The next pivotal record after “Voodoo Ray” was by Evelyn and Harper’s old Bradford comrades Unique 3, who began making tracks on a RolandTR-909 drum machine after buying early Chicago house records at Manchester’s Spin Inn. Originally released in 1988, the raw and sparse U.K. acid-house warehouse party anthem “The Theme” was, in the words of Matt Annis,“every bit as alien and otherworldly as ‘Voodoo Ray’ [but] crucially nowhere near as polished.” By the time “TheTheme” exploded at Downbeat and JiveTurkey, Evelyn and Harper had already been experimenting with their own second-hand equipment. “I begged my mom to get me this Fostex four-track cassette deck and Casio SK-1 keyboard on credit, so we started with that,” Evelyn recalls.“Then we borrowed someone’s 808 drum machine, and I bought a Roland SH-101 keyboard from a friend. So we started making tunes and recording onto cassette.” Out of this DIY experimentation came the first Nightmares on Wax track, “Let It Roll,” a raw bleep house cut that sampled Doug Lazy’s hip-house smash of the same name, and, by extension, that track’s sample of “Set It Off ” by Big Daddy Kane. “We decided to play it out at Downbeat, and the place went berserk, so that was the first time of having that feeling of playing your music to your crowd,” says Evelyn. “We must have played it off of cassette about six times that night. It was like,‘We really need to try and get a label interested in this.’” It was a different, raw DIY track that would ultimately open the door for Nightmares on Wax to reach the market. “We had been so inspired by ‘Voodoo Ray’ that, in our cheeky way, we sampled it,” says Evelyn.“So that is how the first version of ‘Dextrous’ came about with a sample running underneath, and Kevin creating this great bassline.
Downbeat, while also serving up an eclectic mix of hip-hop, house, electro, soul, funk, and jazz for Leeds’s most serious dancers, would become an important hub for a new musical movement that Evelyn and Harper would soon find themselves immersed in. As affordable home studio gear became widely available in the late 1980s, a distinctly British dance sound exploded across the North of England. “There was this real feeling at the time that, all of a sudden, rather than looking to the States, we started to think,‘We could do that,’”Winston Hazel of Sheffield production team Forgemasters told me in “Forged in Steel City,” a 2023 Wax Poetics feature on that city’s electronic music scene.“So you had this whole new DIY bedroom vibe coming through in the music.” The most influential of these early bedroom producers was a Mancunian jazz-funk and fusion dancer turned 808-loving techno convert named Gerald Simpson. “‘Voodoo Ray’ [by A Guy Called Gerald] changed everything,” Richard “DJ Parrot” Barratt, Winston Hazel’s partner at the Jive Turkey club nights in Sheffield, told me in the same article. “It was like hearing the room you were in coming back out of the sound system at you. A sonic-kinetic feedback loop. Feet to speakers to ears to feet to speakers.” George Evelyn—who would experience the full force of the Northern dance scene at the infamous Blackburn raves held in that town’s disused warehouses between 1988 and 1990— recalls his own introduction to “Voodoo Ray”:“We knew of Gerald because we were all breakdancers and poppers. But, when ‘Voodoo Ray’ [came out], it was like, ‘Shit, we have to do something to match that.’ It was that sound system mentality of having to come up with a tune to represent where we’re from.”
( opposite ) Lounging in Leeds LS6 at the Carboot Soul photo shoot in 1998. ( top ) George Evelyn aka DJ E.A.S.E. at an early Nightmares on Wax appearance in 1987.
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