"Nineteen" - Paul Hardcastle
I was only a kid at the time and I thought that song was just the coolest tune ever.
Neh-neh-neh-neh-nineteen!
Of course I didn't even know what a sampler was, at the time and thought the guy was actually saying "neh-neh-neh-neh-nineteen" rather than it just being a stutter effect on the sampler.
In fact, although I was familiar with computers and keyboards I didn't really come across a sampler until the following year. You're going to laugh when I tell you where. It was on The Cosby Show - yeah I told you you'd laugh - the episode with Stevie Wonder. If memory serves correctly he brought the Cosby kids in and sampled Theo on his synclavier - "jammin' on the one, jammin' on the one!" "bay-bee! bay-bee!" And I remember thinking - hey, that sounds just like what the neh-neh-neh-neh-nineteen guy done!
The following year came one of the all-time greatest techno tracks of all fucking time. I'm listening to it here now and I still think it's brilliant - hard to believe it's twenty years old!!!
"Pump Up The Volume" - MAARS
When the acid house was in its infancy I was playing with my brand new Commodore 64 and, having pretty much gone cover to cover in the manual, and all the Usbourne "write your own games" books in the local library I went to the bookshop in town and there I found a book that - and it sounds cheesy to say it - changed my life. No it wasn't the bible, it was the Usbourne guide to keyboards and electronic music and it cost me two weeks pocket money. Like the other books I got from the library, it was written for kids and had all those silly robots on the cover. It explained things like MIDI, talked about synthesis, sequencing and, of course, sampling, citing legendary units like the aforementioned Synclavier and the Fairlight. Now, at last, I knew how Yello went "Ooooh yeah!"
Meanwhile S Express were burning up the charts with their infectious theme causing the woman who minded me after school to say "shur that isn't music". But for me it wasn't just music, it was the coolest music ever and I became obsessed with one thing and one thing only, owning a keyboard, and made damn sure Santa Claus knew it.
What I got wasn't a Synclavier though, but a Yamaha PSR-6. Not quite in the same league in retrospect but I thought it was the shit. Now all I needed to do was to figure out how to get it to say "Jammin on the One." I knew I could theoretically get my C64 to play samples because of the old Ghostbusters game but soon realised that there was no way to connect the two together.
By this time dance music was beginning to come into its own and I was just entering puberty. I wasn't aware of the underground side of things, just the commercial stuff like Technotronic (/hangs head in shame), or the occasional crossover like Bomb the Bass or KLF.
Then came 1991; I was confused, angry, spotty and nothing made sense.
Least of all this:
"Charly" - The Prodigy.
But it was infectious as fuck. It was called rave, it meant I was no longer allowed to listen to Guns and Roses, for fear of a beating, and I had to wear big baggy jeans all the time so my teachers would think I was on drugs.
To be honest, when I started, I wasn't as big a Prodigy fan as I was into Altern 8. I guess in the early years the Prodigy were the Beatles and Altern 8 were the Rolling Stones - it was a big thing at the time and I reckon half my teenage years were devoted to arguments as to who was better. Most of the local headcases thought the Prodigy were better, but then the Prodigy didn't have those cool masks.
And then there were these crazy bastards:
They had crazy outfits too, and they sounded really fucking crazy. And even back then I'd started sample spotting "Hey! That's the same "Armageddon" as Altern 8!
My first rave tape I bought was a stupid compilation tape, of which there were many, with the word "rave" on it. Rave Generator, or Rave Generation, or Generation Rave or something retarded like that. It had really sad early 90's CG "trippy tunnel" graphics on the cover like just about everything techno-related back then, and it had all the big names of the time; The Prodigy, the Messiah, the Shamen, Altern 8, SL2, the lot. I played it over and over and over and over and soon I wanted more. Thing was tapes were expensive, so the next tape I got, I got because it looked like there were hundreds of songs on it. It was a mix tape, and, for a 13 year old, the greatest tape of all time...
The Year is 1992... Hardcore has become the most energetic form of dance music...
...Who controls the present controls the past, who controls the past controls the future...
And so began my obsession in earnest. The album? Hit The Decks Volume Two
Two Little Boys and Megabass - holy fucking shit - how cool were they? Hell the tape had only been on for a minute and already they'd gone through a dozen or more songs and samples - and all of them were amazing.
This is the ultimate I can't cope with it!
Your name's not down, not-not down, you're name's not down you're not comin' in!
Soon's I had the money I bought Hit the Decks Volume One, where once again Two Little Boys and Megabass dueled it out on either side. Then Hit the Decks 3 came out, which was perhaps the best of them all, whereas the previous installments had a lot of eurocheese, 3 was pure rave. This time around Two Little Boys and Megabass were joined by SL2, Krome & Time, Unity Mixers and the legendary Carl Cox.
I read the inlay cards from cover to cover over and over again, memorising all the names of all the groups and DJs and all various record labels. There were also pictures inside of the guys with their equipment. I learned they used Technics turntables and a Citronic mixer. Right, I thought, so all I need to get to make music like these guys is to get two turntables and a Citronic mixer - the one they use with built in sampler.
No wonder, then, that the first ever sampler I ever bought was, guess what? A Citronic. A shitty DJ thing, basically the sampler from the Citronic "hit the decks" mixer in rackmount form. It wasn't exactly capable of producing brilliant polished megamixes like Megabase and the 'Boys, you only got a few seconds and you couldn't edit with it, you just hit start when you wanted it to start and stop when you wanted it to stop and hoped that it wouldn't sound shite when you looped it. So it was no Akai and it was no Synclavier either, but it did have the stutter feature, and so, it's no surprise then, that the first thing I ever sampled, was me saying "Nineteen" into a microphone and stutter-starting the result.
Neh-neh-neh-neh-nineteen!
\o/
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