Dream Machines // Interviews

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...

As a member of Cabaret Voltaire and more recently Wrangler and Creep Show, Stephen Mallinder has been active on the nonconformist fringes of popular music since 1973. One of the most charismatic voices and perceptive commentators to emerge from the industrial music era in the UK, he has also been a radio presenter, academic and writer. I chatted with him about his early encounters with electronic music, Dadaist art and the writings of William Burroughs, Cabaret Voltaire’s gestation in a Sheffield attic in the 1970s, and how they loved the rhythms of funk as well as the energies of punk. We also discussed the electronic music community that emerged in Sheffield in the post-punk era, the politics of  Cabaret Voltaire  and how Black American styles like New York electro and Detroit techno had a cathartic impact on their sound in the 1980s. When was the first time you encountered electronic music? It was ‘Sparky’s Magic Piano’ [children’s story], which I heard when I was a l...

Dennis ‘Blackbeard’ Bovell is one of Britain’s pre-eminent dub producers and has been making records, with his band Matumbi and then as an artist and producer, since the 1970s. He was also a sound system operator, an important figure in the creation of lovers’ rock and a key instigator of the reggae-punk crossover with his productions for The Slits and The Pop Group. In this interview, he talks about making tape loops at school, UK sound system culture, being a prog fan, using synths in reggae, and his work with Linton Kwesi Johnson, Ryuichi Sakamoto and members of Radiohead. You did your first recordings when you were at school, using a reel-to-reel machine, is that right?  That's right. The school had a studio meant for making sound effects for the drama group so it had a couple of quarter-inch Ferrograph tape recorders, and that’s when I began experimenting with loops, because I’d been reading that The Beatles and George Martin had been making loops. So the first loop I actually...

Chris Carter and Cosey Fanni Tutti are vitally important figures in British electronic music. They’ve made significant records for decades as Chris and Cosey and Carter Tutti and, before that, as members of industrial originators Throbbing Gristle. Tutti’s hard-hitting autobiography Art Sex Music , which explored her career in provocative art and experimental music-making, also had a major impact on electronic music’s discourse. In this interview, Tutti and Carter talk about the importance of the hippie movement, mind-expanding drugs, DIY music-making, Throbbing Gristle’s challenging approach to sound and performance, and how they came to love disco. You were both involved in the alternative culture of the 1960s and early 1970s. How much do you think that that's been an important factor in what you've both done since then, and how much did it shape your worldview? Cosey Well, for me, it had a huge, massive importance. The alternative culture was the foundation for everything I’...

Hello and welcome to Dream Machines Interviews,  an online depository for interviews from my book Dream Machines: Electronic Music in Britain from Doctor Who to Acid House . I did well over a hundred interviews with significant figures in UK electronic music for the book. A lot of that material couldn’t fit into Dream Machines, and there were lots of good quotes and anecdotes left over that could possibly be of interest to readers, journalists and researchers That’s why I decided to start this site as a free resource, and I’ll be publishing a couple of raw Q&A interviews from the book each week. The interviewees will include Radiophonic pioneers and psychedelic veterans, industrial adventurers and electro-punks, dub scientists and housemasters. First up are Chris & Cosey and Dennis Bovell - I hope you’ll enjoy what they’ve got to say. (PS. About the photo: there won’t be an interview with either Marc or Cindy on the site, unfortunately - I just liked the picture.)