a very racially mixed area where you’d walk down a back street and hear Reggae blaring out of one house, Ska out of another, 60’s Pop, Elvis Presley or Country & Western out of the next. So it was a combination of those factors rather than any real grand plan that dictated Unique 3’s early output.
87 hits 88 and acid house starts dropping hard all over the country and of course especially in Manchester. Looking back – how do you see that movement – that moment? I have to say – it probably wasn’t as transformational or as valuable to us as perhaps it was to a lot of other people. Don’t forget, we’d been playing what we considered underground music for a fair few years before that, and I suppose that one of the principal effects of Acid House was to open underground music up to a wider and ….. I suppose….whiter audience. I know that must sound odd coming from someone with a big white face like mine, but almost all the underground music up until that point was quite frankly black and really hadn’t penetrated ‘Middle England’ at all. And again, while before there was about 3 cool clubs in the whole country that you had to travel to, within a few months, they were popping up everywhere, so it was suddenly far more accessible…..and then of
course the drugs came with it. Acid house is heavily romanticized these days, but when push came to shove – 80% of the kids in any given warehouse or club weren’t there for the music – they were there for the pills and the tabs. And so while it was a great thing in many respects and it gave underground music a massive boost on a number of levels, it also killed a lot of the reason why me and people like me were already on the scene.
That’s a really interesting take – so you didn’t see it is an electronically laced evolution of Funk, Soul and Disco – but as the downfall of a lot of it? Well in some respects it was. I know things have to change, but it’s an open question as to whether it changed for the better. There was a pretty lengthy period during that time when I was absolutely disgusted by the music - both the dance stuff and the Hip Hop stuff as it seemed to move from something with intrinsic value to a flood of throwaway tunes. And I suppose that there was an element of resentment that everyone was into it whereas it had been ‘our little secret’, and as soon as it went mass market, it did leave a bit of a bad taste …. Ahhhhh …. ‘The good Ol’ Days !