in pigeon holes, it all getting very specific, we didn’t really fit into any of the big four dance magazine’s sub genres and promoters had little idea what to do with us. Even as a production unit – there seemed to be too much diversity and too many influences to fit the rigid specifications of the day. Nothing’s changed in the way I approach things – the last album, ‘Invasive Signals’ had all sorts on it and the new one has all sorts on it too … And I’m past the point of caring, I’m not sure anyone is still listening!..
How did you see the transition from hardware to software? that really wasn’t what we were about. And that tied back into the TOTP episode – where we went on and did a B-side – Musical Melody - purely because it had a rap on it after we encountered massive resistance to playing The Theme – even though that was the track that was going down massively in the clubs. So I don’t know – maybe if we’d been with a different label or I’d have had a bigger pair of bollocks and stood up to the label a bit stronger – who knows what might have happened, but as young kids – it was a definite life lesson in how the music industry works or doesn’t work.
How did you cope with the splintering of dance music into highly specific genres as things headed into 93? Not very well! That’s always been Unique 3’s problem – we struggled to keep inside the outside lines of a genre. We played what we considered club music and our whole reason for being was to make people dance, when we did a night – there’d be a Hip-Hop crew at one end of the room waiting for us to drop some Hip-Hop and a Soul Crew at the other waiting for the Soul Anthems to drop. So when the ‘Dance Music Industry’ had worked out how to manipulate it, creating pigeon holes
I was all for it myself. You hear all these people moaning about the demise of vinyl, but I hated it. That’s right! I SAID IT! Obviously I used vinyl, and at the time I had one of the biggest vinyl distribution companies in the north with 6 vans out every week. Vinyl, the finding of it and the storing of it more or less ruled my life for many years. At least 2 flats and one of my houses were bought solely on the fact that they had room enough to house my record collection (I also made sure the kids got a bedroom!) When the vinyl tower eventually fell and all the new technology came along – I was glad to see it come but not as glad as my kids who then got their own bedrooms!