Marc Bowles, known as Mr Thing, takes listeners on an engaging journey through the world of turntablism and record collecting in this episode. As one of the UK's premier DJs, he shares insights into his experiences performing alongside legends, the evolution of his craft, and the importance of setting up turntables for optimal performance. The conversation dives into the nuances of vinyl culture, discussing how the standard of equipment has improved over the years and the unique challenges that come with using vinyl in today's digital age. Mr Thing also reflects on the impact of social media on DJ interactions and the ever-changing landscape of music discovery. With anecdotes of incredible record finds and the thrill of digging through boxes, this episode is a treasure trove for music enthusiasts and aspiring DJs alike.

The conversation with Marc Bowles, also known as Mr. Thing, delves into the multifaceted world of DJing and record collecting. Mr. Thing shares his journey, starting from his early days of DJing to becoming one of the UK’s leading turntablists. He discusses the unique experiences of performing in various settings and the camaraderie that develops among DJs, especially when sharing the stage with talented artists. A memorable moment he recounts is the thrill of performing before a legendary DJ, which highlights the respect and admiration that permeates the DJ community. This narrative sets the stage for a deeper exploration of what it means to be a DJ in today’s music landscape, where the balance between technical skill and artistic expression is more crucial than ever.

As the discussion progresses, Mr. Thing emphasizes the importance of the technical aspects of DJing, particularly the setup of turntables. He reveals how a single lesson on proper alignment transformed his approach to DJing, showcasing the dedication and meticulousness required to excel in this art form. The conversation naturally shifts to the evolution of DJ equipment over the years. Mr. Thing notes a marked improvement in the quality of turntables found in venues, contrasting it with the often sub-par equipment of the past. This evolution reflects a growing respect for vinyl and the art of DJing, suggesting that venues are increasingly recognizing the importance of providing quality equipment for artists.

The thrill of digging for records emerges as a central theme of the episode, with Mr. Thing sharing captivating stories from his record-hunting adventures. His passion for finding rare vinyl shines through as he recounts the excitement of discovering gems at car boot sales and local shops. The conversation also touches on the impact of the digital age on record collecting, with Mr. Thing reflecting on how the internet has changed the game by inflating prices and altering accessibility. Despite these challenges, he remains undeterred, continuously seeking out new music and sharing it with audiences. Mr. Thing’s insights provide a unique perspective on the intersection of music, technology, and community, making this episode a rich exploration of what it means to be a DJ and a record collector in the modern era.

Mentioned in this episode:

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So, yeah, welcome to once a DJ Mister thing.

Great to get you on.

Really excited about this.

It's going to be the only one, probably, where I've djed.

I keep using the term djed with the guest.

I should say supported the guest.

It's a better way of putting it because we gigged.

I'm doing it now.

I'm saying, like, we gigged together.

No, I played before you in.

I think it was like sort of march, April time.

Yeah, it was, yeah.

And it was great.

I mean, I've done it before.

I remember watching Woody in NottinGHam 18 years ago and just being there, just a chin stroker at the front looking at everything that he did, but this time I was the chin stroker at the side, looking at everything that he did.

So we'll probably have two or three different parts to this interview.

The first thing, maybe because it might bring us on to different things, is kind of a breakdown of that gig.

Really?

Yeah.

Because the first thing that I saw that really kind of struck me was you get in there and you kind of like, the way that you set up the turntables is like sas, you know, the exact height that you want, all that sort of thing.

And is it taking a long time to get like that or if you've been like that for a while and.

And do you need to do that more because you're doing sevens?

It has taken.

It did take me a long time to figure it out, to figure out the science.

Someone actually showed me how to do it.

I remember doing.

I'll tell you what, I'll tell you exactly when it was, actually.

So just after.

Just after, not long after I won the DMC's, I was playing in east London.

And after the gig, I parked my car up and I put my stuff in the car and I was staying at my girlfriend at the times house and she literally lived around the corner.

And I went back to my car and my car had been completely smashed up and they'd stolen three boxes of records, my mixer, my needles and everything out of my car.

The thing is, everything was hidden away.

It wasn't like on the back seat, it wasn't like, you know, it wasn't on show.

Nothing was on show.

They must have seen me do it.

So because they smashed every window on a car, I literally had to drive back to Kent with no windows on my car.

And so anyway, the long and the shorter, this is the reason I bring that up is because at home I had got given some, sure, 44 sevens because of all my work I've been doing where I'd done dmcs, and people were just giving me stuff to try out.

So I had a couple of sets of 44 sevens at home that I hadn't ever used.

And so I put them on and I set them up like I'd done with my old stantons that I was using before.

And they were fine, but they were moving around a lot, and they weren't the most stable needles to be doing, like, routines and stuff with.

And then I did.

I did an in store at deal real, the newer deal real, not the original deal, so hope, but that one that was on Carnaby street.

And this guy came up to me and was like, hey, man, you know, you should probably set those up like this, because then they won't do what they're doing.

I'm like, oh, what you mean?

And he showed me.

He showed me how to do it, and I don't know who this guy was.

Now.

Was that like angling the carts and stuff then?

Yeah, angling the carts, but also making sure that it's level so that it's stable.

So, yeah, whoever that guy was, thank you.

You probably.

You might see this and be like, oh, yeah, that was me.

That's why.

And so ever since, I've been.

Because of that, I've got them set up like that at home.

I never changed them.

I've never changed the setup.

And so anytime I go anywhere, the first thing I do is just sort that out.

Like, without question.

It's the first thing I do when I'm getting ready to go on.

I do that before anything else.

If you get them in the seized, is that a problem?

Because sometimes the height adjustment can seize, can't it?

Oh, yeah.

If they get.

If the arm seizes up, you just have to deal with it, unfortunately.

And sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't, but that is, unfortunately, the thing with old tech like that.

It just.

It's had.

It's already had a lot of abuse.

I mean, I.

My decks that I've got here, I've had those for 25 years.

Yeah.

Do you find now, because vinyl's more of a speciality than, say, back when you were doing dmcs and stuff everywhere, had a set of techniques that was invariably.

A lot of them were probably quite battered.

Maybe you played at places where they weren't.

Is the standard of the decks that you'll turn up to better now?

I think it's got a lot better because a lot of places don't have them now and they're used to everybody wanting seeded the latest cdjs or whatever.

I tend to find that when I get to places now they've either got really well serviced turntables or they've hired in brand new ones.

So I did a gig on Saturday night and they hired index for that and they were, they were absolutely perfect.

Nice.

And, and also the fact that people are having to hire them in and they're looking after them now.

I mean, they're ridiculously expensive to buy now anyway, but it stops people using them to put their cds on or their controllers or whatever because that was the thing that was breaking the arms on them all the time.

I'd quite often turn up to gigs and the decks would be like covered in cd wallets or computers on there and stuff like that as well.

And I'm just like, you know, there's no room to set up or no room to kind of do anything and then they put a record on and they go.

When they put a tune on and they leave.

So, yeah, there's, there's definitely.

I'm glad that.

I'm glad that vinyl is a little bit more respected again now and that they're.

The decks are getting looked after properly and things like that.

It's all.

It all helps, you know, it helps everybody.

Yeah, I mean, it's like the amount of times that someone's been walking out of a bar on the way out with the mates and they'll just run over and just like do whatever on the turntable and stuff.

I've had that happen so many times.

Well, that gig that we were at, there was someone who was, let's say, a little bit lively and she went up to do that and you turned around to me and you were like, that's a 300 quid record.

And I was like, jesus, you don't want that getting ruined.

No, I mean, I have had to be.

I don't like to be rude to people, but I have had to be quite stern with people a couple of times when they think they're being funny.

But, you know, you've got like a really expensive record on the deck either playing or getting ready to get played.

You know, you just can't.

You just can't do it.

Don't do it, don't do that.

I think the thing that started me off writing this, like nerdy list of things was noticing that you used two different shapes of seven inch adapter.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

What's that all about?

Okay, so there is a, there is a method to that.

So when I'm playing dinked forty five s, ones with a big hole, are you.

I tend to use proper sturdy.

I use some ones that come from Poland by a company called sure shot shout out.

Sure shot shout out to sure shots.

So basically I use those for when I'm playing anything with a big hole.

They're just the right size and the right weight for everything to be stable.

But when you've got UK records or UK or european seven s, sometimes the pressings are a little bit shabby.

Despite them not being the dreaded styrene, it doesn't mean that they're perfect.

They can still be a bit dished and a bit light.

So I use a regular technics adapter kind of as a little weight and it just kind of holds it down a little.

It holds it down enough and it doesn't make it heavy and it doesn't make it impossible to dj.

I couldn't dj with one of these like weights that people clamp on the records to stop the feedback.

That to me is a nightmare.

That that's, that doesn't work with my style of djing at all.

But having the technics adapter on the thing is just the right amount of weight for it to kind of level it out enough without it being too much.

It's a really, it's a.

I can't remember where I picked that up from or even where I got the idea for that from someone.

I'm sure somebody showed me that and I was just like, that's a great idea.

That's a good bit of gold dust.

I didn't come up with it.

I can't take the credit for it.

But it's a really, it's a really helpful thing.

So it does mean that I like around two sets of 45 adapters.

But to be honest, I did.

I used to do that anyway because if you've got say, dancehall reggae, forty five s, the holes on those things are notoriously awful.

They're either going to be huge or too small.

Right.

So I tend to keep a few in the bag so that I can do it, do it smoothly because they're all different.

They're all different.

Yeah.

It's nice for me to hear from someone.

What you're saying without saying it is basically that sevens can be a bit of a pain in the arse.

They're great.

You can take so many more with you when you're traveling.

I tend to travel with them just as hand luggage, because the bag fits in the thing.

They never question it because it's not a huge suitcase or anything like that.

But it does just.

There.

There is just a lot more to go wrong with them, I guess.

Yeah.

You've got to be.

You got to be careful.

You've got to be careful there.

I mean, if you.

And especially if you've got stuff that only.

Only came out on styrene pressings, then you're in serious trouble because that's like.

The Cuban, like, wears them out, doesn't it?

Yeah.

I mean, that.

That's a real.

That's a real issue.

A lot of the.

There's a lot of really good rare soul and funk records that.

Only on styrene pressings.

And they're just.

You can't.

You can't cut them up.

There's no way.

They just.

They just be got.

They'll be gone in a cube.

As soon as you've queued them up, they're done.

Yeah.

There's an antique shop near us and I got loads of copies of O honey by delegation.

Yeah.

And the black girl lost Naz sample starlight.

Starlight.

Is it Anita Ward.

Oh, right.

I think I know the one you mean.

I've not listened to that tune in a long time, but, yeah, it's nice.

Nice sort of two step thing.

And I've got loads of copies of that.

But both of them, they were like 50 p each, I thought.

Brilliant.

So I don't know, about 15 of each.

And then, like, no one wants them because they're styrene.

Yeah.

There is vinyl pressings of delegation, thankfully.

Yeah.

But I haven't seen one for a long time now.

But that used to be a really cheap record.

Like, no one cared about it.

It was one of them things that got sampled in, a couple of things.

It was an ultimate breaks and beats, and then it was just a cheap record and now it's not around, really not like it used to be.

So is there a particular record that you've seen jump up in price more phenomenally than anything else?

Yeah, let me think about that.

There's a good example of that too.

I'll tell you what.

Can we come back to that?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I need to access the Rolodex on that one.

Sorry.

That's a pretty.

That's a pretty niche one.

Without a warning.

That's a big question.

I need to access the files on that one.

But, yeah, we'll come back to that.

So I don't know if this is all right to ask or not, but, like, what would you say when you're going out gigging?

Because you obviously had that record that was a 300 quidder.

Would you kind of have a rough idea of how much money's worth of final you're taking out for like a sevens gig in a shoulder bag?

It's definitely.

I couldn't put a figure on it, but it's definitely worth more than my car.

Yeah.

My car is an old beat up car that's done 220,000 miles.

Any amount of records I take out the house is worth more than my car.

Yeah.

Well answered.

Because I thought with that, because sometimes I think with it, it's like, I don't want anything to happen to these when you're just like lugging them about everywhere and stuff.

Yeah, you got to be careful.

Can't just fling them around.

You've got to have a bit of a method to, if you're going to do quick changes and stuff, kind of keep them together and keep them together when you finish the mix.

And then I kind of keeps them all in one area and then you can just put them back in the sleeves.

Yeah, I'm pretty good at putting stuff back in while I'm playing.

If I have to refile it all at the end of the set, it's a disaster.

I'll think I've lost something.

So I always try and put them back in while I'm playing.

Yeah.

What I noticed as well at the gig was that you're like a very ambidextrous turntable list.

Did that come naturally or did you have to really work on one side to even it up?

I would.

I mean, I'm right handed naturally, but my right hand scratching is very limited.

And I'll be the first person to admit that I can do.

I can.

I can do alright stuff, but I can't do a lot of fancy cuts and stuff on my right with my right hand.

But once I stopped crossing my arms to do cuts on the left, I got a lot better at it.

And I didn't learn that until quite a few years into djing, really, to cut with both hands.

So.

Yeah, but one of the things I do, because when I do practice, when I do get in the room and practice, I do.

One of the things that I still do that I started doing back in the kind of early nineties when I was practicing a lot more, is that I just would get the same two or three records and I would cut them up, but I would try and do the same thing with each hand.

And I would do everything at quite a slow tempo, too.

So it would always be, God made me funky, you know, so basically, ultimate breaks and beats eleven, that was my go to warm up record.

So impeached president.

God made me funky loads of stuff in.

God made me funky to practice different stuff on, so I would do it that way.

And I, to get both hands, at least at a level thing, but I could do much more intricate stuff with my left hand, right hand on a fader.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Was there ever times with that?

Because I sometimes think I used to be a bit better at scratching than I am now.

And I think I wouldn't even know how to get better at it now if I tried.

And it's like, would I even have the impetus to do that?

Like, was it, did you have to really force yourself to learn?

No, I wanted to do it basically, once I'd seen it, I'd heard it on records, but once I'd actually seen it, I really wanted to learn it.

So I just spent all my time learning.

Luckily, I had a friend at school who had Dex.

I didn't have Dexd.

Um, I had two.

In fact, I had two friends at school who had decks.

One of them, I would just go around there because he lived around the corner from me, and we would just go there and mess about.

And we didn't really have any idea what we were doing or how to put stuff together, but we were just having fun and trying to figure out how we were hearing what, what was going on on the records.

But my friend, my other friend, he was a bit more musically trained, and so he taught me how to count in bars and things like that.

Yeah, that was the most helpful thing I've ever had.

Because once you've, once you've got that, you understand about where things need to be and, and all of that.

So I really, I really kind of embraced that because once he showed me, and once I figured it out, I could hear it.

I could hear it easily.

So it was a big, it was a big key thing to learn that they don't really teach you.

I don't think I've ever seen, really, anyone talk about that.

But it's very important.

I mean, something that just blows my mind about music anyway is that it's so emotional but so mathematic as well.

Yeah.

When you get into things like the harmonic series and stuff like that as well, just how notes work and things, it's like all of that stuff, it's just maths.

There's so much to learn.

So if anyone, like, if anyone can see what you're doing and appreciate that and they're really musically trained and I'm not at all, then it's amazing that they can hear that.

I at least understand some of it.

Yeah.

I mean, with scratching.

I remember I was on a message board with Chili when he was learning all about polyrhythms and things like that, and there was people really developing, like, the turntable manuscript and all that sort of stuff.

And that's.

That's when it just.

You get into almost, like, savant level mathematics and things like that there.

Yeah.

When I.

When I look at music scores and stuff, I'm like, I'm lost.

I mean, I did learn a little bit at school, but trying to follow it and trying to read it like that, I didn't understand it.

I understood things much better by hearing it.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So, again, like, I hope this is something you've not done too much anywhere else on podcasts, but what was your journey or what was your entry point into digging.

Into digging.

That's an easy answer, to be honest with you.

That's a very easy answer.

I used to listen to as much rap radio as I could, and my knowledge of samples was very small.

I knew.

I knew bits and pieces.

My friend had played me some ultimate breaks and beats, but I.

Because none of the artists were listed on ultimate breaks and beats, you kind of got clues, but you didn't know.

So when it got to about.

Anyway, the record that turned it around for me and got me into it is jazzy Jeff a touch of jazz.

And there's a reason for that.

The reason is, is that I used to listen to my.

Mike Allen had a show.

Mike Allen had his famous capital rap show, but then later on, he went to LBC.

He did a much more toned down show on LBC, I think, from memory.

Anyway, one day, this guy is on there, he had sometimes had a guest in to talk about.

To talk about what other stuff that was going on, and he was a guy called Mark Webster.

And Mark Webster basically came into the show one day and was, like, talking about a touch of jazz.

And he goes, right, here's all the records that they sampled for Touch of Jazzenhe.

And I'm like, what?

And they listen and, you know, it's like, you know, t plays it cool.

West Chester lady, Harlem River Drive.

Change makes you want to hustle.

And I'm like, what?

This is just blowing me up, blowing me away.

So then I needed to know more about this.

And also, the other thing that happened around the same time was I was reggae.

I started going to London to buy records with my uncle.

And so I bought.

I started buying this magazine called Seoul Underground.

Now, a couple of times in Seoul underground, they had people come in and write articles about breaks and who'd sampled what.

Because none of this information was out there.

And again.

But.

But the difference with the Seoul underground thing was, was that they put pictures of the covers up.

So when I used to go to the import stores to buy.

To buy hip hop records, they nine, back in the back in the late eighties, they used to have the cutout section, right?

And I didn't understand what the cutout section was at all.

But I just remember seeing all these records in there.

And I was just thinking, why are they in this shop?

This doesn't make any sense.

But now it all makes sense to me.

Because once I saw some of the covers in Seoul underground, I was like, they're the break records.

And so I would go in, into, you know, you would go into, say, any of the shops in Soho.

And there would be.

There'd be copies of Dennis coffee albums in there and stuff like that, but sealed with the cut corner or the Holt punch.

So.

And then you would go to cheapo cheapos.

Which was a huge, like, three floor shop in the middle of Soho.

Which I think now is sadly like a frozen yogurt shop, of course.

But that place was legendary.

Pogo always tells me about going in there.

And they're just being like, multiple.

Multiple seal, James Brown stuff in there back in the day.

Yeah.

So they would just go in there and get all of that stuff.

That's how come all of those guys had all that stuff.

So it's amazing.

It's amazing to have that kind of tie it all together.

Then after that, I was off to car boot sales.

Once I'd learned to drive, I was off to car boot sales.

I was going to jumble sales.

Any.

Anywhere I could go.

Basically.

Anywhere where there was records, anyone's house I went to.

The record collection wasn't safe.

I would basically go route through route three.

People's parents records and can I borrow that?

And.

Yeah, all of.

All of that kind of stuff.

I was notorious for it.

So when you were picking that stuff up at that time, then were you using it for routines or were you like, no, no, no, I'm not going to, like.

Were you aware of Q burn and stuff?

And you were like, I'm going to keep.

Keep that stuff for not juggling I.

Absolutely had no concept of the value of anything.

If I was getting stuff for a pound, 50 p, couple of pound, I didn't care.

I would dj with it.

And so it was kind of a nice way.

Nicer way to be, because now I'm a bit precious about things.

If I've paid a bit of money for something, I don't really want to mess it up.

Yeah.

And I suppose you didn't have.

I mean, obviously, I don't know the level anywhere near the level of sort of stuff that you do.

But I suppose some places, you know, I'll go, if I'm at a boot sale or something, I see something like, what's that all about?

Or I pick something up and I realize it's actually decent, I will go on discogs or something and see what it's worth.

And that'll affect.

I got the.

That Sheffield drum record the other week.

Nice.

Yeah, 50 p, I think it was.

Or a pound from a boot sale.

That's a bargain.

Yeah.

It's like getting something back in the early two thousands.

So then, like, I've not really.

Not really touched it because it's in mint condition.

It's like, I don't want to start, like, dirting it up and stuff.

I don't even want it out the sleeve.

I would do a rip of it and sample off of it.

Yeah.

I actually found a cd of that once and I regret not buying it.

That would have been an amazing thing to have, but I've had that a couple.

I've probably had that twice.

I don't think I paid a lot for either copy, but the second one was an absolute error on the guy's party, put in his pound box.

Do you ever find with things like that, when you find something, you know what it's worth?

Do you have to, like, I remember once when I went for a job that I probably wasn't quite qualified for and they asked me.

They asked me, like, how much money are you looking for?

And I just, like, aimed high.

But when they took me seriously, I had to, like, bite the inside of my mouth to stop myself looking excited.

Like, do you ever have to kind of, like, play it a bit cool when you're like, they've put an 80 quid record there.

Sometimes I can't.

I can't control it.

If I'm genuinely excited to find something that I'm looking for.

I'm quite audible about my shock at finding it.

I'm quite often like, oh, shit, like, you know, or, you know, something similar, you know, I'm not, I can't, but other times I can be quite, quite poker about it.

Do you find they ever like realize and try and sneakily like charge you more or anything?

I got horror stories about that kind of stuff too.

So I went to, I went to a shop on the coast.

I'm not going to say wherever I, but I went to a shop on the coast.

I've been in a few times before.

The guy was always a bit rude with me and I just kind of accepted it because I didn't really care.

I just wanted to get records.

And so if he was an idiot, he's an idiot.

Anyway, I go in there one day, he's got basically a whole hospital radio's worth of jukebox 45s laid out on tables in boxes.

None of it priced, all of it basically completely coated in dust and dirt and muck.

And I'm looking for, and then I look through one of them and I start finding a couple of good r and b 45s that jukebox 45 only.

And I'm like, okay, this could be, this could be good.

So before I went any further, I said to the guy, how much are these?

Forty five s.

And he's like two to three quid each.

I'm like, all right, cool, great.

So, um, I've been around the shop already and pulled a little stack out and I found some alright stuff.

Nothing exp, nothing crazy, but just some decent stuff.

I left it on the counter.

I spent hour and a half, 2 hours going through all these 45s.

There was a lot.

There's probably 30 boxes.

So in the meantime, in these boxes, I basically found all of the rare UK wrap jukebox 45.

So there was loonies was in there.

I got five on it.

California love was in there.

There was all the fugees 45s.

Like, all of those are really good snoop ones.

Anything, any of those big, big titles that you can think of that are worth serious money.

They were all in these boxes, but they were all in there with take that s club seven.

Yeah, there was no order to it.

It wasn't like there was a section of just rap forty five s and I could just lift them out.

So I basically did all this work.

In the meantime, this guy has looked at my pile, seen what I'm buying, and he's decided that he wants to look them all up.

So I take him to the counter and I'm like, there you go, I'll take those, please.

And he's like, I need to look these up.

I'm like, but you said they were, you know, two or three quid each.

He was like, nah.

And he starts looking them up and he's like, right, 50 quid, 100 quid, 200 quid.

I'm like, no, it's not going to happen, it's not happening.

That's not happening.

So I left him.

I had to lean.

He was a tosser.

But I have.

I had some good revenge from there because the last time I went back there, I still went there, even though he was.

He did that to me.

I bet.

I went back there, he had a load of.

He had a load of stuff down in the basement that was open to the public and priced up and the prices were, like, absurd, but the wrong way.

So, yeah, I got.

I got a nice bit of.

Nice bit of record karma that way.

I got some good bits.

I got some good bits that way off of him.

But that annoyed me with the sevens.

It was frustrating after I did all the work and then he just.

He just tucked them away blatantly.

Would have listed them on eBay or something later on.

Yeah, that's a dirty move.

I think it was when I was talking to Danny Dan, he was saying that if people know in certain shops that it's him that's buying, they'll raise the price.

Yeah.

Yeah, they do.

I guess if he kind of knows.

Your pedigree, he wouldn't know me at all, though.

He's never given.

This guy really wasn't giving me.

I'm very, very low key about everything and so I don't make a big deal about any of it.

I just.

I just go off and I buy records and if people say hello to me, you know, or they've seen me do something or whatever, then that's cool.

But I.

It wasn't like this guy had an idea that I, you know, DJ'd or whatever and.

Right.

He just wasn't.

He just was an idiot.

He just looked at my pile and thought he would get one over because I got some good stuff, you know, it was like, it was decent stuff and he'd already messed up because he had a cheap box in the street and there was great records in there and I pulled all of them.

Yeah.

So, yeah, it was a frustrating thing, but that, that kind of thing does happen, unfortunately, when you get people, because.

Sometimes I go to boot sales and I'll see that there's things that I think are overpriced and.

And it's just someone who's got about seven records, they're mediocre at best, but they're all, they'll all be.

They're not a quid, put it that way.

And sometimes I think I should maybe say to them, look, if you want to sell these, you've got.

No one's going to buy them for this, you're just going to take them home.

But then people are just so adamant.

I think, yeah, there's definitely a culture of people thinking that every record is worth eight grand.

Yeah.

I've seen some horrors at car boots with, like, beat up split sleeve, like Madonna and Aber albums and stuff, and people have got 20 quid on them and then they'll have, you know, some libraries or something now just stick them out for a quiddeen.

Yeah.

And that kind of thing can happen because they're so convinced that the general pop and rock that sold so much money, sold so many copies.

Sorry, is worth the money and it's not.

And that weird record that you chucked on the floor is worth all the money.

So, yeah, I just let them, I let them get on with it.

I can't, I can't say to people, you know, if someone comes in my shop and says, you know, that's a bit too much money, I'll be like, all right, cool.

We can have a conversation and we can, we can work it out.

But, yeah, generally I try and price everything quite fairly, so, um.

Yeah, yeah, I think you've just got to price things to sell, haven't you?

Else you're just going to be.

They've got it, they've got to go so that I can get more.

Yes, that's my way of, that's my way of having stuff in the shop is like, I want it to go so that I can get the next lot in, so that you come back next time and there's different records for people to look at.

Yeah.

Have you always bought and sold before getting the shop then?

I dabbled in record fares kind of in the late nineties with my friend, my friend Johnny Roast, like, huge, like, really good record dealer and an excellent dj as well.

He, he.

I used to be his box boy, basically.

I would go to help him at record fairs and I would carry his boxes in.

So basically I figured out and learned, and I learned a lot more about the music then as well because I was, I was finding about a whole different world of stuff from what I was seeing around my, my area.

Because where I live, it's, it's very, um, you know, it's very white and middle class there's no.

There's no to fight, you know, like, I found a Farrah Saunders record last week and to in Tunbridge Wells.

Now, I don't know if you've ever been to Tunbridge Wells, but there's no reason on earth that there should be a Ferra Saunders record in Tunbridge.

So it's quite incredible that sometimes things happen like that.

So, basically, I started out doing record fairs with him.

Then I got brave and started taking a box of my own, and then I started doing the odd one here and there on my own.

Then I was selling a little bit on discogs, and I kind of really hated it.

And just before lockdown, I was working at BBE.

They were based in Hastings, where I was living at the time, and I was selling records out of my house, but I'd run out of room, and so I needed a space.

My friend needed a space, too, to do the same thing.

So we found that basement that we're in that you came to, and we just had as our office.

But people got word that we had records, so they would knock on the door and be like, oh, you got records?

Can we come in?

Right, okay.

So word got round town.

We had to.

And then I said to my friend, look, do you think maybe we should open a few days a week?

I don't mind doing it.

I don't.

You know, I'm not.

I'm not working.

We were like, yeah.

So we opened up, and that was basically the start of the shop.

Something I always wanted to do, but it kind of was a bit of a happy accident, almost.

You know, it was just supposed to be an office.

Is it.

How's it been in terms of, like, workload and stuff?

Is it.

Has it been more than you imagined, or.

I actually enjoy it because it means I'm not at home all the time, which is one of the reasons why I'm quite difficult to get hold of.

Yeah, a lot of that.

I would probably say 60% of the day, I am on the road and I'm driving somewhere, and I'm.

Because I tend to go out three days a week looking for records for the shop or going to look at collections and stuff like that.

So let's just then say, what does a week in the life of mister thing look like, typically, so people can just understand the time that's involved in your passion, which is also your career.

It's definitely not as glamorous as it might look.

I do try on my instagram, actually, to post up the horrors of what I'm seeing when I'm out and about because I think that's important.

Because all the time you've got these like really aesthetically pleasing shops that are nicely curated and everything.

That's great.

But the real digging is going to some awful hole of a place and crawling over boxes of old VHS tapes and stuff to get to what might be something in the back of a box somewhere else is more.

Is more exciting to me than any of that.

So Monday to Monday, I generally try and give myself the day off, but I will normally go and at least go to a couple of places on a Monday just to do something.

Most of the rest of the record shops aren't open near me then anyway.

But Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, as a rule, I'll be out on the road looking for records.

I'll pick towns.

I'll work out a route so that I can go to maybe three or four shops or three or four towns where there's a lot of charity shops or there's places I can go and look for stuff.

Then I'll come home and I'll work them, work through them and work out what I'm going to keep, what's going to go in the shop, what needs cleaning, what doesn't need cleaning, because that's also super important.

That also takes up a lot of my time.

Cleaning records is a time consuming thing for someone to come in and put their paws all over him.

What's your technique?

I tend to use warm, just warm soapy water gets the worst offenders of the dirt off.

You can kind of see what's going on with the record then a lot more.

And also we've got a proper, we've got a machine at the shop.

We've got like a proper cleaning machine at the shop.

So if anything really needs.

If anything's like super expensive or really needs some attention and we'll run it through the machine as well.

So it's just a double way of making sure that things are okay.

Have you ever tried the glue technique?

No.

I'm scared to do it.

It is scary, but it's pretty good.

I've heard it's very good.

Heard it's very, very good, but I've not done it myself.

Test it on something cheap.

Something cheap?

Yeah, I'll find something cheap and do it and try it out.

It looks like, I mean, it looks very satisfying as well when it peels off and like, it looked.

That, that looks quite appealing, to be honest.

Yeah, the main, like, I'd like to do it more, but the main challenge is just because your records are going to be drying for probably, I'd say about three days.

Yeah, that's.

I need to have a quick turnaround, unfortunately, because I quite.

I probably do.

I probably clean about 100 or so.

Yeah.

Here.

So is it.

Is it Thursday, Friday, Saturday in the shop?

So I tend to do.

I tend to work Thursdays and Saturdays at the shop.

Friday is a quiet day, so Andre tends to run the shop on a Friday because.

Because it's a two hour round drive for me to get there.

And some Fridays are.

Are unbearably quiet.

Like I might take.

You know, I'm not.

I'm not ashamed to put this out there, but, you know, some Fridays you can take maybe ten or 15 quid.

Yeah.

And then on a Thursday you might take quite well, and then Saturday might be.

Might be really good.

But Friday is not worth what.

Not more of me going.

So what I tend to do on a Friday, if I'm not djing or I don't have a gig to get ready for, I'll go to some other spots that are open the same days as me and then I can go and check them.

And if I travel anywhere, I look for records while I'm out, while I'm away.

So if I go up to the midlands or I go up north or anywhere that I go, I'll go and look for records.

I'll find the shops on the way and do that too.

Have you got any particular favorite places to go digging favourite areas?

I'm not going to ask you for specific shops or anything.

No, I always find good records in Manchester.

I would always say that there was a nice little trilogy trio of shops in Manchester.

In Piccadilly, you had vinyl exchange, big shout to Simon.

And then you had.

There was another shop I can never remember the name of, which is right around the corner.

I always used to find good stuff in there, but then beat and rhythm used to be on that little strip as well.

And beat and rhythm basically only sells 45s in port.

45 sdHe.

Right.

And they've moved to just outside of Manchester now.

And I've not been to their new shop, but anytime I went to beat and rhythm, that would be like four or 5 hours, and I would just sit there and just play through stuff that I didn't know and just make some.

Maybe make discoveries for me, maybe stuff that other people might have known, but just make discoveries for me, you know, like.

And that's how I was finding a lot of breaks and a lot of samples and stuff just sitting in places like that and going through everything, so.

And then, of course, you've got the legendary king bee.

I was there today.

Was you really?

I love it.

I got a couple of sevens there, but that was about it today.

But their pricing is really good, I think.

I think their pricing is very fair.

Even when they've got stuff that is legit rare, they still price it.

Yeah.

A really good price.

I think they, you know, that's the kind of shop where they just want to keep it moving.

Yeah.

Because they must have.

They must have people in there every day of the week going back and what's new?

What's new?

So they've got to keep it turn.

Turned over.

Yeah, that's it.

So just then going a little bit back to where we were at the start talking about the gig.

Something else I thought about then is you've obviously got a ridiculous record collection.

If anyone doesn't really understand the level of it, they can just go on Mixcloud and check all, you know, your numerous mixes on there.

You know, you've got ridiculous breaks and stuff.

And it's like, something I thought about is, I guess for a lot of gigs, you'll be taking out, say, a certain section of your collection.

Do you ever just think, I wish I could just, like, do a lot.

Do more gigs where I could just take out, like, a load of library or site rock or any of this sort of stuff?

Cause you must have a load of stuff that, like, people just aren't up on.

I don't know about stuff that people aren't up on.

There's definitely a lot of collectors who know more than me and a lot of dj's who know a lot more than me.

And I'm always the number one thing I always say is, it's okay to say, do you know what?

I don't know that.

Because so many people just go, oh, yeah, yeah, I know that.

I know that.

And they don't know what you're talking about.

But truthfully, if I don't know it, I'll say to someone, I don't know it.

I won't.

I won't go, oh, yeah, yeah, of course.

Like, it's just lies.

It's just, I'm not gonna do that.

I would rather say to someone, I don't know it, because then I'll learn something.

I'm just constantly learning.

I love to learn.

Like, that's.

That's my thing.

I love to learn, but you.

But, yeah, but you still you must have some crazy stuff that you may be.

Do people expect, like, a certain thing of you, which is like, I want to be a different version of me now and again.

Some days I do feel that way, yes.

So I get a lot of people that expect me to only play UK hip hop because I did so much scratching and stuff on UK hip hop records.

And I love.

I love it.

I love all of it.

I love every kind of, you know, hip hop that I.

That I play.

But I can't.

I can't just do.

I set just at that all the time.

I have to do it for myself to play different records and at least try and put.

Put stuff that's a little bit deeper in there so that I can.

It's enjoyable for me, but.

But with the.

With the libraries and stuff like that, do you know what?

I've been collecting them for years, and I've probably only ever done a set of that kind of stuff a couple of times.

So when I did.

When I did live convention in Toronto a couple of years ago, they got me to do a mixtape of UK breaks and beats and UK library stuff and things like that.

That's the closest, I think I've got to doing a set, which is like, here's some stuff, like.

But I'm actually playing there at the end of this month again.

I'm booked to play it again.

And I'm playing with Edon and DJ nuts from Brazil.

Oh, wow.

DJ nuts is absolutely insane collector and amazing DJ, and so is Edon.

So I've got to come with some stuff.

I got a.

I've been putting records in piles for, like, a month already just to kind of get a bit of a shape, something together for next weekend.

So it's going to be interesting, but it's good for me because it means I can play a bit deeper.

I can play some rarer stuff.

Like, I got.

I got a lot of stuff here, but a lot of these kind of, like, hi fi bar places and stuff, I can't.

I can't get booked to play those.

I don't know why, but, you know, I would love to play a set of, like, you know, a jazz set somewhere or a Latin.

Yeah, maybe not a Latin set, but, you know, like, play some libraries and play some, like, some of this kind of interesting, kind of easy listening stuff that's a bit funky and whatnot.

I like all of it and I still actively search for it, so it's just, I don't really have an outlet for it, and I.

So I think if I did a set of it on Twitch, it might be, might be a bit boring for people, maybe.

I don't know.

I don't know.

It's difficult to say.

I can't say it.

I don't know what people are gonna like.

I can't second guess it.

So, yeah, it's like, where, it's like, the music's amazing, but it's like, where do you find that audience for it?

Yeah.

And if you do, nine times out of ten, it will be a lot of people who know it already and they just be like, oh, yeah, well, yeah, he only played x, Y and Zenith.

And then you're like, you can't win.

So it's so, you know, but I, like, I say, my thing is I like to learn and I like to find stuff.

And even if it just ends up being on one of my samples, mixes that I do, or I put it into a mix as a link to something else, then at least I've, I've used it somehow.

Yeah.

How do you feel about the sort of access levels people have to sample knowledge these days?

Because, like, I'll chat to Hudson and he knows a crazy amount.

And I'm like, you know all this stuff from before the Internet, like, how, how have you done this?

Because I had a job where I could just get away with basically doing nothing for 90% of the day.

So I'd just read about musicians and samples and stuff all the time.

So I, it was all there for me.

I didn't have to, like, go out and learn from the records and just learn from the digging experiences and stuff.

It seems like maybe there was more of a rite of passage.

It's definitely a lot more accessible now.

I don't know how people feel about it.

It does, it does feel like between the kind of, say, the traditional New York producers, they really don't want people waving around and advertising what they've sampled and naming it and then tagging them in the posts and stuff.

That level of stuff, I think, is pretty, pretty bad.

That's not really what it's supposed to be about.

But there was always this kind of like, weird inner circle of DJ's who knew this stuff and traded this knowledge with each other.

And you would often find out more things like that just from talking to other producers and stuff where they'd found it by accident, and then they would play it to you and like, like, the people I learned the most from was Mark B and Nappa from Firelife Cypher.

Right.

Like, me and Nappa would regularly spend hours on the phone playing each other, samples down the phone.

Pre Internet, like, pre Internet.

And there was only a handful of people, really, that I was able to do that with, you know, but Mark was putting me onto a lot of stuff.

Anytime I went to do cuts or do a session with Mark, all the creators or any of those guys who had really serious records, you would always come away from it knowing something else.

But even if you.

Even then, if you knew it, you didn't have anywhere to go and advertise the fact that you knew it.

You just had to kind of hold it.

You kind of had that thing, and it was just there then.

And so now everyone's in a rush to kind of talk about that they found it, or here it is.

And this is a bit like.

I don't know.

That's not really how it's how it's supposed to be, but I do.

I am enjoying people discovering samples for the first time because I.

I know how it made me feel.

It's exciting, like when you fight, when you get a record home and you find a thing, you're like, oh, oh, shit, there it is.

That's it.

You work it out.

You might call a couple of people and tell them, I still do that, but generally I won't, you know, I'll hold it down.

Yeah, I'll save it for a mix because I don't want it.

I.

For me, if I find.

If I found it, I don't want it out there first, and then I.

It'd be on a mix and then people, you know, so, yeah, I, um.

I remember when I found out because I think, like, the shuck ones, one was a big one, but the one that I was like, what on earth was the seals and crofts?

Busta rhymes one.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

When you're just like, I don't know how some producers have the vision to be like, hear that bit of seals across, go, we can do something nasty with this.

And just.

There's not even much done with it, but it's just so, like, sinister and hard as well.

It's such an amazing sample.

Like, it really is an amazing sample.

And the fact that that record then went on to become, like, a dancehall record, and it's now been, like two other pop records that Buster's been involved with as well.

And it.

And even when Buster came out with it was, like, the biggest record.

But I remember when that came out, I was doing.

I was djing at a shop opening in London, and there was like b boys there and like poppers and lockers and stuff as well.

And they were.

They were asking for it and I played it and they were just like, this is the greatest thing, like.

But it's just.

That was Buster's thing.

He was so good at picking those beats.

Yeah, he's so good at picking those beats like that.

Like, they're unusual but immediate club records.

It's interesting, isn't it?

You know, Jay Z seems to have a pretty good track record with picking beats.

Yeah, definitely.

Nas's career has maybe been dictated by whether he can pick his beats or nothing.

But the other person that I think should have kind of blown it more that didn't is Az, because I think an amazing rapper.

But maybe he just didn't always pick the right beats.

He.

There's.

You know what?

There's two AZ tunes that I love.

One of them, I think it's only on a cd and then a bootleg twelve inch and it's called the hardest.

And large professor produced it.

Now, I'm not going to blow it up, but the sample for that record is amazing.

And the most unlikely looking thing you've ever seen in your life, you would never in a million years guess.

But yeah, there's a tune by AZ called the hardest with Styles P on it.

Amazing.

And then there's another one.

There's a theme here too that.

There's another one that, again, I think was only on a cd that knotts produced called Fire.

And the sample for that is on a really common soul record, like 80 soul record, too.

When you hear how he hooked that up, it's unbelievable.

And it's a perfect fit, too, because AZ, on this large professor thing, it's quite smooth, but it's really sinister.

Whereas this knots thing is like angry.

Yeah.

And when you hear the soul record that it comes from, not angry at all.

Right, I'm going to be checking them out.

Yeah, check them out.

I recommend them, but there's no.

There's no vinyl, I don't think, for either of them, apart from some bootleg of the eight at the hardest, which I'm trying to find, so I can at least play the thing out.

Yeah.

Just going back to what you were saying before about doing the UK stuff, did you say that you were doing cuts on some of the creators stuff?

Yeah.

So on the wait album I did.

I did probably 80% of the cuts on there.

Right.

So the intro to it is actually plus one.

The acapella intro to it is plus one.

And then after that it's me.

And I think I did all of the rest of it.

I spent basically three or four days in a studio in Cornwall doing that with them.

But all the other stuff I did with the creators, like the big quorum records and even the stuff with Mark, actually, we all did that.

That was all recorded at Julian's initially, and then.

And then it was recorded at Mark's later on.

Basically, there was three places that we recorded all of that stuff.

It was either at Julian's house or it was at Vadim's house, or it was at Mark B's house.

All of that stuff was done at various people's houses.

Was it a real big community then?

Yeah, it came out of record shops.

All of my meeting, all of these guys came out of record shops.

I met Mark.

Mark had a friend, mister serve, who used to go into Mister Bongo's and he was selling breaks to producers out of, like, a bag, and he would just be selling samples and stuff to people.

I got friendly with him.

He would ring me up and play me stuff and sell me stuff.

And then I.

Mark heard about me and then he got.

Wanted to get me on a record.

He phoned me up.

Me and Mark became friends and then we started doing all the records together.

So we did the.

The first record I did with Mark was called new school Dean, but I did the b side.

There's no.

I didn't do any cuts on that record.

I did the b side, which was called it's impossible.

I think I might need to look at that.

I can't remember.

But that was definitely the first thing I did with Mark, was the delirious twelve inch.

Then after that we did the Mud family, might be a mud family, twelve inch.

Then there was the might be a blade ep, and then there was a task force album, the new mic order, and then there was a couple of other twelves.

Like, we did one without a as well.

Yeah, we did a lot of stuff together.

We were.

We worked on a lot of records.

It was good.

There's some of them never came out.

There was a really amazing remix for the creators that Mark did with consequence on called in and out, the in and out version.

The regular version came out as the b side of a record, but the mark's remix, for some reason, never came out.

And it was absolutely amazing.

If it had come out, it would have been a big record.

Yeah.

And we did.

I did.

I did cuts on that because the original didn't really have any cuts on it.

And this one mark put a bridge in there for me to do cuts on.

And then there was a whole bit at the end as well.

Oh, wow.

Yeah, it was cool.

And.

And then the other.

The other crazy thing that happened was we did.

I did one of the big qualm records verbalize, and they got spinner to remix it, and spinner left my cuts on a record, so I was over the moon.

Like.

Like, I remember going to Julian's one night to work on something else, and he was like, oh, we got the tapes back from Spinner.

He's used your cuts.

I'm like, what?

Like, yeah, he used your cuts.

And I'm like, you kidding?

It was like, for me, that was the biggest deal.

So I'm.

I'm super happy that that even happened, you know?

Were you earning a little bit of money from the cutting and stuff?

I was doing it.

Do you know what I was doing it for?

Records.

Oh, right.

Yeah.

I was getting rare records.

I was getting paid in records, which suited me fine because I would have only spent it records anyway.

Yeah, yeah.

But I was getting paid, you know.

You know, I got.

I earned some nice records that way.

My planet Sauvage came that way.

And, you know, things like that.

You know, things that.

Things are pretty sought after all came from that, so, you know.

Yeah, I did.

It was never a money thing.

I was happy to be making records with people, and I was getting some records out of it I wanted to dj with.

So, you know, it was.

It was.

It worked.

It worked nicely for me.

It was later on when I was doing bits and pieces for people, they would pay me money, rather, you know, because that was how they did things.

They didn't have records to offer me, so they were paying me money.

But it wasn't a huge earner by any stretch.

But it was good for me.

It was good for me because my name was on all these records.

Yeah.

So there's been.

There's been plenty of currency in it, sort of for you, anyway.

Yeah, it's.

It's not really about that anyway, for me, I, you know, I'm.

I make the money, really doing set club sets, and occasionally someone might pay me to do, you know, you know, like a mix for them or something like that.

And so that.

That kind of work.

That kind of works for me.

How do you feel about being the person that's in front of everyone?

Because you are quite, like you've said when you're going around, you know, you just kind of want to, like, move in the shadows and stuff as it were not make a big deal of things.

How do you find that contrast with being that person that's up there and everyone's just, like, watching you and that side of djing, I hate it.

Put me in a corner and let me play music.

That's.

That's my thing.

I like that.

Yeah, I prefer that.

So I was comfortable at that gig that we did because it was ground level.

I like being among the people I like.

I don't like to be on a stage.

I'm not comfortable on the stage.

I'm not a natural, like, performer, you know, gurning, dancing guy or anything like that.

I just like to play music.

Yeah.

Like, I do appreciate it as kind of, like, the performance element of it and stuff.

It's just like, it's not for me.

When I see these big crowds of people, like, and they're all just standing, staring at someone playing on a stage like that, I'm just like, that's my worst nightmare.

Like, if I'm gonna do that, I'd like to be behind a rapper or something so that I'm.

At least I'm not the focus.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Do you feel like people are different on dance floors nowadays from, say, pre phone cameras and stuff?

Is that something you've noticed 100%?

They're all trying to.

I think most people are trying to grab something that they can use as content.

Yeah.

I like it when people aren't on the phones.

And I hate.

I hate this whole kind of thing of just having to film everything all the time.

Yeah, I hate it.

But I still get caught up in it thinking, oh, yeah, that's something to put on these on the gram.

I will sometimes take some pictures, but I won't take video because there's no point.

The sound will be rubbish.

It's not going to capture it properly.

I just want to take some pictures and get at least a memento of the night rather than standing there with my phone out on record all night trying to catch something.

Like, it doesn't.

That's not really appealing to me, and I don't like it.

Again, it's just.

It's an extension of being on stage that you're not asking for someone filming you all the time.

Yeah, yeah.

I just want to because, you know.

Yeah.

It doesn't make me feel very comfortable.

Yeah, yeah.

But I imagine a lot of people are filming you.

They do.

And it's.

It's.

I appreciate people coming out and supporting and everything, but I.

I'm not a comfortable stage person.

Camera guy, whatever.

I'm not comfortable.

I'm probably not looking at the camera most of the time that I'm talking to you because I'm very aware that I do that.

Yeah.

And I think something that we discussed the other day when I was in the shop, Washington, the lack of boundaries that there are when it comes to things like Instagram and kind of people tapping you up at all hours and things like that, that must get pretty exhausting.

Can you kind of give us a bit of context around that?

Yeah.

People can be quite abrupt.

And if I'm having, you know, like a bad time or I'm going through something or whatever, I can't necessarily get back to people right away.

And like I say as well, I'm on, I'm on the road driving most of my day, every day.

I'm not, I'm not sat at home.

But people do think nothing of sending me music to check at one in the morning, two in the morning.

And even though I put my phone on silent and everything when I wake up, I don't always, I don't always want to do that.

I need, I've got other things I need that are a priority, that need to get done first.

But also, people are very abrupt.

They won't ask you how you're doing or they won't say, hey.

They won't even say hello.

They'll just be like, here's my tune.

Wow.

And it's like, oh, right, okay, so, hello, how are you?

You're right.

You know, I'm quite, you know, I'm just, I'm a polite guy.

I like to ask people how to do it.

I always do it.

And so.

But I think that concept is kind of lost on people a little bit.

I try and be as polite as possible whenever I can, but when people are rude to me, I do tend to actually, if people are like that, I sadly, I tend to ignore it because I think you, you know, you don't come to anything.

I do.

You don't, you don't talk to me.

Outside of you wanting to give me this thing right now, for me to ask me something, to have something from me, and I don't really like that.

That's not an exchange, is it?

It's not.

It's just, it's just you chucking something at me and hoping that I'll tell you what you want to hear.

That's.

That's not a comfortable situation for me to be in, so.

And I would hope that if someone see me dj, that they would understand what kind of stuff that I play and how I play and what kind of stuff they feel that I might play.

Not just send me your.

Just send me something.

It's, it's a, it's a bizarre, it's a bizarre thing that I never really got my head around.

And that's probably why I don't really do radio, because I don't want to have to play stuff that I'm not feeling for the sake of, for the sake of, for the sake of it.

I would rather play something that I'm feeling that I can comfortably put energy behind and say, I really like this record.

Yeah.

Something that occurred to me the other day is someone was asking about wanting DJ's and, and they wanted open format.

I mean, I don't dj a lot, but I think open format is kind of a way of saying, oh, what I take from it is if I go and play somewhere open format, I'm just basically gonna have to play some stuff that I don't want to play.

And it's kind of like saying it without saying it.

You know, it's like you can, you can be your genres, but someone might ask you for a certain thing and there's going to be a bit of an expectation that you play that.

A couple of things around that type of communication on social media, I think, is how we interact with our phones and, like, our levels of distraction and stuff.

I know I, there's, there's loads of times I'll just like, WhatsApp someone something, and I'll just, after I've sent, it'll be a question or something, and after I've sent it, I'll go, oh, yeah, how are you doing, by the way?

Because I'll just realize I've just gone in, in such, like a rude way.

It just really easily happens.

But then I guess as well, there's like, with the people that are just like, here's my tune.

They're probably scatter gunning that to loads of people thinking there's a pure numbers game to it.

I remember in the MySpace days, just sitting there, just adding people because you could spam even more on that.

Brutal MySpace.

I'm glad that's not a thing anymore.

It was a good way to get your music out there, though.

It definitely was.

I actually met a few good friends that way, too.

But the brutal inboxing of everything all the time, that was the start of the end.

I was like, and that's why I came off Facebook, too, because I was getting it.

I was getting on there, too.

People couldn't get hold of me on.

I gave.

I stopped using Twitter, I stopped using Facebook.

People were just relentlessly sending me messages for me to check this, do this, do this.

Can you do this?

Will you do this?

Like, it's too much?

I can only do so much.

I had to.

I've had to cut down what I'm doing now because with the shop and the.

My own djing work and records I'm trying to make and things, I've had to kind of put the brakes on a few things and to say, this is too much now.

And I'm not.

I'm not doing any of this well.

I'm just doing bits and pieces here that are okay, but I want to do things well in a concentrated way.

So I need to concentrate.

I need to focus on that.

So, yeah, it's it.

I think it's a good way to be, isn't it?

Trying to have a bit of self care involved.

I.

Because it is easy to burn out.

Yeah, it definitely is.

It's easy to say yes to everything, but it's.

It's a lot more sensible to say, you know what?

I can't do that right now.

That's it.

We've.

We've got into a lot of stuff there.

Something we've not gotten into yet is, I suppose, bbe and putting together compilations.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

How good is it when you get approached?

It's like, we want you to put a compilation together.

Well, I'll tell you what I was doing.

I was working as a delivery driver when Peter from BBE called me up to ask me to do kings of hip hop, right?

So I'm driving through the countryside in a delivery van, dropping car parts off to miserable garage people, right?

And the phone rings and it's Peter.

So I pull over and answer the phone and he's like, all right, I've got an idea for a thing and I want you to be involved.

I'm like, yeah, cool, what is it?

He goes, yeah, we're going to do this series of things called kings of.

And I'm like, oh, yeah, cool.

And he was like, yeah, so we're going to do one that's called kings of hip hop.

And I was like, all right.

And he was like, so, you know, would you be up for doing it?

I'm like, yeah, of course I would.

That sounds amazing.

Absolutely.

I'm like, who else is doing it?

He's like, oh, DJ Premier.

I'm like, sorry, DJ Premier.

So I'm sat at a side of the road in like, scruffy, like work, you know, work clothes, working in.

Working.

Working at my dad's garage, doing delivery driving.

And I'm like, just got this call that I'm going to be doing a compilation record alongside DJ premier, one of my heroes.

And I'm just like, this is blowing my mind.

So that was an amazing day.

And the contrast of it couldn't have been better.

You know, I was.

I was doing a job, I was working, and I got the call and it was.

It was incredible.

So.

And then when I got approached to do the strange breaks comps again by Peter, I went up there for a meeting.

He.

He called me up for a meeting.

And so before I went to the meeting, and he was like, look, you must have some interesting stuff that we can.

We can put on a comp, like, stuff that's not really the normal stuff, but stuff that's kind of samples or funky or breaks and stuff like that.

And I'm like, yeah, yeah, of course.

So I put together a compilation cd and I took it up to him and I said, this is the kind of thing I was thinking of.

And he played for it and he was like, this is it.

This is perfect.

And there was like two or three things we couldn't clear, and we have to kind of work around, pick some others.

But I would say about 75% of what's on the first strange breaks is what was on my.

What was on my cd that I gave to Pete that day.

Wow.

And then we ended up doing three more.

There was supposed to be volume four.

A lot of things went.

A lot of things went down at BBE and it didn't end up happening.

So it's a shame, but I can't.

I can't make it happen with all the will in the world.

Yeah, I would like to make it happen because we had got some really good stuff cleared and stuff that's not really out there even now.

And this was probably going back five years, five or six years.

So, yeah, there was some stuff.

There was some good stuff on there that was.

That was going to be coming, so.

And did you do a library one fairly recently as well?

Oh, yeah, we did two of those.

We did two of those, too.

And then I did some other bits and pieces for BBE as well.

I did a Diller edit on the seven.

No pressure, no pressure, no pressure on that.

Is there doing a dealer edit?

It was.

It was terrifying, but all I could.

Thankfully, it was a song that was a minute long.

It was Rico suave, Bossanova and I was just like, we need to just make this a bit longer for DJ's because this record ends as soon as it starts.

Like, as soon as it's got going, it's faded out and done.

Like, needs to be a bit longer.

So, yeah, we.

I just extended it a little bit.

I didn't.

I didn't do anything to it at all.

I just extended it.

But I was really happy that that happened.

And what else I did, I did a compilation album with Spinner as well on there of, like, of other BBE stuff, like hip hop and r and b stuff on BBE.

That was good fun to put together, too.

Yeah, two volumes of Cat of Cavendish slash booze.

Boozy and Hawks library music.

That was good fun because we went to the actual archive of boozy and Hawks.

It's now called Cavendish Music.

But at the time, it was boozy and hawks, and they had this basement in the bottom of their building and they just had boxes of records.

And the only other person, I think, that had really gone through them was Lewis Parker, because he'd done a remix project for them.

And so there was, like, little batches of really interesting stuff that was obviously what Lewis had gone through.

And then there was all this other madness down there as well.

But there was tapes and, like, multiple copies of some records and everything, and we just kept finding them.

I think I found about 20 copies of space drama down there, which is like a kind of jazzy space library type thing.

But it was just like, I think I posted it on my facebook and people thought I was selling them and they were messaging me, gun.

Yeah, I'll take one of them space dramas.

I'm like, they're not mine.

They're not for sale, so.

But, like, I had, like, a pile of them like this, so.

But that was really cool, I found, because I've been buying those records for a long time.

Again, that came through Mark's influence, really.

And so to go there and go through it all and make discoveries of my own was.

Was a really nice thing to do.

And then, you know, me and Chris.

Chris Reid sat down and, you know, worked out how we were going to split them up so that it would be like the sample stuff.

I picked a few bits for producers so that there was, like, just drum breaks or records with drum brakes on.

There's only a handful on boozy that have got drum breaks on, like two or three tops.

It's not like KPM or themes where there's loads of them, but, yeah, the boozy stuff, there's only a handful, but there's some really good tracks, though.

But we kind of.

We kind of did all of that.

Now, have you got, like a digging adventure, digging story or anything?

That was just like the best dig ever?

Yeah, there's a good one.

There's a really good one.

That, again, involves two people that I'm good friends with, I've known for, you know, 20 odd years now as a result of this.

This.

So I got booked to play a gigdez in bath at a place called moles.

Me and young gun Essa did a gig at this tiny little club called Moles in Bath.

And Boba Fat put this night on.

So shout to Bobby, and Tarl Mofingers was living down that way, too.

And Bobby used to have a record shop called groovement, actually.

And Bobby Shop was also famous because it had a Banksy.

Banksy did the wall in there, right?

So anyway, he had this really cool little shop.

I went there to buy some records and have a look around.

Go and see him after the gig.

And then upstairs from his was a massive record shop.

And I'm embarrassed to say, I can't remember the name.

If you.

If I was to message Bobby, you could tell me right away.

I want to say it was called, like, porky's or something like that.

Something daft.

I don't know.

It was.

Anyway, it was in bath.

And anyway, I was in this guy's shop, and I found some cool records.

He had amazing stuff.

There was so much records in there, it was crazy.

And then he had a box of libraries on the side, like, on the side of one of the tables.

And I was going through it, and I pulled a couple of bits out, and he was like, oh, do you like those?

And I'm like, yeah.

Yeah, I do.

Yeah.

Why?

And he was like, how much?

How long have you got?

I'm like, okay.

He goes, I've got a basement full of them.

I'm like, you haven't?

And he goes, oh, come on, I'll show you.

So he took me back downstairs to the gate, which was next door to Bobby's shop.

He opened this gate up, and this basement was just wall to wall libraries.

Every catalog you can think of, every label you can think of.

I had to call Nick Essa up and just be like, I'm gonna need some time here.

This guy's just unleashed the mother lode.

Like, I basically went and got every penny that I could get out of the bank.

I think I spent all my money from the gig and got some amazing records.

Like, it was ridiculous.

And there's another good one that's similar to that, but it doesn't involve me meeting any of my friends.

But I went to a shop, which I'm not gonna say where it is.

I went to this shop, and it was the first time I'd been to this place.

And this was a shop that had been there probably 30 years, maybe.

And it was.

And I only went there for the first time about twelve or 15 years ago, maybe.

Maybe twelve years ago.

Anyway, so I'm in the shop, small shop, I'm going through finding some bits again.

He's got a cheap box of seven inches on the counter, 50 p.

Seven s, going through this box, start pulling out rap 45s out this box.

I'm like, oh, okay.

So I'm going through the box, and the guy's like, oh, you're looking for that kind of stuff?

I'm like, yeah, yeah, yeah.

How long you got?

Again?

He said to me, how long you got?

So I'm like, oh, man.

Well, I said, look, I've got about 40 minutes left on my parking, and then I've got to go.

And he's like, all right, well, next time you come, just ask me and I'll take you.

I'll show you.

I'm like, all right.

So the next time I went there first, rather than going to the other shop first in this.

In the same town, I went to him first, man.

Basically, this shop was dead stock.

Seven inch singles, most of them from promo companies or mail outs or just over stocks that had never sold.

And it was two big walls of it.

And it was all in alphabetical order.

And there was divider cards for artists.

There was a big daddy cane section.

There was an ice cube section.

There was an ice tea section.

There's a jazzy jeff and a fresh prince section.

There was a jungle Brothers section.

There was a Della soul section like this.

It was insane.

And.

And the guy was just charging a flat price for everything.

Nothing was priced.

He was just like, they're all this much.

I'm like, okay, cool.

I got so many big rap 45s out of that shop in one day.

I I don't even know how I managed to hold it together.

They were all in there.

Everything was in there, like, everything.

And then I went back.

I went back a month later, and I did the same again, and I filled two bags, and then I went back again, and I did the same again.

But then I started looking through the soul stuff as well, and started finding, like, multiple copies of, like, soul and boogie stuff and things like that.

And he had.

He had Motown, dead stock from like the sixties, like american import Motown, but tons of them.

It was crazy.

It's kind of been picked through now because the last time I went there was probably 15 or 20 De La Soul, seven still in there.

And then I went there a few months later and all of them had gone.

Someone had just gone in and bought them all.

So someone had obviously picked for it.

But it's a lot of fun.

I tend to go there with my portable and just listen to everything just, just fine stuff.

But those, those two are really good, good stories from over here.

I've got some good ones from the states as well, but they're from here.

They're like, they're good.

Is it different digging in the states?

Yeah, definitely.

Yeah.

It used to be a lot better, too.

I went.

I went to New York recently for a bit of a holiday to stay with one of my oldest friends who lives out there.

And, yeah, the prices of everything seems to have gone quite mad.

Like, I think that's.

But I feel like that's kind of a thing that's happened generally with records everywhere, like, since the arrival of discogs.

Nothing's really ever under the kind of mid price and most things are way over it, so.

But having said that, is still bargains to be had if you're not looking for a.

The same big records everyone else is looking for.

Like, I always come away feeling happy that I've managed to find something for a couple of bucks that I can't get in this country.

I'm not going to do that.

So I'm always just happy to find something for cheap that I'm looking.

That I'm actually looking for.

So it was good for that.

And I didn't really come back with much for myself.

Most of it was for the shop.

Yeah.

Do you still get the same thrill then finding something amazing in a pound bin?

Yeah, 100%.

100%.

Can't beat it.

It's a great.

It's a great, great thing.

Yeah.

Right.

Opening records.

Have you.

Do you have anything that's unopened, sealed stuff?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, definitely.

Is there any one thing that you've got that sealed that you would be more gutted to open than any of the others?

Mmm.

It's a really weird way of wording the question.

I know I'll show you.

All right.

So this is my first us copy of first tribe album that I bought the week it came out.

I bought this, an X Clan album on the same day from the same shop in London.

Is that a double?

No, it's a single.

Single vinyl.

The first 1st press was just single vinyl.

So it's.

Look at this, look at this.

Inner sleeve is all split.