sam and Dunmore had signed to defected and we’re like well it’s already a hot tune while we’re mixing that and and so instead we would rather get you know Jamiroquai well what’s America or or um ameliana would send us an album and go pick a tune from that would be like okay well which one of these we’re gonna have a go it became much more creative as an idea that you could take this record that was in a Bjork world if you like of alternative Electronica and put it on the dance floor that that was more exciting than taking a currently hot dance record and just creating another mix that was going to live on B2 on a double pack you know let’s take let’s take two minutes to satisfy the Geeks amongst us um who did what between the two of you um well I was probably the the kind of consummate DJ and Alex was the engineer but we’ve very much blurred the lines I think um it was it was wasn’t true to just say that that was the role we setting but you you do when you work in a partnership you do need to take on different roles you know what I would walk out the room and make a brew and come back and go uh you know what we might be going a different direction with this whereas Alex was incredibly good and still is he’s you know it’s a masterful guy I could play him a record and two days later he’d say oh you know we need some hi-hats that were like that that thing you played me yesterday and I’m like what and he just he’d have that eye for detail that I probably didn’t have I was using big broad strokes and he was getting in on the detail and you do need that to compliment each other I think what did you um get quite you say you know growing up you were a geek you take pride in the fact that you really then as the technology progressed into the late 90s were you getting Hands-On or was it over your head well I um I mean I built every Studio we worked in so I’d you know I’d be wearing up the patch bays and sort of sussing out the gear and getting my head around that you know the difference between processes and effects units you send to and all this sort of Hands-On stuff um it was like going to school it was like going to University it was like doing a self-made course really so for a long time I mean like you know we did have we did have a bit of a sort of overnight moment but it came at the end of 10 years of of sort of learning our way around the studio and figuring out where we were going to live as an artist you know that it wasn’t it wasn’t like we had that idea and it happened it was like the the 30-yard releases we did on Urban hero all culminated in us becoming Future Shock that 10 years in cellio learning our way around the studio and cultivate a few contacts and understanding how the music business work all played its role so I mean there’s no way we could go um Darren Hughes had just left um Cream open uh home in Leicester Square Steve was one of the residents down there too and one of our first gigs as Future Shop was there and it was a big high profile gig to a journalists in there and stuff you know you couldn’t just do that at the Trap as a d you need to have something you know you’ve got to run your stripes yeah yeah that’s a phrase I like to use which will bring me very neatly onto Pete um because are you going to sit there and take some credit for the state or or the um not the state the mammoth that Ibiza became because yourself and Mambo uh taking over from Cafe Del Mar really was the you know the beginnings of what turned I beat that into just something insane right you say almost two decades of yourself honing your craft creating the you know the actual following in the footsteps of Jose and then you know that those eight hour sets at mumbo’s were legendary right I mean I I wouldn’t like Jason by was there before me but in in the years he was there it was his idea to do a pre-party with Harry and invite in the likes of Brandon and Alex and I guess in back in that period like Nikki Holloway you know whoever was around really and that they were friends with Cafe Del Mar was amazing and Jose did the best sunsets but after Sunset Cafe Del Mar would empty even in its Heyday it would empty and what Mambo saw before I worked there was well actually we can do sunset too but we can make a party afterwards and I think the I mean the owner have a uh you know just great with people a great host understood how to you know play the game and be there and and make everybody happy the guys at Cafe Del Mar generally weren’t playing that game they were quite miserable you know I rented a department of one of the owners ones they weren’t sociable guys like like having so have you understood and it was massively he was really into the club scene like keeping going to hear Alfredo from the mid early 80s he was massively into it so for him this was a really exciting thing to do so when I got to Mambo I mean I definitely did it differently to anybody else who’d been there before for sure you know in the sense that I guess everything I’d learned from listening to people like Nathan you know a night at Mambo to me because you know there was they doing differently now there’s lots of DJs but I was in the period I was there I was the only nighttime leader so you’re coming in about six and you play till even four in the morning so you know you’re there for 10 hours every day and this is seven days a week for five months of the year and so you know I would come in and play a lot of chill out stuff and then movie soundtracks and things like that classical music um and again obsessively I bought every Jose cassette ever bought every record on it probably from senior Northern too I mean Birmingham and really enjoyed that like a lot of some other DJs didn’t like that but to me that was like an amazing thing to do every day you know um memories you know I still play at my mom once in a while and um just that view playing what I mean again like you know to to a lot of DJs maybe that played their the more alternative stuff was a compromise they kind of had to do to me was my specialty yeah um so and then as the as the sunset would end and it was a different era then you know you’d play those sort of mid-temporary records for for quite a long time and then as the sky would be getting dark but still kind of lit up around the sort of horizon they’ll be playing a lot of very atmospheric deep house like Paper Moon 51 days and look you know a lot of stuff again Nathan Gregory would sell me out the back at Network records down in digbeth in the he would really really had a great year so you know a lot of those early Derek carts are sound Patrol records those kind of things Lily Osborne actually is a good friend used to sell me a lot of records as well at hard to find and had amazing taste actually talked him into coming to join me in 98 in fact at Mambo um so I had great people in Birmingham helping me get great records so and then you know then you’d have a guest come on so like every Monday it might be Roger Sanchez and Tuesdays might be Frankie Knuckles and David Morales and then Wednesday would be Murillo and you know just deep dish on the Thursday whatever every night was the world’s biggest DJ so from being in Birmingham and not really being able to see even a career was possible suddenly I knew these people that were these legends that you never imagined you’d even meet you decided to become friends with all these people over time there was never someone who forced a relationship and I never tried to be anybody’s friend I just took a long time to naturally get to know people and because he just felt more comfortable so that and then towards the guests would go on for an hour or so and then I go back on but then towards the end of the night I’d get those sort of jazz funk records and old cell Soul records out and I played different and I’d even put a bit of Frank Sinatra I remember once Frankie and his boyfriend were Waltzing around Mambo while I was playing and playing with videos so I played a little bit of everything I just played good music as I thought Mambo was a place where I could you know the thing is as a manager now I it’s like you’ve got to be in a lane I couldn’t be in the lane and Mambo allowed me not to be in my people hearing people like Jose and alfredo they weren’t in a lane they just played eclectic you know what would be considered baleric as a style of music that was what I was into I wanted to play a bit of everything so that’s what I did in Mambo over 10 hours you know I never I look forward every day to playing there it was never like oh what another 10 hours you know became legendary you say about baleric can’t mention the word balerica not say hi to Dean Smith who’s watching and says nice to see you guys sharing your stories and also I’ll say hi to Jimmy so uh truly enthralling stuff um eventually you would get to represent Mambo around the world right because for a long time you you would never leave there and then all of a sudden right it was like okay now you’re starting to travel a lot what happened I guess was Neil Rushton another Birmingham story so Neil did the first Mambo album with us um it was with Paul Taylor who went on to own retro so Paul and Neil came in one day and they played and it was incredible just old discos I’ve still got all the tapes actually and Neil was great and obviously we had a shared history of being from Birmingham and we ended up doing the first Mamba album ever and we did one with them but then the year after it was like 97 I was with Caroline prothero from uh VC recording so we did you know so I guess for years I was the only person doing the member compilation so we you know we were with universal we would react we were with Sony yeah we kind of defected you know we went round everywhere really we did did him with lots of people so I guess um and again I loved loved doing that you know I guess I probably I’d watched Jose do his and I really enjoyed that process um and and then what happened to me which I guess was significant was I started seeing the big promoters who I recognized on site in a Renaissance was a big influence to me and I remember when growing up in solihull Steve got his break at cream through Darren Hughes I remember he called him in our record Shot once and offered him a job and his life kind of changed overnight and another friend of ours Claire got a job she was called DJ Heaven she got a job at Ministry so I always saw that the only Club left was Renaissance and I remember swimming in in the gym every day thinking how am I going to get a job at Renaissance how am I going to get a job at Renaissance like obsessively how am I going to do it and then one day Jeff Oakes walked in who obviously I didn’t know at the time and I thought right how can I get Jeff’s attention so I went through my records like right I’m going to play that and of course it was high bias driving home it was on big shot someone came out about 89 and he just came over and went oh my god I’ve only ever heard Sasha play this who were you and I was like he told him my name and I was like haha that worked and then this kind of kept happening because Frankie Knuckles came in maybe the first time I met Frankie and he was just stood and watched me play for about an hour and then when they all left Jeff’s wife came back in and said what’s your name Frankie’s asking about you know have you got any tapes I gave her about eight tapes and um and then it happened the week after we Danny ramping and then a friend of mine Brett who was working at Renaissance was playing one of my tapes around with Paul and Jeff heard him and this tape’s great who’s this and he said this guy called Pete Gooding and he was like lady help fight escaping yeah I got very lucky and I kept Jeff kept hearing my name so he came up to me at the end of that year and said look do you want to be our resident you could do compilations you could play around the world we’ve got this club in London the cross you you could be resident there we’re going to open this club in Nottingham and I was like yeah you know I mean it was like a dream come true to me um so I had this sort of I guess this chill out thing that was very Jose inspired that I got to do at Mambo but then in a club it was it was this sort of progressive house thing and Renaissance was the coolest club in the world so that immediately got me an agent which was uh Dave Siemens agency which was actually run by one of my best friends from school Sarah um so I was suddenly on the same agency as Teemo Mass Dave Seaman all these other people and you know I got to play in nearly 100 countries like relentlessly for like 20 years so that taught me around the world really I think initially and then obviously Mambo just grew and grew and overtook Cafe Doma and became Then Pete Tong started doing the radio show so I would interviewed on Pete’s show and get essential mixes and you know again there was a quite a funny funny memory I think somebody maybe let Danny rampling down uh a guest and me and Louis Osborne got asked we were just there but we’ve been drinking all day I think Louis had been drinking the Storm Rider for about 12 hours so we were not in a good State and we went live on radio one this was my first interview on Radio One and Louis was really sure Danny was asking a question he hadn’t even realized Danny had asked him a question I was like and um and then when he came to me I put a record on him I’m not the needle but I just watched it bounce across the it was that the longest three seconds of my life it was oh my God so but yeah but it was just great fun days and I was in a place where a lot of opportunities fell in my lap I was in the right place at the right time you know a lot of Mambo is a real meeting point in that early time the key people in the scene you know you’d look around Carl Cox would be over there the guys from cream they like everybody was somebody well I’m gonna I’m gonna bring you back to Mambo in 2023 in a little while uh let’s go back to Phil while he’s listening to that story um again you tell us your timeline in parallel to all of this as your story progressed well we didn’t get to I didn’t get to Ibiza until 99. um but obviously being friends with P first place we headed for was Mambo and in fact we stayed in the in the apartment above which was uh interesting but that but but that as Pete says it was very much you know we’ve done some stuff by the time we got there so we were able to meet people who who knew who we were which was nice and they cut and people take you they they take you more seriously don’t they when you yeah it was it was it was lovely you know there’s DJ sneaking well there’s Dennis and ugly and you’d be like I might have been playing that thing and with the intro was brief and instantly sort of um nice because because they they knew your music it really did open doors if somebody was genuinely into what what you’d created you know and and of course it was it was just that it it was inspiring place to go and just sort of see see that and of course we lagged a little set at remember I think we played for an hour or something but um but it was um yeah so so 99 we were just breaking through that in terms of getting offers and things that I mean the next thing we probably did was start another label we closed Urban Hero by now and we started a label called fuju that we partnered with uh junior boys own so it’s future short unibody Zone the most inspired name of all fuju um and um we’d signed we were we were kind of running parallel at a time with peace division those guys and um we were doing a lot of the same gigs because if musically there was a bit of a sort of trance was huge in the main room at cream and things and obviously gate Crusher was was doing it there was there was there became a sort of space that lived um either in another room at those clubs or early I mean one of the best sets I ever played I actually did it on my own it was a future shot thinking about played on my own was playing before Tiësto at Goat Crusher in Sheffield it was just that you know they knew that he was going to come on and do what he did and this you know Tiesto wasn’t the huge phenomenon he was he became but he was he was on the way and I could go from zero almost sort of chuggy sort of stuff right the way through to that moment where he came on and did what he did it was amazing and I think there were quite a few clubs to work were into that I mean we hated the progressive tab we really hated it but we got kind of lumped in with that a little bit um was it the same kind of era where no control would have been touring with you too or it or is it before he did that I mean he had the Courtyard at cream didn’t he for a while and when Darren Hughes left cream he took Oakenfold down to London so yeah it kind of was because he was doing Saturdays I think in in Leicester Square and Andy’s touring stuff and and Steve was doing Fridays and we would okay sorry I appalled you I pulled you off we were monthly guests monthly residents at home in Leicester Square with Steve and then um as well as doing other bits as well you know all over the place so it was just a really busy time it loads or when was the touring with um underworld well that was later when we we spent a year making an album which was interesting because when you’re trying to DJ as well it’s it’s hard and we struggled with that if I’m honest because we’ve never done it before we you know we’re figuring it out and you know so for every most of the music you make you Chuck away you’re not happy with it and so you off you go you’ve gone you’ve worked in a studio and Monday to Friday and you’ve got nothing to show for it and then you’d be together at the weekend as well so it probably put a lot of strain on our personal relationship because you’re in each other’s spaces all the time but we’ve got that together we signed with Junior boyzone at a time when they were sort of refinancing via uh Emi so we ended up signing to parlophone so now we’re label mates with you know Radiohead and Kylie and blur you know it was like okay this is interesting and and that meant that they had budgets for remixes and things and videos and stuff and and uh and the next Pro the next progression from that was touring with underworld um uh you know picking up the festival bookings where you perform live and it’s rather than DJing so we did you know last every three years in a row and went over to Japan with underworld and did some shows with them and stuff I mean that was all completely new to us it was like how do we take these very Studio based records and try to try and do something live uh did you did you nail it did you ever um fall on deaf ears it was it was it was difficult because I think a lot of people the thing about becoming a live electronic music acts is you can get stuck in that what you really need to do is spend money on the production you need to do what Daft Punk did when they did that first um what’s the big Festival that they came back and did the pyramid stage yeah Coachella when they did Coachella they they got um they kept going back didn’t they ask again for an advance on their fee because they knew that they had they’ve got to fill that space with something very visible Visual and very um uh worthy of of filling the space because you know ultimately electronic music is like um you’re not careful it’s like watching somebody you know saw a bit of wood it’s not it’s not the most visual of things and and so you do need to grow it and I think if you’re an app breaking through it’s really hard to get to that level because you’ve got to spend money and you know we we did it by going small I think Pete saw our live show we we created this backdrop a little little sort of 12 by 12 screen and set up in front of that with this with this sort of console thing and just centered it on stage so so we did it with visuals and but to grow to the point where I don’t know if you’ve seen chemicals Show recently or one of those kind of guys I mean it the the the expense on production is is huge so I think and it was before as well there was there’s been a blur and hasn’t been there now between when somebody DJing and when when are they playing live if you book Calvin Harris now you see playing live or is he DJing and it kind of it gets blurred with all the production that everyone else is doing around it but I think back then you either played live or you DJ’d you didn’t it wasn’t it wasn’t so blurred and it was an interesting time to be honest I probably enjoyed DJing more because there’s much more flexibility in that I hear that I hear that um so what are your stamp on that well 2003 our album came out with with parlophone Emi and of course we’re still remixing and stuff for them and and we went into I mean Junior boyzone had got experience with the chems and with under the world of the sort of tourist cycle that they’d learned from the rock bands You know you put your record out and you go out promote an end tour in it of course that model very quickly turned upside down because other things were happening in 2003 you know iTunes was being launched and somebody had the brainstorm to give away MP3s for free online so I’d meet people going yeah yeah I got your album like did you buy it no no I got it from Napster okay you know the music industry turned upside down didn’t it really overnight thank you and so it became really tricky at one point because it was a lesser less clear where where the money was going to come from and it took a while for it to sort of reinvent itself and get to somewhere where we are now we’ll skip forward a little in a little while Sam Homer has been listening saying loving this great stories and jeffy’s keeping praise upon you Pete for uh the regular appearances at mambos and uh also album release parties in Ibiza um that’s for Jeff and the Jakarta um connection um I’m sorry uh okay so let’s let’s skip forward a few years then I guess Pete because there’s lots of gigs lots of appearances something significant I guess that that Springs to mind I mean I started getting more noticed in Ibiza I guess once a bit like Planet roses and Sally Holland getting Geeks in Birmingham by being the DJ at Mambo I would get to meet people like Danny Whittle who was running Pasha who I said met before in Birmingham actually at Steve’s house uh because Steve DJ for Danny in Brighton I think when we were a global grooves um but of course Daddy went on to run Pasha and I got invited to go and play there so that was incredible I ended up also winning the best to be the DJ award which I was obviously has become a big thing since then but it wasn’t that whatever the first thing I kind of Nick was that I’d actually run it I was a bit like wow um so that was a really nice thing that had worked very very hard in Ibiza so that was a lovely thing and then Renaissance made me their resident uh and it was the year they went really big at privilege and had like left field Live and Moloko and Kylie and you know there were nights where it would be like Carl Cox Dave Seaman me and you know left field live at Great lineups and then Renaissance shifted around different venues so all the pets okay I’ve got my dogs here one of the cats um and so I became resident Amnesia and then I’d start playing for cream and doing the closings of Amnesia in the openings and then I would meet Darren Hughes probably through Steve and Mark Broadbent and Sarah Broadband that were running home I was home it was home at the time wasn’t it and I would that became we love and then I would start playing at wheel of on the Sundays which you know I think would say the best gig of my life ever so it’s super loud um so I and you know like Lee and uh Jim made me resident for money pennies in their bat room at El Divino so I ended up kind of being resident I guess at different points at every Club in Ibiza and that was great so play at Mambo then maybe go and play at Renaissance afterwards and then end up playing at a after party with Charlie Chester till lunchtime till Thursday I remember DJing like a pink wig and a sarong and I think it was really embarrassing I think back now and it was the first time I met Dave pidgeoni and I’d elbowed a pint of lager into his record box um you know messy times but fantastic and you know sometimes you do like 18 hours DJing in a day back to back almost um so and then then what started happening I guess I would Steve said to me that we need to start making records we’re going to get left behind and of course the only thing I know about music was Phil and Alex because we used to hang out a lot at their studio and it was always fascinating it always seemed way over my head but I absorbed a lot of information sitting at the back of the room watching them make records and obviously they started working with Steve but I I made a record with a with a guy called Gordon um who was actually this he was a sex trumpet player sorry Gordon trumpet player in in all the shadow records and his brother was Sade’s co-writer so that’s my intro was working with Gordon and he had a guy in London called Adam so we I would drive down to London work in the studio all day and then come home uh to Birmingham so that’s how I started so started making much Renaissance this is all in the off season of course or through the winter I guess this would be yeah I mean this was about 99 when I started making records I think my first one came out Pete Tong played it a lot got into the buzz chart you know back then records even then they were selling thousands you know you’d make like 20 grand from an underground record so you know I was thinking wow if I could put five of them out a year and DJ that’s looking good and then I actually signed a record to Phil uh to fuju and that was the he never he never gave me 20 grand I’m sure nobody know it was the year a sales plummeted and you know your fault I mean I know somebody build the music industry that Year film was doing like 25 000 copies of some records on Fuji you know like a lot of units and it was the year that it really I guess there it kind of collapsed but I Steve would sign a lot of my records and so but again I never had a specific I meandered in my style and then a good friend of mine I met through Steve who was his producer a guy called James Doman he was like you know let’s try and make a hit and it seemed fun and James is really into making pop so we took an um we took the Gary Lucas sample that van helden used and you don’t know me we could put like a wrap up I was just I was in and I would be making like Latin jazz and chill out with sort of super famous chill out producer afterlife who became a very close friend and still is who lives down in Cornwall so I’d be going down there making tracks for the Mambo album um so I was doing every like I was doing I am almost the caution retail to the artists I managed don’t do what I did think of one thing stick to it um but yeah so making lots of music traveling a lot and yeah just you know many years passed um you know high points were getting invited to do things like essential mixes and really going to countries I was so lucky I think I think I played in nearly 100 countries and going to see meeting all these amazing local people um and just discovering the world was an amazing I think that’s why I left Birmingham I you know I I think I feel like I had a great time growing up in Birmingham so it was a it was a great place to be but I discovered that world was a beautiful place and urban city in England did stop looking exotic enough to me and I then moved to London and probably spent about 10 years living in London it was also nearer to the airport you know there’d be there’d be nights in solihull where I’d be playing in Hong Kong the next night I’d literally get a cab to Birmingham Airport get a coach to Heathrow not get any sleep fly 14 hours to get to Hong Kong so moving to London made it easier I had a girlfriend at the time in London so I stayed with her a lot and that and then I was starting DJ a lot in London as well so that that also changed and became resident for Ministry and I was resident at the cross for Renaissance which was incredible uh again it’s not you know I can’t really remember all the places I played I played everywhere I guess for a long time down there but 90 of the time I was abroad and uh you mentioned a statistic there how many of the gigs when you were going abroad were amazing I’m sure the I’m sure the shine must have started to wear off after a while you know I I was on the same circuit as the DJs I looked up to because I was playing at Renaissance so I’ve been playing at a club in say I don’t know Singapore and I’d see Pete Tong was there the week before Steve was there the week after John digweed you know he was Nick Warren it was that that they seem and these kind of guys I really looked up to Phil and Alex were you know there was a night where it was I think I don’t remember it was he was headlining you guys are Steve it was you guys were headlining I think oh you’re talking about Renaissance in Nottingham yeah it was like it was Phil and Alex Steven me it was the whole life yeah it was mad it was a mad one where we suddenly realized it was Birmingham in the house oh he’s doing good yeah I’m when I worked at uh Global grooves a young kid used to come in you barely even see over the counter and used to write I think wrote me a letter once it was Jim Breeze and he was such an Enthusiast about me he was so young and he had great taste when he was young and I get I got Jim a job at Rambo and Andy Baxter by default I got Andy a job in Louis Osborne so I basically infiltrated a bathing with brummies and that went off I used to be I guess maybe like I guess it would be the musical director at member where I was choosing a lot of the DJs I was organizing who was playing not the guests who but who the residents were so I was literally I think you pretty much had to be from Birmingham to Black Mambo for about 15 years well someone’s commenting I’m not sure who believe is forgive me they say yeah that’s a boy to get on Steve Lawler uh Pete and I have spoken I’m gonna uh send out the call and see if we can we can track Steve down at some point uh you’ve mentioned a lot of names here in this conversation which is one of the reasons why I like to celebrate Birmingham because we have a lot to uh be we have a lot that we are responsible for in the club in in the clubbing world you mentioned gate Crusher we talk about some decentral uh we took you know there’s so many different topics that we’re not going to talk about right now uh let’s continue focusing on you guys um Jimmy’s asking a question that I’m not going to ask forgive me Jimmy because we’ve got so much to uh still get home from these guys conscious of saying fully aware that we’re not going to get the full story in in this short interview uh Phil tell us bring us up to sort of like the the 2010s and onwards when did that the pace start to slow down for you or is this still more of the of the High Life that we haven’t yet covered well I mean you know you mentioned about whether that when when you’re touring it’s true that not all of those shows are amazing but lots of them are and you do things that I mean I I we played in yellow in Tokyo which is just like it’s like a movie set it’s not and it had such a legacy you know Lauren Levan had played down people like that and you could go and you could play long sets and they would you know you know what the Japanese created like they’re so appreciative and so into what you’re doing and they give you carte blanche to do your thing and build at your own pace and so some of those were just you’d be buzzing off those gigs for for days we did loads of touring in Russia I’m not sure I want to go back there now but we did low you know lots of uh you know beyond Moscow Saint Petersburg we were getting offers every week for cities we’d never heard of would be you know getting the map out where’s that you know I mean traveling across to catherineberg in siberius I was just about to say a katrinberg and Leningrad all that’s good yeah yeah right I mean I’ve got so wrapped up in that that it felt like missionary work felt like you were introducing this music to to this sleepy town in in you know four hours from Moscow and really sort of uh wrapped up in I’m going to play some music you’ve never heard before it wasn’t about playing the big Tunes it was it was about sort of having a sound and taking that sound and yeah of course we were playing our own music and mixes alongside lots of other stuff and somehow coming up with with the sand we called our own uh I think but it was always fed for us we definitely came from recording so you’re only as hot as your last record and like I say I mean things really did change in 2003 2004 the music industry was struggling to identify itself there were lots of redundancies at the Emi like lots of people lost their job the guy who signed us wasn’t there anymore and stuff and although we’ve got a three album deal the other thing that was happening for us was we were struggling sort of musically to go well look the way we’re playing now how does that relate to the music we’re making and I think a lot of people can go through that if you’re if you’re playing you know we’ve gone a bit more underground with what we were playing we’re playing a lot of tracky stuff we weren’t playing loads of vocals and stuff and uh probably creeping into sort of playing uh bits of techno and stuff because we were on bigger stages and then and then trying to figure out from that how do we take that back into the studio and make another album so we really really struggled to make a second now and in the end it got so if I’m honest it got so difficult that I literally rang up business Affairs and said oh we’re not gonna We’re Not Gonna deliver this album mate how do you feel about that you know and who does that you know if I could go back and speak to myself and I’d say don’t do that it’s Emi records deliver another record they’ve got to pay you for it but um we walked away from from the deal because couldn’t deal with the the anr process that you’re delivering music you’d be playing stuff to them in their office and they were obviously thinking radio sales this isn’t going to work you know and and so you either take it on board that they want to come up with something that’s commercially viable but then prevent yourself that you have no passion for Yeah It’s Tricky I mean I think now I think I’d approach it differently I’m you know I would look at it differently now and I wouldn’t it’s not about selling out I think every artist struggles with making something that’s viable but equally you’re passionate about you know and of course there’s a lot of snobbery around music it’s one of the industries where that that that that that happens a great deal we all we all turn our nose I put the next record and stuff and there’s loads of that going on then we we and we were just as guilty of doing that and we’d sometimes be when we made our first records when we made a record like spark nobody was looking really you know nobody cared because we but when when you’ve had some success people are looking and you know they’re waiting for the to for your next move and it it can be quite a scary place to be and again like I say I’d probably handle it differently now because it doesn’t matter really but at the time it really did we were so wrapped up it was in the age thing so um but so at some point then as as I started to say that the the the tempo slows down in LG and uh so tell us how how it all slowed down until it eventually stopped Alex decided he wanted to live in London and move down to London and we thought we could make that work and in truth we probably didn’t because when he first went down he lived in Brixton so it wasn’t getting down to London because we were doing that loads it was getting to London and getting across to Brixton and it just sort of made working together a bit more tricky and I think that that the momentum had gone out of it a little bit so we did Beats we’re still getting some offers and I think again if I’m completely honest I I fell out of love with the music industry a little bit um not the music not the not the DJing um but the industry and and the sort of fragility of that kind of career and um me and Peter aside with the aside from the struggling to find your sound so to speak did you still feel um relevant did that ever become an issue for you did you have a question if you were still relevant um yes and no I think you know you you fight for that and then you it kind of didn’t matter whether we were relevant or not I think you know people have the industry moves on the industry that you’re it’s hard to be the next if you they’re always looking for what’s new and fresh and people want to write about the new thing it’s it was led a lot by journalists and stuff discovering new music and talking up the next thing and a record company owner is the same so unless you’re super established as unless you’re broken through to a point where you can go away for a bit and work on your next record because you you don’t need to be in the Limelight it It’s tricky because you’ve got to keep putting music out so you’re trying you’re trying to balance that so yeah I suppose to some degree um yeah you move on and I think what what I did as a sort of I kind of reacquainted myself with Pete who was in a place where we had a bit more time to spend time together and stuff and and the kind of Blair thinking that Pete had been doing and I just suddenly took a break from house music I suppose and just embraced all this sort of music that I’d been ignoring for a while because I think there was a while when I was so blinkered about what we played and what we did that wasn’t interested in anything else it had to sound like that you know there was there was a sound you know so blinkered about it and then to come up for air and go wow you know what there’s a lot of music out there that I’ve never played before or even heard before and just really discovering stuff so I’d add a moment where I just sort of I don’t know a cathartic moment where I just sort of started buy another record well let’s let’s carry on with this conversation I just want to say to people who are with us uh this is an enthralling conversation I’m truly enjoying it um guys I hope you you you can afford me a little bit more of your time as we continue talking people watching it are loving it I want to get the rest of the story I’m aware that time’s rolling on but let’s carry on then so Pete take up the story for where that comes so I guess if a similar I mean there’s probably a million things I’ll leave out but I mean that you know you forget a lot a lot of the things but I think as time progressed um I mean actually Eddie Gordon who was Pete songs manager was like I meant my kind of first I guess it was a manager of sorts he was like mentored me a lot and um he was always trying to teach me um how to sort of get into radio and I had a girlfriend at the time that was a voice over artist uh so I was surrounded by people who were really good at that and Phil was always great at talking on the radio so in that period um Eddie was trying to get me and my girlfriend at the time to do a show together but they never made sense to me um it was always very music driven for me and so me and Phil started talking about doing a radio show so we started a radio show called The Global Network and this was great fun I mean we made it together sometimes and then often I was in London so we’d send it backwards and forwards um but that was I mean you know the first time you have a mic in front of you kind of climb up in your monotone and then I kind of Eddie really helped me like a lot and Phil did and a guy called Justin Wilkes who was from Birmingham obviously did a lot on the radio so but then I almost took it like me every time they didn’t feel college and it’s like hi you know almost Tony blackburner so I’d be like oh yeah yeah global map like and it was like oh God no so it took a long time to learn to be comfortable and just be yourself so so miafore did this show and you know we’d play new music that we were into but then we’d have a section of alternate more alternative stuff you know that just never could ever go away for me and I I guess I was the future manager with me was already like I’ll get this on some stations and it ended up on like 200 stations around the world and so that I guess started a love of radio and also I guess I’ve been writing for djmag for about 10 years at this point because um a guy I met who’s a journalist in a bit called Ronnie Randall asked me to review some records he had to like write it out in fact handwriting and fax it into djmo I mean I’m so dyslexic I mean Ronnie had such a nightmare typing up my nonsense but so I was doing a lot a lot of different things and um and and yeah I think and as time passed and I I think I where was it if I go forward to 2012 you know also with the more commercial record than maybe James Doberman we got signed by again good old friend from Birmingham Jason Ellis who was obviously the buyer in HMV um and we’ve stayed really close friends and so Jason we signed to positiva and then you know it was it was number one on beatport it was big in Canada we got nominated for a Juno award but beaten by Deb Mouse I think was the year he broke and and this created quite a demand and we we got we had a manager Tony Garvey was our manager he was an amazing manager and still a good friend now and we started doing a lot of remixes so we were but he was really I don’t regret any of it but it was wasn’t what I was into but I was you know James is an incredible producer we were with another guy called Alex Griggs who was really prolific in kind of early dubstep with Skrillex and Diplo and we were you know remixing and production work for all sorts of people you know we remixed Beyonce Lady Gaga Justin Timberlake like just loads of huge major artists we’ll be doing like a couple of months but I don’t know like a couple of years so we were getting played on Radio One every week I remember getting an email from uh I can’t remember his name actually now but it was that head of radio I want the time just saying what uh you know what a great output we had but I wasn’t really into the music and a lot of the time I wasn’t even there when the records were made and I’d be like it’s good for what it is but it’s not what I’m into it’s not me I don’t want to put my name into that money you know you’ve got a lot of money for doing that and we were doing a lot of them but I I had done a lot of different things I look back now as a manager and I did a lot of things without any strategy I didn’t really my first manager was Dean Wilson who was obviously fantastic but that came much later when I had a record that it was quite big in innovator one summer so I was really doing a lot of this on my own I didn’t understand the idea of a strategy I generally said yes to every gig which is the opposite of how you manage someone so but I didn’t care I was just having fun I never I don’t know how seriously I ever took any of it I was having the best time for 25 years and I loved every minute of it I loved the traveling I yeah I was just I enjoyed radio writing for the magazines just I enjoyed every every part of it making music um so I was just having a great time but then I I tried to live in Ibiza for the first time all year round in 2010 and I loved it but it was quiet and we’d had we’ve been doing all this commercial music at the time and James said we’ll just come and move to LA we’ll just do loads of songwriting so I moved to live with him in West Hollywood and we’ve just been different songwriting sessions with some super talented James is super connected and we work with a lot of really talented writers so every day in sessions just watching people write songs like that and I’d be like wow and you had up until this point you had me now you’ve gone you’ve gone clear now you you you’re in a different territory I don’t feel connected to you anymore the thing is I was just having fun I enjoyed making chill out I enjoyed making pop stuff I I just enjoyed the process the people I worked with I I wasn’t thinking of this career I was just having a good time earning a living I wasn’t still drink still drinking a lot or did you stop drinking oh yeah no yeah it’s constantly yeah yeah um yeah basically having flying around the world drunk I don’t think I’ve ever done a gig sober until I stopped drinking years ago you know I literally was just having a great time so and what happened was I I moved back I guess I moved back to Birmingham after living in La I probably broken up had a long-term relationship breakup at that point and I was I I think I DJ in India New Year’s Eve and I flew back and I was just having like a moment on the plane and I got my diary out and I I did about 100 gigs that year and I was thinking how many did I enjoy and it wasn’t a lot of them I just suddenly EDM had start it wasn’t called EDM I guess it was electro house and it got so popular and it became EDM and again you know each to their own it just wasn’t my thing and it overtook everything and you know you were getting there was a more visual side of it and I’d had promoters asking me you know can you dance around a little bit I was like oh that is not pizza you don’t want to see me down the values seem to change in what DJing was and I’m not saying that it just wasn’t for me that wasn’t who I was I you know I was a nerdy record you know I spent 300 quid on vinyl this week I mean I’m obsessed with finding music I you know that’s what I love that’s why I enjoyed it and I realized I started to dawn on me that I was sort of mid to late 30s and I was thinking oh I haven’t of the right path a specific path but I never could have and again I or if any of my artists have always they’ll be laughing their heads off how much I tell them no you’ve got to be in a level up world yeah you didn’t did you um and I I just thought you know what I’m done I I I’m exhausted from traveling life’s one big party and I just didn’t want it literally I the the desire to want that stopped and I was thinking what am I going to do I thought I’ve never had a job I’ve got no qualifications and I but I don’t want to do this and and basically within a few days just a guy I kind of knew he was like an ex-girlfriend’s little sister’s ex-boyfriend called me and said will you manage me and I was like I don’t know anything how am I going to manage you and he said look you know everybody you you’ve been at it years you could help me and I I was like okay and he was a nice guy and we’re still friends he’s actually one of my managers now but but that’s that that began and that was a really new chapter that was 2012 but within six months I mean I’ve never had a business card or a website even to now but I had about 18 up and coming artists like total unknowns because of course that you know you’re not going to get a big artist when you’re uh you’re starting out you know I didn’t really know what I was doing and um I was I couldn’t believe how much I enjoyed helping other people whether an amazing he was to be bigging someone else up not yourself it’s exhausting digging yourself up and I was tired of that and I was so excited literally it was like uh you know I loved it it felt like 25 years of DJing was my apprenticeship to be a manager like I loved what I was doing but there was a part of me that never let go of the music I lived and I literally I was in the pub with Philly Mosley the Bull’s Head it was Phil in front of ours Murray McKee was working at Renaissance and we just got talking about you know but what came of the idea was we would start a blog called secret life and it would be about music we care about and there was going to be no compromise it will you know suddenly we’d all taken ourselves out of these positions of of our careers as it were and it was like let’s do it as a hobby kind of thing and it was really like filled up Greg Wilson involved in doing a bit of writing occasionally for us and it naturally turned into a record label really quick and then it naturally turned into managing Jose Padilla who was like my idol who I’d known for you know 25 years at this point so and again it wasn’t even to make money it was uh how can we give some back to Jose for what he gave us it was like a real labor of love the whole thing was so it became many different things and then we started running um parties at Pikes I’d always been friends with Tony and used to like always go to Pikes after being out on the night these stories you know eight in the morning after a bit of a bathroom I have a bit of breakfast and hang out there for a bit and we ended up putting a party on and it went okay we had Jose and Mark Barrett who was running International Phil who became a big part of our Lives as well from that point onwards and then the next year we took it a bit more seriously and we started booking like just again just people we wanted to hear like Leo Mass who was like a legendary Italian DJ it was very instrumental in the early days of Amnesia Paul Daly from Left Field um Richard Norris from the grid just all these interesting people that we wanted to book and it went it was all right you know I didn’t know if I was that comfortable trying to be a promoter because I was also a manager at the time and I didn’t feel there was loads of time but then in the winter after that second year I we wanted to book Greg so I called Greg’s agent who’s a guy I know called Matt and I said we want to book Greg and say Greg Greg’s not available he said you can have Harvey and at the time I I didn’t know who Harvey was I was a big fan of late night sessions volume one that compilation when he was the ministry resident but I wasn’t that aware of this sort of big legend that is that Harvey was I just wasn’t party to that so it ended up with you can have Harvey every week and it was like Phil we’ve got um it was that great you know so we would have like Phil mice around the pool and all these really interesting people like roon Lim back from Norway all these super cool people that made music we were just really in that Balearic scene and and that became a big thing that became Mercury Rising which is a legendary now obviously we don’t run it after that first year we stopped running it it just got way too big but I just play there now basically because I live here I mean Pikes bikes clearly legendary going back to the 80s but that was that was a party kind of re kind of revitalized the legend right we did and then Dawn and um Dawn and Andy two friends of mine who used to own money mission because they plant many Mission as well and they under beta rocks they bought it and obviously they totally understood when Sarah went there they ended up running the place and they do now so had these amazing people with a lot of knowledge and a lot of history involved and um so we were really lucky again it was an accident you know we tried to book Greg ended up with Harvey and that became a wonderful thing and I guess the accident well we got Sarah Harris coming into the chat yes boys oh it’s a college of Sarah so I did feel like something that was sort of almost anti-club and it was anti the big Club thing it was very somebody um in my family described Pikes as a house party that’s got a bit out of hand it’s like it doesn’t really feel like a club it’s it’s um but it is a magical place and you’re kind of very aware of the the history and stuff and you can’t get in that pool without thinking of the one video or is it the uh what’s the case we did the parody of the Wham video recently I can’t think of his name the the Scottish guy with the um Tourette’s arm come on anyway he did a parody of the uh Club tracker really famous someone will tell me in the chat but uh sorry so um other stuff happening around this time I guess when I had officially I guess given up my DJ career and started managing artists I started really reflecting and thinking okay I didn’t regret at all getting it wrong and not having this Focus because actually it had got me where I was and where I was was it I loved what I was doing so the things I was then doing like things like secret life they mattered and they were important to us I think um Phil was telling you about an interview he read uh about Carl Hyde from Underworld saying that they sort of promoted their elevated their career to hobby status once they said in an interview and we kind of liked that idea that that was face to face it was backstage at one of their gears oh sorry I mean you do I think anybody Falls in and out of love with the process or the music or you kind of reinvigorate yourself and it was it was Rick who said that they elevated it to the status of being a hobby again and at first you have to think about that but then when you think you take the pressure off it because when you do something you love for a living Sorry I’ve interrupted you please but when you do something you love for a living it changes the very thing that you’re doing and if that thing’s art then it because if you quickly figured out that the most the biggest record you could make was a full-on EDM thing and we would all be making them wouldn’t we but what we allowed to complete applicator is our personal taste and the fact that actually we don’t particularly want to make music and enjoy that and you don’t want to be associated with it that’s right yeah it’s very yeah right and so I just think we ended up with these things that mattered and I think secret life is really a great fun way of doing it I guess for me doing it in a way that was sort of like correct on point with your what you were most into we didn’t we didn’t measure it in commercial terms and I think our first party when we figured out what we spent on flights and stuff I think we made about 30 quid didn’t we I think so yeah yeah and you know what also happened when I moved back to it I think it was about 2030 and I met this girl through Mark Knight called kelly Allen who’s a DJ and I would do really well and she agreed to work work for me so we moved to Ibiza together rented a house and that was kind of the beginning of the management company in a way but because I was still obviously very close friends with the guys at Mambo I’d start playing there a little bit again and um and really enjoying and I would just do the sunset which was amazing so I did the bit I like and and that would be that would be it but then the owner happy bought a place I was well aware of through Jose called Hasta la Torre which was three miles up the coast in the middle of nowhere on the edge of a cliff and I got the job to be the musical director there so that was really interesting and this was again another way to really be self-indulgent and do exactly what you wanted so Secret Life as an entity became partners with a guy we’d met called Mark Barrow who I guess ran the most credible label in the world at that point uh called The International Film he’s a great great producer so the three of us with the owner of Mambo who became Partners in hosta Latorre recording to me started a compilation series like a double game fold beautiful vinyl compilation and again another labor of love and that got real critical Acclaim so I then started to bring in really interesting people to play it look sorry and I put some amazing residents in so I had like Jose Padilla Alfredo Pippi uh Neil Macy actually I’d never knew I knew Neil’s name I’d heard him in Birmingham but Neil was in the same co-working office and he’s such like such a nice guy and I knew he was a great DJ so Neil became one of the residents as well one of the residents Phil Cooper yeah Phil came later and then Andy Wilson and Johnson so he had these um I mean I was the youngest DJ and I was in my 40s you know I think we went from about 40 to Mid 60s like my specification was proper selectors who are really into what they’re doing and the comp did really well and then I’d start and bring guests like Harvey did our first comp launch um David Holmes has come and played and and again Bill mice I mean there’s too many people to even remember like Sasha did an ambient set a few years ago which incredible um man called Adam would perform live Phil mice and Leo Mass a super long list of Deans again yeah D people like Dean Smith who again I’d never met amazing DJ and again you know um and then that also led to me and Mark as if Phil wasn’t living in a beat or so it wasn’t well you know we’d play when he came but he wasn’t here so one day me and Mark ended up filling in that’s actually Phil produced the radio show you were there oh yeah yeah yeah and we filled in for Charles Peterson and worldwide FM and that went really well so we ended up getting the worldwide to beat the show became our show which I’ve done until it’s worldwide FM sadly stopped really recently a few months ago so again I carried on doing radio but with music you’re obsessively passionate about nothing’s a compromise and it doesn’t matter because it’s not your job in that respect it wasn’t how I needed to get paid so that that’s how things progressed um that’ll be a good a good moment for me to step in and say to Phil then um because I do know there are other avenues now that you get paid at what point did a career um change happen for you I think I just got I mean I was I think there is a point in if you do music for a living where you’ve got to either compromise what you do or or do something else I I got to that point where I thought I can’t just make music for to get paid I I took that that sort of it maybe it may be a personal question but was any of the decision based on the fact that financially things were slowing down for you yeah you’ve got to get away yeah you know and I just I mean we all had I think we had um well I think every DJ goes through this at some point that sort of panic in January where you’re looking at your diary and you’re thinking where are the gigs you know Christmas is out the way where are the gigs for this year and I’ve had a couple of years where it was really slow start to the year and I knew why because obviously it our stuff was fed by music the Future Shock stuff at least was fed by music without releases and without um that profile that that gave you of course the gigs were going to slow so yeah I just needed to I just reinvented myself as a school teacher um well everyone would assume that I’d go in and teach music but I actually teach computer science because I think accidentally making electronic music you you teach yourself quite a lot about technology and so I was some music technologists rather than a musician and so yeah so but but it has allowed me to continue to I mean I think doing what we did you can’t put it down you’re a DJ for life I can’t stop thinking like a DJ I can’t stop hearing a track and thinking oh what would work nice with that and you know I still you know that I’d relish the chance to go and play some vinyl up at a plow somewhere or do you anyway I’ll do stuff all the time um because you can’t you can’t walk away from it but I just needed I I needed to take that make it hobby status to uh to the next place really I mean Pete’s we have of course please please approached me into being some management a few times all right so how long how long down the road are you into the teaching now um five or six years now yeah but um like I said we got um we got involved with Ministry of Sound because they’ve got a roster of guys that were touring with them and and people were wondering look you know we’re gonna we’re gonna work for the ministry doing managing there guys and that that was that was interesting that was a learning curve but um so that yeah I’ll put it down for a bit and went back into music management and work work with Pete and then some artists um again beautiful learning curve beautiful learning curve and I think if you’ve done what we’ve done you can pass that on but this is um and a focus probably mainly on the a r process you know working with working with someone who might have all of the sort of Social Media stuff and branding and imagery right and I’ll be like okay well forget all that let’s have a listen to your tunes excuse me um well that could be better couldn’t it that doesn’t really grow right I love that I like the Integrity of a r in tunes and I think if you’ve made music and you’ve got some kind of proven track record you kind of have the the right to do that because otherwise if you’re an a r guy who’s pulling someone else’s music apart when you make something it better be good yeah yeah definitely I get that with there’s a whole different it’s a whole different conversation to be had regarding the um practices that we we learned down the years in relation and how that stands up in today’s society so uh Pete tell us then um because I’m I am conscious of keeping you guys for too long but I’m also conscious of capturing the whole story this evening um the the where you’re at now with the management uh and uh that the height that you’ve uh you’ve reached I mean I mean firstly I mean it’s amazing that I mean I think it’s about the 12th 11th or 12th year now of doing it um there’s been I’d say there’s been two or three different aspects to it I started with totally unknown kids and I also got to manage some friends people bigger DJs have become friends with who already established and that was also interesting so I got to worry lots of people I really admired again when we were managing Jose who was you know my absolute all-time DJ Idol but it was complicated because you know Jose had battled with a lot of addictions uh you know and he was a complex character and we had some amazing times working with him amazing um but it was complicated and it was very very stressful and you learn a lot dealing with people I guess and that you know you know you realize it wasn’t always going to be straightforward so you learn to deal with different personalities and what something dawned on me there was a young guy I was working with from really early on this group called Will Clark and there was a record we had that we both loved and we couldn’t sign it and I think it took about eight months to sign the record and I think well had pretty much decided he was just wasn’t working out trying to be an artist and it’s almost like everything got put on the side and then Jamie Jones opened his Glastonbury essential mix with it and you know very quickly we got well Club on stroke signed into Dirty Bird which was his dream label you know that was the hardest level in the world to get on in that sound and very quickly where was we Paradigm and he was touring America you know it was incredible a real learning curve and it became very clear it was all about new artists people you couldn’t really get that much interest in someone who had already been there because again it’s that thing you can only be hot for so long it’s so capturing that first wave of of of heat was that was clearly the key thing and but I loved I really loved working with new people and you know I know at one point me in trouble trying to write a course and we didn’t we put it down and I ended up picking it up one day in Bali I just got really inspired to write about 15 hours a day I ended up writing a course on Art it was almost like what did you learn about developing an artist with all your experience and and that led to writing a course that I ended up partnering with big Point Blank um with a lovely guy called Rob who owns Point Blank and they never actually partnered with an outside person before so you know we’re really lucky in our partner with a guy called Nathan Burrows from Manchester and we ended up partnering up partnering on the course so that was an amazing thing teaching kids and that actually really kicked off the year covered started so that that’s been a wonderful thing you know I love helping new people but over time some of the artists had more and more success and the artist’s Carmen artists go and then there was an artist I met through a friend in Ibiza uh called temba a South African guy and we got very well really connected and it just worked we spent about a year working in the background not releasing music really putting the sound together and then it just worked like you know people were booking him to play in Miami and Ibiza before the first record came out it was like wow this is insane I just never seen an uptake that quick you know it was really exciting and we’ve been together seven years now or nearly you know maybe six and a half years and you know that led to lots of interesting opportunities um Timber’s one of the best friends of a big art big African artist called Black Coffee um so that led to me partnering with black coffee’s manager um and he had you know Virgil ablo black copy the Martinez Brothers blondeish all sorts of amazing artists and I met some wonderful people um and there were a lot of changes in that company set up and um like obvious that his own company I ended up partnering with um the lady called Cristiana her name is who runs that company and we partnered on Timbers management so I work in an amazing team of people um working on Timber and he’s obviously exploded all over the world and things are going great with him um but also ended up managing Steve Lawler rewinding it all the way back come back around Full Circle A couple of years ago um we started doing some stuff together um and I’ve managed various other artists as well um and I have different managers working for me and stuff but um but yeah you know it’s uh I really really enjoyed it it’s almost like you get to use everything you’d learn but also I I started to do a lot of personal development stuff in about 2016 and I then I had an amazing guy called Ben coached me for about a year and a half and it was really life-changing so I then decided to learn to be a coach I thought that would be a an interesting way to learn how to I guess it involved the way I could communicate with the artists so yeah you know it’s been a great way to learn new things and it again it was you know it was easy to reach out to somebody would say I really want to be on this level yeah I know I know that guy you know because 25 years in the business 30 years you’ve kind of met everybody really and if you were nice to people and built relationships you were able to open a door didn’t sign a record but you could open a door so from promoters to labels to you know knowing how to do a record deal a publishing deal knowing what those things are mean you know it just became a really natural fit I didn’t again right place right time if Lee hadn’t called me and asked me to manage I wouldn’t have done it you know I wouldn’t have been informed on me I was actually proud I thought I’d become a chef I loved cooking and I I I Googled the best chef College in England was in a little village in Dartmoor I totally forgot about it and then two three years ago we actually moved back to England and we ended up living in this place in Dartmoor and I was like that’s the place I nearly applied that’s insane yeah so I was listening listening to that there obviously my mind while I was paying attention to my mind drifted back thinking all of this uh thanks to uh Emma taking by the hand and it reminded me that earlier on Ryan had actually uh commented uh I it’s so far back in the comments I can’t even read where it was now he he was saying something about Emma’s mixing or whatever I’m not sure did her first gig at the hair and Hounds I I mean again I’m not there so I’m not I’m not aware I don’t I didn’t get you have to forgive me Ryan for missing that comment I did read it but I I can’t interrupt these channels you know it’s insane uh and yeah interrupt you I must because we’re two hours and 15 minutes oh wow it’s conversation okay you know I I I’m quite happy to sit and listen to you all night between me uh our friend he says a great chat this just keep going to at least Thursday I am I I am going to start wrapping it up but what I will say is at some point uh it would be enough for you guys to come back on and and chat with the likes of you know where to be Adam Regan or we’ll get Lee Fisher on your jack or dick or someone because once once we get the the Crux of the the actual history down in this conversation then it opens up a whole new opportunity for us to just talk about funny scenarios and funny situations down the line um Phil is there anything that you as you’ve been listening you’ve been sat there is there anything else that you think I didn’t actually talk about this or there’s something else that I wanted to to bring on probably but I was too busy listening to things um absolutely I mean I think there are probably lots of little stories along the way that you forget and you kind of fast forward through bits and don’t know that was an interesting one um I mean in a nutshell that that’s what I’ve been up to in this game I mean people as I say people people would be more than happy to see all evening and Pete clearly uh you know it is fascinating as I did I made light of it at one point I said oh when you started throwing La into the conversation I was like okay no I don’t relate to this man anymore but it’s incredible mate you ever pinch yourself and think wow I mean I I you know I remember as a story I’d relate to probably all my artists and it’s that I remember in my geography class it was a guy called Mr Napier and he asked everybody what they wanted to do when they grew up and I was a bit embarrassed so I didn’t answer but I knew really clearly and it was that a lot of people in the class seem to be suggesting things that sounded quite ordinary to to my mind and um and I just thought I want to do something I love that I really am passionate about so the more I put in maybe the more I’ll get out you know but I I wanted my life to feel like an adventure and to feel like fun and you know I never wanted to have a job in the traditional sense of I couldn’t you know I’d get fired if I had a job I just wouldn’t be able to do something I’m really bad at things I don’t love I I’ve got to be obsessively into something to be able to even put any attention in so I I’m always very grateful that I ended up accidentally I don’t know I mean there’s definitely been an intention to do it but that I’ve ended up doing what I love for I don’t know what I’m 49 you know I left school at 16 and all this time I’ve had great fun been to amazing places met great people and you know and just you know it’s just been great fun the whole thing and you know and also I’m loving it you know maybe more now than every and I still I DJ a little bit now I play a you know Latorre a little bit I play at The Standard Hotel here in Ibiza player pikes I do the odd little bit like best of all which I love you know it’s a hot it’s very you know I really do keep it down how how much I do and but I I really love it I mean the only thing I was gonna flag actually just bringing it back on a Birmingham tip of some of the I guess some of the other places I went that I didn’t mention that were really inspiring were things like um because I’ve been listening to a lot of the other interviews you did with people I know like Jim and Lee and Adam and Dick and you know I think it was breathless or a better way at snobs here in Fabio and Lauren Garney I’ve still got that Fabio tape I mean oh my God that was mind-blowing and Amnesia house raised in Coventry Raw um yeah eclipse in Coventry every Saturday um you know there’s so many great what was that club called above Coast to Coast bunkers that was all like again soul to soul Funk like I just loved that and I you know yeah just a release teapot all these sort of like a lot of our friends were really into the rare grouping so we used to do it go to a lot of those kind of things as well which I loved so yeah they’re just you know I really did so much I looked back now and it makes sense where it all came from you know Birmingham was a great place to be when I was growing up you know and I think yeah I don’t really know what birmingham’s light now I’ve rarely been to Birmingham the city central I’ve not even been there I mean I think I’ve been there once in 20 years probably you won’t recognize the old place it’s really like the smartest cities and drive I think probably in the country it’s beautiful but but yeah I just ended up staying in Ibiza so much I’ve spent maybe 15 years here I got married uh ended up staying here you know and I love living in the countryside here it’s you know again there’s a great saying that Steve Miller who’s the chillout producer afterlife said to me he said create a life you don’t need to escape from and you know I kind of feel like I’ve done that here and I assuming the scene every morning you live in Spain as well you know it’s it’s a nice life you know being in the sea every day The Sun Shines well I thought I had a nice life until I heard yours what are you get an award and actually I’m just gonna throw this in I’m not going to allow you to reply uh you would awarded the lifetime achievement by Pete’s hung right uh it was the radio one hall of fame or Pete Thomas Hall of Fame yeah yeah look when I when that happened I I looked at who’d run it and I genuinely didn’t understand that that happened to me at all because it was like you know people you really look really looked up to so yeah I I think maybe that was a very lucky thing I don’t know that was we did the 20th I did I did a deal with universal to signed Mambo for their 20th anniversary we did a really beautiful compilation and it it kind of came around that time so it really I stopped DJing it as a job really at that point you know I was two years into being a manager but yeah that any things like that you do they’re nice little touches I think that you know I’m really proud of the the uh was it the best to beat the DJ award the thing is I got out the taxi that night after being at Pasha and I was so drunk and dropped the thing and I I mean I think it’s in a box somewhere at my mom’s bed I had to glue it back together the tails the tails that can be told are over a beer okay well listen I’m gonna I’m gonna bring this to an end now all I can say is guys seriously I’m so glad that we managed uh to do this and Phil and I were going to be talking in a few weeks Pete and I were always um scheduled to talk this evening and I said You know guys you should both come on together and I’m glad that we did really because your stories are tied together so well um and you know you’ve both delivered them so amazingly so thank you so much we’re getting a lot of love inside the chat room for the people who have been hanging on every word so the only way for me to to end is by thanking you very much and uh you know I’ll get in touch with you at some point and ask the people to come back on uh some of the guys to comment and and we can get some more crazy stories from you fantastic thank you and I’m so glad that you invested in all the other conversations that we’re doing because even though this is brahma’s [ __ ] the the whole the whole uh energy behind the channel is Inspire and be inspired and you are to guys who I genuinely do respect I look up to and I’ve taken inspiration from you both down here so thank you so much guys okay I’m just gonna say a few farewells I’ll press my button and kick you off the zoom I’ll drop you a message later thank you take care enjoy the rest of the night okay so the boys go and uh here I am thank you Sarah Harris uh says so very proud Pete you’ve come a long way from Rosie’s and Rafael’s days and the biggest musical influence on me in that time lots of love uh Emma was talking about 49ers uh and thank you all for your comments throughout it’s been interesting reading your inputs and I’ll say again to anybody that does come back because we do get a hell of a lot of people checking out the recordings please do leave a comment let the guys know uh what you enjoyed and we’ll get them back on as you can see on the screen uh the next up next Monday we’re going to Nottingham further up the motorway nuts as [ __ ] is the conversation in our next series uh two guys uh who you may recognize your recognize is definitely one of the names Mr Christian would yet you might recognize that logo in the background it’s the Venus logo and Sam Barry is a gentleman responsible for much of the incredible Knights incredible times uh in Nottingham uh before the words super DJ was even a thing that’s not even a word is he before Superstar DJ was even a thing Christian would yet was a superstar DJ and we’re going to be talking about life in Nottingham and all that that meant in the late 80s early 90s uh I’ve taken up way too much of your time thank you so much if you’ve enjoyed this conversation and you would like to see more of them if you uh click the like button on the YouTube channel what that will do is the next time I do present uh a conversation then YouTube will bring it up in your feed and it’ll just give you a little reminder to come and check it out also if you’re not subscribed if you subscribe then again that will mean you’ll get to see more of the chats that we do there’s so much content out there by liking and subscribing it just ensures that you don’t forget us uh thank you everybody Chris Day says a great chat Mr start but we’ll go back and listen please do two hours and 25 minutes we’ve been talking and I was hanging on every word it’s always a pleasure so much love and respect for Pete and Phil boy’s done good right okay that’s me done you take care now see you later [Music] foreign

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