51 for 50 – 1991

Funnily enough, although the late teens were about guitar music, my university years saw me start to get back into electronica and hip hop. The Orb’s amazing ambient work Adventure’s Beyond the Ultraworld was one of the pieces of music that helped me on that journey.

When I started at Loughborough, I was super keen to get into being involved with the Student Radio station LCR. As a little kid I’d spent time in the front room of our little house in Watford, records on the floor, hosting my own little shows with the music provided by my Dad’s Thorens record deck.

The idea of being a DJ, being able to select a set of music that would reflect my tastes and influence others was captivating. As it turned out, though, I found spending hours in the LCR record library trying to find things of interest in a collection that was pretty much unindexed and had had much of the good stuff nicked by generations of undergraduates utterly boring. So my shows were often seats of the pants stuff, and in many cases I spent more time trying to write comedy sketches (not very successfully) than trying to become the new John Peel.

However, there were a few exceptions. With my house mate (and still good friend) Dan, we did two or three ambient specials, pulling together music from The Orb, LFO, jazzy stuff and more mellow hip hop. I think I might still have tapes knocking about of some of these shows…