Influences: Red Rack’em

I grew up with this Big Youth album. My dad used to play it loud on his massive Celestion vintage speakers. The bass on Natty Cultural Dread was a huge influence on me and those speakers too. They were capable of producing sub bass as they were floor speakers and I can remember dancing with my parents to this album as a teenager on some saturday nights when I got back home on the last bus after a night out in Anstruther. I would be a bit drunk and/or stoned and they would have drunk a bottle of wine together. We would listen to stuff like this and have a dance together sometimes feeling the vibes. Lovely memories.

I remember being blown away by mental synthy psychedelia of the background music on Timm Tyler (the boy who lost his laugh) which was a badly dubbed German children series I watched avidly during the 80s. The plot was based on Faust and it seems like a chilling metaphor if you watch it now as it was basically an evil twisted baron surveilling young boys to find out who had the best laugh so he could steal it for himself as being an evil bastard he couldn’t laugh (of course). The soundtrack by Christian Brunn made a lasting impression on many kids of my generation and we used to even use it as an adjective – ‘that sounds well Timm Tyler’ or ‘playing the Timm Tyler shit’ to describe proggy cosmic synth funk music. I bought the vinyl on a whim about 10 years ago and it’s super dope and edgy stuff. I think kids today would have to lot more respect for authority and a better work ethic if they had watched all the terrifying programs we had in the 80s.

This was a great program set during the second world war in North Eastern England about a group of kids who find a downed German plane after a particularly heavy night during the blitz. They steal the machine gun off the plane, build a base and even take an injured German pilot ‘Rudi’ prisoner. It was a huge influence on me and my friends. We convinced ourselves the IRA were going to do a sea invasion where we lived (despite it being the East Coast of Scotland), built our hidden bass in a sunken area just past ‘the braes’ in the village I lived in (St Monans, Fife) and even stole my friends fathers air rifle to keep with the gun vibes. I remember my friends father coming to see us one afternoon at ‘the camp’ as we called it to negotiate the return of his air rifle. We could have accidentally shot him in a fit of ‘they are coming’ delusion but fortunately for all a peaceful resolution was secured.

I was a pretty rubbish skater as a teenager (I could do heel flips and grind the odd curb but very rarely) but I really enjoyed the culture surrounding it. Being an errant, renegade type chap I fully immersed myself in the underage drinking, heavy bong sessions, being chased by the cops, brat behaviour and mild delinquency which being a ‘skateboard junkie’ (to quote the local populace) afforded in super puritan, uptight Scottish fishing village. As this was all pre-internet, it’s impossible to put an emphasis on just how influential the films made by manufacturers such as Plan B and H Street were on us suburbanites. The nearest skate park was 30 miles away in Dundee. This was also the nearest place to buy music in Our Price and HMV so when we heard stuff like ‘Tommy The Cat’ by Primus and ‘Ahonetwo Ahonetwo’ by Del on this skate film, it was like a beautiful acknowledgement of the international brotherhood of skateboard outlaws as we were already deep into these jams. Much drunken no complying off garage roofs and ‘focusing’ our 40 quid decks ensued. Yes it WAS 40 effing quid for a new deck in 1992!

The Bible. And then some. This album saved my life. Growing up in the hostile environment of an East Fife fishing village, where near lynchings and stonings were regular occurrences for those who transgressed wasn’t so easy. Especially if you dared to have English parents. My teenage love of Hip Hop (and hash/skating/drinking/the hope of girls) was the thing which kept me sane. It’s interesting how I managed to relate to super political, radical black street politics from the US, talk of the 5 percenters, gangsta rap, NYC stick up kid stuff – I guess I felt marginalised myself too. But De La managed to transcend all that firebrand anger and offer something a bit more…left I guess. I had a cassette of this album and I listened to it so many times that I could pretty much recite the whole thing from memory once it starter playing. ‘How many times did the batmobile catch a flat?’. Hearing things like Steely Dan (which I knew from my father) being augmented for ‘Eye Know’ and then discovering ‘Me Myself And I’ was sampled from my new favourite group Parliament ( I was always more of a Funkadelic guy at that time) sealed the deal. I even had the girls in high school cutting out the song lyrics of the hit singles from Smash Hits so I could rap along. It just shows you how massive De La were at that time. I was 13 years old and never looked back.

I loved all types of Jungle and Drum and Bass circa 1995 but unfortunately I was still living in Edinburgh at that time so I was quite far away from southern England where the action was happening. There was stuff like Manga going on in Edinburgh but I think the Scottish crowd thought being moody somehow equated to an authentic drum and bass vibe so I mainly went to techno parties which felt much more inclusive. I had a friend called Robin who lived in Bath around that time. I used to visit him in the summer and he came to stay with me in Edinburgh in 1995 – I remember he brought up his decks and mixer in a coffin case and we had them set up in our living room for a few days and we mixed loads of his latest drum and bass records. Stuff like Doc Scott and Source Direct blew me away at that time. It still does. It was the emerging ‘tech step’ or ‘hard step’ sound and it was a real departure from the bombastic Jungle and floaty Good Looking sound. That was the thing in those days – there was about 10 different types of drum and bass and everyone had their own sounds, dubplates, breakbeats etc. It was such an amazing time – imagine having a form of music being made in your own country which seemed like it was being beamed down by aliens. Factor in flatliners, doves and calis and you’ve got a revolution on your hands. I moved to Bristol in 1997 literally to be closer to the source.

I grew up with P Funk. It was heavily sampled in the hip hop that I loved and also me and my friends CONSUMED all of the Parliament and Funkadelic we could get our hands on. Fortunately for us there was a music shop on Cockburn Street in Edinburgh called Fopp and they used to sell loads of P Funk albums for crazy crazy prices. We were paying between 2 and 5 pounds for some of the finest funk rock ever committed to wax. We lived that shit. We would get blazed up to fuck (or stoned off our tits as we would say back then) and zone out to some Funkadelic. I could have chosen any album by Funkadelic as we loved them all but Maggot Brain for me has it all. The 10 minute transcendence of the title track then some party starters such as ‘Hit It And Quit It’ (an ode to not hanging around too long after you’ve got someone pregnant I believe) and the wacked out post acid stumble of ‘Back In Minds’ . I was in loads of bands as a teenager and I played drums for a while in a band called ‘The Wizards’ and we were completely influenced by stuff like Funkadelic. It was such a fertile time for us all and it was soundtracked by Funkadelic. I love their honky tonk country influence. It’s not just funk. Or rock. Or soul. It’s all of it put into a blender. I also have to massively recommend ‘Music For Your Mother’ which is a collection of their singles – You NEED this music in your life.

When I was about 10, I used to get to stay up late and watch stuff like Bergerac while I was being baby sat by my older sisters friend Sarah. My parents would go out for dinner at a pub in Anstruther called The Smugglers Inn (yes that one) and I would watch programs like M.A.S.H and Bergerac and possibly have a mild crush on Sarah as well. I loved Bergerac. The theme music is especially heavy. French accordion reggae anyone? John Nettles was taking a break from being a Shakespearian thesp and earning some dough as a vintage car driving (no cliche there), suave detective in the Jersey Police force. Foiling french drug smugglers, jewel thieves, violent criminals etc. Basically the channel islands in the 80s were a hot bed of crime which is borne out by the emergence of street punk bands like Level 42 who were a product of the rough Jersey dockland scene. I named my label after this program because I wanted to choose a name which was already in peoples consciousness (like Nike for example) as it’s easier for people to say and remember if the word is already in there. Bergerac was just another tv program for some but for me it symbolised a racy world of sports cars, champagne, trophy wives (who flirted hard with our lead character) and that ‘je ne sais quoi’ French vibe which us Brits find so beguiling.