A Guy Called Gerald: Interview

From ‘Voodoo Ray’ in the early UK house era to ‘28 Gun Bad Boy’ at the dawn of jungle and beyond, Gerald Simpson has long been one of the most important figures in British electronic dance music.

We talked through the formative years of his career since his youthful enthusiasms for jazz-funk and electro - how being a contemporary dance student led him to buy his first drum machine, how he started out scratching tunes on an Amstrad home stereo and progressed to recording raw analog jams with an 808 and a 303 at his mum’s house; how Chick Corea gave him the bug for sonic futurism, and how a major record label contract ended in disaster but led him to new musical beginnings.

I first interviewed you back in 1988, around the time ‘Voodoo Ray’ was released…

It seems a long time ago, but it also seems so close. I mean, I'm not the same person I was back then. You know, I've had a really fucking mad time of my life the last 30 years, seriously. It's been a crazy, crazy fucking ride, man.

Do you think you've always just about managed to do what you wanted to do?

Well, I've been really stubborn. I mean, basically I should have given this up years ago, but I just kept on going, doing what I want. Because I love music. More than I love life, to tell you the truth.

When you started going out to clubs, places like Legend in Manchester where Greg Wilson was the DJ, was it all about electro for you?

Well, electro was kind of like the new school thing actually, because we was into jazz-funk and stuff like that in the late seventies, early eighties. So for electro, Legends was the spot where all the dancers would go, as well as the all-dayers, pre-Haçienda.

How many of those electro heads later got involved in house?

I'm not sure but basically what happened with me I kind of caught the production bug, I wanted to produce music and that was a really lonely place - I mean, it's not like today where people can say, “OK, I'm a producer” and get a computer or whatever. I mean, you really did have to invest time, effort, and money into your craft, getting all these drum machines and stuff, you'd have to hunt them down.

When I first got into the electro stuff, it was all about dancing. At the time, I was in this kids’ home. And after school, you had to do some kind of specialist thing, you know like boxing or a craft or whatever. And I chose dance. And at the time, there was only one dance place that would take us, me and my brother, Shena Simon dance college in the centre of Manchester. So we would go there after school and do contemporary dance; contemporary and jazz. And in the middle of the class, there was woman who would come in and she was from the Northern Ballet School. And because me and my brother were the only males in the class, she took us took us on because there was a shortage of male dancers in like the Northern Ballet School and so she was pushing us towards that. And so I got right into that for a little while. So I got to the stage where I was doing the contemporary stuff and started to learn dance theory and was getting bang into it. And the music thing was out the window in a way.

But we used to do a warm-up for dance classes, there was a drummer that used to come into the dance class and do this drumming. And every time we'd do when we do a sequence of exercises, he would up the tempo a little bit. So that's how you would warm up.

I wanted to do this at home. And found the best way to do it would be to use a drum machine. So I got my first one, I think it was a Boss drum machine, I can't remember the name of the drum machine. So I got that, and I used to plug it into the Amstrad at my mum's house.

I got intrigued by how I could programme this drum machine. It sounded like some of the electro stuff, and I was thinking, “Wow, I could probably do ‘Planet Rock’-type drums like on this.” And I remember going to the [Manchester] Apollo and seeing Herbie Hancock with Grand Mixer DST; I had heard the scratching on ‘Rockit’ but when I saw him doing it live, it really registered. So soon I was doing beats on this drum machine and scratching on my mum’s Amstrad and recording it on tape.

By this time, I'd left the kids’ home and I think I was looking at like to try and get more equipment because we've got hold of turntables and we started like this little jam we called the Scratch Beatmasters that was like me, MC Tunes and another guy [Dave Caine]. I was called DJ Ski.

So that was how I started. We would just do these jams in the attic at my mum's house. We'd invite other people to come in and jam too, like across the road from me was the Ruthless Rap Assassins. They used to come over there and sometimes the Spinmasters who later became the 808 State DJs.

You were making your own kind of little sound system collective there?

We even built our own boxes and everything, we robbed wood from building sites and built our own boxes and robbed all the components from Maplins. The Scratch Beatmasters, we were more into the tunes by then and building up like this collection of electro-funk stuff. Round about that time I was going to legends and getting into what was going on with the electro-funk. When I'm doing music now, I still feed off that energy from then. So yeah, I eventually got hold of the [Roland] 808 drum machine and started getting more serious with the production thing.

I remember getting a Tascam [Portastudio] and then I got hold of a couple of keyboard things and a [Roland] 303 and started to do you like these jams. I think by that time, Stu Allen was on Piccadilly, and he used to have this section on his show where you could send in demos. I knew Stu Allen got his records from Spin Inn [shop in Manchester]. So I used to give them the tunes, and they used to give them to him. And like he started to play them on the radio. That inspired me more than anything.

Were you still called DJ Ski at this point?

I was calling myself DJ Ski when I was doing jams in the attic at my mum’s house, then I changed my name to Jackmaster G. But what happened was the first time Stu Allen played my tunes, I hadn’t put any name on the cassettes. So on the radio he said, “That was a tune sent in by a guy called Gerald.” And from then on, I called myself A Guy Called Gerald. I met up Colin [Thorpe] and Aniff [Akinola], the guys from [electro-soul duo] Chapter and the Verse, they introduced me to the guys at Rham [record company who released ‘Voodoo Ray’] and said they're interested in putting some of this new house music stuff out.

At that time, house and acid was considered quite weird music, wasn't it?

Yeah. Really embryonic. I mean, I would do jams for the, for the Scratch Beatmasters and that would be more like electro-funky type stuff. When no one was in my little studio, I would just link all the machines up and do the stuff that I was hearing on the radio, the acid stuff. I was making all sorts of different things by then, you know, because by when I got an 808, I was trying to do SOS Band-type stuff, all sorts of different vibes, because you have to come up with your own style, come up with your own way of doing it. So when I got a chance to do some recording in a professional studio, I had all these fucking tunes.

After ‘Voodoo Ray’ and your first album ‘Hot Lemonade’, you signed to major label Sony and released ‘Automanikk’ [in 1990]. Can you describe the musical progression that you went through?

Well, the technology was changing. I started off with synthesis, with ‘Hot Lemonade’, for me that was more about synthesizers and the introduction of samplers, but there was a lot more synthesizers, the samplers were very sparse in that. And then with ‘Automanikk’, it was, it was more kind of sample-based. So basically, I was just moving with what I thought was the times, you know? But looking back now, it was my time.

With ‘Hot Lemonade’, it was kind of also a little bit forced. Because the label realized that I was doing something that was a little bit different, they were excited about the charts and stuff like that, they wanted me to have an album that they could put in the charts. So they were saying to me stuff like “do something poppy”. So I was like, OK, ‘Hot Lemonade’. Basically, the reason why it was ‘Hot Lemonade’ was because I was just saying to them, like, fuck off. ‘Hot Lemonade’ was basically like my mockery of a pop album. You're telling an underground person to do pop, that was ‘Hot Lemonade’.

‘Automanikk’ was basically me kind of celebrating my part in the whole Manchester scene from the dance side of things. At the time, there was a lot of kind of indie-type stuff, and it was weird how that got kind of mixed up with the futuristic stuff. I kind of couldn't really figure it out at first, the stuff that was being played in places like The Haçienda wasn't the same kind of stuff that [Factory Records boss] Tony Wilson was promoting.

I did another album for Sony after ‘Automanikk’, because they were kind of like “yeah, we kind of don't really get it” - they wanted vocals. So I did an album called ‘High Life, Low Profile’. And that was totally not their thing. I think it might have been a little bit too left and a shade too dark.

Who did they think they were dealing with exactly?

That's the thing. I don't think a lot of them knew. I mean, they got ‘Voodoo Ray’, and they thought that everything was going to be like that. But in my head I was in Detroit and Chicago and popping my breakdance moves and basically trying to do something that’s totally fucking different to everything else. Not trying to be S’Express or Adamski or whoever else - I was just doing my own thing. But they just didn't get it.

So they didn’t release the album, and that was the end with Sony.

Yeah. I'd already started to do all this kind of early jungle stuff. So basically, I then started to do my own label called Juice Box. And I started to do my own productions. I was fucking mad about it all, so that's what came out in the jungle stuff I did at that time.

Have you always seen yourself as a kind of futurist?

Yeah, I guess. To put it in a crude way. When Miles Davis heard Jimi Hendrix, he went electric. He caught that bug. He gave that bug to people like Chick Corea and all these other people that were playing with him. He basically just was like, “Yeah, just set yourself free!” He gave them that bug.

When I heard Chick Corea, there was a record called ‘Armando’s Rhumba’. Basically, there's one side of the record where he goes from acoustic to electric. And that blew my fucking mind. He kept the same riff all the way through, but he went from acoustic to electric. And you know, I used to study, every fucking note of this guy's tunes, I would sit at home, I would take these albums from the library and study them - like really fucking study every nuance and read all the stuff about what he'd done. Even the albums that were deleted, I managed to find.

That inventive futuristic bug I caught from Chick Corea was basically about using technology to express yourself. Then what I got hit with from Chicago and Detroit was basically the catalyst. It was like, “Oh, fuck, this is dance music - but, on another level, and it's something I can do - I've got that drum machine, I've got that bass machine, I can do that and more.”

Then when I got the Tascam [Portastudio], I'd realised I can record this and then go back and record more on it. And then when I found out about SMPTE, so everything would lock in a groove and you could lock all the machines into each other, my brain went mental. And then when I found out about using the effects system in a studio, my mind went out of the fucking window. Then when I found out you could do all that in one box, in a computer…

Interview by Matthew Collin for ‘Dream Machines’ on June 15, 2022.

Photo: Victor Frankowski for Southbank Centre, 2014/Wikimedia Commons.