5. Carl CoxF.A.C.T
When I first went to university in Newcastle, I was totally alone. I had gone from a tiny home counties village to a much bigger city at the other end of the country. I was desperate to meet likeminded people, and one day I spotted someone in my building wearing a Warp Records t-shirt. He was a guitarist, but also played about with sequencers and synths. Through him I discovered a lot of new music. We also formed a live techno duo that gigged around Newcastle in the mid-90s. All my life I had been buying music on cassette and CD, so had never really touched upon the vinyl-based side of dance music culture. Carl Cox’s F.A.C.T changed all that with two CDs of (then) current underground techno and trance. It introduced me to names such as Jeff Mills, Adam Beyer, Thomas Heckmann, DJ Hell and Pete Lazonby, and it made me realise that there was a whole world out there outside of the bigger crossover dance music artists.
