Billy "Daniel" Bunter On The Complexity Of Electronic Music History
Reconsidering the one-dimensional narratives that dominate
Welcome back to Music Is The Answer. I’m currently working through a backlog of dynamite interviews and I cannot wait to share them with you. I’m also working on a big piece with a bunch of my journalism peers and connections, which I’m also very excited to share. I recently played four hours of Larry Heard’s music at Spiritland in King’s Cross and it was an amazing evening. I spent a lot of time and money gathering up a whole bunch of music for the gig and it was 100% worth it. I learned a lot more about Larry and his musical output. I wasn’t totally happy with the transitions (Spiritland’s mixer is not much fun to mix with as you can’t remove the bass or highs) so I’m going to re-record the whole thing at home over the next few weeks - watch this space as I’ll be sharing it here.
Besides that, a fair amount of work, days (and nights) filled with music and a never ending flow of ideas for Music Is The Answer, including a very exciting extension of the platform that’s in the embryonic stage at the moment… Can you guess what it is?…
The main feature of this edition is a huge long-form interview with Billy “Daniel” Bunter, a fellow music nerd and long-serving DJ, radio host, producer, author and event promoter who’s posts on Instagram have been giving me life. I find his enthusiasm infectious and the music he plays, new or old, always gets me pumped. What I’ve really enjoyed is his posts that question the linear narratives that dominate electronic music history, or at least ask questions that get you thinking about the origins of things. He has such an open-minded take on things and the interview is a great insight into his thinking. You may or not agree, but it certainly offers a lot of discussion points and, for me, the more we can look at the past and unravel some of the common tropes and mythological stories, the better.
This edition also features a bunch of techno reviews and a mix of all the tunes, as standard. I’ve put some absolute corkers in there again this month, so go check that out too please.
Billy “Daniel” Bunter: “It’s so easy to settle on a simple narrative”
How long have you been doing the Instagram thing now? Because you popped up on my Explore page, or maybe someone shared something of yours, about four months ago. It’s a clip of you in the mix, and you were mixing ‘Narra Mine’ with something else…
…‘Energy Flash’.
That’s it! I love that clip so much. I love how excited you are when you’re rolling it out as well.
Now, that piece of footage is from four or five years ago. If you go onto my Facebook, it’s become a hub where I share flyers, old music, records… Sometimes I go back to old livestreams and things I've posted, and I realise that it’s something I’ve done for a long time. In recent months, with the rise of the way music and content is conveyed, especially on Instagram and TikTok, some people have said to me, “Dan, why don’t you do that? You’ve been doing it forever.” And I’m like, “Oh, come on. I’ve got my radio, I do this, I do that…” I’m active as it is. For me, this was “a new generation thing to do”, which, ultimately, was quite ignorant of me to look at it in that way. When, actually, if you go back in time, it’s what we’ve been doing from the start. We had message boards in the mid-nineties, sharing music, there’s always been public forums of some kind.
So all of a sudden, I just started putting stuff up, and I was quite shocked at how some of it went. I’ve had some bits that have had half a million or a million views across all my pages. I’ve had other bits that haven’t gone as good. One of the most interesting things I put up was when I did a short snapshot of my view of jungle music. And all of a sudden, everyone from Mantronix to Questlove to Goldie to DJ Red Alert in America to Frankie Bones… some amazing minds from around the world, but from completely different genres. The Questlove one blew me away on a few interesting things… I shared my thought process on Eddy Grant's 'Time Warp'.
I also loved that post. That’s the one that got me wanting to chat to you.
And a lot of this stuff I take for granted because I worked in a record shop in my early teens and every Friday and Saturday I was resident at Labrynth in Dalston for five years. This was before hardcore and jungle were even a thing in their own right, before happy hardcore, and before it became really British-centric. I watched all of this music come through. I said to someone yesterday, even to the point where, when we were playing bleeps and bass in 1990 from up north, or the records that Hype or Shut Up and Dance were first bringing through the East End, we were still playing the odd Balearic record, or the odd record from a few years previous. I’ve taken a lot of this stuff for granted.
And when I posted the Eddy Grant 'Time Warp' thing, it was just merely because I’ve always marvelled over this record. I feel that it has elements of house in it without it being house music. And I put my opinion and my thought process out because it becomes so easy to settle on a simple, or linear, narrative. “That’s got some electronics in it, they created house.” But hang on, there’s other elements going on here. It’s not as easy as saying, “These lads went to Ibiza and created acid house.” It’s just not. There are so many things that you can go back to - as middle-aged people who were fascinated by it when it was happening and then revisit things now - and think, “Oh no, that doesn’t actually make sense.” What fascinated me with the 'Time Warp' thing that I put up, from ‘77, was Questlove downloading the video, re-uploading it, and putting his perspective on it. The comments were split down the middle. So 50% of people were like, “Wow, this British guy really knows his stuff.” The other 50% were going, “How dare he take house music away from Frankie Knuckles? How dare he?!” Really angry people.
When I didn’t say it was the first house record. I just said, “Here’s the lineage that we may want to take a deeper look at”. As opposed to ‘Trans Europe Express’, or Donna Summer ‘I Feel Love’. But “I Feel Love” is a full vocal track, whereas 'Time Warp' isn’t. It’s absolute minimalism, in the way that the very early ‘84/85 house records are. What fascinated me about that particular thing was, Questlove then started replying to people, going, “Well, I’ve gone and dug on what this guy’s saying, and I can’t find a Frankie record from that time.” I didn’t even mention Frankie Knuckles! But then Questlove is getting quite passionate and completely animated, like, “I’ve gone and done my own research now, and I can’t...” So that’s been very interesting - to share things that have fascinated me, and to see it reach out in such a way.
I've been really enjoying all of that stuff that you've been doing because it’s thought provoking. I think it's really important for anybody who has a big platform within electronic music to ask questions that get people thinking and having a healthy debate. Like you say, it provides alternatives to narratives that have become so established within music, because it's never as simple as this linear thing of “this happened, this happened, and this person did this and then “Boom!” a new genre is created”. Never. And you don't know what people have been listening to in the past. Maybe Frankie Knuckles might have listened to that 'Time Warp' record at one point. You just don't know. It's that thing of getting people to think and debate. There's going to be people that are going to be very rigid in their, “No, this is how it should be and that’s how it is” mentality. But there’ll be others going, “I thought it was this way, but actually it's opened my mind up to the idea that there could be other things that fed into this”.
There are three things I’ve picked up from my social media in the past four months. My Facebook is on something like 7 million views a month. My Instagram’s on 3 million views, and I get thousands of comments, likes, and shares a day. So I see a lot of stuff thrown at me on a daily basis - 99.99% of it is really positive. I’ve broken people down into three categories.
First, people who speak from a place of experience but take a selfish opinion and show little humility to other things that are going on. It’s “my opinion, I was here on this day, at this specific thing, I bought a record here or heard a DJ there - and that’s it.” This applies to both artists (who should know better) and fans of the music.
Second, are people who are either on a road of discovery, or have lived through all of these moments. Through experience, and now through the wealth of knowledge constantly thrown at us, they start piecing things together.
I’ll give you a fine example of this from my point of view: I was listening to Jazzy M on LWR in '85 and '86 when we were into hip hop. Then Jazzy M starts coming through the radio and, slowly, you’re getting used to this stuff. You’re thinking Jazzy M is the only thing in the world. Going to Groove Records and Music Power Records, finding this stuff ourselves as teens. That was it.
As I got older, I became really good friends with northern pioneers in my world, like Stu Allan, who sadly passed away. He was incredibly close to us. His wife is incredibly close to us too; she’s a big supporter of our charity. If I had a man crush, it would be Stu Allan. Over the years, sitting around the dinner table with him, going abroad with him, suddenly, my brain starts going: “Well, Stu Allan is what Jazzy M and others were to us - that’s what he was to people in Manchester.” As an inquisitive person, even at the age I’m at, before Stu passed, I’d ask him at any moment: “Stu, do you remember this? Do you remember this record coming through? What’s your earliest memory?” I’d talk to him like I was talking to Jazzy M. Thinking to myself, “We had our moments of enlightenment and our heroes down here, but this is what a whole world of people had up there.”
So the second group are those who have lived, uncovered, or read all the interviews, watched all the documentaries. Yes, there are the obvious. what I now call “biblical” moments, like the commercial lineage of what happened. But the second group of people are those who go, “Okay, there’s more to this than all that. There are so many more layers to this.”
Then there’s probably the third group - and actually the most endearing and most important - which is just people who had, and continue to have, fun and enjoy the music, regardless of its lineage or historic meaning. Some of us are really geeky about this stuff, beyond just the music. But ultimately, there are people who couldn’t care less. They just love watching footage of me mixing four records on vinyl, double-dropping the mix, playing 20 records in 10 minutes. There are so many avenues to go down. But I think as we get older, especially in recent years, as people incredibly close to us in various corners of the music scene pass away or become ill, it’s really important to share different perspectives, and not from a place of absolute selfishness.
We call ourselves “the geeks”.. we literally have a WhatsApp group, just four of us, all middle-aged men, all successful in our chosen careers. Between us, we’ve probably got 150,000 records. One of them, Ritchie K, recently wrote a book: The Rave List - 1988 To 1994 - big up Original Gidman and Johnny Scratch, as well. We’ve all lived through this, from teenagers to now. We’re always sharing interviews, unearthing records between us that we marvel over. Even this morning, we were reading the sleeve notes of North: The Sound Of The Dance Underground. That sent us down a rabbit hole of interviews with Mike Pickering, Graeme Park, other Manchester people. In those interviews, from their youthful days, they’d say things like, “London was two years behind us.” Londoners booed them in equal measure. Then you find interviews with Terry Farley where he says (and I hope he was misquoted, but maybe not) things that reflect a real youthful tussle of egos, “We were the first, though. We were the first.”
You read those Mixmag and DJ Mag interviews, early BBC documentaries, the earliest books and there’s always this mythology that’s been passed down. But I actually think, now we’re this far down the line, that those simplified lineages are an insult to the deep history of the culture and all the different movements that sprung up around it.
Yeah, for real.
Someone posted something I’d never thought about until recently. Look, I love the ecstasy scene. We’ve released eight or nine books through Music Mondays. Every single one of those books, whether it was DJ Rap, Frost, Uncle Dugs, Rob Tissera, had the author’s face on the cover. Except for me and Uncle Dugs, if I remember right. I chose to put an ecstasy pill on the cover of my book and called it The Love Dove Generation. I love ecstasy. But someone said something the other day, I’m paraphrasing, but it was along the lines of: “Yeah, but without the drugs, who cares about what you’re saying?” It hit me. I’d never thought about that. And I thought, actually, that’s quite an insult to the depth of house music… to reduce it to just being about the drugs.
Yeah, I’ve spoken to people like A Guy Called Gerald, etc, who explained to me that there wasn't really so much drug taking way back in that very early phase of house filtering in over here. He talks about going to the Hacienda in 86 or 87, when the guys from Trax Records first came over to do a tour, and no one in there was taking ecstasy, because that wasn't the cultural thing at that particular time.
I've been thinking about this a lot, and I'm going to skip around some years and some moments right now. So the word rave… you can go back to the 70s and find psychedelic flyers that use the rave.
In actual fact, in one of the Carry On films, I think it's Carry On Camping, there’s a scene where Barbara Windsor is like, “There's a bunch of ravers over there!” I think it comes up in an old episode of Only Fools & Horses as well. I’ve always used that word rave for parties, and sometimes festivals… Raving, for me, is partying in any form.
You can go back in either a drug sense of the psychedelic scene, the word "rave" is used, or you can go back to the late '70s and early '80s, where every soul, funk, and reggae event used the word "rave." You can find a lot of footage from that time, whether it's carnival footage from the late '70s/80s, Soul Mafia footage in Southgate from the same period, or various reggae and blues dances. They’re all using the term "rave."
Wherever music is happening, the whistles, the delivery, the energy… look at that Moss Side footage I posted, for example, the way in which the music is being accepted. Now, some of those scenes, whether psychedelic, Soul Mafia, or reggae/blues - even before ecstasy was used - involved high-octane drugs like speed. Others used less intense substances. But that element of the word rave and what it conveys can really be seen in certain soul event footage and sound system footage, especially when applied to up-tempo music.
Another thing that needs to be explored,really, really explored, for those who are interested: I read a Rolling Stone interview. And I'm well aware of all these interviews over the years because I've lived through this thing. In that interview, Rolling Stone celebrates Shoom, quite rightly, but it alludes to the idea that this club created rave culture, born out of coming back from Ibiza, the Balearic beat meeting up with ecstasy, December '87… and here it is: rave culture.
I actually think the energy and the way people expressed themselves to up-tempo house music - which is what ultimately became the energy of raves in East End warehouses in '88/89, and in Blackburn, Sheffield, Manchester, etc. - that high energy, deep bass, up-tempo rhythms, whistles and horns... that energy carried into early hardcore and jungle. And I would say, actually, that the Balearic energy… Because I went to Boy’s Own, I remember those parties and I had these amazing, enlightening moments when the DJ would end the night playing William Pitt – ‘City Lights’ or Simple Minds – ‘Don’t You Forget About Me’, and you’d be off your nut on everything. “We won’t forget about you, DJ.” It was quite contrived, in a way. Some eclectic records were played, mixed in with Italian house and vocal house records. And I loved it, I absolutely loved the whole Balearic thing. But actually.. in no way did ‘City Lights’ influence LFO or Ital Rockers. In no way did Chris Rea ‘Josephine’ influence Renegade Soundwave ‘The Phantom’, or Longsy D ‘This is Ska’. It was Adonis and the real Black music of Chicago that influenced all of that.
So in the same way, reading this Rolling Stone interview, where it's alluded that once these workers came back from Ibiza, that was it - everyone understood house and raving and blah blah… I don’t think it’s that. In the same way as reading an NME interview with Graeme Park and Mike Pickering, where they say they came down to Astoria in '87 and got booed, and that no one understood house music claiming, "Manchester needs respect, we were two years ahead."
Well, wait a minute. DJ Ron and Rebel MC were playing house music literally on the 1st of January 1987, way before your story of being booed for playing house. They had whistles and horns in abundance while playing house. No one was booing them.
So, all these myths get thrown around, creating more of an egotistical thing of: “We were first” “No, we were firs.” “This was first” “No, that was first” “Balearic beats met ecstasy” “We wouldn’t have had this without that.” I don’t think so. I think all these elements - the raving element, the jackin’ house element, the enlightening Balearic beat element (Waterboys ‘The Whole of the Moon’ at the end of the night .. “Wow, I’ve discovered myself in this moment”)... they’re all part of the puzzle. Could you have the warehouse rave scene, the house scene, without Balearic beats? Absolutely. Could you have that myth without ecstasy and the stories of togetherness? I don’t think so. Ecstasy was more important - not more important, but more potent - than Balearic beats.
I’d put Balearic beat into the pigeonhole of go-go, acid jazz, Detroit techno, Chicago house, northern soul, bleep, hip-hop... There were so many genres in the mid-to-late '80s - acid jazz, jazz funk, rare groove. Balearic was another genre, and at the time ecstasy collided with acid house, both in Manchester, Nottingham, Sheffield, London, Bristol.. everywhere — that collision happened while all those other genres were happening, too. And in the end, not to focus too much on Balearic beats, but there was only ever Balearic Beats Volume One. They didn’t follow it up. I was reading the back of Balearic Beats Volume One and it’s incredibly snobby about acid house, calling acid house the “ugly brother” of Balearic beats. It’s all incredibly snobby. It’s all incredibly elite. It’s hilarious. Ultimately, throughout 1990 — specifically that year, we had many downtempo records that used Soul II Soul rhythms, melodic, Balearic-feeling music: Bass-O-Matic ‘Fascinating Rhythm’, Saint Etienne ‘Only Love Can Break Your Heart’, and ultimately the big one: Massive Attack ‘Unfinished Sympathy’. But by the end of ’91/’92, those people who had been into the Balearic thing were pretty much all playing house. It wasn’t like this magical thing lasted. It’s the house. It’s the boom boom boom. That’s what kept the world ignited.
There’s this whole human thing of people laying claim to being the “first” and being the originators and the pioneers. Of course, there are people that have helped to advance things and put their own stamp on things, because that's just natural human creativity, right? But I actually almost despair at these arguments that go on. Where people are like, “We started it” “No, we started it”. You see it happening in the techno world, especially. I've seen a lot of this, “Kraftwerk were first” or “Detroit people were first” or “Talla 2XLC was the first to use the term techno”. At the end of the day, nobody was really first because and nobody “owns “music and everyone had their part to play. Things continue to evolve every single day, so there’s rarely ever a true origin point. There's this very arrogant thing that humans do, which is, like, “We own this and we are the ones that should be credited for this”. They need to step back and just go, “Okay, we played an important part in helping to develop a particular style, but we're not necessarily the owners or the people that everyone has to now pay homage to all the time”, you know?
Yeah, well, I've thought about this a lot as I've got older. So, like the Stu Allan thing, I can take my personal experience. What becomes more fascinating is when you look at other figures who are basically the same as whoever was in the realm of your personal experience. You go, “Wow, I want to know about this person [who was doing it] at the same time”. Here is the thing, and this is it for me, this is it. You and me, we love being fascinated about things that we weren't part of. That is why I love going down the rabbit holes of the 70s -because I was merely just born -and I like to do my research, and it fascinates me. In the same way that, even though I've collected every Street Sounds Electro album, collected every single 12-inch that was available on those albums - it was a lifetime mission. Once I'd collected every 12-inch on those albums, my mind then wanted to find all of the things that didn't get on those albums. The even rarer ones. I apply a lot of my thought process to that. What ever it is I think I know, I also know there's other stuff out there in equal measure.
On the flip of that, in my own career, when Happy Hardcore came through, that era of the mid-nineties UK scene was on a completely different trajectory. It was a completely different moment in time, compared to the '88 to 1990 thing - which was the catalyst for the jungle, the catalyst for the hardcore, the catalyst of all the breaks… whether that's handbag house, whether that's drum and bass, all of the trance, all the things that came out, ultimately, that '88 to '90 period is the catalyst. I remember the first magazines that started interviewing the hardcore DJs, the hard dance DJs. And there we were, five years down the line. We weren’t in 1990 anymore. It was 1995, 1996. We're not getting paid 50 pounds from the promoter and maybe chasing him around the venue for our train ticket or our petrol home. This might sound like such little money, but now we're going up and down the country getting 200 quid a set, 250 quid a set. And we're getting it three, four, five times a weekend. We were in our early 20s and, all of a sudden, we're getting nice cars. “Wow. This is a career!” We don't know how long this career will last, but this is now a career. And as the music and the things start changing and people interview us: "So who started this genre?" “We did”. "Who was the first?" “We were”.
So our own youthful egos in that moment, fueled by the need to further our careers, and having interviews for the first time… I can also start considering that when I read interviews with people from '86 and '87 in the same way we can go back to hip-hop and absolutely know that Kool Herc did not invent hip-hop on one holy night. You start applying your own experiences. I cringe at some of the things that I was asked in interviews in my twenties. I can apply my own youthful experiences and my own youthful ego onto now a middle-aged perspective - actually, a far more humble perspective. I'm no longer muscling in for my career. I've had all my magic moments as a hardcore DJ, as a rave DJ, as an author, as a promoter. Every day of my life now is a magical moment, and I have nothing to prove like I did in my twenties. I don't have to worry about paying my mortgage. My kids have been through university and college. This music, my career, has rewarded me a million and one times over, beyond what I ever expected, all I ever wanted. Actually, I never even cared whether my name was on flyers.
Yeah, you just wanted to play.
But then, when it started becoming a career, all of a sudden, all of these other aspects came in. "Well, I want to be the first." "No, I’m the first." Some of the arguments between friends that have always happened within genres... I was privy to that in hardcore music, as me and all my friends were getting bigger. I think that.. and it goes back to my three points, broken down into three people - a lot of people have spoken from ego. And a lot of people continue to speak from ego. I find a lot of people speak from ego when things aren’t going as good for them, or whether they feel that they’re not being heard, or they feel that there might be an opportunity to climb over other people, to look like they’re the one. And let’s face it: if we use Kool Herc as an example, who’s not going to let the world think that you single-handedly created hip hop in one night? But 52 years after his mythical creation, we now see that being completely blown apart in America. There are documentaries made about it, there are people coming out saying, "Well, I wasn’t actually on that flyer. That’s been made up. I wasn’t even around in 1973. I weren’t his MC then. I didn’t know him." You can’t blame people for taking the full spotlight. But now, especially with the internet, and so much information being at hand, it's an injustice to the music for all of these different lineages to not be spoken about.
I think that the beauty of what you're doing and what I see a number of other people doing, is that there is this awareness and curiosity, too. The electronic music media also seems to have woken up and seems to be a lot more mature in the way that it's presenting things. As opposed to this nineties mythology that has reverberated for years. It seems like there's a lot more awareness of the complex nature of the way that music has developed over the years, and nowadays, with contemporary narratives, trying at least to present the full scope of how global everything is. Also just generally, trying to tell stories in a way that at least acknowledges that things are complex, and reminding the readers of that. Because, in the eighties and nineties, there was such a linear presentation of music and its timeline, which I was guilty of believing and perpetuating myself. Nowadays it feels like that's changing a bit. There's that book Party Lines that came out and that did a good job of piecing things together. I think journalists are trying to be more aware. We can't let these things exist forever as they have been. I guess we’ve all matured to an extent…
What’s interested me is journalists who’ve come on or messaged me and said, “We’ve been guilty of this,” I think you did as well?
Yeah, I definitely did and I have definitely been guilty of that.
That is a good thing, in the same way that I can say, “Well, I’ve been guilty of being an egotistical shit,”. A fine example - me and MC DJ Sharkey, we were like that. We were tight, but we were at each other all the time. “I was the first with that dubplate,” “We were the first to do this,” “We were the first to do that,” and in the end you kind of fall out. We’re very close but we had our moment as teenagers. When you get to that stage though, the competition isn’t healthy anymore, because everyone wants to be known as the first or the pioneer. And that’s just a snapshot. By then, we were far down the line from the ’88/’89 era. But I think the fact that people are willing to go, “Well okay, we got that bit slightly wrong,” or, “We didn’t fully explore the other bits that were attached to that, now let’s revisit that moment in time,” I think that’s a really, really good thing. And it’s funny, because it would be interesting to know how people in all the different genres feel about what’s been said, or feel about how they may have framed something along the way. Like, “How do you feel when you said you were the first to do this? Do you believe that you are?” “How do you feel when you say your club was the first to do that, or your label?” “From a different perspective, do you still believe that?” And I think a lot of those who would say, “Yeah, we are,” are in their 50s or 60s, and I think there could potentially be a far more psychological, deeper thing going on there, you know? Because ego is a really interesting thing.
Do you know who fascinates me within this? I’ve DJ’d with him, and listen, I flippin’ love the guy… Trevor Fung. His humility. Everything about Trevor Fung fascinates me. And I remember, I think it was last year or the year before, at a festival called House and Classics, and I saw Trevor, had a chat with him, and he just walked off so humbly and quietly. And I just said to my daughter, “That man’s a real fucking legend and pioneer with the whole Balearic, UK acid scene, and he never gets the credit, beyond a handful of others”. There he was, walking around this festival with 5,000 people and no one knew his absolute influence on what was going on there” Some people have been masterful at marketing themselves. Others are just incredibly humble in what they’ve done.
I tell you someone else who's humble, almost to their own detriment, is Colin Dale. He's such an important person to so many people. I’m so glad he’s doing the Abstrakt Dance show again, it’s amazing.
Colin, again, another absolute pioneering legend. So the second time I ever went abroad, to Switzerland when I was about 17 in ’93 or ’94, was with Colin Dale. And he said one of the most profound things to me as a 17-year-old that has literally stuck with me forever. He said to me, “Dan, I never play a record I don’t like. No matter how big it is, I don’t play it.” That has stuck with me my entire career. happy hardcore really comes under fire now, but I have the same passion for happy hardcore as I do for the coolest late ’70s electronic records, and in the same way I do for bleeps and bass. One of the reasons is that during my period in Hardcore, Happy Hardcore only lasted for two years - ’94 to ’96. It went from breakbeat to the stompy stuff, and when it became really stompy and poppy, that was when I thought, “This doesn’t align with my history or where I want to go.” However, it meant so much to middle England - 5,000, 10,000, 15,000 people across two or three arenas at The Sanctuary, huge events with Dreamscape, Resurrection, or Wembley Arena with Fusion. It was a massive thing. And it’s not down to me as a music person or a DJ to be snobby about other people’s experiences. There are some really fucking brilliant Happy Hardcore records - ‘Heart of Gold’, ‘Paradise & Dreams’ - brilliant stuff, and it meant so much to so many people. The one thing that always rang in my head, even with some of the really anthemic hardcore stuff, was Colin Dale. And even if I chose to play a certain hardcore record, it was always because I liked it. I would never have played the ones I didn’t like. And it was Colin Dale, in a moment from a completely different time when we were abroad - me playing more breakbeat, him playing more techno, underground stuff in Switzerland - but his words always stayed in my brain. I think Evil Eddie Richards is another one, and Colin Faver.
I find these people fascinating too, because there's this thing of being an early adopter, or someone who's just open to stuff that's not necessarily what's hot at that particular moment. You know, for example, rare groove seemed to be quite dominant at that particular time, whereas people like Colin Dale, Jazzy M etc, were open to this music that was just different. People that are, for some reason, like, “This sounds different. I'll have a little bit of this”.
When you think about this, and if you go back to even Woodstock in the late sixties, when the uptempo music comes on from The Who, Santana, even when Richie Havens starts playing his guitar faster and goes from being more folky to more ferocious - that's when you start seeing everyone getting up, losing their mind, dancing. Go back to the late seventies and we study disco, we study jazz-funk, we study the uptempo vibe. You realise the energy that was happening in Studio 54, or you see certain videos of Paradise Garage and other house clubs… even in our own sense, when we go back to the videos of the early Brit-funk and jazz-funk stuff - bands like Light of the World and people like that - we can see it. Whether it’s your Colin Dales or Jazzy Ms, or up north your Mike Pickerings, Graeme Park, Stu Allan, Greg Wilson... they all came through a disco-orientated, uptempo thing. They understood disco, jazz-funk, all of that.
When we get past that point, once these DJs have lived through or been on their own road of discovery through disco and jazz-funk, before house, before electro - they're understanding the uptempo. They’re understanding the bass. Especially records like Adonis, and all of them, they're just stripped-down, uptempo records. And especially in the case of people who were listening to electro too, who came through disco, funk, jazz-funk, that uptempo lineage.. it becomes clear. They get it. It starts to make sense. You begin to see the lineage of music. So back to Balearic beats - especially once that road to enlightenment opens up, discovering ‘City Lights’, ‘Jibaro’, ‘Josephine’ - all that really eclectic set of records. People were playing Vangelis at the end of the night, Tulio De Piscopo… all of those mid-80s European dance records. Suddenly, in ’89, especially 1990, people started putting that Soul II Soul beat to their own creations, or creating it through a Happy Mondays or Primal Scream vibe. Taking that more down-tempo, Soul II Soul, almost rare-groove energy... and you can read interviews from that Boy’s Own era, that Balearic crowd, they were soul boys. Rare groove boys. And you can hear that in their beat. You can hear it in the groove. That’s their lineage.
So I think a lot of it depends on people’s influences, too. How they pick up a groove. I’ve seen a lot of people on my pages. Yogi Haughton is someone who fascinates me, absolutely fascinates me. His history, his record collecting, his understanding of music. DJs from up north, like him, they identified with house quickly because of the uptempo-ness of northern soul.
Yeah, super interesting. I love the way you described catching a groove and how someone’s lineage and influences can prime them for catching on to new sounds.
It goes back to that thing that it's almost an insult to put so much importance on ecstasy, or just some people coming back from Ibiza or just some people discovering it in Manchester. It actually is an insult to the lineage to put these one track, single-minded histories into this music. There was stuff happening in Nottingham and Sheffield, and many other places.
Completely. I interviewed Dean Zepherin for RA a few years ago. He had the Shock sound system that did one of the rooms at Rip at Clink Street. He talks about taking his sound up to Derby in like, 87/88 and it was going off . When I heard that, I’m not ashamed to say it was a surprise, because it was the first time I'd heard anyone say, “We went to that place, at that particular point, and people were getting down to house”.
When I did the Mark Archer book, and when I did the Rob Tissera book, I was really conscious that through me, Jumping Jack Frost, Uncle Dugs… all the books we released were just London-based. These people had different perspectives from that London-centric view. We'd released albums and projects from Mark and I would be quizzing him, talking to him the same way I would Stu Allan. I was always fascinated by Nexus 21, which was an act he did early on with Chris Peat. Their music was big for us in 1990 at Labrynth. It was really fascinating. So many Midlands and northern records struck at the heart of Dalston, East London, every Friday and Saturday, the same way they would have got into Rage every Thursday.
And Dungeons…
Dungeons was fucking brilliant. Mark Archer was fascinated that we were playing Nexus 21 down here. That 1990 period was really underground because all the 1989 raves had stopped. The police had shut it down, and people were saying it wasn’t going to last. And then, suddenly, these amazing records started popping up, which led me to ask a lot of questions to Mark about his experiences, just like I would ask Stu Allan about his. So I got Mark to write a piece in my book about what he was doing at the same time we were doing our stuff, which led on to his own book. In much the same way, Rob Tissera from Leeds fascinated me. We uncovered footage of the warehouse rave he was arrested at and stuff like that. I have this sheer excitement and appetite to absolutely want to know about my friends’ experiences, or other people’s experiences. Like, when Greg Wilson, or A Guy Called Gerald, or Dave Swindells or any of them come on my page and share their experiences, I’m like a kid in a toy shop. I said to Dave Swindells the other day, “Your name’s been synonymous from the moment we all walked into record shops as mid-teens and early teens, reading Time Out”. Before the stories of the Hacienda and Balearic beats, we all knew Dave Swindell’s name. Even as we were making our name in the nineties, we'd all buzz when we saw our name in the listings in Time Out magazine. Even through the 2000s, we were still buzzing when we saw our name in Time Out. So when someone like Dave Swindell shares his experience, someone who saw it before, during, and after, that’s a buzz. When Guy Called Gerald shares his experience, who was there, during, and after, and so on and so forth, I’m fascinated by his stories. Everyone’s got a story to tell that’s beyond a simplified, commercialised story.
100% and that's exactly why I love doing my job. Because I get to speak to people like you, and all of these other people that were there way before I was. Not only does that give the opportunity to learn myself, but to also share what I learn with the wider public and hopefully create more of an openness and awareness within the electronic music community around all of this stuff. I've been listening to a lot of garage from the mid to late 90s recently, and listening to old pirate shows… and the sheer diversity and breadth of everything that's being played is so different to what you get if you go to a garage brunch, for example, or anything like that. I just love that. I keep on wanting to dip into it and speak to the people from that time so I can get a broader idea of what was going on, because exactly like you, it excites me to hear those perspectives, purely as a learning experience. I really geek out on it.
MC Creed and I started out together. He used to MC for us at Labrynth, and he really knew his music. There’s actually some brilliant footage from 1991 at Wonderland Arena, just up the road from the Dungeons. It was me, Lloyd Anthony, Kenny Ken, Adrian Age, Vinyl Matt Frankie Valentine… underground names, people who aren’t necessarily etched in the obvious history of rave and jungle music, but who played a huge part in it - well, apart from Kenny Ken. At that time, Creed was coming to Labrynth events. There are great pictures of him at Labrynth warehouse raves back in '89, and Creed was absolutely incredible on the mic. He was brilliant and really knew his music, especially deep New York house tracks like Fallout ‘The Morning After’, which was his thing to MC to. There’s brilliant footage of it.
I’d say he’d be a fascinating person for you to interview. His moniker is the “Godfather of Garage”, but he was raving in '88 and '89, and really knew the depth of his music. I distinctly remember a moment… Most things we forget, but certain moments stick with us. I remember Colin Dale saying, “I never play a record I don’t like” and when Genaside II ‘Narra Mine’ started becoming popular. It never became an anthem the way ‘Sonz of a Loop Da Loop Era’ or ‘Zero B’ did, but for us at Labrynth, it was an underground smash. And it was huge at Rage too. That record really represented a shift, especially in East London, where a lot was happening. It stayed big into 1992. I remember Creed, because there had been a lot of records like G-Double-E's ‘Fire When Ready’, ‘We I E’, ‘Meat Beat Manifesto’, and others that were using dub, breakbeat, and ragga influences, like the Ragga Twins with Shut Up And Dance. There were tunes that would add samples from the past, and those Shut Up And Dance bits with the Ragga Twins. But when we dropped Genaside II, Creed said, "That’s the first one that’s done it properly." That’s the first one that got a vocalist in and he went off and did the full thing, for three minutes solid. Many records were using samples or strong influences from sound systems, but that one came along and just bam, did it.
That tune is so ridiculous, even now. I actually took that clip of Killerman Archer going OFF on that tune and put it on my Stories a few days ago. Every time I listen to it, when he comes in and he just starts going off it, the energy that I get from that is just incredible.
Over the years, a lot of Americans have tried to chat Jamaican, but they haven’t done it well. Sorry, but the KRS One stuff is just terrible when he tries to do it. You can tell it’s an American trying too hard. But Keith Thompson, who sang on Raze’s ‘Break for Love’, one of the most soul-stirring house tracks ever, had a ragga house track with Mantronix in 1989 called ‘Can't Take It’. That was actually an early example of the ragga house sound, but it hasn’t aged well, and you probably don’t want to listen to it now. But people had been trying to do it, and you could hear it in the music. One person who deserves a lot of credit in this conversation is Longsy D. I’ve done a video about it, and he really needs more recognition for his influence on reggae in house, dance and breakbeat music. Longsy D rarely gets mentioned, but his influence was massive. We’re trying to track down Longsy D, I would love to interview him.
So what's next on your agenda? Do you have big plans for the year? It seems like you're getting a good amount of traction, especially on Instagram. Your posts seem to be stimulating a lot of communal sharing and interaction…
Well, I’ve got the music-making side, which I do when I’m in the mood. If I catch a vibe, I’ll make music. Then there’s the social media side, which, I guess they call “content creation” nowadays. I never realised, after using the internet forever, from when the chat rooms were a thing, since the mid-nineties with message boards and chat rooms popping up where people would say, "Such and such did a shit set", that I’d end up doing what I’ve always done on my Facebook. But now it’s framed in a much more strategic and creative way. Or at least, I’m sharing the thoughts that come out of my brain when I’m going through records and stimulating discussion.
I don’t do it to further my career. My bookings are my bookings. It’s not about adding more attention to my radio shows, because I’ve been doing radio for decades. My Monday show, 12 to 2, has been going on for 15 years. It’s just something I enjoy. I like sharing stuff, whether it’s a clip from Clockwork Orange from last weekend with 30 to 50-year-olds in front of me, or footage from 1991 with a load of 18-year-olds in front of me when I was 16. I get a buzz from it. I never would’ve dreamed I could put on a rare record, or sometimes not so rare.and play it in its entirety for 8 or 6 minutes. Then tell some anecdotes over the top of itm and people actually wait for me to lift the needle at the end. I’ll get messages from record labels whose new music I’ve played, thanking me, saying, “Dan, we finally sold the last 40 copies we had.” My biggest buzz, outside of sharing knowledge and sparking people’s imagination, is when records like Mondee Oliver ‘Stay Close’ get a second life. You could pick it up for two quid forever, but the B-side, the Mr. Fingers mix, is a soul-stirring masterpiece. How the hell did this record slip under the radar?
I posted about it, shared my passion for it, and suddenly, there were 90 copies in the world for sale. When I checked again, there were only 30 left. I was so proud of that. Now, underneath my posts, people write, “We just bought Electric Funk. We just bought Tamika Jones. We didn’t know about modern artists like T-Cuts.” To me, that's what it’s all about. And yeah, I see others in the old-school rave scene moaning about the content creators, all grumbling about how it’s all “bollocks.” They’ll say, "That’s not what a real artist does." But you know what? For me, it's the same as doing a pirate radio advert in 1992. That’s how I see it now. If I can promote someone’s new record that I’m feeling, it’s like sharing it on Eruption FM in 1994. If I’m promoting someone's gig or event, it’s the same as when we used to promote labels or events on pirate radio. I don’t get why people from my generation, who were involved in that, get so bitter about it. How can they be angry at the new generation for making names for themselves through social media? They’re doing the same thing we were doing, creating awareness. I’ve messaged people from the drum and bass scene and asked them, "How do you do this? What’s your thought process?" Some of them - big names who’ve made it from social media - have said to me, “Damn, we used to watch what you were doing online years ago" So, yeah, I’m not bitter. I’m curious.
I’m far from snobby or territorial about our history. I believe that people from any generation, any genre, have something to teach us. In many ways, they can teach us more than we can teach them. They can take us into the future and offer us fresh perspectives. I’m not down with the negativity some of my peers show, complaining about how the new generation is doing things "wrong." The truth is, just like us, they’re doing it their way. We may not like every method they use, but that doesn’t mean it’s wrong. Ironically, I put up some great footage of me playing Clockwork Orange, awesome tracks from my sets. These are the mainstay records that people love. Even though they’re the more commercial tracks, I grew up playing them, and seeing thousands of people enjoy them was a thrill. But when I post footage from events where people are simply enjoying the music, they’re lost in the moment, not holding up their phones, some people from my generation will comment that the kids today don’t understand. They’ll say, "Look at them, not a phone in sight. That’s the real 1992." And sometimes, I feel like being a bit petulant and replying, "This was just two weeks ago, you know?"
The truth is, I don’t believe the younger generation doesn’t get it. Just the other day, I was leaving the gym and a young guy came up to me. He was like, "I came to the fundraiser for Deman Rockers last week. I was at the Moondance event, and I’m only 21. My dad handed me down his records." It was this beautiful moment, and it made me think. I don’t believe that kids today are out of touch. They’re absorbing it, just in a different way. People of my generation sometimes act like the younger crowd has no clue because they’re always on their phones, but let’s not forget, we were selling ourselves in the nineties too. We were doing it through white labels, tape packs, flyers and remixes. It wasn’t any easier back then. So, to say we did it better? Well, we didn’t, did we?
I guess, as long as you’re doing it with integrity and respect for yourself, first and foremost, and the music, then putting yourself out there can have its merits for sure. What’s it like for you looking back over your life in music and thinking about the heyday?
When I drive through London, I look at various spots. So if we pass the spot where Dungeons or Wonderland Arena was, or if we drive past where Tascos was, or Rocket.. especially because me and Sonia [Dan’s wife], our relationship started at Bagley’s. When I drive through those areas... Or, not long ago, on a Saturday night, we were out to dinner in East London, where Paradise Club was. The first time I went to Paradise Club, my friend who was running Eskimo Noise, he took me to the fetish night that Alan Torture Garden runs. He didn’t take me as a participant, he’d done the sound system. He was like, "Come on, you’ll love it there." And it was like the most decadent experience I could’ve had as a fucking 16-year-old, watching what was going on.
But, when I drive through London, I always look back on it all, and it all feels so big. It feels ginormous actually, like the entire world was part of what we were doing. But now, as a 50-year-old, when I go back, I think, if you were to take a snapshot of the summer of 1990, before Telepathy had come about, before A.W.O.L. had come about, before Innocence had come about, before a wave of hardcore and jungle labels had come about - if you were to take a snapshot of the summer of 1990, it’s actually nowhere near as big as my youthful memories want it to be.
So when I think of Pirate Club, Busby’s, Astoria, Camden Palace, Rage, Labrynth, Fantasy FM, Centreforce being big in ‘89 bout going off air by 1990, Rave FM, things like Pulse FM, Weekend Rush - Kool FM hadn’t quite started yet. That summer of 1990, when you actually frame it into what was going on in London after the big '88/89 thing, it was a really insular, intimate world. But that moment for me - out of the acid house, out of the Balearic, out of London, out of Manchester - that summer, that is where all of a sudden hardcore and jungle is brewing. There’s the catalyst. Shut Up and Dance, Blapps Posse, Rebel MC, Tenor Fly, Ragga Twins. The meeting of the northern Ital Rockers, Ability II, Juno, then the whole LFO thing… All the bits are catalysts, but there’s something about that 1990 moment. But, it all seemed so much bigger as a teenager.
Yeah, I guess it always seems bigger when you’re young and immersed in something. That bubble is your whole world.
Where Labrynth was, at Four Aces, there's a library there now. They've named a block of flats behind the library after it, they've called it Labrynth Towers. When you go into the library, it’s got pictures of the Labrynth on the walls. I’ve been in there a few times, purely for nostalgia. About a year ago, I went up there, and there was a guy in there, probably 50 or 55, just studying with some books. He said he'd come to Four Aces every Friday and Saturday and now lives down the road. It's so different now, seeing how much places have changed. Dalston Lane is a perfect example of gentrification. Four Aces was a club that was so decadent, one of the first London clubs with a 6am license, at the turn of 1991. The sheer amount of drugs that went through that place, the sheer amount of things that shouldn't have happened... I posted some footage recently where the road is just chaos with the queue down it. And, like, the number of times I’ve shared on my page, people saying, “Our car was broken into when we came out, or I was mugged because I parked too far away but didn't care because the experience was so good”.
Life changes, time changes. But I think people like us, if we’ve got a more open-minded view, we can apply our stories and understand that there are much bigger stories out there. I can talk about the summer of 1990 with passion, and talk about Hype, Shut Up and Dance, Fantasy FM, Rage, and all those things with joy. But I also understand that, in that point, we come from somewhere, and while that moment will always be magical to me, I'm under no illusion that it’s the be-all and end-all.
Make sure you subscribe to Billy “Daniel” Bunter’s YouTube channel here.
I want to learn something about the flip of the RAVE Scene, from dance parties to drug cults. I explain in my podcast here ( hint the Gov got involved).
https://open.substack.com/pub/soberchristiangentlemanpodcast/p/rave-music-history-and-the-intelegence?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=31s3eo