2. Danny Weed
Now this was another dubplate that I had. I was mainly playing tunes that had just been made, hence them being on dubplates. The producers wanted me to test them out at raves or on pirate radio. So I was getting different mixes to the ones that actually came out. They were edits at first, really. Danny Weed and Nick Cage made this tune together. Good solid bassline, man. I was playing that for months, maybe a year before it came out. It was a real Sidewinder rave special – that was the big rave in the early days. It was up in Milton Keynes in a place called Sanctuary. Radio smashed it up too. It was huge on there. It was a big tune for all of us, not just Danny but everybody.
I should probably talk about Sanctuary a bit as no one else does, really. I first played there in 2001 or so. It was the Saints Ball I think, like a Halloween Ball. That was the first time I saw a really underground, big – like, I’m talking massive – rave for a few thousand people. My mate Sammy B got me on it, he’s Boy Better Know’s manager now. He used to work in Planet Phat, the record shop in Caledonian Road. And he knew [Mark] Lambert, who was one of the people behind Sidewinder. Now when I got there and started playing I realised, ‘They know all the dubs, they must be listening to the radio show’. That was me, Wiley, Maxwell D. There’s a link to it on my Soundcloud so you can hear how good it was. Just the best, man. But it was always good to us. Milton Keynes, Roundabout City we called it, that was the stepping stone. Like radio, pirate as Rinse was then, was the midpoint, but then after that people made careers out of this. I mean Dizzee and Wiley especially, but of course there are so many others.
