Were you conscious of people like Pinch and Vex’d when you were living in Bristol?
“It’s funny because Pinch was at Bristol as well, but we didn’t really know each other, and we certainly didn’t do anything musically together…but I’ve subsequently heard that Peverelist came to a couple of the early Hotflush nights, so I suppose there was some unintentional crossing of paths going on.
“The whole proper dubstep ‘thing’, if you like, didn’t really start ’til around 2002 – I moved back to London when I’d finished, which was in 2001, and immediately set about getting myself a show on pirate and all that kind of stuff. FWD had started in 2001 – in its first incarnation when it was still in the west end it was very much centred around the sort of DJ Zinc kind of breakbeat garage type thing. It was very much centered around that – I guess there was also Zed Bias and El-B and things like that, but it was very much the cool thing, breakbeat garage.
“I went to the first one and went every month for about four years after that, and a little community just started to grow, and by the time it moved to Shoreditch – Plastic, where it still is now – it was just a few people who were making tunes in the bedroom…I mean, a few people were attached to the garage establishment – like Hatcha, he was already playing out properly and actually at FWD from early on, and obviously Benga and Skream and all that were mates with him – but there was loads of other people who didn’t have any connection at all with the establishment, and it was a just sort of a nice little monthly meeting place. And the music just gradually developed into dubstep.”
“The ‘haven’t got a fucking clue’ thing was kind of applicable to the label too.”
When did you make your first forays into production?
“I didn’t start producing properly until around 2002, but when I say ‘properly’ I guess I mean just messing around in the bedroom with some very basic equipment. I didn’t start producing properly properly until 2003 or 2004.
“Me and my then DJing partner, who I’d been at Bristol with, had had the idea of starting a label for ages, really from since when we’d first started playing out. And so we were putting that together, and me producing was just a thing on the side – even though I was really into the idea of doing it, it was just one of those things where when you haven’t got a fucking clue, it’s a slow process. [laughs]
“The ‘haven’t got a fucking clue’ thing was kind of applicable to the label side of things too, but we basically just pressed some records and put out the first one. And that was 2003.”
Where did the first releases on Hotflush come from?
“The first ever release was some of my early tunes. The second release was Distance. So it was basically just our mates – people we’d met down FWD or wherever, likeminded people who wanted to do similar stuff but without the infrastructure or maybe just not knowing the right people to do it. So it was a complete DIY thing.”
‘Financially, from a business perspective, it’s always been a waste of time.”
Has the way you’ve run the label changed much over the years?
“All we’ve tried to do from the start – and it’s still true to a large degree now – is to give a platform to music that wouldn’t otherwise be heard. I know that sounds a bit silly to say that now, because it’s since become quite a big thing, but certainly back in those days – in 2003 and 2004 when we were playing out, we were just playing sets of unreleased tunes, and people would come up and say, ‘What’s this music?’ Without us putting it out ourselves it wouldn’t have come out. We just wanted to provide a platform and build something from the ground up.
“For all the people who were into it, some people would come up and be like, “What the fuck is this racket?” – so for it to have got as big as it did still surprises me a huge amount. However many people are making a living out of it now, there was probably about four years of banging your head against a brick wall thinking it was never going to get anywhere.
“The thing with the label is that financially, from a business perspective, it’s always been a waste of time – it’s never been anything other than that. And f you don’t expect to make money out of something, it’s easier to justify spending x amount of time and getting very little money out of it. ”
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CSK