A Guy Called Gerald

Gerald Simpson has played several key roles in shaping the British electronic music scene. Starting out as a regular clubgoer in his hometown of Manchester, he went on to become part of 808 State, cut the classic solo acid track “Voodoo Ray” and helmed the respected drum & bass label Juice Box Records. His 1995 album Black Secret Technology was a genuine milestone of the genre, pushing jungle to new levels of sophistication.

In this 2010 Red Bull Music Academy lecture, he shows us how to make records without MIDI, talks about his formative influences and delivers some sage advice to up-and-coming artists.

Hosted by Torsten Schmidt Audio Only Version Transcript:

A guy called Gerald

Hello. Hello. Thank you for turning up to the lecture. My name is A Guy Called Gerald and this is my... He’s doing the presenting, actually.

Torsten Schmidt

Well, actually, you’re making the job a whole lot easier here because I just ran up the stairs and spent the last few hours looking at Excel sheets. I have to say ... This might be even more complicated from first sight, but it’s a lot more pleasant.

A guy called Gerald

Thank you. Yeah. It is. It’s a lot easier to use than ...

Torsten Schmidt

Yeah. Yeah. No, we’re not good in dealing with Excel here. That’s official, I guess. Well, we are strong believers in non-centralism, as most of you are, I guess, because we all come from different places and it would be an absolute shame to be in England and only talk about London. There’s been other cities in this country that have been really instrumental to what really makes our musical world tick and one of them does include a neighborhood called the Moss Side.

A guy called Gerald

In Manchester. It’s actually Moss Side and Hulme. Basically, just across the Mancunian Way from Moss Side you have a place called Hulme, which is where the Haçienda club, a well-known club in dance history in the northwest of England – it was basically where I did their first nights. I’m from both these areas. I used to run across the motorway playing chicken. Actually, there’s a lot of people that lived there from Manchester who were famous or are famous in the music industry…

[Plays clip from documentary about Hulme]

Torsten Schmidt

What is that time, specifically?

A guy called Gerald

That time is basically the late ‘70s, the early ‘80s and that’s where I actually grew up in that area. Yeah, we basically had to find our own entertainment and my entertainment was, at first, destroying things I found on bits of wasteland. That was round about seven or eight years old, and there was nothing else to do. Then I found like some old TVs and old radios – that kind of thing – and I used to take them home and try and fix them, thinking I could fix stuff. I don’t know where I got that idea from, but I used to take them home. And I think one day I got this old radio someone had thrown out and it didn’t have a plug on it and I just put the wires into the socket and a plug in on top of it and the lights came on and it started buzzing, and I was like, “Wow, I fixed it.” So, I think that’s probably where it started.

Torsten Schmidt

Good thing you didn’t kill yourself in the process there.

A guy called Gerald

Yeah, it was a touch and go thing. From then, I think I became a little bit fearless about electronic stuff and I decided to delve deeper into it, so I got myself a screwdriver and started to reverse engineer everything in the house. Well anyway, I should move on from the early period. Then, I kind of discovered, for myself personally, dub music, and I decided to get into the style of soundsystems, which was really interesting for me because it was still incorporating a lot of electronics, but there was some entertainment value in there. So, I was interested in what was actually going on with the amplifiers, and there were actually people who were living on my estate, like older people who were actually into building speaker boxes and building amplifiers. So, I used to actually look at what these guys were doing, or try and look at what they were doing because they were a lot more advanced than me. Obviously, we were just plugging stuff in. Anyway, I should show you something from a soundsystem.

[Plays clip of PSV nightclub in Hulme]

Actually, after this time, I started to go to more jazz-funk and soul-type clubs. I was introduced to this music from listening to the radio. There’s actually a radio station in Manchester called Piccadilly Radio, and I used to listen to this show on a Sunday. At first, there was a DJ called Mike Shaft, who used to play music who was on a Sunday afternoon and it was just the latest imports from America, like all the early funk and soul stuff and also some jazz-funk. I got really interested in listening to this music, but I was also pulling it apart at the same time. I was listening to what kind of instruments they were using – synths and stuff like this and actually recording the radio shows.

And one of the things that happened with the radio shows was that you would find the DJ would talk over the top, and around about this time there was also the invention of the double-tape machine, which was a real interesting way of dubbing the DJ out. So, I found I could do these techniques of just recording maybe eight bars of the track and just continue recording them and it would always be in time and then I would maybe record four bars and then two bars and then go back and then I realized I was actually doing – well, I didn’t realize at the time but it was actually an edit. And maybe at the end of the track – because I never really got the end because he would always talk before the end of the track – but I would record maybe like two bars and then record the same bars again but a little bit quieter and just repeat this until it disappeared and when you played it back it sounded like a delay or echo effect out.

I just basically sat in front of this Amstrad – which was a really cheap hi-fi that my mom had bought – for days, just trying to make tapes with that. I could actually play at school, or in them days we used to have these ghetto blasters that you played to your friends and stuff. You played your music to them on your friends. Some people could afford to buy the records, and tape them onto the cassettes, but some of us that couldn’t afford them, we would just tape them off the radio. But you would try and take the sound of the DJ talking out, so it didn’t sound like you were being cheap and taking it off the radio. Anyway, and if you had your own version of the track that was really cool, so I would always try and do that.

Torsten Schmidt

So, just to clarify, you were actually doing this on this size type audio cassettes? [Gestures with hand size of a cassette tape]

A guy called Gerald

Yeah, it was on a cassette, like a small cassette. I forget that people are from a different age. It was like CDs in them days.

Torsten Schmidt

So, out of curiosity did you always take it out and manually use a Biro, or were you getting so good that [you could] do it with the buttons?

A guy called Gerald

You would have to listen to where it was, and after a while you got the technique of looking on the counter, and there would always be a little bit of a delay but you would compensate for the delay between where you stopped – the tape would move just a little bit. Everything was really manual, so you would always have to compensate for things so you would make sure that, OK, when it stopped, I stopped it on “6,” so maybe it rolled back. So, maybe I would press record and throw it in a little bit. Somehow it worked. It was like “needs must,” and skipping forward to today, I see the way that things are. Like, when someone needs a new reverb or something, it’s just like, download it. I remember my first recording studio I had, actually, maybe had a drum sound with a snare going and I needed a new reverb and it was like, wow, I had to actually go to a music shop and buy a new guitar pedal or something. You know, or borrow something from someone just to get that reverb. To be at that time now where you can basically just duplicate the actual effects that you’ve got – I mean, I’m sounding like a caveman I know now, but for me it’s still amazing the things you can utilize in the software now. Anyway, go on.

Torsten Schmidt

If we go back to the dance you were showing us, how big was the Caribbean community up in Manchester?

A guy called Gerald

It was pretty big. I think it was in the ’50s. Actually, what I’ll do – I’ll show you a little bit of a movie about the Caribbean people coming to England.

[plays clip of documentary about UK West Indian immigrant population]

But anyway, that was to give you a flavor of what it was like in the earlier days I think from my parents.

Torsten Schmidt

When did they actually come over?

A guy called Gerald

I think like 1962 or something like that.

Torsten Schmidt

And was that still under the Commonwealth Act?

A guy called Gerald

I think so, yeah.

Torsten Schmidt

So, for us who are non-British could you explain a little bit how that worked? How former colonies were allowed to settle in the “motherland”?

A guy called Gerald

Well, I’m not really a politician, so I don’t know the real rules but it was like, yeah, the way I see it anyway is like, they put their service in, and there was still sugar and tobacco and stuff like that. Like financing things in – I don’t know what you would call it, in the “motherland” or whatever – so, everyone was welcomed to come and help out with nursing and driving buses and all the rest of it. And the offspring or the kids of this generation of people that came to Britain from the Caribbean kind of settled – well, actually made their parents’ music into something else, which we’ll go into later. What I’m trying to do is to show the actual what was the background of the music that I started to do. These are the kinds of seeds that actually planted the music. This is how it was made. I was told I had a bit of time, so I went a little bit in depth into it and kind of give you a bit of the beeline in drum & bass and all that...

Torsten Schmidt

You’re looking like you wanted to share something else.

A guy called Gerald

Well, I was going to show maybe another bit of footage from this PSV club, but in a different genre, in a way. This is a group called Foot Patrol. They’re from Manchester. Dancing to ... this was pre-Haçienda days, but the music was still housey type stuff. Anyway, go for it.

[plays clip from PSV club]

... That, for me, was the core of dance music. I did a track called “Voodoo Ray,” which was done in like 1988.

Torsten Schmidt

But hang on, before we get there, obviously we have jumped time a little bit.

A guy called Gerald

We have, yeah, yeah. I’m not sticking to a timeline any more.

Torsten Schmidt

Yeah, and the interesting there is, for us who were born later, you can instantly see so many different influences in the dancing there.

A guy called Gerald

Yeah.

Torsten Schmidt

And the strongest might be maybe even jazz-funk dance?

A guy called Gerald

Yeah, sorry I should – at the same time that this was happening there was also jazz-funk and soul music and reggae, and all sorts of different things. We weren’t so genre-specific in them days. I mean, there was different styles of dancing and there were like – say, like, on a night out you may get a jazz break in the middle of the night, where they would play jazz-funk for half an hour and then go back to playing funk again. House music was like one of them kind of little sidelines that happened like that.

What would have happened was they would have created an arena, and these guys would have done an announcement that they were going to dance, and they would go in and do their routine, and then people would go back to dancing again. Still, overnight you would probably hear loads of different styles of music. It wouldn’t just be the same thing. Everyone would also be doing different styles of dancing and stuff like this. It was a magical time. I try to encourage people now to be more less genre-specific and just basically go with your feelings.

Torsten Schmidt

So, just to clarify, both those scenes were shot at the same venue?

A guy called Gerald

Yeah.

Torsten Schmidt

Could you tell us a little more about that venue as such?

A guy called Gerald

Yeah, well this was a venue in Hulme, just near the high-rise flats that we saw. It was actually the birthplace of the Haçienda, or the place where they first did their nights.

Torsten Schmidt

Who’s they?

A guy called Gerald

Oh, sorry. The people who put the Haçienda together.

Torsten Schmidt

Rumor has it that one or two of them had other functions in their later life as well, right?

A guy called Gerald

OK, I don’t know that. Yeah, no, they did. Tony Wilson was one of the founding fathers of the Haçienda. Actually, there’s a guy, Peter Hook, who was part of a band called ...

Audience member

New Order.

A guy called Gerald

Actually, no, he was first Joy Division. I knew that. Then later New Order. Well, actually, he’s still flying the flag for the Haçienda now, which is really cool, because it was a really magical place. A lot of DJs, some that you probably wouldn’t even know, actually built the spirit of that place. I think everyone who played there made a building block in the spirit of the place. One of the first DJs was called Hewan Clarke. I used to actually hear him DJing at a place across the road from the PSV, called Burley High School Youth Club. He introduced me, in a way, to jazz-funk. That’s the first time I’d heard of this jazz artist called Chick Corea, through this guy Hewan Clarke playing a track “The Slide,” off the album Tap Step, which is an amazing tune if you ever want to check out some jazz-funk stuff. That was really cool.

There was another DJ called Chad Jackson, who also used to play there, and also another DJ called Greg Wilson, who later became the manager of Broken Glass, which was a breakdance crew from Manchester who were pretty famous in the north-west, and then I think up and down England. I don’t know how far they got, but they were big-time in Manchester. Basically, the street music that was happening in Manchester was, a lot of it evolved from the city center of Manchester. And the PSV was at the heart of the city center, so it was a sacred place, in a way, to most. They also had other nights and all. There’d be old-people nights, where old people would go out and drink and whatever. You know what I mean? I mean, it still happens now in communities all over England.

Torsten Schmidt

So, it’s a lot more community-center-based than actual venues that are kitted out with massive amounts of money.

A guy called Gerald

Yeah, I mean it started off ... it definitely started off just as a community-based thing. It was basically people in the community would come out and show off their talents. Then from there, it evolved. Manchester’s a really interesting place. It’s a lot of universities and stuff there, so you get people from all over the world coming there for a season kind of thing. Like at university time, there’s always loads of people all over the streets and stuff, and loads of clubs. It’s like, in the winter, you’d get all this stuff happening. And yeah, I think that actually triggered off the interest in Peter Hook and these guys actually taking on the FAC51 building and making the Haçienda more of a full-on venue, which it became.

Torsten Schmidt

So, when you say that was the birthplace of it, does it mean that all these people were more or less from your end of the city?

A guy called Gerald

Most of them, yeah, at first. After a while, people that used to go out and do this kind of dancing, they got older and disappeared into doing other things. Actually, some of them ended up doing stuff on Coronation Street and all this kind of thing. Coronation Street is a soap opera, by the way. I always forget I’ve got to explain, because it’s people from all over the place.

Torsten Schmidt

Yeah, and something that’s fascinating for a lot of these people is that when you look at footage like what you showed earlier, or if you take a glamorized version of it, like Control, the movie on Ian Curtis, and you see Macclesfield, and what that’s like and how also glamorous it is to start out in one of the world’s best-known bands ever, and you just say, “Oh yeah, but at the heart of it, it’s the dole, crappy heating, and…”

A guy called Gerald

Exactly, yeah. There’s also one of the... I don’t really know that much about indie music. Excuse me while I have a drink here. One of the guys from The Smiths, the main guy, he used to live in Hulme, too. He used to…

Torsten Schmidt

I guess it would be a hard debate to see who of the two the main guys is, but yeah…

A guy called Gerald

Well, the guy that used to walk around with branches hanging out of his pocket and stuff [referring to Morrissey]. He used to live there. Actually, they used to do tours [of the area], but I was living there in a squat. They were doing these tours, and there’d be busloads of people walking past your house. You’d wake up in the morning, and you’d walk out into the corridor. I mean, there was still dog shit and stuff like that. You’d think if there was a tour going on or something, they’d clean the place up. I think they just left it there for the reality of it. Anyway, should we move on to something else? I actually wanted to, at some point, demonstrate to you how I did some music, but I’m not sure exactly how much time I’ve got.

Torsten Schmidt

Well, I guess if we get to the demonstrational part of it, we might have all the time in the world, because that’s what people really like to see. Maybe, to put everyone on the same page – because shockingly enough, I do remember when “Voodoo Ray” came out, and I know that there’s one or two people in this room that actually weren’t even born then – it might be a good reason to play it, and then see how we go from there, because that was one of your very first releases.

A guy called Gerald

What I’ll do is, because I don’t actually have a copy of it here, so I’m going to go to the internet and find a copy of it.

A Guy Called Gerald – “Voodoo Ray”

(music: A Guy Called Gerald – “Voodoo Ray” / applause)

A guy called Gerald

What I’d like to do now is show you how this track was made. Believe it or not, there was no MIDI around, so we didn’t actually ...it was all drum machines and synths. There was MIDI around, but there was the more expensive machines in them days. I actually used the stuff that was being, in a way, cast out by the studios. We’d go to secondhand shops – it was a used-goods store kind of thing – and buy old instruments that were either broken or no one wanted to use any more. This machine is called a TR-808. And basically, with this machine, I developed a way so I could –I didn’t have a manual for it at the time either, just got it from the shop – and I found that it was easy to trigger the other machine that I had, which is called an SH-101. At the time, I got into this idea that if both things had the same name, then there would be definitely some way that they could talk to each other, because I was from the hi-fi world. I didn’t realize…

Anyway, I took them apart, basically, to see what they were, and I realized that you could go from the trigger out, or the accent, from the 808 into the clock on the SH-101. It took me quite a while, because I was basically just playing around with them both. I wanted a way to be able to manipulate the envelope, while it was playing. I couldn’t really do that while I was playing it. I wasn’t really that good at playing, but I wanted the notes to be sequencing in time with what was going on with the drum machine. I noticed it had a sequencer on there, but I didn’t have a manual, and it was like, “How do you work the sequencer? Where’s the trigger? What’s actually playing the sequencer?” It was just through trial and error I realized that, “OK, you stick it into the clock, and it would actually play the sequencer. I started basically writing stuff into the sequencer, and writing these little notes, so it was almost like the sequencer was in my head, the main sequencer. But then I would go, “OK…” On the drum machine, I would press go, and basically, if I tapped in four triggers and I pressed load on the sequencer, and the clock was clocked in, and I pressed anything from two, four, six, eight on the sequencer, then I was going to get an even tune… note. Then I would write stuff that way, randomly at first, until I got more into trying to do my own melodies and stuff. It was basically a really easy way of writing stuff.

Let me see if I can get this going. There you go. Listen to that. You don’t get that any more. So, I just typed in eight notes, anything [plays keyboard]. You can’t go wrong. What I thought was, if I got another one of these 101s, and had the drum machine going at the same time, and then actually incorporated the Roland 303, which is a machine that Roland did to basically accompany another machine that they did called a 606. All these machines were made roundabout the early ’80s to accompany pianists and people like this, and it never really took off. I can’t remember the guy’s name… it was a Japanese guy who was working for Roland who had these ideas to make these accompanying machines. But they never took off, and I think they ended up in a trash can somewhere, and then they ended up being sold really cheap. Anyway, so some of them ended up in Chicago, some of them ended up in Manchester…

Torsten Schmidt

I mean, basically, at the time, you were in another group, which we’ll get to in a second, just before that. And in an interview, you guys mentioned like, yeah, some weird three-digit numbered machines, and there’s a young boy in Germany thinking, “OK, this sounds unlike anything else that I ever heard before, so apparently it has to do something with these weird things.” I tried to search them out, and obviously, all the music stores in the greater vicinity didn’t have them, so I traveled to the big city and go to the music store and go, “Would you gentlemen maybe stock an 808?” They’d just be looking at you and totally burst out laughing and go, “No, we sold the rest of them seven, eight years ago. No one wants that shit.” It’s like, “Yeah, but is there a way to find these?” I mean, at the same shop they are one of the world’s biggest music sellers these days, and a majority of the stock is actually drum machines and synthesizers. Someone has woken up at some stage…

A guy called Gerald

Yeah. It was really interesting, I think in them days the old electronic music thing was almost like taboo. I remember it was basically just kind of in general classed as soulless blips and beeps kind of thing, they would say in the media and stuff like that. One of the things that I was actually trying to do at the time was kind of show that it had some kind of emotion, you know? It wasn’t the actual instrument, but like how you actually used it yourself. And I think even today people kind of push that kind of vibe.

You know, someone could be sat with a computer and another person sat with a guitar, and yeah, obviously you’re going to be like [about the guitar], “Yeah, that’s more real because you can put more emotion out of it.” But at the end of the day it’s like, the melody or the actual feeling of what you’re doing is the thing that creates the emotion, you know? It’s not just the act. I’ve seen some people who, OK, they’ve got like about two or three chords and they stand there strumming the guitar, and like maybe shouting or something, or screaming, and people go, “Wow!” At the end of the day you could do the same thing with a keyboard or whatever and people would be like, “Huh?” Traditionally we’re kind of pushed in certain directions with things.

Anyway, I think you should use the electronic side of things to create more emotional type stuff, you know? I mean, I can hear it a lot in a lot of music, but it’s always catching the background, you know? They’ll kind of use it as a bed of stuff and then they’ll put something like, maybe someone playing the piano and something. You know, say this is the thing, which is cool. You know, I mean, the live thing is the focal point, and then the electronic stuff. I did a track called “Emotions Electric” after kind of hearing these vibes. I just wanted something that was totally electronic, but that would push across a sound that was more emotional. It was inspired by what was happening in Detroit and all.

For me the early type of music, that techno that was coming out of Detroit, was like so, I mean, I could cry when hear some of the sounds, you know? Just some of the chord progressions that people came up with. I think it would’ve been impossible for any inner-city kid to actually get an orchestra together to [convey] this kind of emotion. It would’ve been impossible. That managed somehow to transfer from Detroit to the rest of the world. It was through the electronic side of music production or whatever. Anyway, I just thought I’d put that in there.

Torsten Schmidt

I mean, some of these Detroit boys, they had to go literally to church. I mean, you can hear a lot of church progressions in there. They literally used the church synths in return for like helping the reverend to program their stuff.

A guy called Gerald

Exactly. Yeah.

Torsten Schmidt

How long ago did you last use one of these, though?

A guy called Gerald

Let’s see. It must’ve been about two years ago.

Torsten Schmidt

Is there a chance, when you talk about emotion and putting emotion that’s in there to put you on the spot and kind of show us a little bit what you learned over the years of how you get some Japanese piece of technology to extract some emotion? Because I mean, that’s one of the most seminal synth setups that you could find, and like a lot of things you might learn on there that you can incorporate in software scenarios.

A guy called Gerald

Yeah. For me the main thing was, I mean, in the acid house days, you would do a crazy kind of 16th, where you would take, I don’t know, a 16-step note sequence. Maybe I would put it through a delay or something and use also the effects as an instrument too. I mean, I’ve only got the two hands so I have to do it this way.

Torsten Schmidt

Yeah, it’s all about using what you’ve got at hand, right?

A guy called Gerald

Exactly [puts notes into synthesizer]. How many notes was that? I lost count. What is cool and all is because, you all know about the step-time, sequence and you can actually do these off sequences that all play against each other. I think I demonstrated that in this album I did with 808 State called Newbuild. If you go on Google, you might be able to find it. If you don’t know anything about that kind of thing – I can’t really go in depth on everything because I’m totally useless at talking usually. Maybe I’m a studio bum…

It was like a kind of cross between a TB-303, which was like the acid machine that you made acid with, and the SH-101, which is this machine here. But it was really, really hard to use, to program, at first. You had to really take time with it. The next machine down would have been the 303 [shows diagram]. The lines that you can see from the 303 to the 202 is basically, that would’ve been like a DIN sync, keeping the time… Wow. No, it’s actually, this is like a later thing. This is a MIDI. Nah… This is a Graham set-up. Graham Massey. He was like totally futuristic. He was into MIDI.

Yeah, so we’ll move on to the 303, which on my setup I would’ve had the 303 clocked with the 606, because that would’ve been the way to do it without MIDI. The SH-101 is got clocked from the 606. Now I would’ve clocked the SH-101 from the 909, actually. You can actually use any kind of trigger to trigger the clock, as long as it was a strong pulse. If it was like a strong pulse sound it would trigger the – I don’t know if any of you actually heard any of the really early electro stuff, like “Planet Rock” and this kind of music that was coming from America…

They actually used this 808 synth stuff. They were the first kind of people to use these machines. I actually once bumped into Arthur Baker who did “Planet Rock.” He was the producer of “Planet Rock.” I asked him what was it like… I’m kind of veering away from this MIDI stuff. He actually said that he borrowed the 808 from a friend of his who had a job at the post office, who could actually buy an 808. That’s a bit of history for you. He did “Planet Rock” on a whim with Afrika Bambaataa. They basically had nothing when they did that. For me that was one of the most inspirational electronic music tunes. It was borrowing from earlier things like Kraftwerk, but it really did take it into the dance realm.

They actually used the trigger, the sound that I’m using now, to trigger the 101. They actually used it in the track, and it was actually used in later electro tracks too. Kind of sounded a bit like this… I’m actually trying to mimic the sound now, but it sounds like that. You might have heard that in a few early electro tunes. This kind of “kitakitakitakitakit,” that’s actually the clock that ticks. If you have a sound that sounds like that, you can trigger a SH-101, which for me, I think it’s almost a different kind of feeling to using MIDI in a way. You’re actually just using something raw, it’s more external in a way, than just using a MIDI signal. From here, without a computer, I could think of loads of possibilities. If I had another two or three SH-101s, you could use one to do your main riff, another one to do the bass, and another one to do a pad or a string. They’re pretty versatile machines. Sorry if I’m just going on with this tune thing. Going back to your thing again, I think that was a Graham Massey set-up.

Torsten Schmidt

Who’s Graham Massey, in the first place?

A guy called Gerald

Oh sorry, Graham Massey was the other member of 808 State. When we first started there was three of us. There was Graham Massey, Gerald Simpson – that’s me – and another bloke called Martin Price who was more like the guy who was funding the whole situation, studio time and stuff like that. We used to actually go in this studio in Manchester, it was an old school, like a recording studio school. It was called Spirit Studios – I’m not sure if it still exists. But Graham was actually a student there, and he used to get free time at night, when there was no one using it, so he would give us a call when there was free time and I would bring all my drum machines and stuff down and, basically, show them how to do a set-up. I’m pretty impressed by that one [looks at setup on screen]. That’s really strange.

Torsten Schmidt

So, Obi-Wan, do you think he was a good pupil then?

A guy called Gerald

Yeah, apart from the MIDI stuff. Nah, it was really cool. We’re actually going to get together in a few months’ time. I think there’s probably going to be some more information as the date gets closer, because I’m not sure of the exact date. So, I’m actually going to get together with Graham and do a live jam again, using lots of the old equipment. We’ll try and keep you posted with Twitter or internet, you know. I know I sound really dumb, but anyway…

Torsten Schmidt

Isn’t it rather funny how times change, because about 20 years ago, you and Graham on the same stage would be the least likely thing to happen?

A guy called Gerald

Yeah, we kind of went our separate ways, soon after a track that we had called “Pacific State.” For many different reasons, which I could go into in a little way?

Torsten Schmidt

Yeah, that’s part of the story as well. It’s what we all have to go through.

A guy called Gerald

For people that don’t know, I was part of this group called 808 State. I’ve been told that I’ve got to explain things because there’s people here that are not actually familiar, they would have been too young or they’re not actually from here. It was more of an English internal thing in a way, from years and years ago, from the ’80s.

Torsten Schmidt

Well not exactly, we’re talking about one of the biggest-selling house records of all time.

A guy called Gerald

Going back again, I was more into being a studio kind of person. I was more into the electronic side and wanted to experiment more. There were parts of the group – not Graham, because he was also part of the same thing – but he wanted to create... I wanted to do more experimental music, which I started out doing, and the kind of ethos of 808 State had changed. They wanted to become a pop band, and I was actually really against becoming a pop band, because I wasn’t into that kind of thing. So, I went my separate ways and started to do my own underground thing. That actually ended up in the charts, so it was kind of strange in a way. We still ended up meeting in a strange situation. We fell out, anyway, over this situation, and in the end we ended up becoming friends again later on. I actually see them every now and again around Europe or whatever. I’ll bump into them sometimes and do revival stuff. 808 State are part of the Manchester scene, and also part of the Haçienda sometimes, and Peter Hook does Haçienda things, so we’ll meet up and we’re good friends. I actually learned a lot from Graham, and I think Graham learned a lot from me. We were doing an “each one, teach one” kind of thing because he got schooling from a recording/engineering school, and I showed him the rough guide to hooking synths up and how to wire things, in a way.

Torsten Schmidt

Not how to kill yourself by using the wrong cable and such?

A guy called Gerald

Well, actually there was one scary moment where we were playing at this Victoria swimming baths in Manchester. It was a Haçienda party, and I’d started wiring all the stuff up at the side of the swimming pool, in my usual way, which was still the way that I did when I was really young, raw wires and stuff.

Torsten Schmidt

Very good idea when there’s lots of water around.

A guy called Gerald

Yeah, well I nearly electrocuted everyone in the pool at one point apparently. I think actually there’s some footage of that somewhere.

Torsten Schmidt

Of the electrocution?

A guy called Gerald

No, there was no electrocution. Because it was a Tony Wilson event that they actually put on at Victoria swimming bath in Manchester. I mean if you can find that thing of Graham’s [referring to the previous diagram] there, I’m sure you can find that somehow on the internet. It’s interesting…

Torsten Schmidt

Well, we’ll have a look. When you say it went into the charts, obviously that’s a slightly different situation than now, where sometimes even 800 physical releases being sold can get you really high up on the chart depending on the territory. But even in major markets like England or Germany or France, sales are not nearly where they were. Do you got any ideas how many units you shifted of “Pacific State” or of “Voodoo Ray”?

A guy called Gerald

Nah, I wasn’t privy to that kind of information.

Torsten Schmidt

Which is another really interesting situation, though, as a young artist.

A guy called Gerald

“Voodoo Ray,” I’d get a rough figure, but as an artist going into that side of it, I really didn’t want to go into that side of it, but you’ve got to really protect yourself, man. Especially in them days. I mean now it’s not so bad, but we had vinyls. We had to go through distributors and distributors would have a run of, say, 500 pressings. Then, maybe two years later, you’ve got people from Iceland phone you up going, “Yeah, I just got your record man!” And you’re going hang on, I only pressed up 500, how did it end up in Iceland? Then you get someone from somewhere else, and then you’d realize, they just press up on demand how many they want and sell it out the back door. This was the thing that was going on, depending on how popular the tracks are at the end of the day.

So, you can keep rough tabs on it. But I never knew, and with “Pacific State,” it was basically, I didn’t know how many they pressed up at all. You really have to keep aware of this side of stuff. I’m sure now, what I would say, I don’t want to start lecturing people too much, but you’ve got to try and protect your intellectual property, for a start, and I think that you should look at the ISRC code system and make sure you join these organizations to protect your work, and make sure you document everything. Also, keep it all under wraps before somebody else takes it off you.

You’d be amazed… I tell some DJ friends today, they could be collecting more revenue and all on their music if they actually joined PRS and GEMA and things like that. And when they actually DJ at places or play, it’s not so hard to do nowadays, they document what they’ve played, they just have to write a rough playlist of what they’ve played, basically, and send it in to the collection agency people, and they’ll actually get paid from it. What happens is at GEMA and PRS and people like this is that they go around and they collect license fees from venues and things like that, and this money all goes into a pot.

If you don’t claim it, then Madonna gets it, because she’s got an accountant that actually... Not just Madonna. Really big artists have accountants that go around collecting this revenue for them. I know you can’t afford that, but if you actually do look into that a little bit, you could find that there could be a little bit of an earner in it for you, if you actually publish your music, put your music out there, and get these people to collect it for you. You look in your account one day and there’s one extra [zero] on something and you’re like “Oh yeah, I like that,” and it’s probably because the collection people, they’ll put the money in your bank. Anyway, I’m wearing on again.

Torsten Schmidt

I mean there’s about eight million topics to cover, but three major ones that we totally need to grasp once we leave here, and I guess we use the audio example of 808 State’s “Pacific State” to ... you mentioned the Haçienda quite a bit, and that had a lot of outcome in various scenes for various people of totally different walks and, maybe, while we have that running in the background, you could take us back to what kind of club that was, and what role it played, and who it attracted and all these kind of things...

808 State – “Pacific State”

(music: 808 State – “Pacific State”)

A guy called Gerald

OK, going back to the Haçienda again, Manchester is a student town basically. Sorry. There we go [adjusts volume]. Manchester is a student town, and a lot of people started towards the city center. The Haçienda was basically… it was a really big venue, and there was a lot of other places that were more specialist or whatever, but that was more of an open type of venue, and they would actually put on live shows. Actually, Madonna… Going back to Madonna, played there for £50. Can you believe that? In the early part of her career, she played the Haçienda. The very first time I seen acts from Chicago, I seen them at the Haçienda… They actually came over as a showcase from DJ International and did a whole showcase at the Haçienda. There was Adonis and Chip E. All these guys that, by then, were heroes of mine, playing live at the Haçienda was amazing…

Before that, I’d seen another artist from the more electronic funk era called, Mantronix. I’d seen him playing at the Hacienda, and was amazed, because up until I’d seen him play, I’d only seen people performing with, maybe… they’d go with turntables or something, or a cassette or something, and they’d be playing, but he was actually playing with a DX… was it a Yamaha DX100? No. He was actually playing with a LinnDrum, a sampled LinnDrum at the time, and I thought that was amazing. All the scratches and all these sounds were being triggered live, and, in there, it sounded amazing. At the time, we’d never heard anything like that. Yeah, these were things that… The places became a kind of a melting pot in a way, after a while. People from all over the UK would go there after a while, and it became really cool.

I’ve got memories of actually touring with them. The first time I’d left the UK, I went to visit New York with a Haçienda tour. I actually went to some amazing clubs at the time. I thought they were amazing because I’d never been to New York before. There was this club called The Tunnel. I went there at the time, and it was basically in a disused old train station and they had this effect of a train coming down the tunnel, as you were on the dancefloor, which totally blew me away. Amazing. Anyway, I keep on veering off, don’t I. The Haçienda was great.

Torsten Schmidt

A lot of people around the world heard of the Haçienda the first time, not for the place that played Chicago and Detroit and Midwestern dance music, but the place where weird skinny white boys would go, and all of a sudden try to dance.

A guy called Gerald

Right. OK. There was actually a transition, I should say. There was a time where there was all these people really into dancing, and then it somehow because of some little small yellow tablets, I think were involved, but there was other things and all. A lot of other people started to frequent when these parties… if you was a real dancer at the time, it was really entertaining [laughs]. This new breed of people. They were having such a good time, it was like they didn’t need to dance. You know? They just totally… They were on another level. You know? That was great. For me, by then I would just stand in the DJ box or in the lighting box and do the lighting. I can only, from personal memories, remember a few characters from there, and one of them was Bez, who, before I actually realized he was with this band. I don’t even think he was with… what band was he in again?

Torsten Schmidt

The Happy Mondays…

A guy called Gerald

Yeah. I didn’t actually realize that he was with this band, and he used to do a lap of the place. He used to wear a fez. Can you imagine that? This little bony guy with his eyes poking out of his head doing laps of this club, like a really funny dance. Like how he goes on stage with these maracas. If you don’t know Bez, anyway, he’s part of… I’ve got to explain stuff, so. He did this shaker kind of dance, but before he had the shakers, he was still doing this dance, but kind of doing laps around the Haçienda. You’d be stood there, drinking your beer, and then every, I don’t know, half an hour, you’d see this strange guy going past… I don’t know. Manchester was full of characters like that, though. You’d get all these… it was like a magnet. The Haçienda was one of these places where people would flock towards. After a while, it really faded away because, what happens is the people who are the freaks end up, instead of being… they’d become the entertainment too much, and then what happens is a lot of people just stand around and watch them. In a way, they just fade away or disappear, or they go somewhere else, where all the freaks go – I dunno. That was an interesting period of time.

Torsten Schmidt

I guess this whole bit of… do you spectate or do you participate? That shift was rather interesting.

A guy called Gerald

It was. I was always in the participating or listening.

Torsten Schmidt

Oh, is that why you hid in the light box?

A guy called Gerald

Well, after a while, it got… I didn’t do the new dancing. I was getting a bit too old for that kind of thing, so I got more… Like how the club was working, you know? I wanted to know about the sounds, and I was really good friends with Mike Pickering and Graham Park, who were DJing there, most of the time. I would go and have a chat with them, see what kind of tunes they were playing, and rush off back to the studio and try to do something similar. By then, I’d started getting into that kind of vibe.

Torsten Schmidt

This might probably be the chance to shout out some of the Manchester legends that did not end up in the indie dance bands. There must have been more people like Bez.

A guy called Gerald

There was a bloke I used to hang around with called Macca, Mad Macca. I think his dad had a fruit and veg company or something. He was totally crazy, crazy bloke. I don’t know how he got crazy but he was really, really crazy. He would drive us down to the Ministry of Sound, from Manchester, and just sit outside, clean the car until we got out, and then he’d drive us back to Manchester. Crazy.

Torsten Schmidt

That’s kind of handy.

A guy called Gerald

Yeah, but he would also be known to stop the car. Actually, he did this once, we’d just got off the motorway down in London and he’d got out of the car and started dancing around in the middle of the street. No music, nothing. Just crazy, doing this weird kind of dance. At the time, I was really innocent to why people all of the sudden want to dance so much, because I didn’t really know. Even in the studio, when I was doing stuff with 808 State, there’d be a point where I’d be doing some programming or something, and they’d start freaking out, and I’d go, “Wow, what are you doing? It’s not that good.” They would really start getting into it and be inspired by…

Torsten Schmidt

You’d look at your machine and it’s like, “Oh, it’s still the same filter.”

A guy called Gerald

Yeah, yeah, basically. They’d get these urges to rock out and stuff. Which was cool, because if you’re actually in an environment where people are dancing and you’re doing dance music, it inspires you. It helps to have that kind of energy. Yeah. Anyway, Macca was one of these crazy dancers that had urges to just dance.

Torsten Schmidt

Speaking of urges and seeing these machines in front of me, there’s just one thing which I guess non-British people don’t get in a similar way, which is a bassline.

A guy called Gerald

OK. All right.

Torsten Schmidt

We had a nice little demo earlier, but is there anyone interested in hearing a nice [bassline]?

A guy called Gerald

What I could do is I could do something on the computer. Because I think just a bassline on its own, it needs to be accompanied. You can’t just have the butter, you’ve got to have a bit of bread. Everything’s got to be in there to appreciate it. I could do you something on the computer. I’d really like to do that, actually… demonstrate how I would do a live thing today. Just say, first of all, how I did that then, it would be this plus maybe about seven or eight other different instruments, and you’d be running around doing this. Hopefully, I’ll do this thing with Graham in the future, and you can all see how it happens…

Anyway, I’ll go back to try and explain what I’m doing when I’m doing it…

[applause]

Torsten Schmidt

I guess everyone in here appreciates the fact that, or knows that feeling of when you get carried away… We can’t let you leave without, because I saw a lot of question marks in here as soon as those breaks came in, the bassline. People know you from very different worlds actually. Some of the people would know all about the house stuff and the others will go like, “Hang on, he did Juice Box, one of the most influential labels in this whole – whatever you want to call it – jungle, drum & bass, whatever, at the time.” You actually did one of the first albums in that genre that actually worked as an album in a totally different concept and a culture that up until then mostly worked on releasing really fast for-the-moment 12”s.

A guy called Gerald

That whole era actually was pretty…

Torsten Schmidt

We just jumped another few years, now, up until…

A guy called Gerald

I’d say the mid-’90s, round about ’95. Well, I’d say ’92, I kind of moved from techy-type stuff into more of a rave, for want of a better word, system. Basically, we started to incorporate everything. It was basically a smorgasbord – it was like, let’s put some speeded-up Whitney Houston in there. Basically, the sampler was invented, so everyone wanted to use it and prove that they were using it kind of thing. We were in an experimental stage, which you’ll find in any creative genre of art. If there’s no money involved, then people get creative, because they’ve got the room to create and it’s a way of entertaining yourself is to create. Once the money comes, then the rules and then, you know, there’s certain set standards of things that you’ve got to get into.

Anyway, in the early days, it was like, well, use some hip-hop, use some reggae, some dub, throw some old sound tapes in there. I’m saying throw, but you actually did sculpt these things. For me, anyway, personally, as the way I looked inside the drum machines and synthesizers, I was also into looking into how you would shape samplers and things like this.

It was like, “Wow, you can do so much now. It’s not just like having a load of tapes and stuff – load of tracks and pushing them in.” Everything’s becoming more and more gelled. I could see it even then, really. It was like, “OK, there’s the turntables, there’s the keyboard, there’s a drum machine, there’s a sampler,” and the sampler was the gelling [agent]. It was the way of incorporating the turntable in a way into the system in them days.

Out came all the hip-hop and everything else. Your dad’s old collection, anything you could find. Basically, you’d start hearing loops from the children’s programs on TV. Everything just became a loop. I remember once I was going up the stairs at Highgate Station [in London]. There was this really high squeak on the elevator. I remember I actually, I didn’t have anything to record it. I wasn’t living in London at the time, but I actually remembered going back to Manchester. I was going down to London on a weekly basis, but going to Manchester, getting my DAT machine and going back down and recording this really high-pitched squeak that was happening in this hall on the elevator. It was really strange, getting so deep into sounds, having digital ways of capturing it. It was a really exciting time.

Out of this was born for me Black Secret Technology, which was at a time an album that I felt I had to do. The earlier stuff was… it wasn’t just jump-up, but that was the stuff that was really pushing forward because it was mass out there. There was a lot of people, there was a lot of DJs spinning, a lot of pirate radio stations were pushing that level of it, which was really cool. But also, at the same time there was artists like 4Hero on the Reinforced label. Even some of the early stuff that Goldie was doing. He was working with them at the time. There was a lot of – as with the earlier Detroit stuff – a lot of string-led, emotional type of stuff. But there was no album. I thought, “Wow, for people who actually hear this music seriously, there needs to be some kind of album.” I decided I would actually do something that was…

Torsten Schmidt

What do you mean by people who listen to this music seriously?

A guy called Gerald

People who would… critics and people who go, “OK, that music is just bang-bang-bang, and that’s it, there’s no substance.” The thing that a lot of people were getting was that was all they were feeling… I could feel everything from the basslines, and I knew exactly what was going on. You could break things down into polyrhythms and whatever… But when jungle came out, people were scared of it. In general.

Torsten Schmidt

Is that necessarily a bad thing?

A guy called Gerald

Yeah… I don’t want to start hating on any media people, but if you’re not getting the good media, if they’re saying that people are only going to it to hang out and to do drugs and stuff, and this music is influencing that, then we’re going to show you the sophisticated side of this…We’re going to go into multi-polyrhythms. We’re going to put frequencies and basslines that not just drop lower, but they’ll sing to you. You’ve got to hear it outside of your head and not even know where it’s coming from. That’s what I wanted to do – show them the depth of where we was coming from with this music. It was basically a gel of stuff out of England that was showing what, at the time, the inner cities were about. It wasn’t just about showing anger. There was also a passion and a beauty that had to be shown too. I’m not saying that it was like… that’s what it was about, but It was like basically trying to sing that song at the same time.

I did an earlier album called 28 Gun Bad Boy which was more kind of for fellows in Manchester driving around in their rides to listen to. One of the things I’ll try and do is I’ll do an album of a theme and then I’ll go, “OK, that was for that period of time, or that was that era, that’s then snapshot.” Then I move onto another theme. Almost like this old-school thing of the concept album… By the time ’95 came about, I think I already banged out enough and wanted to show the fruits of what I felt drum & bass had grown into, and jungle by then.

Torsten Schmidt

Do you think people confuse depth with sophistication?

A guy called Gerald

Def?

Torsten Schmidt

Excuse my pronunciation. D-e-p-t-h.

A guy called Gerald

Depth. With sophistication? I don’t know. Depth is like something deep, innit? Something sophisticated is, I mean, it depends. To me, sophistication is having lemon on your chips instead of vinegar. Where I’m from, you put lemon on your chips it’s like, “Posh him!” What we was doing with the earlier drum & bass stuff was like an introduction. It was kind of like ragga stuff. It was new. It was basically still the elements being born. You heard the rave, you hear the hip-hop, you heard the reggae. All those bits and pieces. But by ’95 all them things had gelled. One of things that we was trying to do at the time was move with the technology. At first there wasn’t so much sampler kind of… I mean, you had time-stretching. This era, where everything had this time-stretch thing. Then something else would come out.

Torsten Schmidt

You literally could tell by the records what got shipped to [inaudible] the last week.

A guy called Gerald

Yeah, basically. There was things being put in as it was happening. In a way, that was an exciting thing for studio-based producers and all. It was like, “This is the latest thing,” and it was always moving forward. At that time, the music was at the cutting edge. It was racing with the technology. I think the technology’s moved way ahead now.

Torsten Schmidt

Is there a winner in this race?

A guy called Gerald

It wasn’t even a competition race. It was basically, the way I felt anyway, the music was basically pushing, or it felt like it was pushing the technology. We got keyboards that were making sounds. We had samplers that could do the same kind of sounds. Then it kind of stopped there, really, with the music. For me, personally, when I look at a lot of the earlier stuff, there was a lot of effort put in the sounds or pushing the actual sounds.

As it became more and more available, it seemed that things were being pushed in like blocks. You could download a sample loop and put a bassline on it from someone else’s thing. Just put it together and maybe you’d just import the reverb from somewhere else. Then, just export the whole thing and that was the track. There was no actual getting your hands dirty. There’s no getting in there and treating the snares or making the… I don’t know, I’m probably totally wrong but I feel like there’s no… Even before I knew there was like 5.1 [surround sound] or whatever, I was always trying to make the snares come out at you. There was techniques of using delays to create movement in sounds, and I wanted to get everything in the tracks to breathe.

It seemed like all this, in a way, has been… I suppose it’s just from an engineer or a producer point of view, it’s lost in a way. It’s like you just grab a sound, 3D sound from a CD, you can go online basically in a CD. You can go online and find 3D sounds, and you just grab it and paste it onto your track. It’s almost like, I’m going to make a gourmet meal tonight, so it’s almost like you go in a supermarket and in this section you find chicken already in the onions or whatever. You don’t have to do any cooking. It’s there, you just pull it, you just basically glue it all together and there’s your meal. I’m thinking it’s not going to taste the same as if you cook it yourself, you know what I mean?

I just feel there’s a lot of people that don’t – not people, the actual system, just seems from sounds that I hear and tracks, some new tracks. Someone told me that people are making tracks on Nintendos and I was like, “Wow. That sounds interesting.” But it’s nice if you got an entire desk of stuff and you can take the bass drum and actually make it into what you want it to be, you know what I mean? Then, do the same with the snare, the hi-hats, and make that into a body of work within itself. And then build the rest of your stuff around it.

In the old days, when we was making stuff with vinyl, we had this feeling that, “Wow, this is going to last forever,” because it was going onto a medium. At the end of the day it would be horrible to make a track, and you’re there in the cutting room and you’re listening back to your track and you can see it being cut into the vinyl and that’s going to be there forever. You’re like, “Oh my god, that part I didn’t really want on…” I’ve had that feeling before. That feeling was so bad. At this point I cannot go back to the studio and change this. You would really want to get all that stuff right before you [went to the get the vinyl cut].

Now it’s, you do it, you finish it and you just go upload and bam, it’s on your site to be sold. You can take it off and put it back on again. I don’t know, it seems like it’s not as sincere, in a way. There’s not a lot of money to be made in the music, and maybe that’s kind of waned people’s passion in a way. I don’t know, I’m really confused with it. I’m someone from a studio. I’m usually locked away.

Torsten Schmidt

I guess everyone can feel the sincerity that goes in there. I think we are really thankful in you sharing that sincerity and opening up your insights. As you can all tell, there’s about, just in the last five minutes, about three million topics in there that we could elaborate on for days at least. You’re going to be around for a bit. I guess we all want to see, including yourself and some other people in the room, this concert tonight, and we need to get you fed beforehand. But we can’t go there without thanking very much for giving us the time and sharing with us, A Guy Called Gerald.

A guy called Gerald

Thank you. Thank you very much. Thanks.

[applause]

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