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This week I'm joined by Eddie Otchere — a name that might be new to some, but his work absolutely won't be. Eddie is the photographer behind some of the most iconic images of 90s hip hop, jungle and drum & bass, garage and grime. He was Metalheadz's official photographer, shot Wu-Tang Clan, Aaliyah, Biggie, Jay-Z, So Solid Crew, Estelle, Chronixx, and pretty much every rapper you cared about coming up. His work is currently exhibited at the V&A East, and he's spent the last 30 years documenting London's black music and dance culture.

Eddie grew up in Brixton, Stockwell and Vauxhall, falling into record collecting at Groove Records in Soho when he was so small he couldn't see over the counter. He picked up his first camera in the late 80s — a Praktika left behind by a friend's granddad — and went on to build one of the most important visual archives of UK club culture. This is a long, deep, wide-ranging conversation, and one I came away from genuinely feeling like I'd learned something. I hope you do too.

Topics covered:

• Growing up in South London and the village mentality of the area
• Early days at Groove Records, Red Records, Dub Vendor and the record shops of Soho
• Getting online in the mid-90s via Direct Connection in Stockwell — and how hip hop became the global language
• Picking up a Praktika camera and falling into photography alongside record collecting
• Why being analog matters in a "post-fact" world of remastered records and retconned history
• The Canon EOS 10 and learning to shoot in pitch-black clubs
• Shooting jungle raves, Metalheadz, and protecting young people from tabloid demonisation
• How Red Bull, smoking bans and changing crowd behaviour shifted the look and feel of clubs
• The art of the loop — Alchemist, Dilla, No I.D. and chasing perfect samples
• Working with Wu-Tang as teenagers and learning to build a body of work
• Photographing Aaliyah, Biggie, Jay-Z, Estelle and Chronixx
• Around the early days of grime and why he gravitated toward So Solid in South London
• Drum & bass being run by women, and the importance of Chemistry and Storm
• The General Levy "cancellation", gatekeeping, and protecting a culture
• The V&A East exhibition and the tension between DIY scenes and academic curation
• Lee Scratch Perry, dub museums, and what music history should look like
• Meta glasses, AI as a personal agent, and digital asset management for photographers
• His advice for new photographers: intention is everything

Welcome back to Once A DJ everyone. Sorry it's taken a while to get a new episode out. Had quite a lot on with the day job and what have you and just other bits and bobs in life.

So I finally just finished editing the the latest episode and just realized what a hash I made of the introduction. It really doesn't do the guest justice. And the guest this week is Eddie Otchere

He's a pioneering photographer in hip hop and in London's black music scenes from the 90s onwards. And he shot pretty much all of your favorite rappers on the way up.

It was Metalheadz's official photographer and he's a huge cultural contributor and has some really interesting insights across music and life, really. And he's even had work exhibited in the V&A, certainly has some in the V&A East at the moment.

And this is a long and wide-ranging chat where we go into quite a lot of different stuff. And it's one where I've come away from it every now and again.

I come away like really feeling like I've learned some new things, got some new insights and perspectives on things with people. So this is one of those episodes. So yeah, Eddie Otchere, have a listen to it. It's a long one and I really enjoyed it and I hope you do too.

Right, welcome back to Once A DJ everyone. Our guest today is someone really important in quite a wide range of genres, albeit from a photography point of view.

Even if you don't necessarily know his name, you'll know some of his work. Eddie Ocher, how are you? Is it Ocher?

Yeah, Otchere is definitely one way of saying it. I think if you were to sort of talk to a German translator, they would probably say something like okiere because there is no C in the Akan language.

It's a K. But that's a whole nother story. I would go with Ochir, to be honest with you, just because that works where we are right now.

And the name, I'll come back to this name because what's in a name?

But as I said, if in, in Ghana, where the name comes from, the English missionaries that translated it would have put the O T C H E R E to sort of make it anglify it so it became Ochir. And if you had to, if you head into the sort of deep Akan heartland, it's Okiere.

And what's happened over time is that's become the new way of saying the language. I always find that really interesting that there's this sort of liquidity to language that shifts over time and over place.

But that's part of the process, I think. It's a human thing, really.

And how are you doing today?

I'm good, thank you. I'm good, I'm good, I'm good. Yes. Another day in paradise, I guess.

And taking a pause from what it is that I'm doing now, which is basically behind me, is the archive.

And part of the process now is to sort of unpack the archive, to be able to look back over the last 30 years of photographing London dance culture, you know, the urban way of life and making sense of it in some respects, you know, where we came from and where we're going, sort of.

Yeah.

Thing. Yeah.

And, yeah, like I've mentioned before, you know, you've been around some really interesting movements, documenting them over the years. So what I tend to do on the podcast is just start with your early days. So whereabouts is it that you grew up?

Grew up not too far from where I am right now, which is in Brixton, Stockwell, Vauxhall area, South London. What is that? That's they say about sort of London, you know, South London is. Most people, you know, in South London were born in South London.

Whereas if you had to go somewhere like West London, everyone who lives in West London wasn't necessarily born in West London. So it's. What can I say? It's just a village, basically. No one really changes around here. Everyone's born here and they live here and they die here.

But that's the city of South London.

Has that got a strong community then?

Yeah, I guess so. I guess so. But, you know, like with anywhere else now, that community is in flux.

But definitely growing up, there was definitely a strong sense of community and a strong sense of, you know, what can I say? The best way of describing it is a class divide. You know, it was a working class area, working class people, so very much.

That's the sort of cultural bedrock, the bottom line, really.

And that's, in a sense, something that I really enjoyed about sort of the jungle scene was watching us lot who grew up in this environment sort of formulate our own culture around music and around, you know, drum machines, samplers. Being quite postmodern about it, you know, taking bits here, taking bits here, sort of realizing that we're in this sort of hybrid universe.

And this hybrid universe is essentially a very modern universe because we are taking different cultures around us and different cultures that influence us, whether it's kung fu films, Japanese manga meets reggae samples meets drum machines. Meets Detroit techno. I think we could all say that conceptually in our minds, we were from the global city. We're from a village in.

In South London called Brixton.

But our minds were like in every other village, in every other city around the world, Whether it's Brooklyn to Shibuya to Lagos, it's kind of like a sort of really interesting urban community that's fully connected to the rest of the world. Because we weren't really isolated from the rest of the world.

Because I grew up, you know, we had mobile phones, we had the early doors of the Internet. You know, there was all this tech that was around us, particularly in South London.

And I think I remember vividly, like there was like a local Internet service provider called Direct Connection in South London. And if you had like a Mercury one to one phone or one of those sort of, he basically had free calls after 7 to other numbers in your own area.

And if that meant that the number you're dialing into is on a modem based, that Direct connection, which was in Stockwell, you basically had free Internet in the mid-90s. It was just one of those little quirks of just being in the city.

And so I really enjoyed that international sort of connections that we could really pick up on quite early. So by. So 90 to 93, Internet was in my house, at least. At least through Direct Connection.

And you're checking out, you're checking in, and you're engaging with the global world as you see it, knowing that you've got this connectivity of essentially hip hop culture.

If I'm really honest, it was hip hop culture that gave me and gave us the language to connect with other hip hop heads around the planet and then make those connections into actual visits. Hanging out, doing stuff, exchanging ideas, exchanging records, exchanging culture.

Can we just rewind then? So before that, then what?

What were your earliest sort of musical influences and what was that journey to discovering and falling in love with hip hop then?

Early musical influences from what you heard on the estate to what you saw on tv. Particularly for me, I never listened to radio until much later. Right, yeah.

So influences were really, for me personally, which is digging through crates. You know, there were so many record shops all around.

Look, I live in Vauxhall at the time of like the early 80s, I could ride my bike to Soho, I could go to Groove Records, I could go through the racks, I could buy what I wanted. And essentially I was. You know, I didn't realize it at the time, but these are like connoisseur shops of like, the culture, you know, you'll.

You know, Groove Records, all the shops in Soho, black market, all of them. I remember going to Groove Records and I couldn't even see over the counter.

I was like, you know, 12, 13 years old, and the counter was so high I couldn't see over. I had to sort of go, can I rewreck him? I know you got soul. Please. 12 Inch.

And there was a granny in the back and his granny would sell you the record. It turns out this granny was the godmother of Excel Records, basically because she birthed half of them. So it goes on and on and on. So that's the.

That's the musical culture I got was from record shops and that comes from collecting. That doesn't come from. This is necessarily. Oh, I was influenced by hip. I was influenced by hip hop because I was consuming it. Yeah, it was.

It was just there to be consumed. It was the cool at the time and it made sense.

And so, yeah, Groove Records was a big influence for me that all my pocket money went there until they shut down. And then other places in Soho opened up to me.

But, yeah, so early influences were literally going around record shops and buying stuff off the wall, essentially just been playing it, hearing and going, that's cool. And so if I did the circuit of, let's say, Groove Records for the hip hop, I wasn't really into house.

There wasn't really anything else until I think MASH came along on Oxford street. And I remember hearing Shut up and dancing there for the first time around about 89.

And that sort of got me into the breakbeat side of things, going through that record store on Oxford Street. So you can see how the culture was not necessarily, oh, you just listen to music now.

The music was aligned to shops and the shops were aligned to culture, and the culture aligned to actually hanging out with people.

And, you know, like, I don't know about you, but this might sound creepy in a modern age, but you might go to a shop because there's a really nice girl in there that you fancy that that wasn't creepy. That was natural.

Yeah, yeah.

You know, and she kind of was cool and you were cool, she was smart as fuck and she put you onto stuff. Like, you respected their intelligence and all the rest of it. You grew up around people that knew shit and that was a lot.

That's how you measured it, you know, and new people and people like that will always put you on, you know, so that's. That's the culture of growing up around music. So I Suppose I'll be collecting 7 inches until 12 inches came along and. And it grew from there.

Red Records dub vendor. There was a shop inside Brixton tube station. You come up the stairs, come up the escalators, come through the ticket barriers.

On the right hand side was a news agent, the left hand side of the shop run by Zebedee. And he would sell the weirdest, just, just UK 12 inches and a couple of US imports. But he had taste.

And that shop would be going off on a Friday night. But that was another time.

What so would be people be like partying in there late then.

Yeah, yeah. Just after work, you come up through the tube, you pop into the record shop and I say party is a strong word.

No, the music's loud but people are collectors. So you play the record loud and then you put your hand up to say, that's the record I want.

And if it's sold out there and then it's sold, it's like a bidding war. It's more. It's close to a bidding war than it is to a party. You know, you're there to buy tunes. You're quite serious about it too, you know.

Yeah. Such a different time, isn't it now, you know, you just hop on discogs if your wallet's fat enough.

Yeah.

Whereas back then it's like you had to be there at the time if you wanted to get that record.

Yeah. And someone had to put you onto that record. So it sort of.

It wasn't, you know, you couldn't unless you knew so and so has got a new album coming out and you knew the distributor, it was still waiting for the shop for it to drop in the shop before you could get your hands on it.

Yeah, yeah. So just aside from that then, when did photography become, I guess, either a hobby or a career for you? When did that come into your life?

Yeah, I think photography was pretty much around the same time, late 80s, early 90s. It sort of follows on from the obsession with vinyl with.

The obsession with vinyl comes in the session of tape and cassette tape, particularly different types of recording formats. And then photography is another type of recording format. So you sort of got obsessed by that and the different types of film available.

So that was roughly around the late 80s when you could. When my friend of mine's granddad passed away and left him like a practika camera.

And then we sort of picked up the camera and started playing with it and it seemed pretty obvious to me then that was a great tool for recording your. What was going on around you at the time.

And I suppose for me, the first set of pictures I took were the trainers that I'd bought, which is like a pair of, like, Nike revolutions, which blew my mind because they were featured in do the Right Thing the following year. But so it's sort of.

And that was important, like, document in these products, particularly as the products were, I don't know, as far as I could tell, like innovations like coming out the 70s, like a Nike, you know, a pair of trainers were bubbling. They were mind blowing compared to, like, the plimp soles of the years before. So these things sort of struck me as, you know, we looked.

And that was interesting for me then because, like, we felt, and we wanted to be really, at one point, really modern, you know, like Nike Air Jordans, a purple tracksuit that you picked up from mash, and a Nafnath shirt that was all quite modern in terms of overprint and the way the garments looked and the silhouettes that you had, you know, and wearing sports stuff as if it's like connoisseur stuff in the night in the early 90s was really a rarefied moment. And I've kind of really wanted to document that.

I thought we were wild and fresh and beautiful and obviously, you know, I'm conscious in my own head of like, things like punk and the iconography of punk and how that was visualized. And for me, given how colorful we were, it was all in color. It was all about just how, like, flowers, like. And then the daisy age came along.

And then it really was like, all about color. You know, that was 91 de la soul.

And that was a real cementing of, like, hip hop as a revolutionary thinking, or hip hop as more than just a musical format, but rather a culture with pillars and points of view.

And then with that in your system, when jungle comes along and you start to realize that you're formulating your own localized culture, that you kind of want to embed hip hop values in it. You want it to have more than one aspect to it that is not just. Just a music thing. It's not just disco. It's actually bigger than that.

We can morph into other. We can morph into the space that we need. And for us, it was drum, it was bass, it was large spaces where thousands of us gather and good drugs.

And then you can actually grow spiritually, physically, and mentally as well.

So just when you started photography, what. What you've got there with photography and record collecting is two quite expensive pastimes.

Was it Hard to kind of prioritize one over the other with, like, say, getting film or getting the latest records.

Not really. I felt like.

I mean, quite early on, you realize that if you're going to put in a tax return, then you have to at least say that buying records and buying films, you need to get a discount on that. And then the other part of the job of buying records, of buying film, is getting as close to the source as possible.

So it's the cheapest value you could. And for me, from records, it was about getting close to record companies, so I could pick up promos and go through the racks.

So eventually, half the records I want, I don't have to buy anymore because I worked out where to get them from for free. And the same could be said said for film as well. Yeah.

So it sounds like you were pretty savvy from an early age.

Yeah.

In Spirit of the Lens, you mentioned that your mum was really savvy as well. Is that. Did she kind of, like, put that into you?

Yeah, I guess you sort of.

You're surrounded by sort of survival instincts, and you're surrounded by sort of scarcity in a sense that you realize that time is precious and things are valuable and you can't let these chances pass you by. And so that's the sort of realization of also, you know, at some point, spending time in West Africa and realizing just how.

How easy it is to have your back against the proverbial wall and how you basically have to cover your back.

In other words, you know, you've got to keep thinking ahead of the curve, keep moving ahead in such a way as you don't get caught out, you know, with your proverbial back against the wall, you know, because you've got no options for yourself. So in terms of sort of, like, records, which is, like, really important, really valuable, in my opinion, because it's.

They sort of statements of fact, a bit like photography. This is, like the truth.

And ultimately, if you're going to sort of be savvy about something, why not be savvy about something that's good for everybody? You know, like, let's figure this one out, because I don't think people fully understand how gaslit we are in a contemporary society that we live in.

Like, everything's like. I mean, we saw it in music quite early on, you know, if you got the vinyl version.

And then years later, Robert Plant decides he wants to remaster all the Led Zeppelin albums and strips out half the bass and half the kick drum because he doesn't like the drummer anymore. Over time these records lose their power because they get constantly sort of refiddled with.

And you're starting to see that more and more in films where everything's been retconned, history's been retconned. There is no fact anymore. You know, we're post fact or post this is it. And so. And back then, you know, what's that?

There's a Michael Jackson album where in the first press in, there's no hand claps in it. And they decided, oh, we need hand claps. They had to repress the record with hand claps in it.

And then they recalled the first bunch, but a few went out. And so you always got evidence in vinyl or in photography or in traditional places.

But for me, um, now I realize that holding onto these things and caring about these things was very much about actually realizing that we are going to face some kind of shit in the future where we need the truth to, to. To help us not go insane. And it kind of feels like we're getting to that point now where it's like actually we're all insane.

We don't know shit anymore.

And, and, and now I don't know if that's like I was wrong to try and hold back the tide because even in science, things we knew as facts aren't facts. They change every day.

So it's like, ah, are we just gonna live in this floating point universe where nothing's real anymore and you don't know or not? And I don't know, sometimes you have to follow your heart on that one.

And sometimes it's nice to pull out a record or look at a piece of film from the past and, and know that that's exactly what it is. You can rescan it, you can look at it again and just see something that's an unfiltered view of another time. Whether it's a tune or a picture or.

Yeah. And I think holding on to that, I just got obsessed. I think it must have been from school when I just got obsessed about in libraries.

I worked in the library and I was in school. And I've kind of saw the power of what that is. I think that's where I'm at now with that.

After all these years of just wanting to document things and hold them preciously and dearly, it's now important that they're now shared with us and alongside stories that go with these pictures of whether it's Goldie and the metal heads or, you know, and the, and the. And the spirit behind things that the reason why we needed to dance, you know, it's not.

It's like you watch those 80s films now about hey Ma, I just want to dance and you can't dance. Dancing is bad. Like just to make people think that. Hold on. People used to think like that.

Like if they saw like 20 kids dancing in the park, they thought the fucking world is about collapse. Like, get over yourselves, you know, like that.

It's nice to be reminded that when we were released from that kind of mental bondage that people did some great shit and drum and bass and jungle culture is the great shit that we did.

Yeah. So when you were learning photography, how much of that was kind of studying books and things?

And how much was just like just, just finding your way around a camera and like just working out for yourself about light and because I'm trying to understand how lenses work with F stops and all this sort of thing at the moment. And I find it really confusing. Whereas if I just spent some time with the camera, I might go, oh well, if I change that to that, then this happens.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I say this much that you're only as good as a camera you got. So whatever you got is what you got. And it's not necessarily about the camera.

It's more about where your intention and where you are with it. And I remember vividly with that something like the metal heads.

I've been shooting in clubs for a little while and I realized there's, there's limitations to shooting in clubs, I. E. It's dark in there and you can't see. So how do you focus?

So essentially I bought the Canon EOS 10 because it had an infrared focus beam on it, which meant that if you're in complete darkness, it could just focus on anything, alert you with a signal. Did it and then you fire.

So.

And it's almost, it was almost instantaneous, almost split second. So. Which is really good. So you could almost hear the thing come in, point in the right direction, just fire and the flash will kick in.

Flash will kick in, kick down. Very small, very compact camera. It suited what it had to do. Yeah, that was quite specific.

If you, if your intention is just take pictures of your like 6 year old baby or 6 month old baby, then there is a camera specifically great for that.

You know, it's probably got Daffy Duck on the front of it and every time the kid sees it, it giggles and you snap away and you got yourself a picture. In other words, these are just tools.

I kind of Worked out very quickly that more like an artist does, like you sort of everything's a tool so you, you want to tell this story, you find a tool that helps you tell the story best. And in most cases different cameras are built for different things.

And that's really sort of an interesting legacy of, you know, particularly British photographers like someone like Martin Par, where you can see him build a whole body of work because there's a camera film combo that he's using that makes colors pop in a very specific way. He's just employing techniques just to do the work. If he goes to Afghanistan, he will have a self portrait made.

You know, there's kind of black and white self portraits where they paint pink blusher on your cheeks to make you look like you're, you know, weird. But the point is every cult, you know, photography is cultural, different people have different things they bring to the table.

And you can almost read a series of books in any, in any well informed library or any half decent bookshop or magazine store and get the knowledge you need.

And I think it's something to be said about magazines is that you would go to Tower records in the 90s and they had one of the largest magazine collections in Europe at the time.

And you could spend an afternoon to early evening, so you get there around about 4 o', clock, you might have a date around 7 or 8, but you go to Tower Records, Piccadilly Circus, go to the basement, go to what camera, what hi fi, Japanese camera magazines, the most bizarre collection of obsessive randomized stuff going and you could pretty much learn the world.

It's like it was better than the Internet because there was no like distractions as such, you know, so you can pretty much go to the camera section and just pick up techniques and pick up like look at different.

And I go to Mix Mag and see what all the other photographers in the raves are doing and then modify yourself against their techniques and that was it.

I did study photography, but the thing is the lesson learned is really in the field where you are talking to other photographers and looking at their setups and actually sort of, you know, chatting to them and getting to know other photographers and techniques and particularly myself as well.

Coming up through the 90s, I would be part of camera clubs or photo fusion, being one in Brixton that I was part of, which is the dark room essentially.

So you're constantly shooting, printing and working alongside other photographers in a communal space while you're making your work, looking at each other's work. And I still do that to this day.

Like, I still use some of the communal dark rooms across London to primarily engage with a new generation of shooters and have conversations with them. Because I think we learn more through, you know, human interaction than we do necessarily in books.

I do teach and I also, I don't teach through book, I teach through praxis. I teach through going for long walks.

You know, like, that's essentially most of my best workshops are my walks right now, which can have up to 90 people turn up so we can just walk. And learning is done within a two to three hour process where you shoot.

You process your film, you make a contact sheet, you see the holy trinity of photography, the camera, the negative and the print. That's the process.

Nice.

So sometimes when you shoot and you're learning how to use a camera, sometimes it's best to have an intention before you even get to that point so you know what you're trying to get to before you even start. And unfortunately with digital, because you're not making a print until you lock it into paper form. You haven't completed the circle.

You're just staring at images on the screen. You can't even take it in. You know, if you need a plug to look at your work, is it your work?

Yeah.

So, you know, this is, this is, that's the, that's the sort of issue with, that's the immediacy of photography, is the print.

Please, whatever you do in this life, go to the print and you'll learn over the course of time whether you've improved or whether your camera is bad or good, or eventually you get to miss certain lenses over time because you couldn't see what they were doing for you at the time they were doing it for you. Then you buy another lens because someone says, this lens is amazing. And you realize, actually, I like the bad lens.

The bokeh in the corners is really quite nice. It's, it's you, you. I generally shoot things, find new toys, shoot on them for a day or two, put a couple rolls for them, look at their flaws.

You know, shoot in extremes, shoot at 2.8, shoot the fast shutter speed, shoot on a gray day, shoot in a bright day, shoot certain colors, just play with it and essentially it will come to you what it is and whether or not it sits with you, whether or not it's your friend or not, or just weird. Is it the weird lens?

Yeah. So how did you first get into doing photography events and of musicians?

Yeah, I think it was for the jungle era. I started shooting in raves.

I started getting in touch with all the raves across London because I kind of really thought there were amazing spaces to play in. Like the Laser Drum in Peckham, which was basically a tag space. You know, it looked like an adventure playground indoors.

And you'd run around and go wild. But they also had a sound system and they're playing jungle and they didn't have any drinks licenses. And it just seemed, like, really exciting.

So I'd shoot for the promoters. And it gave me some experience, like shooting a space empty, shooting at people in it, getting to know the promoters.

They're using some of my images on their flyers. Than other promoters needing images on their flyers because, like, oh, you can take images in the club. Let's put that on our flyers.

And I was like, yes, I'm that guy. So from the early 90s, I was like, well, early mid-90s, whatever.

I was shooting for Thunder and Joy, a couple of other sort of one or two other promoters, and just really putting their. Putting their raves in context.

And the service was to make sure that we didn't insult the people that came there to dance and have a good time, that we had something that they can feel proud of and they can see themselves on the flyer and they could be like, yeah, that's me. I'm having a great time. So that was that. And then it sort of. Ultimately, the last sort of big one I did in the 90s was the metalheads.

Cause it sort of led my way into working with Goldie and documenting his club, at which point I'd crystallized that sort of club photography for me. And.

And then once I got that under my belt, I got a chance to work with the producers and then sort of start to create their iconography, start to work out ways of. Again, realizing that photography was used in such a way as to promote the culture.

Because this was set against the backdrop of, like, the Daily Star taking pictures of drunken women and saying jungleist Nazi techno in Brighton. It was a Daily Star headline. And it was just really insulting, really demeaning. Again, this.

This idea that the media will just attack young people dancing, like, there's something wrong with us. Why would you go out and dance?

And so my job was to make sure that didn't come across, that people actually went out, young people went out and had a good time and go out and kill each other or rape each other. They actually just went out and danced.

And there's something purely magical about the act of dancing all night, particularly after midnight on a full Moon, something happens to you. Who knew, you know.

So do you find it weird when you. If you look at. If I look at sort of footage of DJ sets and stuff now.

Yeah.

And the dj, like, have everyone in. In and amongst them and stuff.

Yeah.

You know, say some of the stuff you get on YouTube, but the crowd just isn't. They just seem so reserved, comparatively to what clubbing was.

Yeah, I think so. I think it's a mixed bag, you see, because I don't know if you remember back then, like, clubbing in London was wild.

And then you'd go to Paris and you'd look around you and go, no one's doing anything. Everyone's smoking and talking while the DJ is playing his heart out.

And this was mid-90s Paris before, and those Daft Punk kids really weren't really rocking crowd. Like, the only time I've seen them, like, wild people out is when they did the American stuff in the noughties. But anyway, the point is that it was.

We.

I realized it was like a cultural thing that we were. We were really. We had something, we were dancing, we were in the moment, we were having it. And then something weird things happened.

For me, visually, once the smoking has stopped, the clubs didn't look as exciting because smoking, the atmosphere, makes things look really edgy, makes the lights look really nice. And then Red Bull changed the energy in the room, which was weird because. And then the clubs became cleaner, so there was less.

What do you mean about Red Bull changing the energy?

Yeah, Red Bull changed everything. When Red Bull became legal, because it was illegal for a long time, wasn't it?

And I don't know, I didn't realize.

Yeah, Red Bull was illegal. It was illegal, but it was banned in this country. You couldn't get Red Bull anywhere.

And then suddenly Red Bull became legal as a drink, or they took the taurine out or something was replaced or whatever. And then it sort of. And then you started having Red Bull in your drink rather than rum.

Even the coke recipe changed because coke used to have obviously cocaine in it, but it also used to have kola nuts in it, which was a stimulant, which they took out in the mid-90s as well. So coke stopped working as a experience. Red Bull replaced it in the late 90s, I think, and I don't know, I think that's a spurned garage.

Like, there was a whole series of changes within what people consumed while they were dancing that changed the nature of the music and the people there, which was a mixed bag in some cases. The nicer, cleaner, carpeted clubs with your Red Bull or your champagnes were just a sexier sound. Like the girls went there.

And the grimier, edgier, dirtier clubs were just more male. I'm losing my train of thought here.

But they also reminded me of the time when kids would go out and listen to drum and bass DJs that were producers that only played their own tracks. They wouldn't play to the crowd. Like they wouldn't play a set of all the great hits at the time. They only played their own music.

Obviously Bookham was famous for this and that was fine, but it was only Bookham. But by the end of the 90s, every main DJ was only playing their own music.

And then that meant the only people turning up were other producers who were just there to sort of like watch, I don't know, X, Y, Z happen. But I'm not.

What I wanted to get to was that over time the trend to actually be engaged in a dance or to be slightly aloof from the dance swings around.

I think, and I say, because I would agree with you, until I think I saw the Fred Again Alexander palace performances and I was like, yeah, these kids are engaged fully. This was only last year.

And is that because Fred again is a more conscious clubber who's like, you know, giving his fans water and performing in a very specific way, still having that sort of boiler room situation where there's people behind you as well as in front of you.

But, oh, is there more consideration for the sound dynamics that every corner of the room is so beautifully tuned that you're going to have the perfect audio experience, even if it's digital.

So it's like, I think every generation, at least within every new genre, changes the way they party within that genre. The problem being is England hasn't invented the genre in a long time. I think the last time we came out with something was dubstep.

I don't know what we've done since.

Yeah, it's.

I mean, is that because you were talking about that sort of cross pollination that happened in the early days of Jungle being formed with that, I guess you had really distinct things. I guess that fed into It. But.

But now just everyone's influence is so broad with streaming because you're not getting handed tapes from your mates of certain clubs or it's not. Take this album, take this single, check it out, you know, so it's like everyone's just influenced by everything. So like how do you.

How does a new genre come around now that's so. Has its own identity?

Yeah, this is it. And I think it's still.

We're starting to realize that everyone's become like imagine the curated thing of listen to this tape, listen to this tape, get a real sense of what was going on in it, try and mimic it yourself.

Play it to the same set of heads in a bigger club and then have the reaction whether they all go off having heard this song for the first time and going, oh my God, what is this? It's that side of the chain that we've lost.

We've lost that ability to feed back into our mates without it just going off somewhere so that we can then get their approval before we then move on to the next stage of it. Because we'd always be sharing these tapes in a way like and making our own little dubs or our little edits and then playing them back to ourselves.

And then it becomes the tune like, oh, I flipped it, I did this with it. You know that feedback loop isn't happening.

But when I see it happen and I only see it recently in like places like Africa where there's so many more spaces to just randomly dance and rock up, that DJs are forced to play more and more tunes that will go were better than the last one. Where the sonics were deeper than the last one. So the DJs are forced to really break records, break tunes to the crowd. I don't. We still kind.

We don't have that when we go out now. We just want a good dj. You can just hold our attention long enough. Not for us not to pull out our phones.

Whether or not they can break new records, I just don't know. But the last time I had a good dance was probably the BBE set recently the last bank holiday, Kenny Doak was a bunch of hip hop DJs playing house.

Kenny Doak, DJ Spinner was Victor Du Play there. Benji B was there. It was such a good lineup Daps. It was a good lineup.

It was a good solid veteran, at least 30 year old plus DJs playing modern music on a nice sound system. And it made it. And it did that thing that only house can do because house is A feeling.

And it really gave you that feeling, the house where it just builds you up, builds you up, crescendo and then melodies you down again. But slowly building you up across the whole night. And you just reminded just how important it is to be a great curator in this role.

And I think throughout conversation, I think we're constantly talking about our mates who inform us, but these were heads, these were kids who obsessed with one thing or another who would inform our sense of like, we might not be into Morrissey, but he's a fucking Morrissey head. And he did play the best Morrissey record you've ever heard.

And he thought, all right, I like Morrissey, but you needed that mate who'll just line you up with that.

Yeah.

And that.

Yeah.

And DJ still have that power. They could still know how to put the record in there to take you to other place, which is still in you.

And I suppose you've got now, you know when in day to day life do you ever have to be subjected to more than two seconds of a song that you're not enjoying?

Yeah.

Because you can just skip it straight away.

Yeah.

And also how. How much of the time do you listen to things in like Good Fidelity? You know, so much of the time we're listening blue, you know, Bluetooth.

We're not even on like wired headphones.

Yeah, yeah.

So there's all sorts of challenges.

Yeah, that's it. And those big rigs are lovely like headphones. You know, I hear people actually mix down on headphones. Crazy. Crazy. Like what are you, radio listeners?

And there's a. There's a diversity of listening space which was kind of.

We were really consist of it in the 90s, like hip hop and the Jeep mixed, you know, the mix specifically for your car that has over more subs than it needs.

But those frequencies are fine because in your car you got subs in the back and you just want to rattle everyone's windows and drive down the street while red man screaming in your ear.

And then you've got the radio edit, which was like slightly sort of thinner, so it cuts through slightly smaller edit, you know, cut out the intro bits. Those sort of like nuancey things are just lost now. And that's. I think that's a shame. But.

And hit records essentially hit grooves of two minute long loops. Yeah, but we live in the age of. I mean the loop. I mean it is where we're at also in society. Like you'd think like western society is in a doom loop.

We are so into loops. Now like even now, we can. We make loops just so we can listen to stuff on loop.

Like I. I find myself going to the drum machine, just sampling grooves so I can just listen to the loop. Because it seems that's where we are. We just love loops now and track pads and all that.

So loops is an interesting one because I was. I was chatting to a mate the other day about what do you. What do you think's the best loop that a producer's caught?

So for me, like no id, like the Common Resurrection loop, the Armand Jamal, like that. I think just. Just for an isolated loop, I could listen to that for. Yeah, probably like six hours. Yeah, I'd be happy with that.

With or without the drums? With or without lyrics, I couldn't care less. It's just such a good loop.

And like Arrested Development, the second half of the Bob James phrase, stuff like that. So, yeah, I mean, I make loops, but it's because I'm not capable of turning it into anything more.

Yeah, but. But there's joy in that. And I think they found it like the new generation of hip hop, like Alchemist stuff, where it's just loops.

It's just perfect loops.

And I mean, insanely dug records as well.

Yeah, Insanely dug records and no kick drum. And the vocal is up front, you know. And it's interesting because your mix down's more actually interesting because you've got less to mix.

And the voice and where you place the voice and the sound effects. Oh, it's really all that space you're playing with now again.

Yeah. I really want to understand Alchemist's audio chain.

Yeah, yeah.

If that's like his flow. Because how. Why is it that his samples sound so good?

Yeah.

Is he on like just an incredible, incredible turntable.

Yeah. Or is it just polished to.

I would say, you know, it's funny, there's a little thing someone was saying about MJ Cole and one of the producers, like, why is it your sound sounds better than mine in the club? And he goes, you know what I do? I just lay everything flat.

Yes. Yeah, I saw that. Was it Plastician?

Yeah, that's it. That's it. And I was like, I bet you Alchemist is on that. He's on the flat. Just less but flat. Just that raw dog, the whole thing.

One sure needle, one technique turntable. Raw dog.

Well, it's like the other thing I think is as well, like just going back to the mixing and stuff. Like Pete Rock and Commons album. Yeah. I think it's one of the Best of the sort of Elder Statesman albums. But if you listen to it, it just doesn't.

It doesn't quite sound like a Pete Rock production.

Yeah.

And I think all it is is like layering and arrangement and stuff. But it sounds like it's mixed for earphones.

Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.

Like the cleanness of it and stuff. It just misses that grit.

Yeah, he does miss that grip. And there was that something about.

There's a certain school of New York hip hop which is made for headphones so that the vocals like in your ear so that on a Monday morning you feel like someone's just giving you a mantra to work with.

As opposed to sort of the sort of bigger mixes that the LA mixes, which is like made for your car so that you've got the drop top down and all that space, the rim shot cuts through those different placements. I always found specific to the cultures that were making those different schools of hip hop and how all that sort of crossed over.

Particularly after 9 11, all the new York guys just left and went to la and then, then shuffle turned up on your ipod and then that was it. We just became everything all at once. And that, that, that, that.

And then suddenly we started to admire all the other people that just didn't go with.

Didn't sort of go with technological determinism like the MF Dooms have just stayed in a particular lane, dug in deeper and just carried on and found more disciples that followed that sound. And then it just. Great.

And you know, Doom is interesting because you can see a line from Doom from KMD on Electra Records, where it's got the same pressing technology as a Pete Rock and cl. Smooth pressing, Fat Juicy. All the sub basses are there. And those. Those electro presses were beautiful because they had brand new being as well.

And they're, you know. And you'd hear like record loops, but master to perfection. Even the scratches were nice. You know, just the top ends are taken off.

It was just nice and muted. And then the vocal will be above that and it's like, oh, genius. All the way through to, you know, a post.

Just the stuff he just does one with with Mad Lib. With Diller, you're like, wow, there is a continuum. But I suppose the only thing that changed was it just. It went down to cassette form.

You know, you sort of had the big studio and you shrink it down back to cassette and then you expand again. It's really interesting, that contraction that occurs. I think Diller pioneered that for me because you'd Hear all the what?

You could hear the Diller when he just had only simps. Only pure. Like the Frank and Dank album. Just pure. Just original synths, levels flat. Just straight to tape versus rough draft, straight to cassette.

Done in his bedroom in a hospital, chopping up breaks. That's hip hop, isn't it? Where you swell and contract, depending on where your money's at.

Just. Just on Doom, then. Did you ever work with him?

No, unfortunately not. Unfortunately not. It's doom. I knew when Doom was around, I just didn't know where he was. People would be like, oh, yeah.

I saw Doom the other day in a news agent and it sounded mythical and it was like. And it was true. I just didn't realize it was in Leeds. That was the only thing. Otherwise I would have just stalked him and tracked him down.

Caught that train to Leeds and just go to the local beer shop and work out which newsagent's serving him. His. His beer, his old gold, you know?

Yeah, yeah. So this brings us on to talking about hip hop and stuff, then. So just. Just in.

In your book, I was just noticed in there that reading the bit about when you shot Aaliyah, photographed Aaliyah, I should say, you were still at college at that time.

Yeah.

So you were kind of like, young. Did you go straight from school to.

I shot Aaliyah, and so that would have been college uni. Sort of like that hangover year where you worked out what to do with your life.

Were you in London?

Yes. Yeah, yeah, totally in London, or. I never really left London, you know, I sort of. When I went to New York to shoot in New York, it's really.

Because it was 2 to 1 to the pound, you know, so. $2.

You got work over there. So just to. Just to understand your timeline, then, because. As well, because you mentioned about the Internet access.

Yeah.

Was that the catalyst for you connecting to the. This level of rapper and singer?

Yeah, basically. Yeah. We were. We were connected in a sense that I could get in touch with management. So when I went to New York, particularly.

Particularly when it was two to one to the pound, you'd get a cheap ticket on Air India. That was painful. Trust me, that's painful.

Anyway, were you flying via India?

No, via Canada.

Oh, okay.

Yeah. That was the cheapest ticket. It was like.

It's like the equivalent of Air Norway was today sort of the cheapest ticket to New York was always being The Air India ticket and you just get there and stay in a dive hotel. But you'd already made your contacts and, and you already sent fax. Americas were mainly about faxes.

They kind of took you seriously if you sent the fax. So thankfully the Apple modem could do faxes as well. Just random.

So anyway, like, even to this day, if you want to rent a flat in Japan, you still need to send the fax. Yeah, don't sleep on faxes. They really could. Powerful things. They are.

So I could make connections, say that I was coming in, meet up with certain rappers and DJs and just photograph them.

While I would go to New York and exploit the fact that it was cheaper to be in New York than it would be to be in London at the time, because everything was half the price and you pick up your records and you pick up everything and it was beautiful. It was a beautiful time to exploit that thing. And I always did like, it's always been my barometer. Whenever the dollar goes $2 to the pound, I'm out.

What's interesting now in America is America is really expensive. America is just a very expensive place. Like, I thought it was like 15 for an egg crust sandwich in Pret.

It's just, it's embarrassing the amount of inflation they're going through. So at those points in the, in the 90s, I would always go to America. I'd always make the visits.

I'd always connect with them in such a way that I could just meet people the same way we, you know, meet in jay Z in 95 as an independent rapper.

Me working with Raucous because I would, you know, get in touch, bring music over from the UK because they had a drum and bass outfit that they wanted to sign on that were based across the road from me. And I would go to America with the Dats and vice versa.

So we're constantly sort of like exporting British culture in exchange for imports in American culture. That was always been my thing. So I, I, I sort of, yeah, I took advantage of those things.

And mainly being based in London meant that I could just get on the plane and go quite easily.

So you're going independently and then selling the photographs to publishers?

Yeah, basically like, you know, I'd say to mix America, I'm going to be in New York. Is there anything you want doing? They'll be like, no. And then five minutes later they'll call me on the phone going, are you in New York? Like, yeah.

Okay, cool. Could you shoot Fat Boy Slim? He's Number one. And he happens to be there, like, cool, done. Let's just do this.

And then I'll then sell photographs of people to other magazines across in America and vice versa. So I'll be shooting for Herb magazine as well, you know, and people forget, like, you know, early part of my career, I'm shooting for flyers.

You wouldn't be shooting for an underground magazine called Touch or On the Go or, you know, Style and the Family Tunes, which was a magazine in Germany or rap pages or whoever. Because.

Yeah, because it's a bit like, you know, I'm out here just literally chasing my favorite rappers, MCs and DJs across most genres that I can think of at the time. So I'd even be photographing people like Ahmed Van Helden, who I thought was amazing in terms of how we.

Because the hip hop house thing really was like a thing I really should. It's kind of hip house was a thing. Ish. And it's still there.

But as I said, if you hear hip hop DJs play house, you are hearing house as it should be played. Yeah, because hip hop DJs understand the roots of house.

Like, and it wasn't necessarily their music, but they always had cousins that played house and they know what house is. Particularly that in DJs, like Kenny Dope, where house and disco and the dance side of the culture is always in them, you know, and that is. Is super.

Anyway, still want to document all of that because I fell in love with a club called Body and Soul in New York. And it was the most amazing experience when it came to hearing dance music and hearing house music and hearing how house isn't just doof, doof.

It's not a fall to the floor, it's a feeling.

And only the DJ and Frankie Knuckles and all these house teachers would say they brought the feeling to you and they somehow mixed it so seamlessly that you couldn't see the joins. All you felt was this feeling.

Yeah, I think with like your Todd Terry's and your Armand Van Helden's and people like that. It's how they work with samples as well.

Yeah, exactly, exactly. And also stabby samples. Like, you hit that pad like Dan Dan, Dan, Dan, Dan.

And it's just, just, just you want that energy and then the drum breaks are just there to support that. Yeah.

And when our men sort of like started infecting all the A train and all the new generation of hip hop kids and they started making house, it's like, okay, great. Yeah, they get it. You just taught them how to get it. How to chop up.

How you chop up samples for house and hip hop is kind of similar, but how you arrange is different.

Yeah, like I like hip hop's kind of my hip hop and digging and funko and stuff. That's kind of my first love, really. Like, I was into, I got into like happy hardcore and that and like house and stuff when I was younger.

But then when I found hip hop and funko soul and stuff, that was kind of it for quite a long time.

But then when you've spent all this time trying to make loops that sound like premiere or whoever, when you then go, actually, I'm going to try and make something that's a bit more dancing up temper. It's just a lot of fun to make something with that sort or to try and make something with that sort of energy.

Yeah, yeah, it is fun. It definitely is fun. I, I, you know, Yeah, I think, I think you should allow yourself that fun.

I think it was good to see it in the flesh where you see these guys like Kenny Dope and all these guys having fun and it seemed, it seemed, it didn't seem as labored. Like when they're playing 7 inches, it seems a bit like, whoa, you guys are working now.

Like, I see you sweating as you're slapping on the sevens, just trying to find the perfect break and cutting like, mate, you're just killing yourself to make it sound perfect. Whereas when you take a step back and house it, just slapping two tunes together and all those, those key, those bass lines are in key.

Let's just see where this goes. That's just fun.

And I feel, yeah, I think we all need that, you know, that sort of like, you know, if you've been working on the tune for so long, it's always like, certainly when I'm playing on the npc, there's always like another page I open to just throw random ideas and just to hear the quirky break, just to hear a break chopped up.

Well, with my NPC at the moment, I'm trying to work out how to use it live while DJing. Oh, to sample and, and loop live. But then how to like match the tempos quickly and Stuff how to try and like yeah, loading a load of brakes.

I'm you know, using the input. Using the input with the through on it as like so that I can use that on Ascend to.

Yeah.

Add delays and add low pass filters and stuff. I'm doing all this stuff and why am I doing it now?

I think you're onto something there, but I think you sort of. You're about like six months away from the Chemical Brothers, you know what I mean? Or, or a guy called Gerald.

Because every one of that generation have just gone into that mindset where it just becomes the long loop like. And it's fun because you kind of. You need the crowd to help you develop the rave wave.

So I remember watching studying guy called Gerald and he was like bringing his 800 weights, his three or threes and rigging them all up and just pressing on. And that was it. That would be the whole night. And then it's just oscillating, oscillating, oscillating, dropping things out, just letting the.

And then the crowd, the crowd like suddenly drops. Cut something out where you only got a hi hat going and the crowd start cheering and you're like fuck it, this is that the hi hat.

Go for a minute, bring in the clap. Yeah, let's go. And then you're playing. Then you just play. But I think A, you got to do it live because it could only be done live.

And B, I think it's more fun when you jam it out. So you have. Certainly my thing was either hip hop breaks like Dilla esque samples which I tried out at the hip Hop Chip shop.

And if you can pioneer it, please do it. Dillet S samples of a trumpet player to help with the bridges. You know, when you're bridging from one thing to another.

So there's a live thing with as you said, delays that are in time so that when they hit one note it. You could just drop the drums back and it'll be fine, you know?

Yeah, yeah.

So it's kind of leaving all that synchronization so that there's a live mic that's always kind of charged or you can. That can be affected by them. And it's really a jamming session. It's like a hip hop jamming session.

Kind of reminds me what the Beastie Boys probably did when they went back to instruments. They just sort of just cr. Just unplugged everything else and turned everything else on and just started jamming into the room.

But yeah, but you have to play Into a room with that setup. It's a room thing is that. And I've seen guy called Gerald do it.

And I'm like, it's the room that makes it make sense, because as you said, you think you're flying blind until you just hit that bass note and it just flies across the room and someone starts losing their mind to it. Like, here we go.

Yeah, Yeah. I think with that sort of stuff as well, You've. You've got to. Like one of my mates that I've. He's helped me out with a couple of tunes before, and.

And he's got the big, like, modular synth sort of setup and stuff like that. And I think when you're doing that and when you're chaining things together and stuff, you've just got to have absolute mastery.

Yes.

Of your setup and understand.

Yeah.

If this goes wrong and I've got to do this to bring it in and stuff like that. It's complicated stuff.

It is complicated. But, you know, Lee Perry has taught us the way. If you just strip it down to eight channels, one delay, one reverb, you can. You just. You can. You can.

You. You'll boil it down to the perfect thing.

And Lee Scratch Pro did the ultimate thing one year where you could go into the south bank and he would have his master tapes running and you can make your own dubs of his tracks. And so everything was on, like, 16 channels. Bass line, drums, everything else. Delays already preset.

And all you have to do is punch in and punch out, Right. And. And that's dub. And then you. And then you put. You know, then you have the.

You can turn the delays up, this goes on, and then drop the bass back in again. And it just made you realize that, yeah, he just had the setup so tight that all you have to do is have fun.

The drummer will come in, put his sets down. The bass will come in for the sets. They'll put all, like, eight parts down and then just play with it.

Have different singers come in and dance in different ways to that song. But, yeah, I wish that.

I was just gonna say I wish that for all museums, that we have a music museum that we can actually have, that we can do our own jobs. You can have access to the tapes. You know, that's.

That's a.

That's a lovely thing to have one day for all of us. And obviously those of us who. Who are into editing and somehow can get into those stems, as they call it, and make their own boogie edits.

Great, great, great, good. Times. I don't have the patience. Right. But good times. Sorry.

Yeah, well, I've got a couple of the Mad Professor, Marvin Gay dubs and they're so nice.

Thank you for putting me on to that. Yeah. Because I've only been picking up on the John Morales edits, but if. If you say mad Professional or large Professor.

Mad Professor.

Okay. I can imagine what he can do with that.

Yeah, it's just. It's really. It's still got like the sort of movement and energy whilst being really dopey as well. It's really nicely done.

Yeah, it sounds good. On a big rig. Do you get a chance to play out much?

No, not much. I always would like to play out more. I'm in this sort of thing. Like, I used to play out more and then I kind of.

I started doing some stuff with a band that wasn't necessarily where my heart was and then doing my own sort of DJing. Fell back a bit because it was a lot of fun and, yeah.

Social.

It was. Yeah, it was good at the time. But then like, you kind of look back after. It's like, I could have like, maybe made some momentum with DJing.

And now being. Being the age I am and stuff, you're trying to, like, get back into it and being somewhere where there's not a huge call for what I do.

Yeah.

So me and my mate, like, in the suburbs now, so we're just going to take the decks down to a local. Local, like micro pub in a couple of weeks and play there.

Yeah.

Because it's about whether you can play records or whether you have to take digital so that you can.

Yeah.

Kind of meet everyone's needs or not. If it was up to me, ideal world, I'd probably go somewhere once a month, play for about five hours playing records.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, that'd do me.

Yeah, definitely. And I think that's the need for like, remember like the Plastic People sort of venue where it's just.

It's just for heads, you know, once a month it's a deep set and it's. That's it. And. And the freedom is to actually, you know, and having Ade come along and go, no, no, no, hold on. You can't play it on this needle.

You need this needle to play this record. That level of connoisseurship is it's always going to be valuable.

I didn't realize that was how they came about.

Yeah, yeah. So poverty. Yeah. So imagine you and your mates could only afford the one Monk album shipped in on Blue Note from America.

And so you'd have it and play on the nice rig and then with your whiskey and everyone had to shut up and listen to it because you've taken out an hour of your life to come and listen to this record that night. And. And I think that level of connoisseurship is still there in the world.

I just think it's just finding, you know, finding the, the, the, the space that will allow it to happen, you know.

My favorite thing now is the Tabernacle in West London, which is a community center that has its own valve sound system that it pulls out once a month on a Friday. And it's fucking heaving because the community comes out and plays in the community sound system. The Gerard, the valves, all British valves as well.

And just like. And the nice units. And it's heaving in there. Every generation, from the 8 year old man to the 15 year old kid, just having it.

Amazing.

And so I wish that for all community centers, that every community center can have its own sound system. And one day every community center can clash.

You know, I mean, whether it's, you know, from Scumthorpe to Dudley to Tabernacle, we have a cup clash who's the best sound system in the country? And that'll be amazing.

I think these things, it's like looking at how do you get back the community that you had back in the 80s or whatever. It's kind of through the digital revolution and social media and then the lockdowns and stuff like that.

Yeah, it feels to me at least like communities kind of eroded. Yeah, it's like, how do we rebuild it again?

Yeah.

And I think for the engineers that are building sound systems, I've seen that their basic thing now is batteries, where you can build a sound system, a big fuck off rig that you can power off a battery for 12 hours, for 12 hours autonomously. That's the future.

So then somewhere in the countryside, for instance, if you can find a nice valley somewhere, park up your sound system and just private land, just blast that shit for a whole evening and, and have a rave in the woods, you know, Nice. And that's the kind of mobility that I think is required where, you know, you gather enough. This is that Takes it back to the 90s.

Oh my God, what are we going to do? Yeah, we're going to the woods, we're going to have a dance.

Someone's bringing drinks and someone's bringing a few mushrooms and it will be fine, you know, like the very next morning we'll call you. But go home, it's like, it's good and as such, and I, I feel that's still possible.

And I'm only reminded of that because I was in Jamaica recently and you're up in the hills and on a Friday night you can hear sound system five miles away because you're in deep jungle. The sound is travels by nature of the hills. But it's such a nice thing to hear music through the night. It doesn't.

It's not like it's a problem, it's just, yeah, somebody's having fun. You know, the tunes are banging. Like these are banging ass tunes.

And you go to sleep, you wake up next day, you got no idea where the sound system was because you were in the middle of the forest.

Yeah, well, like where I live, we're about. So we're in Derby on the edge of the city.

And last year when it was Download festival in Donington, that's what, about 10, 12 miles away, you could hear, you could hear the music from that somehow it's first year I've ever noticed that. It was mad.

It is weird.

Acoustics in the countryside is really interesting, but because of it, I think, you know, whether or not you find an old bunker somewhere with low ceilings and concrete walls just to make the sound system really dubby. Oh my God.

You know, you know, you know already when you're in that setup, you're not going to bring certain records, you're going to bring certain other records because it just hits in that room better. And then if you play into a pub, as you said, do you go? You spread it wide.

But you know, nuance is such a fascinating thing because you can't tell with DJ and you just can't tell how deep you can go and how many people can go with you because for whatever reason they, they grew up wherever they grew up or they lived in New York between 87 and 92 and they know the tunes, you know, and, and that's some. That's playing a set in Derby, you know, so I wouldn't discount what people are capable of taking on board.

It's just having the opportunity to serve these people. Or at the very least last night I was thinking about it. Should I send My take to Croydon FM and go, right, I'm going to do radio.

Like, I want to do pirate radio, because I've done pirate radio a few times and it is fun because you are playing hardcore. Whatever you're playing to the unknown, you know?

Yeah, yeah. Just going back to what you. What you were just saying.

This made me think, like, there's no better feeling than getting a good request from someone when you're DJing. You get this request on someone and you're like, they've got it. They like this music, they care about it.

And they've told me something that I do really want to play.

Yeah.

So satisfying.

Exactly. Then it ramps up. It ramps up the way you hedge the. Yeah, you. Shape of the crowd, basically.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

And it's. It's a lovely thing. And I'm. And again, sometimes there are records that you can play that are a total education.

Like, you know, you're the only one who's got a copy of this. And whoever hears this is going to be educated on a certain sound and they're going to go on Shazam. And they won't find it. And that's just.

Yeah.

And that's just life, you know, we're gonna have fun. That I always enjoy. I always love being surprised by DJs. And it happens. And I. I find. Yes.

Particularly as there's plenty more time in random parts of, like, Jamaica and New York. Jamaica and Africa, where you can be in the middle of nowhere. And he were great DJ player, set to.

You know, because for some reason they've got DJs at Bus Step. You know what?

Service stations in G. On a Saturday, on a Sunday morning, at six in the morning, there's a DJ at the service station greeting everyone coming off the bus. Whose idea was that? Whose idea was that? And it's like, okay, this works. He's banging and he's shouting. You go, he's having it. I was like, what the.

Okay, we can make it. But, you know. But I don't know what's happened. It's like. It's like bandstands. I'm imagining that bandstands were built for bands to play music on.

Yeah.

Why aren't their bands playing music on bandstands?

Because you need somewhere to smoke when it's raining.

Yeah, exactly. It superseded it. I'm like, why can't DJ AJ just go to a band stand and play on the park for three hours?

Yeah, that's a really good point.

And still get the deck chairs out.

Yeah, just. Just Going back to photography. Just in your book, I was on the section about Wu Tang, and it mentioned in there.

I forget the exact wording, but some of the publishers basically got you to work with artists like Wu Tang because they were, I think, the word in these, like, acts that they didn't know how to handle or something like that.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. The Wu Tang fell into that at that time where it's like, they couldn't work out which way it was gonna go. Like, in terms of.

Would they even step in front of the camera? Are they. You know, like. Because, you know, some.

You might go in someone's studio and, like, excuse me, Mr. Meth, could you put the spliff down, please? Like, you can't do that. He's gonna. He's Mr. Meth. He's gonna need that. And so in terms of, like, getting them to go in front and not be.

Was kind of like.

Because basically, they weren't sensitive to who these kids were or the fact that, you know, they've never been on a plane before and this is their first time sort of leaving the country, and they. They needed to feel safe, basically. So, yeah, so they always sort of put me in touch with, you know, I could say, you know, there's something.

I mean, we see it differently now. But, see, even people like Coolio would have been seen as, oh, we're not so sure. And I'm like, the guy's a former fireman. I think he's all right.

You know, like, you know, you've seen the video and you've seen, like. But that's. People are performing to a certain extent, and some people are not performing. Some people are exactly who they say they are.

But again, to disarm them is part of your job as a photographer. You know, you can get on the wrong side of Jay Z very quickly. You. You work not to. You know, so ultimately, it's about sort of respecting boundaries.

And I think photographers back then, particularly if you.

Yes, some photographers might consider themselves to be bigger than the acts they were shooting, but that can happen to all of us where we don't fully understand who you're talking to or what you're dealing with. You might think it's Mr. Meth, who's just some random kid.

But by that time, you know, let's say you grew up in the 80s where pop acts always seem to wear blouses, and now you've got someone wearing camouflage fatigues. We're in a different time. So I think there was that too, as well. Like, essentially, I was in my teens, late teens, early 20s.

So I would be like, you photograph these wild kids, because you are essentially a wild kid. And that was fine for me because I love these guys. And I really wanted to just basically hang out.

Not hang out in a big way, but just long enough to actually get the picture and get something that, for me, made me think of them as I would a comic book character. Like, this is how. This is Peter Parker. This is Clark Kent. This is Bruce Wayne, you know.

But somehow you can almost see their Batmans as Superman's and their Spider mans because they are alter egos.

What's interesting as well, with that collection of shots that, like, each one of them you've shot in such a different way.

Yeah.

You know, it's like you. Did you have all the shots in mind before you shot them based on them or my.

I always wanted it. And I think I was looking at my contact sheet recently, and I was looking at the first shot, and it was the group shot.

And from the group shot, I realized they all couldn't be in the same picture together. That was impossible. Like, they just wouldn't do it. Like, they always had, like, someone's pissed off that this guy stolen my lyrics.

So it was like, oh, okay, so I'm gonna have to work with them individually.

And given that the first time I shot them, I only had, like, six Wu Tang members, I had to wait a good 10, 15 years before I could get all of them, you know, and then have no Meet the Rizza finally, lastly. And even Capadonna, even Young Dirty Bastard now is on on camera.

So because you have to sort of gather them all together and then put them together as a body of work, which taught me to. Especially as a photographer, to build bodies of work. Like, the core of what you do as a result of it is to have a body of work. And for me, a body.

My first sort of. Oh, my God, I've got it. Is the Wu Tang. That's a body of work that I can. That the world will understand. You know, let's say.

I mean, I've got a pet peeve. I've got a pet thing for, like, photographing lone trees in the landscape. I just like that sort of thing. I could have a body of the.

The best shots of lone trees in the landscape by any other photographer, but I don't have enough yet to put together a body of work of, like, 10 great trees in the landscape. Tree. Sorry, Lone trees. The lone tree is my pet obsession, but Wu Tang's was Like, yeah, I think I've got a body of work here. I think I can do this.

And so pulling it together, giving them their individual identity and then taking the negative. So like a master printer and be like, I want you to translate these into. Into something a body of work.

Like, because there's something to be said about being the analog photographer is that my job is to take the picture and have the film. A printer's job is to interpret the film and make a print. And I wanted.

And it's interesting how having a printer's take on it was to almost mold the things into really strong individual iconic imageries. Images but with a tone or color temperature that makes them all quite consistent.

I was thinking Bailey when I shot that.

So going to Bailey's printer and having him tease out the Bailey quality in it, but also knowing that I didn't shoot on black and white like Bailey did, I shot on color. So I still, I still wanted my own sort of take on things.

And again, it's back to the sort of opening question really about learning photography from other photographers, you know, rather than necessarily from a book.

And hence the reason why my book is written in first person because I didn't want people to think, you know, I'm going to use the same language that people would assume would be the language of photography, where you talk in a third person, but rather first person. This is my experience picking up the camera, taking the pictures. But also what feeds into that isn't. Is your intention.

And that comes from who you are, where you come from and what you. What you feel you need to do with this tool. Yeah. And making.

And making the most of that philosophically, rather than getting into the technical thing,.

I suppose it's kind of like think like it's just made me think about like when I learned guitar, I didn't really listen to a lot of guitar music, but because I'd done other instruments when I was younger, I kind of had my head around music theory, so I kind of got all that stuff.

But there was another friend of mine who probably didn't have that music theory background, but just listened to better music and to me it was just a way better guitarist because he just had so much feel.

Yeah, Fraser. Yeah, yeah.

And I suppose it's that sort of thing, isn't there? You're understanding, you're in your influences and stuff like that.

Yeah, this is it. It's all about feel in that regards and I think a lot. And again, it comes down to sampling. I was thinking about the.

The drum and bass thing when I met Kevin Sanderson, who famously invented the Reese space line.

You know, he's credited for inventing it, but essentially he bought a Casio keyboard, there was a preset, he twinkled it a little bit and it came out with this sound and then he used it in his track. But really famously, it was Ray Keith that sampled it for, I think it was Terrorist or one of the Jungle songs.

And that was the first time he'd come back.

But it's the way Ray Keith took that sample and tuned it because he's just took a bass sound and then this internal loops that only the S950 could do. So the chop was quite interesting and made something that went on to become an iconic bass line.

And I think it comes down to what you're saying about hearing and tuning and just being able to pick out something that's like a little bit and cook it down. Which is slightly different from hip hop sampling, where it's a loop.

You are literally snatching someone else's bass sound and then tune in, making more of that bass sound. So it sits on a track that relies on bass, so probably has to stick a sign underneath it. Oh, that was fun. That was fun.

To thank Kevin Sanderson for coming up with a baseline and not suing anybody for losing that baseline. It's gone now, you know, it's gone. And.

And I would say the same thing for the Eamon brothers as well, for allowing this bass sound to just run and run and run and run and run and run and run and so be it. And the whole genres can be built on these little moment, these little moments and recordings. Yeah, there's something to be said for that.

Something to be said for the ear and the technical over the spiritual, which is again why the book is like the spirit behind the lens.

It's trying to refocus everyone to sort of look at the spiritual component to things, the mystery of it all, how things come to you like mates, friends, love, laughter, joy, pain. The sound of the crashing waves floating on the. On an ocean.

How all those things can actually feed into you being a better musician or you know, like, rather than, you know, allowing it to think. And I would say even going to Jamaica and just being on the island is an inspiration.

It all starts to make sense because in that environment of that sunshine and that food and everything else that island has to offer, it all makes sense. You just have to be there. And you come away with that and it walks with you for the rest of your life.

As a photographer going to work with new subjects or people, you know, whatever the preferred term is. Do you.

Or at least when you're early in your career doing that, do you feel the pressure to act a certain way in front, like you're more confident than you are, or is it always been just like, be myself? Because people kind of see through it.

I've definitely had things in the working world where I've tried to seem more confident and I've just looked like a dickhead.

Yeah, there's a worry there, I think. I think that's the thing. You sort of give it some and then you realize that doesn't work. You know, like, you know, being.

Being around like mob deep and thinking, okay, I gotta hold my own here, so I'm gonna roll a spliff and smoke your place out and be mad cool and share it with them like my homies. And then you didn't realize at the time that actually Americans don't mix tobacco with their weed.

And it's antamount to just getting killed because it's like, what did you put in my spliff? What did you put in this spliff? It's tobacco. What is wrong with you? It's like, oh, what a. I didn't need to be that guy. I already in the room.

I'm good. Like, we've got this far. We're good. All I got to do is take a picture. But I tried it. I learned my lesson.

I was like, you know, from this point on, there's no, absolutely no need whatsoever. And that artists, specifically, I've worked with young artists as they're coming up. Everyone needs help, everyone needs support.

It's not about you, it's about them. And as long as you support them, they kind of support you in the same sense that, you know, when I first met Estelle, she was in college.

She went to my old college.

We had a conversation in college as I was teaching, giving a talk about my career, and she was like, oh, you know, one day I'd love to work with you, blah, blah, blah. And you know, this was talking about like a 17 year old girl. Eventually she did get in touch. Eventually we did shoot.

Eventually we did create a look for her that allowed her to get signed. And then when she got signed, she came back to me. So we can go to New York City, take some shots.

So it's kind of like this thing where you realize, well, it's a long road and you're going to see people as you go along. So you're better off just helping them get there. Because we can all get there together, really.

And particularly when it comes to iconography or trying to change the way people perceive you. Because the time when Estelle came to me, she was like, she's a rapper who wore tracksuits and was like a young.

Like she looked like a, you know, like a. A grind, almost like what a grime MC would look like.

And then when we work together, we put a skirt, heels, a shirt, custom made shirts, custom made outfits, and tried to make her look like money. And that was basically the mission at the time. So then you stop thinking about trying to impress people.

You only used to actually want to support people to help them get to where they need to go and they're your clients. Then what's impressive then is that Estelle's a client. And the same could be said with Chronix as well.

Like trying to build an iconography for the music by working with him really closely to just take pictures. And then eventually that gets boiled down into the iconography.

So it's a support in him in that regard and not trying to get caught up in perception or, you know, I mean, the thing is, there's greatness in some of these artists when you work with them and you can't help but feel like you're among greatness. But equally, that doesn't discount what you do. You just actually add into their greatness and maybe they're adding to yours.

You know, we can listen to each other. So sometimes it's best just to listen and take it all in.

So, yeah, were you around the early days of Grime?

Yeah, I was around for the early days of Grime for sure. Definitely around. Lethal B, Definitely around. Obviously he blew up from this, from the get go. Boy in the corner, Dizzy Rascal.

But yeah, I was definitely, you know, working with people adjacent to him as well. Working with Taz, who wrote He's a Rascal. Yeah, we always like collabs. His management was quite interesting. And yes, I was around for that.

And it was nice scrim. They were young, there were MCs. I didn't get to the producers and I think I would have had more fun with the producers, to be honest with you.

But I was also. Just had a child then as well, so I was kind of not.

I was trying to operate between the hours of like 9:30 and 2:30 so I could get back to school, you know, and there's. And the griming kids were like, they'll get out of bed around one or two, you know. But then, you know, it was a tough one.

It was a tough one to keep track of them.

And also because grimy happened in East London and I wasn't located in East London, I was located in South London, Whereas a so solid crew was located in South London. So I could support their careers.

Yeah.

So because basically I knew them before they were coming up and I knew what they needed. You know, they just needed to be styled in a first family. The first family of grime or first family. A garage or something like that.

So we created that look for them. And that's. That's why the image is in the vna, I suppose.

Like with. So with jungle and drum and bass. I think over time it's hit the mainstream.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But I guess in the 90s it still stayed largely underground. And correct me if I'm wrong.

Yeah. No, drumming Base and jungle was underground because that's how drumming Base and jungle wanted it. They didn't want.

Yeah, yeah. So was it exciting when you were around, say, so solid and. And maybe other garage artists and like in with grime and stuff?

Was it exciting seeing something that's homegrown, that's just like, you know, geographically close to where you're from and is blowing up like that?

It was interesting to watch because you can tell these are the younger brothers of the drum and bass guys.

And the drum and bass guys were not interested in being seen at all because a lot of them had day jobs that they wanted to keep and then just have their careers on the weekend. They really were like. They weren't trying to make this thing become too big. You know, they really wanted it, manage it.

And also stadium dmb, when it came, wasn't really. It was done by the Australians, it was done by other people. Not necessarily the main underground.

The ones that sort of started to pioneer, you know, that bigger Pendulums. Pendulum, particularly the Australians, you know, they came in like, yep, we're gonna make this like this. And they did.

And then they dragged everyone else with them.

And that was nice because it also, to be fair, they didn't like, take something over they just opened up a new way of doing this thing because, I mean, for whatever reasons they, you know, the underground stuff was still there. Thankfully for us, it was still there. The overground stuff was for other people and it did that thing.

So when garage became more commercial is because it wanted to be more commercial. It wanted that notoriety, it wanted to be seen, it wanted all of those things, which I didn't think was impressive.

I just thought, right, And I knew, look, I said to the guys from the start, like, guys, whatever you do in this world, get the record deal, do something with it, buy a house or something, but don't go to the Audi showroom and buy Audis. They went to the Audi showroom and bought Audis. That, that's the world, that's what they wanted.

There were our younger brothers who just wanted that life. They wanted to be at China Whites, they wanted to be at the 10 rooms, they wanted that, you know, Harvey would go to all the clubs across anyway.

Yeah.

Do you know, I mean, all across across Essex and be adored, you know, they wanted that everyone in Drawing Base would have steered clear of it because it was a, it was a. It's a dirty business to get into. It's a double edged sword, you know, it will, you can stab with it but it will cut you as well.

So, yeah, no, I wasn't happy that they were doing well because I knew they were just basically sellout, but that's just how they wanted it.

And I was happy for them too because obviously one of them's now become an actor, one of them's now become a theater person, one of them has now become t. You know, that they wanted careers and my generation were raised that careerists were people you couldn't trust and you don't with like, because they would never really support your creativity. They always want to exploit creativity, right? So there was a heart. But my generation were raised by, you know, Marxist punks. So we had that.

Always warned about the system, always warned about Babylon. You know, those same uncles that we fought on mad will now prove correct by the Epstein files. So it's like, oh God, they were right all along anyway.

Which was again something that we didn't want to face. But that's just the reality of it. Those mad uncles were right all along, but they're the ones that were raised me. So I took on some of their stuff.

But the next generation beneath us didn't have those qualms. So they were happy to have it. And yes, I was happy for them during the. Whenever it was when we were taping Top of the pops 21 seconds.

And they invited me down to the BBC to come and hang out with them because we had worked hard to get to that point where they were in the top 10.

And as soon as I walked in the television center, the smell of weed, especially a certain strain of weed that he knew came from Battersea, was just hovering in the air and it was everywhere. They had smoked the place out.

And that was a privilege that was allowed to artists in the BBC that you can bun down, do anything you wanted in that part of the building. Because, you know, let's not forget probably, it was probably invented by, what's his name, Jimmy Savile, anyway. Cause he was a godfather.

Top of the Pops. So I guess anything that happened at Top of the Pop stayed in Top of the Pop, so. So yeah, that was a privilege. We were given that privilege.

We bunned the place down.

And I love that because that was also the same day I saw Cardi Minogue coming out of her changing room wearing the Christmas outfit, the bunny outfit that she had. Yeah, good times.

Nice. And then on that note, like what you were saying about the. The sort of short blow ups of the musical ly and stuff.

I mean, you look at the oldest sort of drum and bass heads that were there at the start of it with you and they're still, you know, there's a lot of them still going strong, isn't there? Yeah, like the forefathers of that movement.

Yeah, I'm proud of those guys. You know, they all, you know, got into yoga. They all start taking care of themselves and they're still with us, you know, they're all granddads now.

And. Yeah, granddad jungle is most dangerous people you can have in your life. You know, they're connected. So, yeah, the committee's still real.

Still there. Gathers every now and then, you know, has a dinner.

What's the committee?

All right, you don't talk about the committee, so I don't mean to mention that. Sorry, let's just, we can move on. Sorry. If you know about the committee, the committees.

It's just a popular joke in drum and bass, but you'll probably have to look it up on Wikipedia and come back to it.

This isn't all to do with the, what you call them all turning the back on. Incredible. Is it?

Yeah, yeah, exactly. The conversation that occurred amongst a group of DJs that created a fatwa that made sure that he got cancelled because he needed to get canceled.

And I'm not, I don't disagree with it. I think the cancellation was required and it set the tone, it set the standard.

Look, if you, you're teaching in the class and there's one bad kid and he's disrupting the class, kick him out. It sets. The other kids will then fall in line because they're like, you're serious, you're not playing.

You don't come into this culture you like and then not get canceled. You're going to get cancelled.

So what? So this was General Levy.

Yeah, General Levy said something he shouldn't have said. He's also. His manner and his behavior wasn't necessarily conducive to an environment that had predominantly run by women.

Drum and bass was a woman, it was run by women. All the promoters that promoted jungle were all women.

And so if at some point something goes wrong within the dynamics in the group, then you are kicked out. We weren't having it. So he said some things about jungle and he had to go, right. He didn't come from jungle, came from a different culture.

He came from a completely different culture. Came from raga culture. They had their lyrics, they had their way of doing things. It didn't really atone with our way of doing things.

We had to set a standard. It was set. And, and, and the. And ever since then, even other mcs who are.

Or not predominantly the MCs actually, but any other individuals that would otherwise cause problems within the culture to damage the reputation of the culture would have to be. They'll have to find another culture they're going to lie themselves with. Because we don't need it. No one needs it.

House and techno could do more of that, you know, because they've got their problems too, and they need to sort of. Yeah, well, you know, you've got a clean house, you know, you just can't have people running amok. They can't. You can't have that.

You cannot, cannot have that. And some people, though, you can't gatekeep unless you can gatekeep. You have to gatekeep.

You have to make sure the dickheads don't come into your club. They'll ruin everything for everyone. And there are special clubs for. But we don't go to those clubs, you know, we know where they are.

If you see a football player and a bunch of women following him, you.

Know, that's not your club.

Although DJing in there is fun though. But that's not your club to go to. You get paid to be there. You don't play to be there. You don't pay to play. You are paid to play.

Yeah.

Yes.

Are there any particular artists we've not mentioned that have been favorites of yours to work with?

No, I think we've kind of covered it really.

I think we've had a good chance to sort of talk about the best of the hip hop guys and the best of the drum and bass guys and, and, and even the best of the house guys like the Kevin Sanderson's and, and, and, and these different streams of cultures that all sort of kind of emerge from the 70s really. And then the photographers that go with it, we, we love that contemporary and otherwise.

But I'm definitely a big fan of all the photographers that care enough to document the scenes that they gifted to document. Whether they're punk photographers or even funk photographers. They are.

They sort of feed into how we see the culture, you know, because they're there and they're in it and they're just catching that moment.

You said before, well, that when we were on the phone, Sorry, I mentioned having had B plus on here before and you mentioned you guys are mates and you're quite similar and. Yeah, I know in the book there's a bit of a. Bit of a joke thing in there around Black Star as well. I got to read that bit, which is pretty cool.

But you're both people that seem very politically aware.

Yeah.

And is this a common theme with photographers?

And if so, is it, do you think, because you're looking at the world, you kind of assessing energies and stories and things like that and documenting and stuff. Does it make you kind of more aware of what's going on?

I'm off.

Focused on it.

I think you'd think that. But I think both, I think I say this for B as well.

We both come from a generation where we were told and taught that photography could end wars, that a photographer can go to a war, take a picture, send it back, and people look at that and go, I think it is a bit shit to napalm children in Vietnam. I think maybe we shouldn't be doing that. And then people. And that picture still sticks with me, the napalm girl.

Or in South Africa, just when the police were just every week just open rubber bullets on like kids throwing stones.

And you'd feel the same way about, you know, I don't know, Palestine, for instance, but you or Jerusalem, for the sake of argument and not feel anything because you can't place yourself in what they're experiencing. And you know what they're experiencing is wrong, but everything else is you're being told muddies the waters.

So if we thought photography can do that, then we're going to act that way and take pictures of what we consider to be important truths in the hope that it will educate the people that see these pictures. But that wasn't given to us anymore. I don't think we have that anymore.

So in our own small worlds, in our own small universes, we try and still exercise that.

And I guess I wouldn't say, I can't say, you know, whether B plus was aligned to the troubles in Ireland, but he's from a county, he's from the south, obviously he wouldn't have seen it the same way. But you start to realize how media sort of speaks with two tongues. And you don't really understand it until you go to Ireland.

And then you go, you walk around the corner, you see all these monuments, and they talk about how Churchill bombed Dublin. And you're like, oh, what? You aerial bombing Dublin? What? And then you start to realize that there are stories that simply are never told.

And, you know, the Irish see things one way because they consider what was done to them to be genocide, and they're entitled to feel that way. You walk around island, it's lit monuments where people just drop dead because they had no food and the food was shipped to England just cause.

So you're aware of that and then you're aware that there are alternative histories that maybe you can contribute to where you tell a different story. And maybe they're just local histories, you know, even.

These are stories that are just out there.

And we try our best to sort of recirculate other stories or at least align ourselves with people that do really amazing things in the hope that rather than tell a bad story, you tell a good story. You know, that's. That's what I think that's about, I think. But, yeah, I hope one day we could sort of make sense of.

With a picture that literally just says it all. Because photography used to be the truth. And that used to be a, you know, truth to the extent that it was even evidence in court.

Like, and here I have photographic evidence of you lying Sir. Oh my God, you've caught me. It's a fair cop. Not anymore. Not anymore. It's all double speak.

Yeah, you got to be so careful at the moment with trusting your sources and stuff.

Yeah.

So some of your work's part of the exhibition at the VNA east at the moment, isn't it?

Yeah.

So I've got a so solid piece there and I've got a picture of Chemistry and Storm again, I think Chemistry and Storm, Metalhead's very important club, very important in terms of the genesis of jungle into drum and bass. But also importantly that chemistry is put in there because they ran the label, they were the people behind the label as well as being DJs.

And I don't think it said enough that drum and bass was run by women. And I think it's important that we have a. That that fostered a much better society for all of us to club in.

And they took care of the mandem to make sure they turned up, you know, to their sets on time, took care of the pr, took care of the professionalism that drum and bass had, even though it chose not to be commercialized in any way, shape or form with. So I feel like it's nice just to say that these are two label owners, but they're also two DJs.

And although one of them tragically passed, it taught us about the mortality of our scene, you know, given that, you know, and since then I've seen in the jungle scene at least, certainly with Randall's funeral, the way the culture came together to give him one of the best send offs I've seen for anybody, you know.

And something amazing about seeing all these wreaths around the grave, from reinforced to metalheads to all the labels having their reefs around the grave to sort of say, like we can, we can now, like any civilization, we can bury our own so our life can be lived in this culture and something that we built.

And you know, I've seen some of the kids there, not, not Pink Panthers, but you know, the new generation of kids who just take it on as a sound and just literally make jungle music in 10 minutes because they could just sample breaks that already pre exist. And that's great, that's great. Like it's a thing now. So that's, that's a joy. And it's nice to have Chemistry and Storm represented.

And it's so solid, obviously, because it was that time where, you know, everyone was trying to represent a crew.

And I managed to get the entire crew, certainly from the whole Wu Tang thing made me realize that if we could gather the whole crew, especially at this point in time, before you're all famous, before you go number one, the song's yet to be released that you can. That, you know, you are so solid crew. And I've only photographed three of you. Mega Man, Romeo, Miss Lady. It'll come back to me.

And then now have a chance to basically have the entire crew in one place in your local park in Batsy on a Saturday afternoon so all your kids can be there.

That's an important picture that's part of the collection now because it's a timestamp is when it's when it all came above ground, when these local crews can become. Not only were they big in Battersea, but they took over the nation and became this thing, this, this. Yeah, Ms. Mafia.

Mafia.

Yeah, that's it.

Is there. Because when I spoke to you the other day, you were going off to speak at an event.

And is it kind of strange when you've got something that's about such like sort of a raw scene that's come out of an area out of a socioeconomic circumstance and things like that? People. It's like with hip hop, isn't it? People work out how to make something out of relatively nothing. It's about being resourceful and stuff.

And you've got these, these really DIY things that then that culture then gets like academicized in a museum. Is that a strange thing? Because it's like great to get the validation. But also do people miss the point?

I think. I think the curators have a. Have a job ahead of them in terms of trying to tell a big collective story. And I feel like it is. There is.

There is a battle against. Certainly I have a battle against things being academicized because it kind of sort of takes the fun out of it.

But there has to be some negotiation between how you contextualize history and how you disseminate that to an audience.

And I think there is a particular show that line's been warped in that there is a sense of academic rigor, or there is academic rigor, but rather it's not about for the sake of academics. It's not for that sake.

It's really about again, trying to tell a story of a series of musical experiences that's happened over the past 120 odd years. And so. And it's tough. And I'm not sure, you know, how music, particularly music history, is told or how it will be told.

I'm good with DJs telling it I'm good with radio telling it. We love a good documentary, certainly about our favorite villains and heroes in music.

The museum side of it I'm not so sure about, but I like the negotiations that are occurring, particularly this show, is the idea of having these headphones that you get when you walk in. And as you navigate through the space, the music changes. So that allows the experience to be bedded into arriving, looking and hearing.

I think those negotiations are really important because it just adds to another way of enjoying culture, you know, by stimulating all of one, two senses, at least two senses at once, and then allowing you to walk through it and have that experience. And I think the model, because it reminds me of the British Library show on. On the history of black music as well.

So it feels like it almost like models itself on the cross between a VNA show and a library show.

Says education meets entertainment, which, you know, kind of relies on me, the carers one, you know, model of edutainment, you know, so I'm good with that. I'm. I'm good with edutainment. It's fun, it's okay. Give some kids some headphones, let them run around, see how that works out for them.

But it's always nice tricking. Tricking kids into like learning.

Yes, exactly. But that said, I would have, you know, like I said, I've had experiences where Lee Scratch Perry's multi track and soundcraft mixing desk is.

Is put on display and you can go there with your own DAT or at the time, mini disc and make your own dubs. That, to me is the future of museums, I think. There's one in Glasgow. There's a synthesizing museum in Glasgow, right? Yeah.

And you can go there with your tape and just wire up some simps and see if you can get some wobbly bass lines out of these things and take them on sample, you know? Yeah.

Have you got any of your music anywhere online?

Not really. I think I did one track on vinyl. I think he's on discog somewhere. Yeah, I suppose I released one track. It was.

I remember someone telling me, oh, Theo Parish played your track. It's like, yes, finally I'm set. Theo Parish is banging out my tune and then I find out he played it at the wrong speed.

I was like, I don't know what to do with that, you know, because I cut it at 45 and he plays it at 43.

It's like, yeah, but if it works, it works.

If it works, it works. Now even I'm trying to work it into the set 33.

You know, like one of your biggest things is a scene that's based on a drum break being played at the wrong speed.

Exactly, exactly, exactly. Bugs in the Bassbin. There you go. Play that at the wrong speed.

Oh, just one more thing I wanted to ask you about because I'm mindful of the time.

Yeah.

Metaglasses. Well, I suppose there's a couple of things. Metaglass are the first one, because you mentioned those. Yeah. Now what's that like as a photographer then?

Because like, I suppose you can be super candid, but then also people don't know that you're walking around with a camera.

Yeah. I mean, I'm using them right now because. But I've got them.

I've got the prescription lenses on it, so I can actually sort of do weird things like, you know, make mental notes and you know, like look at this thing and go, hey, Metha, could you translate this document for me?

Oh, wow,.

Okay. And it started to go on about what the text appears to be in Japanese and what it's talking about. So it's mainly for research that I'm using it.

I would never go out on the street with this because it just looks weird and creepy.

Because the general view is people with method glasses are like just weird and creepy people who just want to do like, you know, like just basically do weird and creepy stuff. So it doesn't go out on the road, it just works in the house in this situation for me. And it also means that I can take calls, be in the room.

It's an interesting one. But can it take? Because my hope for it was really about first person presentations, how to teach first person.

But it doesn't allow enough time to record like that. So okay, that's gone out the window. But aside, sort of just having really interesting correspondences from a first person perspective.

Perspective, like what's this? Or both engaging in the same thing at the same time. Interesting. But is it. Is it a camera? No. Is it access? Is it me interfacing with technology?

Yes, got it. And what happens next? I do not know, but I'm starting to see that this.

Because my hope for AI is that it's not about what it does for the big man, it's about what it does for us, the individual. Like how do I train it to be working for me? So it's my agent. Agent.

In other words, how do I suck in all my archive into a hard drive, not put it online, but have my own agent trained to go Adidas, Ronnie size You know, find the things that I'm looking for, street, you know, like just little things so that I can then mine or other people can come in and mine the archive based on what I've seen in the last 30 years. And this is my way of understanding that. So even if it's like picking up negatives or registering numbers, but that's my next learning curve.

If you're gonna ask me what I'm gonna do next, I'm just understanding digital asset management for photographers to basically manage all our assets.

I was gonna ask you about that because I was thinking about when you talk about going through people's contact sheets and negatives and stuff, is it fun for you that going through someone else's sheets and seeing the shots that haven't made it, made it off the sheet, as it were, and stuff, and talking to the photographers about it?

Absolutely. I really enjoy it.

I've come across photographers who I've worked with in my time who've taken some great pictures alongside me, but have poor taste and make the wrong selection or leave it up to editors to make a poor selection for them. In my case, I only shot nine pictures of Biggie. I only made one of them work. You know, actually three of them work, so. But I chose those shots.

If I was this to anybody else, they might pick some other random thing and then I had to print them and work them to make them a working picture. So I kind of see the art of photography. I can see it from the negative.

So I'm always happy to support a photographer in their curation because I think of photographers, it's impossible photographer to curate their own work. Some are better at it than others, but I think it's very difficult.

I find it difficult, but I find it much easier to create someone else's work because I'm not attached to the memory of taking that picture, which so many photographers are. They seem to just, oh, I remember when I took this house feeling that day. And I can't see any of that. And I don't care for any of that.

I just want to know what the picture is saying to me in that moment and translate that to a print on the wall that can then communicate to an audience.

So I was going to ask you about mood, where the mood affects the mood you in when you go to a shoot, affects what your output is and like the tone in the style.

It can do. It very much can do.

I mean, you can add mood later in the print and actually cook it in different directions, but at the very Least you're reflecting the energy. The person in the camera is reflecting your energy. Like if you go and excited and bouncing up and down, they'll be bouncing up and down.

And so whatever you're feeling, if they're on your wavelength or they'll be feeling it too. So you have to be conscious of that. Or sometimes you just chime into what they're feeling and just work, work. But you kind of.

Ultimately you are reflecting each other's energy. And so, yeah, and so it's very much. It's there, it's locked into the picture, but. But then you double down on it.

I've definitely done print and variations of prints where you just double down on the mood that's in there. Either make it darker or make it lighter will change the tone and the spirit of it.

And I'm kind of playing with that now because as new papers come and go, sometimes I'll revisit the negatives by reprinting them onto a new type of paper to see if I can extract anything more out of it or in the plane with it. At this point in time, I might gain a certain insight into the negative having played with it over the last 30 years.

So that's been quite fascinating for me.

And so that's what drives me to produce new prints and new bodies of work now is the actual materiality of how to make these things look good without having to plug anything in. You just stick them on the wall, have them in a box, they just hit and you could put them in a frame and they'll just resonate for a very long time.

Right, so one last thing then. Have you got any advice for anyone that's starting out in photography? Given the low to zero barrier to entry now, I say, well, still, it.

Still pulls down to intention. I would ask everyone who's into photography to really check in on their intentions and make sure that they work towards that.

Like have, you know, whether it's just. Even if it's something as know my favorite photographer, Charlie Phillips is like his thing was funerals.

He just, his intention was to document every funeral we went to. And every week he was at a funeral and you know, he got fed well obviously and that contributed to his stroke.

But anyway, the idea that he, and, and after 50 odd years, he is the number one photographer of funerals you can go to. He has the most and, and the work eventually looks like poetry. It's like pathos and you know, the human condition is like, we all die, like wow.

And some of us don't want to remember the people that passed away, but when they do, their photographic image becomes really, really important. So it's a. It's an interesting thing to have. So I would say just. Just. Just set out your stall and go for it.

And even if it's your own family, even if it's like, I'm just gonna take pictures of the kids for the rest of my life, please do. You'll be the best photographer of your kid ever. So that intention, I think, is the key to everything.

And then over time, people will associate value with that. They think it's important. They'll come chasing you down the street for it. And that's, I think, the core to it, really.

Right, Eddie. Well, I've really enjoyed our chat today. It's been nice to sort of get deep with you and let it go kind of here, there, and everywhere.

So great hearing all your input put and stuff. And I think it. At some point, I think you'd make a really good memoir because of where your travels have been.

Thank you. I really appreciate it, too, as well. And I was thinking this, how you've allowed me to go deep on this conversation, and I appreciate that.

I appreciate the space and time you've given me. But I realized that the format kind of lets us talk, you know?

Yeah. This is why we have to block so much time out for them. It's not pressured, and it can, like, I don't. I didn't go too intense with research.

I kind of went through the book, and in a way where it's just, like. It just makes me think of, like, little thoughts. But I think, like, a lot of stuff you answered before I asked it anyway.

And thanks for asking about things about me and my DJing as well. I really appreciate that.

No, I'd love to. I'd love an excuse to come up north. I feel like I've got to come to Warsaw for whatever reason. No, you're not north. Derby's. Derby's north, isn't it?

Derby's north, Warsaw's the Midlands, and then Derby's definitely north.

Yes.

So past Sheffield.

No, before Sheffield. So you got Derby, then Chesterfield, then Sheffield.

Of course Chesterfield. Never forget that. Okay. Yeah. Look, mate, I'm praying that you can find a safe space to bang out tunes. You know what I mean?

Just bang out tunes, do you?

Yeah, yeah. But, yeah. Where can people find you? Online.

All right, so online right now, I've got a soft presence. I haven't quite gotten to my website yet because I'm working on the archive, but I've got the shop, which I should be putting some bits online soon.

T shirts and that sort of thing for Whitsummer and then which is my surname, Otchere shop. And then obviously there's Instagram, which is under my name, Eddie Otchere.

And then beyond that, I think it's just trying to do things in IRL will real world walks, talks and that sort of thing.

My thing is I. I've yay close to find the space in London where we could have DJ set up so we could have a social space where people could gather, particularly photographers. But that space has now sort of gone to developers, so looking for a space that will allow us to just, you know, they can make money on the bar.

We just require the space to sort of engage with it in an analog way and particularly get your. I don't know. We have this thing in London called CDR where producers can upload tracks and play their tunes on a nice system.

I'd like to do the same thing for photographers where you can come along, show a body of work, you know, like, really push this idea of a body of work, like just a closed caption. One thing you've been into, it could be trainers, it could be anything.

But those kind of obsessions make photography quite interesting when you are just obsessed.

Yeah.

So that's the hope. That's the hope. So hopefully in the real world we can catch up and do things properly.

Brilliant. All right, mate? Yeah, well, I'll let you get back to it.

Nice one, Adam. Appreciate it.

All right, take care.

Come on. Oh, that was nice.