Paul Hardcastle - '19'
I had a friend called Blemma, who was in my class, his brother got all these tapes from radio stations in America with electro on it so we would hear these tapes at school. His brother was a couple of years above us and he was a breakdancer as well, so he tried to put breakdancing things on in the school and I went to them. He's a dancer now, still. He's doing street dance stuff I think. But yeah, I just remember hearing that and then I remember Chaka Khan on the radio. Then a bit later Paul Hardcastle released '19' and I bought that and I was pretty obsessed with it and all the B-sides and all the remixes. I didn't know anything about import records or whether it was called electro or anything about Paul Hardcastle. I just loved the drum machine sound. It really inspired me.

It was around this time that I started making music, maybe about six months after that. I managed to get a drum machine that was 40 quid. I went to a Catholic school and we had priests who had a four-track recorder and we had to listen to stuff about Jesus. I never really listened. I was an atheist even then. So I borrowed this four-track and started doing a bit of recording with the drum machine and my friend Joe playing guitar on it and stuff. We'd actually had a band going for a few years by then. We were called Blue Innocence, playing covers of Bon Jovi and Bryan Adams, which weren't my choice. We had started to write our own songs. Actually we played a lot of rock & roll stuff. But the girls in the convent across the road liked it so it was a good way to meet girls.

We did a few gigs in the youth club at school. But they weren't really playing my songs in the band so I just wanted to record my own stuff. Joe was the singer in the band as well, he always wanted to get involved in everything. I've still got all the recordings from those days. I bought a Korg synthesiser in '86. We used to do covers of OMD songs and I did a remix of 'Souvenir' that was about eight minutes long. I started to buy synth magazines and lust after samplers. I wouldn't get a sampler for another 10 years. But yeah I was really into the sound of that Korg synth. Once I got it then I had to borrow the recorder to do stuff with it, and that wouldn't happen very often. I didn't get a lot recorded in those days.