“Metalheadz used to have this soundsystem called Eskimo Noise, and they were like fucking scientists when it came to speakers.”

I read somewhere that when you started getting really into drum ‘n bass you made some pilgrimages to London to check out the sound ‘at source’. Can you tell me about thoese trips?

“I wouldn’t call them pilgrimages exactly [laughs]…but I was just very curious, because when I got into drum ‘n bass I really got caught by the whole Metalheadz thing, and Photek – especially Photek, actually, and Goldie. And I just wanted to see where all that came from, and what the vibe was, and what it should sound like – because obviously there was people playing in Holland and we went to see them but we just really wanted to see what the Blue Note was all about basically. So that’s what we did.

“Me and a friend went to London – I think we stayed in Peckham somewhere, I don’t know why there, but yeah, we stayed there and went to the Blue Note. We saw everyone there and what impressed me a lot was that Metalheadz used to have this soundsystem called Eskimo Noise, and they were like fucking scientists when it came to speakers. I remember that Blue Note had an upstairs which was kind of like a cafĂ©, or bistro thing where people would play, and then downstairs was a proper club; and the cafĂ© was always open first and then once that filled up they’d open up the club downstairs. And I remember walking down when there was no one in the club yet and there were all these people walking around with db-meters, standing in front of the speakers just to test the sound and to test – I don’t know what they were testing but it was magic to me! I was like wow, this is a science. They weren’t wearing white suits but it was pretty damn close
[laughs]”

“So I went to London then and saw all that stuff and I came back and I said, alright, we’ve got to do something here, we’ve got to do our own events and try to get to that point where you have this vibe, and this music, and this sound quality. So that trip was really what motivated us to start our own nights.”

So began your Redzone nights, which ran for 10 or 11 years. Was it a drum ‘n bass-oriented night throughout the whole of its lifespan? Did the musical policy change much over the years?

“Actually it didn’t change that much at all. As I said, we were so inspired by this Metalheadz thing when we started. We started Redzone with local DJs but the first foreign artists that we invited were I think Iain and DJ Stretch from Reinforced, and after that basically everyone that was associated with Metalheadz played our night, including Goldie a couple of times. We just had everyone really, and I know d-Bridge from that era, and Marcus Intalex, Klute, DJ Krust, everyone


“We were always pretty straightforward when it came to booking people, we weren’t consciously looking for what was the ‘sound of the day’, we just kind of did our own thing and it was basically quite Metalheadz-related. It was only maybe in the last couple of years that I started to play different stuff, because I used to warm up on the night or end the night or something like that, and I used my warm-up slots to play some house or techno, I think we even premiered some DMZ stuff, and some Burial and Kode9 things there, all the way at the end. But that really was right at the end, it still remained a drum ‘n bass night first and foremost.”

Was broken beat ever a thing for you? You can kind of hear its influence in your music, and there’s a Maddslinky track on your Fabric mix…

“Yeah, ‘cos while I was doing the Redzone nights I also had a weekly residency at a real small club. It was kind of a student night, maybe 150 or so capacity, so it wasn’t all that really
The owner of the club said to me, ‘You can have the residency, but you can’t play drum ‘n bass’ [laughs]. Which was a bit strange, ‘cos that was my main thing at the time, but I was like well, ok, I can use the money I make every week to buy records that aren’t drum ‘n bass.

“So that gave me a whole fresh incentive to explore new and different music again – I mean, I’ve always been buying vinyl in different genres anyway, but I just thought that I could take it up a notch and really get into other styles. That was around 2000 I think, and that was the broken beat era, and stuff like the first 4Hero album, early 2-step, Wookie, Exemen, Maddslinky, Zed Bias, the Locked On label, things like that, and obviously a lot of broken beat – like the People label, and one called Main Squeeze. So yeah, I basically bought all that every week religiously and I just mixed it and I listened to all the tunes and that was for a good three years. And then I completely lost track of anything 2-step/garagey up until I heard DMZ, Kode9 and Burial. That was obviously a huge gap, but I could also still hear what the roots of it all was.”

So you weren’t into Horsepower, Artwork and the stuff that came between garage and dubstep?

“No, that completely passed me. All that came much later for me, basically when everyone started tracking it down. Like when everyone heard Burial saying that he was influenced by El-B, and all of a suddenly everyone starts hunting down El-B records – I was doing the same as that [laughs]. But you know, although I didn’t really follow that connecting stuff, when I hear the first Burial album or the early DMZ things you can definitely hear that it comes from 2-step, from garage.

“So maybe that’s what appealed to me, and also the tempo of it all – because I was used to drum n bass, you know, 175rpm, and getting more and more frustrated at not being able to make music at that speed because it was too fast to do the kind of melodies that I wanted to do. So I thought, OK, I should just show it down a little bit and go on this 140 thing and see what happens. And this is what I did, and it was an experiment more than anything else, and that’s where we are now
”

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