Dream Machines // Interviews

As a member of The Wild Bunch, Milo Johnson has a special place in UK pop cultural history. T he Bristol-based DJ crew that he co-founded in the 1980s helped set the template for the creative collectives that would make some of the most important UK dance music of the late 20th century . The  Wild Bunch  also included Daddy G and 3D, who went on to form Massive Attack; Nellee Hooper, who went on to producer Soul II Soul’s debut, and later offered a platform for a young rapper called Tricky. Musically, they dealt in hip-hop, electro, soul, funk and reggae; their recorded output was small, but ‘The Look of Love’ in 1987 pioneered the very British style known as lovers’ hip-hop. Milo Johnson went on to establish himself as a house producer under the name DJ Nature, but in this interview, he talks about the origins of the Wild Bunch, the early Bristol scene and the influential Dug Out club, as well as how the crew made the record that opened up new horizons for UK underground music. How di

British electronic pop music would not be quite so wonderful if it wasn’t for Daniel Otto Joachim Miller, the founder of Mute Records, early producer of Depeche Mode and music-maker as The Normal, Silicon Teens, Duet Emmo and Sunroof. In this interview, he goes back to the DIY roots of Mute and  recalls  the liberating influence of punk, the joys of cheap synths and seeing an early minimalist  Depeche Mode play live for the first time. He also talks about  pushing the sonic limits while doing  sampling experiments with the Basildon band , as well as the musical influence of Berlin and the rise of the remix. When you were starting out, what was the first synthesizer you ever bought and what did you use it for? My first synthesizer was a Korg 700S. Which I used exclusively on my first single [‘T.V.O.D.’/’Warm Leatherette’ by The Normal, 1978] and I also used it a lot on the Silicon Teens album [‘Music for Parties’, 1979]. I think on those two projects, that was what I used, really

Janet Beat is one of the pioneering women of British electronic music - a genuine original. Born in 1937, she made her first musique concrète recordings back in the late 1950s and resolutely battled through years of misogynistic hostility and discrimination to forge a career in the genre. In our interview, she spoke to me about her early interest in sound metamorphosis, her parents’ disapproval of her chosen career and how her father destroyed her early tape experiments, her struggles with sexist adversaries, and how she achieved wider recognition as a composer with her first album release when she was in her eighties. You became interested in making music at a very young age - three years old? Well, yes, it just happened. I mean, I don’t know whether it was anything to do with the fact I was born prematurely. And my mother told me, she said that she went to the theatre to a musical when she was pregnant and she swears I was kicking in time to the music. So I’ve always been very se

  Peter Zinovieff is a towering figure in British electronic music history; a composer, inventor and computer music pioneer whose company EMS (Electronic Music Studios) manufactured one of the first portable synthesizers to go on the market, the VCS3, back in 1969. EMS synthesizers were used on records by Roxy Music, David Bowie, Pink Floyd and many other bands, even though Zinovieff, as a committed avant-gardist, was utterly dismissive of popular music. I spoke to him in June 2021, just a month before his death at the age of 88. He talked about learning tape-splicing from female pioneer Daphne Oram, the complex and intensive process of making computer music in the  1960s , working with the BBC Radiophonic Workshop’s Delia Derbyshire and Brian Hodgson, and being one of the first people in the world to have a computer in his home. He also explained how he felt no kinship with 1960s counterculture.   You were building your own devices in the early days, before synthesizers and computer

  When I spoke to drummer and producer Keith LeBlanc in January 2023, the year before his death, he was looking for a publisher for his autobiography, which he promised would tell some of the never-before-heard inside stories of the early days of hip-hop in New York. My interview with Keith didn’t focus on his work for scene-defining hip-hop labels Sugar Hill and Tommy Boy, or on the pioneering track he made that used vocal samples instead of lyrics to drive the narrative, ‘No Sell Out’, which featured the voice of Malcolm X. As my book is about electronic music in the UK, we talked about his collaborations with Adrian Sherwood, the On-U Sound Records crew, Mark Stewart and the Maffia and the mighty Tackhead – explaining what made their sound so good, and why, after they secured a major record deal, it went wrong. You, [guitarist] Skip [McDonald] and [bassist] Doug [Wimbish] had a great career in the US – you provided the rhythms for important New York labels like Sugar Hill and To