13. AcenTrip II The Moon – Part 1
I left college when my first record came out because I thought I was going to earn loads of money and I was pretty unhappy at doing architecture anyway. I wasn’t very good at it. I wanted to do music, so against the advice of everyone, I left and got into the hardcore rave scene. I think when ‘Trip II The Moon’ came out I’d even been signed by Virgin at that point and all my friends were listening to what became jungle, what was known as hardcore at the time. That record was a great demonstration of what could be done in hardcore to be honest. It just had this huge emotional resonance. We did take quite a lot of drugs in those days and that tune was just the shit when it came on, we would dance – even me! It was just the scratching in it and the bubble sounds and James Bond samples; everything just seemed to fit together so perfectly, it was like all the scenes of a film. It was so imaginative, which was sorely lacking in a lot of what was known as techno in those days. The record shops I was going to would look down their nose at anything by The Prodigy or anything known as hardcore. "You don’t want to listen to that shit." They were still obsessed with Detroit. But I was really influenced by hardcore and so was Aphex. He was DJing a lot of that stuff. We didn’t want to be seen as snobs that just liked techno, which a lot of the music press seemed to write about in those days. There were only a few outlets that didn’t think electronic music was inferior to rock music.
