And then suddenly, all these records I’d seen as a bit of a waste of time and just clutter around the house turned into this goldmine. There was no hip hop in there so I didn’t give it the time of day – and then in that instant, the light above my head starts flashing, that eureka moment drops hard and it’s like ‘WHAT???????’ I had the breaks man. I had the breaks. A treasure trove of the craziest shit you ever heard. And that opened my mind well beyond any musical spectrum I’d been working off up to that point. Next thing I knew I was dusting off some BBC theme tune album, slapping it on the deck, sitting back and thinking ‘fuck me, this is wicked’. I don’t really want to tell my mates I’m listening to this shit – bit of a guilty pleasure, but sat there with the cricket theme tune or that trippy Kojack theme by John Love and his Orchestra going off, all I could think was – this is amazing. I think that was one of the characteristics of hip hop though. As soon as you probed past the surface, it opened you to other styles of music because by being into hip hop, you also took a heavy interest in everything they were sampling which in itself took you on a journey through the crates of the 60’s and 70’s.And if you were even semi interested in any level of production or DJing, you not only knew
the breaks, you made damn sure you had the breaks. So you’d get hold of say, Apache and from there your musical knowledge would grow until you were ransacking the record and tape exchanges or car boot sales on a full blown digging mission, then scouring the length of the record for the pure break. And I became a crazy digger, putting in all day shifts down at the car boot sales hunting down some obscure 80’s pop instrumental or some random acapella. For no other reason beyond loving doing it. There was no sense of building a DJ arsenal, or strategically arming myself for some future killer set – I simply loved records. I guess I was still expecting my journalistic career to miraculously take off, but I didn’t really have any actual plan over and above that slightly vague hope. And the irony was that the longer it went on, the more I was doing the writing and the interviewing solely to get the promos and the free 12’s. Getting paid was way down the list of priorities. Free tunes, free tickets to nights - as long as all the freeness was flowing – it was all good. I was the blagmaster. But there’s eras. And you know who’s ridden them all – certainly in hip hop terms? Westwood. It’s amazing to really reflect on how much influence he’s had over hip hop. Less so now – but back then….wow.