He's been in it from day minus-one, it's his baby, his brother, his mother, father. "I live' breathe, eat and shit this scene," he says, "you have to!". You could even go as far as saying that the sound of breakbeat at 160+ BPM isn't complete without his grimacing smile behind the decks somewhere in the world! And because of this Siamese-twin type attachment to the drum 'n' bass sphere, when he has some beef about anything that is going on concerning the music, he'll go straight to the horses mouth and say it succinctly! He might have been affectionately nicknamed 'Victor Meldrew' by his close friends, but behind this radical facade lies an intensely likable character, who cares about nothing more than a highly rinsed drum and psychotic bassline! (Except maybe his increasingly infamous partner in crime, his playful dog 'Snoop'
You'll have to forgive me for the gushing compliments, but he's been my favourite DJ ever since I 'saw the light' of his philosophy behind mastermixing and scratching together the best in hip hop, house and breakbeats on the aforementioned pirate. (A philosophy now clearly shared by many bass lovers in the UK.) A collective view of beats that slowly matured into the scene we all know and love today.
When I was fresh out of college years ago, it was his radio manner and the fact that he'd just won the London finals of the 1989 DMC mastermixing competition which led him to be the subject of my first ever interview, where we spent hours in the cramped bedroom of his Hackney, east London frontline flat musing about the attractions of low frequencies. Times where his days were spent stacking boxes in a Burberry warehouse, and all the musical assets he possessed were a pair of decks, a mixer, a four-track tape recorder and a parasitic urge to record music...
As well as having such a larger-than-life manner, Hype can be said to be a prime contender for the 'hardest working man in the breakbeat business'! Jungle has strode forward in leaps and bounds over the last few years, and Hype has been in high demand from all four corners of the globe. It's not an uncommon occurrence for him to be DJing in, say Germany on Friday night, back in the UK on Saturday and off to Toronto, Canada on Sunday Not to mention his regular spot junglising up London's Kiss FM and being voted best male DJ in rave organisers supreme, Elevation's awards in 1994. Clearly a far cry from stacking boxes in a dingy warehouse.
"When I first started out in the late 70s," he says, whilst on the subject of his skills, "in reggae you had your sound systems, but they just dealt with one deck and the attraction at the time was more in the power of the sound system as opposed to the mastermixing capabilities of the DJ. Until I got the job of Eq'ing up the sound system, I was just the little white boy that hung around with them. Really though, I wanted to take part in something to do with the actual playing of the set.
"Then came the days of the soul and hip hop sound systems like Rapattack, Mastermind Roadshow and that. There were a few DJs that really influenced me like DJ Streets Ahead who were using scratching skills and I was like 'yeah, I like the way that's going'. The "Buffalo Gals" video and Grandmixer D.St on 'The Tube' scratching to "Rockit" was also like 'that's for me'. So, at first, I just had this one deck and learned to scratch before mixing and cutting, so once I had two decks that was it! I got really fanatical, people used to make fun of me! At work, I used to wear weights around my wrists like a boxer or something so I could strengthen them to do better cutting or spinbacks! And it worked! Sometimes I used to get home from work and just do an hour of non-stop cutting like one two bam bam, one two, one two. Non stop!"
Then the rave and hip-house scene began to permeate through the musical consciousness of the south-east UK and Hype really began to make a name for himself through his mastermixing whilst playing out. "What was better about going from a competition [like the DMC championships], where you've got to go fucking mad for about seven minutes, to the rave scene where you're given an hour or two's set, is that you can spread it out a lot more. And whatever I used to do, the people used to go mad for it' "The thing is though, now I don't do as much as I used to, for a number of reasons. One is because most of the stuff I use is on dub plate. Now, I do scratch with dub plates, and some DJs come up to me and say 'fuckin' 'ell! You're scratching with a dub plate. I can't even cue 'em up!' Also, a lot of systems I play on are a bit dodgy and you can't go onto them and start cutting, so I have a few things like my 'Hyper!' scratch that is pretty much safe to do anywhere, and I've started getting double copies of some tracks that I can cut to, but there aren't that many of them because of the way the breaks in jungle are all chopped up anyway So, if I do do it, the only people that are gonna notice are the DJs who have bought the record anyway. I used to cut-up Goldie's "Terminator" years ago and the amount of punters that came up to me saying 'what's that remix you played?' and I was like 'no, that was me remixing it!'.
So, yeah, I do still get a response from the things I do, and when you're playing in London you do a scratch and you'll get a little response, but most people just like it and rave to it. They're not going 'oh fuck, this is amazing', because it ain't such a big deal. It's not so important in this music. So, I'll give it a bit so the people who ain't really into it won't be killed by it and the people who do love it are dying for more. They're not standing there saying 'alright Hype, you've made your point, you can scratch mate, we know Hype, WE KNOW!'
So what about hip hop then, would you say you've left that scene in favour of breaks? "Not necessarily," he replies. "Like I said, I eat, sleep and shit jungle, but I've still got all the latest hip hop albums upstairs. I know the music, but I couldn't tell you all the insides and outs with what's going on with it like I used to. I grew up with hip hop, but at the end of the day, it's not mine, you get me? Always before, you were making a tune and wanting to be like the Americans. You were copying someone else's sound, trying to be like someone else. I wanted to be DJ Cheese, I wanted to be Jazzy Jeff. I used to listen to what they did before I took my next step, because they were leading the way. So, doing hip hop in the UK, you'll never compete with the Americans. Although I loved doing what I was doing then, I always knew that I couldn't reach the same heights you could if you were from the States. For the simple reason that British rappers naturally haven't got the voice of US rhymers.
