Game Changer

It could have been his junglist garage pastiche ‘My Red Hot Car’. Or it could have been the burning 303 d&b of ‘Vic Acid’. In...

S'Express, the project fronted by DJ Mark Moore in the late '80s and early '90s, have a remix album dropping on Needle Boss Records soon...

Todd Terry started DJing around his home city of New York in the mid-'80s. “When I started — around '84, '85 — I was just...

How a largely instrumental album by an unknown Norwegian duo became a word-of-mouth million-selling sensation at the start of the decade, thanks to some unique...

By the mid-'90s, Norman Cook had been involved in three UK No.1 records. First there was the acapella 'Caravan of Love' in 1986 with Hull-based...

The Game Changer is taking a slightly different form this month. Usually it focuses on seminal tracks, but when it comes to the emergence of...

One of the most prolific and pioneering electronic music composers of the '70s and '80s, Giorgio Moroder was born in Italy and started playing guitar...

As a teenage boy, music-obsessed Kris Needs ran the fanclub of '70s bluesy-glam band Mott the Hoople before becoming immersed in the London punk scene...

As was the case in many towns and cities in the UK in the late '80s, a sizeable portion of the youth of Stafford were infected with the rave bug. More or less equidistant between London and Manchester in the West Midlands (18 miles south of Stoke-on-Trent, 16 miles north of Wolverhampton), Stafford became notable for spawning two of the rave scene’s most successful acts – Altern8 and Bizarre Inc. And then, later, Chicken Lips too.


“We loved electronic sounds, really,” adds Phil. “With synthesisers it was like, ‘What made that sound?’ It was that sort of search – for electronic sounds and drum machines.”



Andy Cato met Tom Findlay through mutual friends after they both left college in the mid-‘90s. Andy was making trance and was in a couple of bands, while Tom was from more of a rare groove background, DJing in Manchester clubs when he was a student.

Layo & Bushwacka! were a popular tech house duo before Millennium time, but after they released ‘Love Story’ in 2002 they totally went supernova. They met at the legendary central London nightclub The End, where Bushwacka!, aka Matthew Benjamin, was a resident DJ and Layo Paskin was co-owner (with Mr C). 



X-Press 2 were one of the principal house acts in the early '90s, rocking the floors with cuts like post-hardcore progressive house cut 'Muzik Xpress' — with its memorable “Music, music, music” refrain — and the cowbell-tastic 'London Xpress'. The trio of acid house originals — Rocky, Diesel and Ashley Beedle — went their separate ways for a while in the late '90s, before coming back together just before the Millennium.

In the mid-‘90s, drum & bass was the most futuristic, kick-ass, innovative UK-derived music around. After a gestation period in the underground, breakbeat science exploded into the mainstream, although that led to assorted TV ads and theme tunes and suchlike co-opting a d&b element to them. But because the scene itself was controlled by the DJs — Bryan Gee, Fab & Groove, Goldie, Hype etc — it was able to be steered back underground, so that by the end of the 20th century d&b was largely associated with the dark tech-step sound of No U-Turn et al.

Loco Dice 'Seeing Through Shadows' (m_nus)

In the mid-noughties, techno was at a crossroads. Sidelined by the glamour of electroclash, the booming bass riddims of...

‘Killer’ started life as an instrumental, and it was only ever going to be one until I met Seal,” Adamski tells DJ Mag. “He came to [big rave] Sunrise 5000 at Santa Pod, although I didn’t meet him there. He walked in when I was playing and he had an epiphany.” Seal wanted to record with Adamski immediately, and Adamski — real name Adam Tinley — liked the sound of Seal’s voice from a demo of ‘Crazy’ that he’d heard.