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Where to begin with Gerald Simpson? One of the founding members of 808 State, the man best known as A Guy Called Gerald pretty much kick started the UK’s acid house frenzy with his ’88 classic ‘Voodoo Ray’ – gatecrashing the charts in the process – and went on to lay down the blueprint for jungle music with the dark breakbeat experiments of 93’s ‘28 Gun Badboy’ LP and the classic ‘Black Secret Technology’ in ‘95.
He has persisted as one of the UK’s most dedicated producers ever since. On top of releases on seminal labels like Perlon, Sender, !K7 and Beatstreet over the past 10 years, A Guy Called Gerald released his 9th album ‘Tronic Jazz: The Berlin Sessions’ last year on specialist Berlin label Laboratory Instinct.
With his ‘True School’ session at Bloc, A Guy Called Gerald will be taking us way back to a time when US imports were streaming into the underground record stores in Manchester; bringing us the true school sounds – pre-Hacienda – from before the time that the smiley face’d up rave generation discovered house, introducing us to the music that was played in the ghetto up in the North of England. We chat to one of dance music’s most unassuming and honest originators.
Your ‘true school set’ at Bloc goes right back to 84… what sort of labels will you be crate-digging through for your set?
I’m not sure there was only about 3 or 4 labels back then. ☺
How did you first come into contact with those records?
The first time I heard this music was at The Reno club in Moss Side in Manchester by a DJ called Moses. I already had a 303 myself before I heard this music because I wanted to make electro funk because I was bored with DJing. Stu Allen’s show on Piccadilly Radio in Manchester was a funk and soul show that had a house break for about an hour in the middle of the show. The clubs were The Gallery, the PSV club, The British Legion, St Alfonso’s and the record shop where most people bought their imports was Spin Inn Records shop. There was not a lot of people buying house imports – most people were buying jazz imports. I came from a culture of people in Manchester who were music crazy. I remember people would buy their records from the record shop and bring a brown paper bag with them so no one would know where they bought them. In them days it was 17 pounds for a digitally mastered Japanese record.
Did you grow up in a particularly musical family?
Yes, everyone in what you might call the ghetto listened to music constantly. Music is a pacifier. I think without music the riots in the 80s would have happened a lot sooner. There are times in my life where I found I couldn’t sleep without music. Jazz, funk, reggae and soul was our soundtrack.
You’re often credited with laying the foundations for – if not outright inventing – the modern jungle sound with your ’28 Gun Bad Boy’ LP in 1992. Did you have any idea of the sort of influence that those tracks would have when you wrote them? What was your main ambition with the ’28 Gun Bad Boy’ LP? It felt like a conscious break from what went before…
It was a totally conscious break. I was really pissed off to see what had happened to house music by 92. I couldn’t believe what kind of a joke it became with certain types of rave music. I don’t think it was just me who was feeling like this. The main ambition was to keep within the circle of serious dance music. I know it sounds like an oxymoron but by then the lunatics had taken over. You had people on the dancefloor who a few years before wouldn’t have even dreamed of going anywhere near a dancefloor or who had no interest of going anywhere near a dancefloor but in a drugged up state they would just slop around. So anyone who was seriously getting down on a groove would be totally put off. For me it was kinda like trying to eat your food while someone was vomiting next to you.
There’s a lot of seemingly endless nostalgia for that era and all things Hacienda… was it as electric and ecstatic as people (or maybe just the marketing campaigns) would have people believe? What are your most resonant memories of that time?
My nostalgia goes back a long time before the Hacienda. My nostalgia goes back to when people were actually funk dancing to dance music. Hacienda was the beginning of the end for this era of music. My nostalgia was of electro funk which I saw house music as one genre of. Hacienda was good because it was the first warehouse sized club in Manchester. It was at a time when multi-media (video scratching, VJs) was just beginning and the Hacienda had 2 giant screens and a VJ crew called Swivel. People in Manchester had never seen this before and everything seemed to gel together. I mean, you had the people from the ghetto clubs – the kind of clubs where I used to go – mixing with the beer drinking and football fan crowd, which never happened before. How could it ? Football fans were not into dance music or clubs in the 80s. And then blending that all together you had the students who came from all over the world. With a concoction of ecstacy and whatever it was a new era. My memories of that time were standing in the lighting box and looking over into the DJ box to see what Graham Park / Mike Pickering or Jon Da Silva were up to. Every night there was a different scene and at that time it was interesting for me to watch and be an observer as I didn’t partake in anything but music.
In the last couple of years, you have released some quality techno LPs in the form of the ‘Proto Acid’ and ‘Tronic Jazz’ Berlin Sessions. Are you working on another album at the moment?
I’ve consciously finished with the concept of albums and decided to try and put out individual tracks – kind of like how the Juicebox Records situation was. I’ve been holding off on putting releases out because I wanted to test the tracks on the dancefloors when I play live. So you will see a series of releases coming out on my own label digitally very soon.
Despite being one of the most legendary producers around (and being responsible for some of acid house’s most ubiquitous crossover moments), you’ve always seemed happiest existing outside of the limelight’s glare and away from obvious trends…. has this always been a conscious decision?
No I suppose I’m just getting on with it. Maybe for the ones who are in the limelight – that is what is important to them. How do I get to the limelight? ☺ I guess it is also because I don’t like the promotion circus and I’m not so willing to pay for it. I see my music in this industry like an Easter Egg. If you find it then great. If you’ve not found it then you don’t need to find it.
Your career has basically bookmarked the evolution of UK acid house music and its many dizzying mutations. Do you ever sit back these days and think ‘they don’t make them like they used to’?
Yes, I’ve been saying that since the end of the ‘80s but there are always people who appreciate the deeper sides of music and they are the people I think about when I make my own music.
Which of the current developments within underground electronic music are you finding most interesting? Do you follow the movements of the UK dubstep scene and its many mutant variants (people like Ramadanman, Bok Bok, Loefah etc)?
By dubstep do you mean slowed down jungle? I think it’s perfect for my age!!! Hahahaha I’m glad they’ve slowed it down. I can still dance like I’m 21 with the youngsters which is the important thing.
On your blog you said that ‘it’s clear to me now that the music I’m making is about 359% away from the music that’s being produced in 2010 and calling itself techno or dance music.’ What did you mean by that exactly?
Well, while I’ve been sharpening my mixing techniques and honing in on single samples and trying to create orchestrations with them, everybody else seem to be grabbing whole loops and melody riffs from all over the place and not actually composing unique or individual music. I feel my music is unique in a way that it would be impossible for you to find origin of it. I love this about my music, even though nobody else can recognise it. It seems like the roots of most of the people doing dance music since the 90s is rock music and football. I feel that listening to improvisational jazz when I was in my mid teens helped me to have a never-ending flow of melodies and rhythms to draw from.
What have been your best gigs over the past year or so?
Hard to say – every gig is totally different. The best ones are where I’m playing unannounced and so the people have no pre-conceived ideas. The response is pure and they don’t want me to stop.
Finally, what is on the cards for the rest of the year for A Guy Called Gerald?
To carry on producing and finally releasing all this backlog of material on my own label. I’m also restarting the Juicebox label.
– A Guy Called Gerald was limbering up with Allan McGrath
