Session Transcript:
DJ Storm
Red Bull Music Academy, London 2002

The video stream for this lecture can be watched here.

For Storm, year zero was 1988, at London's rave mecca, Rage. She, fellow DJ Kemistry and Goldie threw themselves into the nascent club scene and became a crew. The rest - climbing up tower blocks for DJs slots on pirate radio, the legendary Metalheadz Sunday sessions, and of course, the tragic death of Kemistry in 1999 - is history. Stepping right into the mix: DJ Storm.

Storm: »Getting DATs and CDs is all about bartering with people. A producer can say: "I give you this, you give me something," but I'm not in that position. I just have to hope that people want me to represent them with my music. The people that give me my DATs and my CDs for dubplates have pretty much been the same for years: J.Majik, Total Science, Dillinja, Lemon D, Photek, Source Direct, Hidden Agenda and most of the Metalheadz artists because I suppose I met them first, really. So I'm quite lucky that I know all these people and that they're willing to give me their tracks. As a DJ who doesn't produce, I have a very open mind. A lot of DJs will go out and play what they've made that week. I can pick and choose because I've got no loyalty to anyone.

I felt very threatened when a lot of the producers started getting DJing work. The reason I'm here is people like Grooverider, Jumping Jack Frost, Fabio and all those people before me have kept spaces open that I can play in, like I do for DJs coming behind me. When producers started coming into the mix, I started to lose a lot of work. It's OK at the moment. Germany is the one place where a lot of producers went quite wrong because the German crowd really listens to the mix. And if you don't give them value for money, they will tell you just straight to your face. They were like: "I don't know why we spend this much money on you. You won't play as long as someone like Storm or Fabio who are DJs. You just come with this one-hour set and it's all your own music."

DJing is much more important than people think. We don't just go out and play a load of tunes. I know by working at home what doesn't work. I've got a plethora of things that do work when I'm out there so I can play three places in one night and have three different kind of sets. I always spend at least three hours on the decks every single day. That's first thing in the morning normally.

I want to not just play a set of records. I want to create something. Grooverider taught me how to select, Fabio taught me how to tell the story and Randall showed me how to pick up on my mixing skills. Randall was doing a whole new thing when I started mixing, called double impact. You'd be at the end break and you'd bring the other track in. By the time the two breaks had gone together at the end you would have a double impact where the bass, treble, everything would drop at the same time. When myself and Randall started mixing, things weren't as good as they are now, the beats were all over the place. In fact, the beats you added to the computers would actually make the breaks move quite a lot. So you're actually very on the pitch for your mixing. Nowadays things have got better and a track will stay in its place, unless it's got a great amount going on in it.

You have to listen to each track. Lemon D will drop something after one bar, which is very unusual. He might produce a sound that will only drop again in one bar, and never happen again. For the rest of the tune you're listening for that noise, so you are really listening to his track - he's has got your attention. Some people will drop their break right in the middle of the bar, so you've to be very careful about counting. If there is a noise that you like in a track you can accentuate it and you can actually create a whole different sound in the mix. It's live remixing of those two tracks together. If you've got something that's very musical it might be very hard to get it to mix with something else. You might work a couple of hours to find something for that particular tune. I've played Source Direct in jungle raves and had them rewound. If you told the crowd that's a Source Direct track, they wouldn't believe it. I believe if I'm a good DJ, I can guide the crowd through what I'm doing.

You're never sure what your set-up is going to be, so be prepared for everything. Don't rely on the needles that the club has got. Take your own. Especially in the UK we are terrible at giving the DJ what they want. Europe is fantastic. I have monitors both sides at the level of my ears, there's great needles on the decks. They really have thought about the DJ, more than we do in this country. In the UK, once something is big, we start pulling it down and want to move on to the next thing. No magazine in England has consistently stayed with drum 'n' bass and nurtured someone, and followed their history.

We definitely haven't gone overground yet, even though we have adverts with drum 'n' bass. We've had such a stagnant sound for the last couple of years, that it definitely had to move on quite a lot and I think we're back to where we were a couple of years ago. It's very fresh drum 'n' bass right now. I don't think you can tell any of us that drum 'n' bass is dying.

At Metalheadz we're always looking for new people. We want to be the label that starts the new Hidden Agenda or Source Direct. We're each listening to 20 CDs a week. I've got my own reaction sheets. So when I email that person I can say what I thought of it.

You really have got to go for it, and have a certain belief in yourself. As DJs, once we got mixing, it was kind of like: "I think we've got something that's slightly different. Maybe we can offer the crowd something that they'll enjoy." We've got our decks and were on them every hour of the day. Me, Kemistry and another guy, Greg - we bought our decks together. Goldie bought them for us and we paid him back because there was no way we were going to afford the two decks at once. So there were three of us on this one set of decks and we had literally allotted time to each other. We were like: "It's never going to work. I can't do this thing." Randall came 'round and said: "Don't worry, one day it'll just click." All we seemed to be able to do was rewind. If the mix got a bit dodgy, you just faded. All of a sudden it started. Once I realised that you can change the whole track with just one mix then that was it for me.

At the beginning of 1990 there wasn't drum 'n' bass. By the end of 1990 there was. It took a year for Carl Cox and Grooverider to stop being on the same line-up. All of a sudden they weren't playing the same kind of sets. Grooverider had gone this way, Carl Cox and Paul Oakenfold had gone this way but before, they were all playing the same kind of tunes. We kept certain things in our sets, but we are doing something different with it now. You got all the R&S stuff from Belgium with all the techno sounds. Then all of a sudden Shut Up And Dance put a bassline on something and we were like: "Oh my god, what's this? It's like being in the jungle. We're going to call this jungle." That's how jungle started.

Goldie was like: "I love this music and I want to be part of it." He worked so hard to get to where he was, even with Timeless he worked hard. His first track, he went and pressed up 1.000 himself. Goldie was cutting out different potatoes and we were pressing the name on [the white label] with ink. We were a cottage industry. We did it ourselves. Goldie did it himself and that's why I have so much respect for him. He has charisma. There is something very special about Goldie, you always knew he was going to be famous.

When Kemistry was here we were very different-looking - black/white, blonde/brunette. It was a very gimmicky thing that people saw in us. We just looked like that and we were the only duo going as well. What we always said was: "OK, so we're getting booked for novelty value. What we'll do is go in that club and just kick it so there's no way that promoter cannot book us again." When we first started mixing, people were like: "My god, they're girls and they can mix." Not in a derogatory way, but almost an inquisitive way. It's difficult to say 'I' because I've always thought of myself as a 'we'. The 'we' is one of the reasons I'm here. We created something together and I've tried to maintain whatever that was. I had to go back out there very quickly, just to make sure I could still do it on my own - which was hard. [Kemistry tragically died in a car accident in 1999.]

There aren't many women DJs in the drum 'n' bass scene. I feel that DJing and producing is not maybe not something that a woman would do naturally. I've always been a real vinyl junkie from when I was very little, so it was natural to me. In general, women are taught to put their feelings into people, whereas men are taught to put their feelings into things. Females are naturally empathic and males are more egotistical. Say, I'm playing to 5.000 people and I've completely rocked that crowd. I just say I did a good job. Now a guy might say: "You were wicked tonight."

A lot of the females involved in the drum 'n' bass scene take steadier steps than men. They might be slow but they're positive steps. Whereas a man might take a step just for the ego thing and maybe only do that step one time. A woman will be very careful about her situation. Guys get very egotistical very quickly and when they get big in the DJ world, the next minute they're turning up late and they don't really care. I'd never do that. This is my job and if someone's paying me to come and play, I'm going to do a damned good job.

When I was a radiographer, my job was to wear a white uniform with a blue belt. It was pressed every day and I had my nice shoes cleaned every day. It's the same premise as a DJ. I personally don't think you should turn up looking shabby. You should be presentable, you should do a good job and you should play the amount of time that people have paid you for. You've got to give value for money. I've just realised that as a woman I've got to work even harder. But DJing as a job is totally wicked and everything else that comes with it is a bonus. I'm so lucky that by playing music, I get to go all over the world. I open my eyes to everything. And even more now that Kemi is gone because I just think every day is a bonus.«