12. TraxmanDa Mind Of Traxman

Again I feel like it’s a really bait album, but I don’t give a shit. When all this juke stuff came around I thought it was the maddest music I’d ever heard. I didn’t even understand it for at least three months. I heard a few little sets in raves when people were picking up on it and it was like no, this is probably the best music I’ve heard since early grime. It was incredible. Less so now, maybe the novelty of it’s worn off but a lot of it went quite jungle and I love jungle but I don’t understand why it went jungle…

Hearing people flipping samples like this and in that particular manner; I always thought Traxman was the best and I always thought he was the strangest or the weirdest and apart from ‘Let There Be Rock’ which I skip every time – I think I’ve actually deleted that off my computer now so it’s actually got a perfect flow [laughs].

I did have the Patrice & Friends side project, which is long dead, but the juke thing really did help with some aspects of my production because I thought well, if these guys are allowed to do such weird things then why the fuck aren’t I doing them? It gave me another little kick up the arse after I stopped making a bit of funky and just didn’t make any music which is kind of where Patrice & Friends came from. Without all the juke stuff, bizarrely I don’t know whether I would have gone down the route I have because the Patrice & Friends stuff really did rejuvenate me in a sense because it actually got me back to enjoying making music. I wasn’t enjoying it so I made that and it gave me a new lease of life. It weirdly made me think about melodies a lot more, even though the juke stuff is necessarily quite atonal and weird.

When I went back to the Patrice & Friends stuff I was listening to a lot of boogie stuff which I’ve got a big collection of, just purely out of interest really. I would have named a good boogie album in here somewhere but name a good boogie album? Its all 12"s…