Who knows what really went on? We’d all like to think that we make our own choices but what happens when choice is taken away from you? When the thing you think you need is really the very last thing you need?

The girl I met in late 2003 and again about a year later was very cool and while she definitely had an edge, she clearly wasn’t anywhere near as tough as she tried to make out. I liked her. She was funny and outspoken and real and honest – all you could want from someone you’re interviewing. And of course, it helps that the music she wrote and the words she sang were just incredible.

It’s a crying shame she isn’t around anymore.

* * *

AMY WINEHOUSE might look like she’s been dragged though a hedge backwards but she walks into the hotel bar like she owns the place.

 We’re introduced and she informs the photographer that, nah, he won’t be taking any pictures while we do the interview. She’s just this minute off the tour bus.

”Look at the state of me,” she says, unnecessarily. Everyone is looking at her already.

“Trust me,” soothes the snapper. “I can do something artistic with the computer 
later on.”

“Yeah? Well, I’m doing something artistic with these zits now. We’ll do the pictures later.”

Winehouse is every bit as precocious as her remarkable debut album Frank would have you believe. By her own admission, the 20-year-old singer and composer doesn’t suffer fools gladly and doesn’t take shit from anyone. She isn’t here to make friends.

”I don’t front to anyone,” she says between long drags on a Marlboro Light. “I’ll be honest about everything. It’s funny how even that can get you into trouble. People think what they want. That’s cool. People’s perception of me isn’t my perception of myself. I haven’t changed.”

She’s always been like this – direct, abrupt, a bit impatient. At school, she and a friend who shared her love for to US hip hop duo Salt ‘N’ Pepa started performing their own rhymes (such as Boys – Who Needs Them? and Who are the Glamour Chicks? Us!) 
under the name Sweet ‘N’Sour. Winehouse was sour.

She’s always believed that you learn by doing, not by being told what to do by someone else. This didn’t always play well with the people who had to educate her.

Every inch the London girl, Winehouse was brought up in a reasonably well-off Jewish family in East Finchley. She grew up absorbing the music she heard around her, her mum’s Carole King and James Taylor, her dad’s Sarah Vaughan and Dinah Washington, her nan’s Frank Sinatra and Tony Bennett, her brother’s Michael Jackson and later, John Coltrane.

“They were a good influence,” reflects Winehouse, brushing raven black hair from slightly bleary eyes. “I’m very lucky, because you get fucking ‘coo-coo-ca-choo’ shit in some people’s parents’ record collections and it’s like, good luck trying to find your way. I’ve been lucky to have a family that’ve been listening to the right stuff, innit.”

A couple of years after her parents divorced, Winehouse won a scholarship to Sylvia Young’s stage school, where, alongside classmates Billie Piper and one of the chipmunks from Busted, she developed her interest in the performing arts as a whole. Or at least that was the idea:

“I’d heard all these stories about the Lane’s Girls never being allowed out to auditions unless their hair was in a bun and they were wearing fresh pink lipstick. And I just thought” – sharp intake of breath – “I wanna be a Lane’s Girl and be six foot two and wear ballerina dresses; I was quite swept up with it. It was fun.

“I didn’t realise how serious I was about it until they kicked me out…”

Turning up with a nose-ring one morning, combined with a perceived lack 
of application and her natural outspoken bolshiness, got her expelled from the school. She moved on to a single sex establishment.

“I hated it,” spits Winehouse. “There were no men there. I was gutted! Them girls there, they were, I dunno, they were just all so wrong. There were two girls there I liked. The rest of them were just…weird. They were like men. I got there and I was like, faacking ‘ell!”

Every dinnertime, every free period, Winehouse would sit in the music room playing her guitar. She wrote her first song for part of her GCSE music coursework – she got a D, thanks, she says, to a miserable music teacher who didn’t even submit her composition.

“I just used these jazz chords that I was learning at the time, and that was it. The first song I ever wrote. I did it in three minutes. And I was like, this is easy,” she remembers, cocky as hell. “And I could do better as well. That’s when I realised that I wanted to write some serious music.”

It’s handy to be able to drag a positive outcome from that kind of negative situation.

“Definitely. I apply that to all my songwriting. Negative experiences, I turn into positives. I won’t live by negative experiences. I’ll make it good.” She shrugs. “That’s just me.”

By the age of 16, she’d recorded a demo tape of jazz standards and was swiftly signed to Universal/Island via an offshoot of Spice Girls svengali Simon Fuller’s 19 Management. Though Winehouse’s album was some three years in the making (“I’m not someone who can be handed an album to record in two weeks. I’m someone who needs to write an album. And it takes two-and-a-half years …”), Frank has been fantastically well received in the months since its release, garnering no less than two Brit Awards nominations.

Winehouse is characteristically unimpressed.

”I dunno,” she muses, studying her tattooed arms. “The Brit Awards is an awards ceremony that doesn’t necessarily represent real music in this country. Don’t you just take it with a pinch of salt?

“I’m up for Best Female, which is really Dido’s award. She has to get that. That’s cool. But if she wins more that one Brit  – I hope they keep that camera on because I’ll be like, no! It doesn’t really mean anything,” she decides, “any of it. It’s still the Brits. So what?

“It’s like I always say about Pop Idol – it’s good because you need shit music at the front so that the underground gets stronger. There’s enough people who listen to the majority of chart music and think, what the fuck is that? That doesn’t represent me or anyone I know.

“That’s exactly what happened to me. I didn’t start writing because I wanted to be famous. I started writing because I couldn’t hear anything that was any good. I just thought to myself, I’ll just write something that I want to hear.

“That’s all I’m doing, even now.”

Winehouse is a laugh-a-minute, a natural flirt who uses eyes, hips, and breasts to maximum effect. She’s got a bone-dry sense of humour and a refreshing unaffected straightforwardness seldom found in major label artists. And she’s very opinionated.

But without this bloody-minded confidence in her own prodigious talent, it’s unlikely that Winehouse could have produced anything as robustly self-assured as her debut album. I know I’m going to be listening to it for years to come.

Frank plays like an old jazz album but its lazy hip hop dynamics and lyrical nods to borrowed Erykah Badu albums and returned Moschino bras place it very firmly in the here and now. She calls her music her own “psychological therapy” and she doesn’t pull her punches. Searingly, even corrosively honest, Winehouse doesn’t balk at making herself -  and other people – look bad.

An occasionally bitter pill is sweetened considerably by some wryly humorous asides and Winehouse’s soulful purr just stops you in your tracks – but never was an album so aptly named as Frank.

The album finds Winehouse pondering her dad’s infidelities in the light of her own role as the other woman (What is it About Men?), berating an older boyfriend for his emotional immaturity and, even worse, erectile dysfunction (Stronger Than Me) and finding that happiness is a new guitar (Cherry) and sadness a dead canary (October Song).

“You can be at a point where you’re so fraught about something, the words come quickly,” she says of her candid, intensely personal songwriting style. “Stronger than Me, I had it in me, but I couldn’t really finish it until I’d got to a certain level in the relationship. It took me a while to write that one.”

Isn’t that a bit off-putting for blokes, knowing they might end up in one of her songs?

“Any man who’s put off by a song is not the kind of man I want to be with, know what I mean?”

[This interview first appeared in the Big Issue in the North in January 2004. Image taken from the official Amy Winehouse site]

See also: Amy Winehouse November 2004 interview

But rather than manning the barricades and ridding our supermarket shelves of brie and Golden Delicious, as a nation we seem to be welcoming this particular Gallic menace with open arms and dancing feet.

Whatever happened to the Dunquerque spirit?

In reality, it’s not like we have much choice. With music of the quality produced by the likes of Daft Punk, Air, Mr Oizo and Etienne de Crecy, we can do little but capitulate.

And just when you thought it was safe to go back on the dancefloor, Parisian funk merchant Alex Gopher turns up to deliver the coup de grace with his debut British album, You, My Baby & I.

Gopher began his musical career in the Versailles suburb of his hometown of Paris, playing in a band named Orange alongside Nicholas Godin and Jean-Benoit Dunckel (later to find fame and fortune as Air). The pair shared Gopher’s love for the music of Prince, Kraftwerk, New Order, Parliament and Funkadelic.

“Of course,” says Gopher over the phone from his home in Paris. “I am a very big fan of Prince. I am a very big fan of P-Funk and George Clinton too. For this album, I just try to use all of my past influences, from funk music to pop music and jazz, because you know, I started my career playing bass in a teenage rock band. I fell in love with funk music at the start of the Eighties and I just wanted to take all these 15 years of music and put something back.”

“I think I don’t have a leader personality, so when I’m working with other people I always try their ideas. The only solution was to make my music alone.  I remember when I was working with Nicholas and Jean-Benoit. They have got very strong personalities so I was always the guy helping them.  But I wanted to do my own stuff. That’s why now I prefer to work alone.”

Although much of the album was produced and played by Gopher and Gopher alone, he also enlisted the talents of Parliament and Funkadelic stalwarts such as Clip Payne and Gary ’Mudbone’ Cooper.

“For this record I wanted to have real songs because the format of the album is for home listening,” he explains. “I’m not a singer so I needed some people to really sing for me.”

“I met Clip Payne in Paris five years ago. And I said, one day I will try to do something with this guy. A few weeks later, he sent me back a demo of Time, the first track on the album, and it was exactly as I dreamed it would be, because it was my music with the talent of a man who made original P-Funk, a very good melody maker.”

On the album’s lead single The Child, Gopher also employed the voice of Billie Holiday to spine-tingling effect.

“It’s only quite a small section,” he says. “The idea was to try to make a song like if she was here today. At the beginning I wanted to have a female singer and I wasn’t able to find a good person in Paris. I fell in love with The Child because my wife was pregnant at the time, so I just tried to meld the two universes together and by chance it fits perfectly.

“When I finished the track, I asked myself, is that respectable or not? And people in general seemed to realise that all I wanted to do was make a homage to Billie Holiday.”

Do you never fancy having a crack at singing yourself?

“I use a vocoder on Ralph & Kathy,” says Gopher. “But that’s the only possible way I could sing.”

Gopher is also conspicuous by his absence in the typography-heavy video for The Child and the follow-up single Party People. On the album’s cover, he seems to be present only as a poster on a wall, before you realise that the whole vignette is actually reflected in Gopher’s sunglasses.

“In electronic music there is no singer you have to push to the front and I like that,” he decides. “It is the music which is important. You have to find a strong image to illustrate the music, but not the artist behind the music.”

Gopher describes the album as “a family affair. I try to work with friends.” One of its mellower moments is entitled 06/10/98, the date of his son Joseph’s birth.

What does Joseph think of the track?

“I think he’s a little too young but it’s quite funny to see him shake his body when he hears it,” he replies.

One curious thing about Me, My Baby & I is the fact that, although it sounds absolutely, intrinsically, hopelessly French with its innate hip-swinging funkiness and general air of louche insouciance, all of the lyrics are in English. While this makes a certain amount of commercial sense in an album destined for the UK market, how does that square with the French culture ministry’s infamous edict that a certain percentage of music played on the radio has to originate in the Fifth Republic?

“Ten years ago in France, all the music was English and American and the government made this law to help French singers and artists,” says Gopher. “But now, it’s funny, because hip hop is the very big thing in France and they all rap in French. But electronic music can live outside of these laws and we are proud to live without government involvement.”

I would just love to hear you playing the music from the album live. Will that ever happen?

“I find the technology I use makes my music go in different directions,” answers Gopher. “I try to make funk but with modern technology so if I try to do live music I will lose the personality of the music.

“But at the same time, gigs are interesting if there is something unusual. If I am alone with the computers, there is nothing visual, so that’s not interesting. Maybe I could merge computers with live music but that’s very difficult and I am maybe too lazy to do that. I’m a lazy guy.”

You can do live stuff with keyboards though. For example, did you ever come across Howard Jones?

“Excuse me? Howard Jones? I don’t know him.”

Eighties pop star with synths? He used to have a little monkey bloke in a cage dancing for him?

“Yeah. Maybe.”

I’m not convinced. Note to self: Don’t make stupid jokes when interviewing French people.

“Kraftwerk were very good onstage as an electronic band,” he continues, regardless. “When I was younger I did not make the difference between guitar music and electronic music when I listened to Kraftwerk. I thought they were just another pop band and I did not realise the tools were not the same.

“It was better before, to be quite naive and to take pleasure with the music without thinking how it’s done.

“I always try to make my computers sound like real musicians and perhaps that’s the only way to continue to use computers. I want to use these tools but I want to make classic pop music.”

These days, Gopher lives in Montmartre with his wife and child. He seems content with his lot in life.

“I think that it’s the best place you can live in Paris,” he tells me. “It is an old, beautiful part of Paris with a very diverse population – old people, the young generation, a lot of artists, lots of West Africans, lots of North Africans. It has a very good spirit, you know.”

Finally, I ask him how it feels for French music to have gone from about as uncool as it gets (Johnny Hallyday) to about as cool as it gets (Daft Punk, Air, Etienne de Crecy, Motorbass, Kojak, Rhinocerose, the list just goes on) in such a short space of time.

“The big sellers in France are hip hop artists,” he laughs. “Everybody knows that electronic artists are successful elsewhere, but for example Mr Oizo is still very, very underground in France. But perhaps for us that is the best situation because we are not too much involved in big business.

“We can continue the way we began a few years ago.”

* * *

Alex Gopher is still making beautiful and wonderful music and in fact has a new album out this month. Read all about it here.

[This interview is an expanded version of a piece that originally appeared in the Big Issue in the North in November 1999]

Believe it or not, the thing that makes me happiest at the moment is taking photographs of trees and flowers – with the occasional night-time foray into the valley of the drunk people. I’ve always liked taking pictures but never carried a camera around with me until recently, when I finally got a decent phone.

I use an app called Instagram to process and collate the pictures. My Instagram account name is undeleted, although you’ll need to download the (free) app to an iPhone or iPad to see my pictures and post your own. I’m not the greatest photographer in the world but I love it. I didn’t expect that at all.

I occasionally link to Instagram pictures on my Twitter feed and sometimes post stuff to my Tumblr account – both of which anyone can access, even people who don’t have the mark of Steve Jobs on their foreheads. Feel free to say hello.

As far as this blog goes, I’ll still film interviews with people who are doing interesting things, and I suppose I’ll post the odd archive interview now and again, but I’m not going to be doing any new writing about old records and I won’t be posting anything like as frequently as I did in the past. Let’s just say I’ve got a bad case of writer’s block.

Hopefully, sooner or later, the words will become as important as the pictures once again. I wish I could tell you when that will be.

But I haven’t a clue.

I’VE got all kinds of crap that I’ve accumulated over the years. Stuff I’ve written, posters, flyers, diaries, notebooks. Most of it isn’t particularly important or profound. You know, it’s just crap. I took the opportunity to get rid of a lot of it when I was moving out earlier this year. I had a bonfire.

I should probably have sorted through it a bit more thoroughly. But I couldn’t be arsed. It didn’t seem important.

One thing I did rescue from fiery oblivion was an unpublished interview with the Shamen, which I’m guessing is from 1989. It was done for Grunt, the fanzine I was involved in at the time, and typed up on Chumbawamba’s word processor – probably my first experience of new-fangled computers. It didn’t run because we stopped doing the fanzine, partly because I was a lot more interested in 24-hour partying than pretty much anything else.

A couple of years later, it was a pleasant surprise to find out that the infectious rave anthem that had been hammered all over the place for the last few weeks, the one that went, I can move, move, move any mountain .. was actually the Shamen.

I think I went to the Shamen’s travelling rave experience Synergy a couple of times. I remember, well, not much. The Shamen were good.

The Es were good too.

* * *

THE SHAMEN are two Scots – Colin Angus and Will Sinnott – who live in London. They’ve been making some very groovy music for the last three years. Initially a self-styled ‘Sixties-influenced psychedelic band’, they released a decent if uninspiring debut album by the name of Drop.

Since then lost two of the original four members of the band and got up the noses of Scottish & Newcastle Breweries, the Daily Mirror, the Sun and the Jesus Army, by means of various scams and stings.

They have also evolved into a whirlwind dance frenzy, where Public Enemy meet HAL 9000 in a battle for supremacy over taut syncopation and wonderfully perverted acid basslines. To coin a phrase, they are mental.

Since this interview took place at Leeds University last summer, the band have released a single or two and have just signed to One Little Indian, home to such luminaries as the Sugarcubes and Kitchens of Distinction.

The Shamen really began to attract people’s attention with the release of Christopher Mayhew Says, a sample-happy true tale about an esteemed peer of the realm who ate some mescalin and cheerfully tripped his brains out while being filmed by a BBC documentary film crew in 1955.

“I think the simplest explanation is that I had these experiences, they were real, and that they took place outside of time,” says Lord Mayhew, as happy as Larry.

As well as the wigged-out psychedelic harmonies found throughout Drop, Christopher Mayhew Says also featured a bone-crunching beat box. The pair had been “listening to a lot of hip hop sounds” and they quickly realised that the developments and changes taking place in that field were a lot more interesting and exciting than anything that was happening in rock at the time.

“It had got really boring,” says Sinnott. “We started to hear things like Public Enemy, the early acid stuff, even the first S’Express single. It was new! We thought, we can do something with that. We can take things out of that and use them to make our own sound even more exciting.”

Newly ensconced in London after leaving their hometown of Aberdeen, the pair threw themselves into the capital’s rave scene. The other two members of the band weren’t quite so keen.

“The other two in the band didn’t enjoy life in London and basically felt a bit redundant – as we were programming all the stuff they used to play. They went back to Aberdeen,” says Sinnott.

“As bad as things were for them in London, there’s still a lot more fun to be had, and a lot more interesting things to do, than in Aberdeen,” adds Angus. “We don’t spend very long periods in London. We’re usually down there to work, to record or whatever.

“Although I call the place where I live home, I wouldn’t call London my home. It’s where I am now because we work there and the opportunities to work with other musicians, engineers, people who produce stuff for us, it’s the best place for us to be.”

A lot of the fun to be had in London these days is about acid house.

“The first acid club that I went to,” enthuses Sinnott, “the only thing I could compare it to previously was the first time I saw the Stranglers in Glasgow in 1977. I hadn’t been in amongst anything that felt that strong since then. Acid house was something completely new, even in the clubs. Things like the way the nights were constructed, the lights shows and the fact that psychedelics were being used. That also attracted us quite strongly.”

Taking their cue from the carefully constructed atmosphere of underground rave culture, the pair began to place more emphasis on the visual side of their live shows. A dissolve unit for their slide projector allowed them to introduce more animation to the images on the screen behind them, UV lights create what Sinnott calls “a certain air” at certain points in the set, while old standbys like smoke machines and strobes put in an inevitable appearance.

“If you can hit an audience with lots of smoke, if you can smother them with smoke and cut them off from the band, the smoke clears away and the audience becomes much more aware of the band. That’s a good effect because it starts people dancing. They feel they can let go a bit.”

“We always wanted to have something with a bit of substance, something that created moods rather than just the normal rock lighting set up. It was always something we’d aspired towards,” Angus tells me.

“That type of event is the entertainment of the future. People go along to raves and have a fantastic time. They don’t want to go back to grungey rock gigs or grotty discos.”

“This is actually the last time we’ll be touring with thsi kind of set up. The next time we tour we’ll be trying to create a whole night – good lightshows, good DJs, and the band will play like a half hour set in the middle of the night. It won’t just be a ‘Shamen plus support’ type of thing.

Later on, during the gig, one of Grunt’s mates went crashing off into an absolute bummer of a bad trip because he’d been confronted with pictures of concentration camp inmates accompanying the song War Prayer. I’m sure there were other contributory factors in the bad trip but if the Shamen want to create an atmosphere where people feel comfortable doing psychedelics, they need to exercise a little more restraint in the imagery they use.

Last year, the band were involved in a minor controversy because of a film which accompanied their song Knature Of A Girl, exploring how female sexuality can be distorted and abused in the name of the feminine ideal. It featured What The Butler Saw-style footage of a young woman stripping off – nothing particularly explicit – but the film was only meant to be used in conjunction with that particular song. Instead, a drunken projectionist showed the film through an entire gig in Manchester, much to the disgust of many women present, who saw it as pointless and gratuitous.

“But even when we used that part of the visuals properly, we were still getting lots of girls coming up to us afterwards, asking us why we used it. The point just wasn’t getting through,” says Sinnott. “We decided we’d had enough of people complaining about it. We had a set of black and white line drawings by a guy called Eric Stanton, who draws woman in long black leather boots in all these incredible bondage scenes, chained and strapped up, all sorts of things.

“We thought, let’s give it a go and see what people make of this. Now I wouldn’t consider the original film to be real porn, it was pretty soft, arty 1930s stuff. The Stanton drawings, they were porn. They were fucking hardcore porn. And not a word was said. Nobody passed a single comment about them.”

“If you’d have seen these things ..” Angus searches for the right words. “I’m sure they were drawn as a labour of love, but they’re the product of a totally perverted mind. But nobody said a thing about them, because they weren’t a film and they weren’t glossy photographs. In the end, we threw all that lot out because basically British audiences were too thick to understand what we were trying to do.”

Too thick? Maybe if they tightened up their presentation a bit there wouldn’t be any room for misinterpretation. This is particularly important when a lot of your audience is off their heads. Drugs like acid or ecstasy can completely transform users’ personalities. There are supposed to be lots of Leeds United fans who were into violence and general dickheadery, who got turned onto E and are now dedicated to Peace, Love and Unity. But so what?

“It’s the biggest social use of psychedelics since the Sixties – and not only that but it’s ordinary working class people making up the bulk of people using the stuff. If nothing else, it’s made them question their pre-existing notions of criminality. They’re at these clubs getting tripped out but it’s against the law and they’re criminals for doing it. But they’re having a brilliant time. There’s no violence in the clubs and psychedelics are much better than alcohol when it comes to having a good time.”

“We’re talking about 5000 people at these things [this was last summer, multiply that by five for some of the raves this summer - ed]. The first thing the law knows is when it sees busloads of people going towards an aircraft hangar. They can take the riot squad in there or whatever. But what are they going to find? Five thousand tripped out people who don’t want to fight,” Sinnott says.

“As for youth’s attitude towards politics, about their place in society, it’s completely apathetic. It’s like 1977 again. This country is dominated by medieval ideas which very few people under the age of 30 actually accept. They’re at odds with the society they live in and they’re starting to get into psychedelics, which makes them even more aware of the social situation they’re in. They can’t help but ask, what the fuck is going on?”

But is this cosmic awareness ever going to solidify into real political action – or even real political thought?

“That’s difficult to tell,” answers Sinnott. “We can’t sit here and say, this is what’s happening. The people using psychedelics in the clubs don’t have access to any kind of political action, but if any kind of extra-parliamentary situation was to arise, what would their response be?

“I think that’s the important thing. It’s all about how people feel about their own situation, which in turn leads them to looking at what’s going on around them. I just can’t believe that anyone can use psychedelics today and not question the whole situation in this country.”

Let’s get down to basics. Acid for everyone?

“Only if everyone wants it,” says Sinnott, smiling. “As we see it, there are only two rules for changing consciousness: You can’t stop the people who want to do it and you can’t make the people who don’t. We certainly don’t want to make it compulsory for anyone.”

“And it’s not as if it’s a pre-requisite for making someone intelligent or socially aware. It’s an individual metaphysical thing they’re indulging in and it all depends how your personality is constructed.”

Exactly. It’s all very well for a pair of ex-psychiatric nurses to go on about psychedelics, well versed as they are in their use, but aren’t there some unfortunates who just can’t handle acid?

“I think anyone can handle acid if they’re in the right place,” says Angus. “For us, setting is the most important thing, you’ve got to be in a place where you feel comfortable. The thing about acid raves is that the set up is right. Good sounds, good lights and stuff, and there’s a good vibe in the place with all these people using the gear.

“There’s no alcohol, so there’s no threat of violence, so you’ve actually created an atmosphere whereby people allow their consciousness to be enlarged or altered or whatever. They’re comfortable.”

“If you’re in the right place, with the right people, at the right time, then it’s good for anyone. In the wrong place, with the wrong people, at the wrong time, then it’s hell.”

Take notice here kids.

“Hopefully, over the next 40 or 50 years, we’ll see the emergence of electronic consciousness-changing devices,” continues Angus, with a kind of wistful, faraway looks in his eyes. “There are already a couple that have been developed in America, like a helmet that can give you out-of-body experiences, shining lights, all the classical mystical things, and they’ve found a way to electronically trigger them in the brain with this machine.

“Folks could start drifting away from the drug scene, saying like, that was yesterday’s chemical technology, now we’ve got something else ..”

Even by bad taste nightclub standards, the fun palace where I’m to meet Edzy from the Unique 3 in Bradford is impressive.

It’s the kind of place which utterly transcends abstract concepts like taste and style. It’s huge, it’s gaudy and it’s one of The Hitman and Her’s more upmarket future stop-offs. But despite all the free aftershave, the multiple screens blasting out MTV, and the gold plating around the ornamental goldfish pond, the bottom line is that the gents still smells like a gents.

The rest of the club is as grandly decked out as the pissoir, with all the state-of-the-art audio and visual equipment you would need to make Sharon and Darren’s Saturday night go with a bang. All in all, there are a lot worse places to spend a Saturday night, I suppose.

But only if you can actually get through the door.

As we drive away from the club is Edzy’s rather flash motor, he tells me how he and the rest of the band couldn’t get into the Magestic’s grand gala opening night, “because we weren’t dressed right. I had three hundred quid’s worth of gear on me that night.”

Somebody should have told the bouncers. These lads have been on Top of the Pops. That probably doesn’t make a lot of difference to your average Bradford doorman. Later on, Edzy’s bandmate Deadly delights in telling him about the sparkling new VIP pass he’s managed to acquire. Edzy is not amused.

Unique 3 might be Bradford’s prime musical innovators at the moment – musical originality isn’t something you’d naturally associate with New Model Army, for example – but like many contemporary dance-orientated acts, they’re anonymous with it. So for the benefit of club doormen across West Yorkshire, here’s a quick history lesson:

Unique 3 are two black lads and a white lad called Cutz, Deadly and Edzy (though I think these may be pseudonyms), with an average age of 22. They live in the multi-racial Manningham area of inner city Bradford.

There used to be four of them in the band but the other guy left recently after the inevitable “musical differences” journalists like writing about so much.

The band grew out of the four’s experiences as DJs and soundsystem operators, and their music reflects a background which encompasses jazz, hip hop, soul, reggae and house, all at the same time.

Three years ago, they pressed up a few white labels of a track called The Theme and found themselves with a massive underground hit on their hands. Basically in 1988 and 1989, anywhere you found lots of plod, rottweilers and space cadets, you’d probably hear the steady beep-beep-beep-beeeeep of The Theme blasting out of the speakers at some point in the evening.

They were swiftly signed by Virgin subsiduary Ten Records and released a couple more singles, one of which, Musical Melody, made the top 20 and took the Unique 3 into the nation’s living rooms via Top of the Pops. Since then they have released a debut album and have a news single out next week.

Unique 3 have never been the most immediately accessible dance act and this tradition is continued with the new single Activity, an atmospheric, house-tinged musical hybrid that stands about as much chance of getting into the top 20 as .. well, Tricky Disco or What Time Is Love? or Cubik. It’s hard to tell these days.

“We never did really aim our music at the charts,” explains Edzy, “but if stuff does get into the charts, it just means it’s popular. Like, we’re not even releasing a seven-inch single for Activity. We’re not doing seven-inches at all anymore. There’s no point, because we’re not aiming at that kind of market, it’s more for a club audience, really. Activity is a bit harder than the stuff we’ve done before. It’s getting more extreme generally and we’re happy with it that way.”

At least part of this desire to sound as hard as possible stems from the band’s determination to counter the tediously traditional accusations of ‘selling out’ that inevitably follow a band’s debut appearance on Top of the Pops. It seems are inherently worthier if they’re obscure and poor.

It’s no great secret that the band weren’t happy about appearing on the programme, fearing just such a loss of credibility. How often do you hear Adamski or the KLF in a club these days? They’re not keen to repeat the experience for the new single. It is, says Edzy, “a load of bollocks.”

But, he continues, it isn’t quite as simple as that.

“It’s hard, especially when you’re on a major label, to turn it down. They’ve got whole departments of people whose sole aim in life is to get you on Top of the Pops. They don’t know who you are, but you’re on of their bands and you know, Top of the Pops is quite a big thing for them.”

“It was a good feeling going on it because of what it is,” says Deadly, who feels a bit more positive about the episode. “we were playing our own music, that we made in Bradford, on the most important music show on television.”

“It’s good to see some extreme music in the charts after Kylie and Jason, it wakes people up a bit,” adds Edzy. “It makes them sit up and take notice. Even if they don’t like it, at the very least they know that your music exists.”

Unique 3 are often lumped in with the Yorkshire bleep scene documented by Sheffield’s warp Records, but in reality, they have very little to do with it. After all, their music has got as much to do with hip hop as house. And it might have the right amount of strange electronic noises but it also has some thumping dancehall basslines. But that’s not as million miles away from many warp acts. So do they feel any affinity at all with people like Nightmares on Wax and LFO?

“Not really. But people like to pigeonhole you, don’t they?” says Edzy giving me a meaningful look. “It’s lazy journalism. We know LFO and Nightmares on Wax – in fact we’re DJing with them in Tenerife in June – but we don’t have a lot in common musically.”

“I don’t really know too much about techno music, because we’ve never had that much of a white, ravey audience. I like some of the Belgian stuff though – it seems quite heavy and powerful.”

“When we’re DJing, we’ll play anything that’s got a good tune, we don’t want to be limited,” says Deadly. Like we’ll go out of town and we’ll be headlining as DJs or doing a PA and we’ll pack the place out. But we’d never do that in Bradford. People here don’t seem to want to know.”

Of course, their determination to keep things fluid and diverse extends to the music they make as the Unique 3. The music on their new single ranges from the taut, moody title track to the motormouth rap of Jus Unique, with its smart De la Soul sample, and the downright weird rhythmic bombardment of Fury In Force. The final track, Reality, is a re-recorded corker from their album, an uptempo dancehall number vaguely reminiscent of the Mad Professor’s work.

MC Nuclear LEE of the Deighton Task Force talks about Bradford and the evils of drug abuse – which is a bit rich since their success with the The Theme owed more than a little to people being off their heads when they heard it. But that aside, Acitivity rates as probably the best thing the band have released in their career so far.

“We realise there’s not a huge market for the kind of music we’re making, but we’re doing alright and we’re making the kind of music that we want to make,” decides Edzy.

“We want to keep it on a music vibe,” says Deadly as I leave. “That’s what the main thing is. And we’re just going to keep banging it out.”
* * *

FOR someone involved in dance music, getting a fax from New York house label Strictly Rhythm is like winning the lottery and the pools and all your Christmases and birthdays rolled into one.

Among the house music fraternity, Strictly Rhythm enjoys the same kind of worldwide reputation for consistent unparalleled excellence as an organaisation like the BBC. Since 1989, the label has released a string of highly-influential records, from Barbara Tucker’s Beautiful People to Reel 2 Real’s I Like To Move It and fostered the talents of everyone from Todd Terry and Josh Wink to Kenny Dope Gonzalez and Roger Sanchez.

“As a DJ, you used to have to be sharp to buy Strictly Rhythm records,” remembers Edzy, erstwhile member of Bradford rave-era bleep merchants Unique 3, former music editor for the archetypal club slacker fanzine the Herb Garden and a longstanding fixture on the northern club scene as a DJ, promoter and now club owner.

“The shops would only get two or three copies in and people would just buy them without even hearing them. Because they knew they were going to be good.”

Edzy admits to being a little taken aback when he saw a fax from the label awaiting one morning just before Christmas last year. Nursing a monster hangover and an arm broken in three places, he wasn’t at his best.

It seems someone at the label had heard one of his tracks, Do It Til You Burn, on an old compilation album. Not only did they want to release it in its original form, they also wanted Edzy to record a new version for the B-side. He sighs. “It was a cruel twist.”

Most DJs would cheerfully sell their entire family into slavery for a chance to record for Strictly Rhythm. Not Edzy, it seems.

“I thought I was finished with all that,” he replies, rubbing his closely-shaved head. “I didn’t have to make music to earn a living anymore. At that point, I hadn’t DJed for about a year. I thought I’d moved on, progressed. I’m 30-years-old.

“The music thing was a part of my history that wasn’t going any further. I didn’t have to break my heart making music anymore. And I was happy with that.”

The seeds of Edzy’s disillusionment with the music business were sown after the initial success of the Unique 3, who came out of the soul, reggae and hip hop scene of Bradford’s Manningham district in the late Eighties.

The rot set in with the success of their first single, The Theme, a sparse, electro-inspired house instrumental which got them an invitation to appear on Top of the Pops.

“For us, it was a bit of a joke,” remembers Edzy. “We were young, we liked to think we were underground. the A&R man at our label said, you can’t do instrumental house music on Top of the Pops. There weren’t that many people making that kind of music in this country then.

“There was a hip hop track on the B-side, with a rapper, and he made us do that instead. We had to go along with it, because we thought, well, the label knows best.” He shrugs.

having spent most of his Unique 3 earnings setting up a pirate radio station – Bradford’s Emergency FM – Edzy admits to having “a few bad years” after the group split. he went into partnership with another DJ and set up a studio in Harrogate, where he concentrated on making his own music, including Do It Til You Burn.

With the single now remixed, repackaged and re-released – and by all accounts causing a stir on both sides of the Atlantic – Edzy has joined a handful of British producers on the label. He is currently considering his next move.

Do It Till You Burn is a prime slice of US-style British garage, complete with a big, girly vocal and an unashamed good times vibe. But it’s not Phats & Small. It’s just a little bit too good to make any serious impression in the mainstream. Edzy isn’t too worried either way. Just as long as he doesn’t have to do Top of the Pops again.

He has recorded another track recently, his first in some time. Will that be on Strictly too?

“Maybe it’s something they’ll like,” he muses. “Either way, I’m not getting into making music to please record labels. Not even Strictly Rhythm.”

[The first interview was first published in the Northern Star in March 1991, the second in the Big Issue in the North in May 1999]

Here’s a rough idea of what happened during the day:

As much as I adore what Jamie XX has done with Adele’s Rolling In The Deep, it’s already loaded with memories that tug at my heart all the more insistently because they are so tantalisingly recent.

I’m not so sure that there’s so much love around that we can let any of it go to waste, but what do I know? Actually, I know that the world is suddenly a very different place. And that’s about it.

Feel free to sing along if you know the words.

And Fila Brazillia are named after a huge South American fighting dog which is now banned in this country, thanks to the 1991 Dangerous Dogs Act.

The name is nothing to do with trainers then?

“I think we confuse the hell out of most people.”

Steve Cobby and David ‘Man’ McSherry have been making quirky electronic music together for almost a decade now. Stubbornly defying categorisation, the affable duo have produced a string of albums for Pork Recordings, the label they started with Dave ‘Porky’ Brennand, as well as a large number of remixes for the likes of Bjork and Radiohead.

Each album is a progression from the last, with their smooth, dreamy grooves tempered only by a fierce determination not to let business get in the way of music.

This refusal to play the game translated as no promotion, no photographs and absolutely no interviews, thanks very much – believe me, I tried. Nothing. No compromise, no surrender.

Having, as they see it, outgrown the label, Cobby and McSherry have amicably split with Pork and set up their own Tritone imprint. The first release, their seventh album, is out next week. The album is called A Touch Of Cloth.

They’re even about to embark on a short tour of the North, supplemented by a drummer, percussionist, keyboard player and flautist. This seems like a very different kind of Fila Brazillia to the one we had before. They’re even doing interviews.

So I get to travel over to Hull on a blustery midweek afternoon to meet them at their rehearsal studio, which is above a builders yard on an industrial estate close to the city centre.

They’re a bit blunt and abrupt. There’s not much in the way of airs and graces. They’re clearly a self-reliant bunch and none-too-trusting of outsiders. I like them immediately.

“When we DJed, we only ever used to play our own stuff, so it was almost like a gig anyway,” remembers Cobby. “We’d play mixes that hadn’t been released, works-in-progress and that. We were trying to get more gig-like, but it was still boring.”

“We did PAs as well, where a DAT would be rumbling along and we’d be pottering around on a couple of synths. It just felt stupid,” says McSherry.

“Bogus,” adds Cobby.

“It fucked us off,” says McSherry, “just twiddling knobs and moving sliders around, cos we know we can play anyway. It was bit frustrating really.”

“So we just wondered how many of our songs would translate to a live group,” continues Cobby. “But it takes so much time and costs so much money that we just kept putting it off.”

Unlike many of their studio-based contemporaries, the duo are competant and experienced live musicians – Cobby, for example, was half of soulful funk act Ashley & Jackson, playing venues as big as the GMex in Manchester. But you get impression that if they’re going to do something, they’re going to do it properly.

“It’s just correct, innit?” he says. “Most of our stuff is looped and chopped-up and we needed really good players. We needed to be at a certain level before we could even think about doing it. And there needed to be enough people out there to enable us to pay all the musicians who are involved. It was a question of ratcheting up to that.

“I think we’ve done it earlier than we should have done. We’re busy getting the label sorted and what have you, and we probably ought to have done this in the middle of next year, but you know, we’ve got it sorted and it’s right and it’ll push the next album.”

“If we’d only had two albums out, we’d have had a job on,” he adds. “But we’ve had six albums out on Pork over the years. We had about 80 songs to choose from and we only needed about an hour of live material, so it was a case of picking the tunes that would translate to this six-piece. We had to shoe-horn a few of them in ..”

“I think it’s got its own momentum now, anyway,” says McSherry. “Plus, they’re really good players, this lot.”

“They’re like fucking machines,” nods Cobby. “We had to think to ourselves, do we get like a bunch of keen amateurs together and rehearse for fucking ever, or do we do it pro? We’ve done a bit of both.”

It was never going to be easy to play this stuff live.

“We tend to do a lot of random sourcing,” says Cobby. “We’ll jam and record, mess about with it, record a bit more, mess about with that and not really worry about writing.”

This way of working may have produced results in the past but it wasn’t through choice.

“We couldn’t afford the equipment,” admits Cobby. “It’s like that bedroom musician thing. We didn’t have a multi-track or anything. So just by the nature of the technology we were using, a lot of it was cut up and re-triggered. If we could’ve afforded to record in a decent studio, the stuff we came up with would’ve been completely different.

“We love the idea of living in two worlds. There’s the playing and performing side and in the studio, the joy of sequencing and sampling, and bringing all that together is what we’re about, I suppose. It’s not like we set out to do a particular sound. In fact, I think that’d be the death of us.”

Together with the three young guns – drummer Matt Swindells, keyboard player Joe Ward, percussionist Aaron Gammon – they’ve hired for live work, and not-so-young gun flautist and longterm collaborator Bernard Moss (who released his own excellent debut album on Pork last week), the duo create a soulful, loose-limbed funk of a kind you might not necessarily expect to come from a bunch of white blokes in Hull.

“The tunes work, you know,” says Cobby. “I don’t know whether people will be waiting for the singer. How many instrumental bands are out playing now?”

We all draw a blank.

“You’ve got to get into a state of mind,” decides Cobby. “It’s a different kind of listening. Hopefully there’s enough to listen to and you’ll get taken along with it instead of thinking that there’s anyone in particular you have to watch. There’s no particular focus – it’s the whole thing.”

Is that why you don’t use singers then?

“The only reason we don’t use singers is because we’ve never come across any that we like,” says Cobby with a shrug. “Everything up to now has been waiting for people to come to us and nobody has. I suppose we work with singers on the remixes. It’s not that we’re anti-vocals. It’s just that Fila is what me and Man do.”

“We are fussy with vocals though, aren’t we?” says McSherry. “There’s not many we like.”

“And lyrics are such a bug-bear,” adds Cobby. “What do you write about? Everyone goes, you should have a singer. Well, why? It’s a commercial decision in a lot of respects. You get someone to wail over one of your tracks – to me, that’s not a sonic decision.

“When we’re in the studio, we’ve never said, right, we’d better get a singer in. They’re all finished. What we’ve got to offer is just a bit different to what anybody else can do. It’s what’s missing that gives it the edge.

“We don’t do backing tracks. There’s lots of top-line melodies and shit in there in the place where the singer would be. You know what people’s attention spans are like. It’s not like we say, here’s a four-bar loop, let’s just run that for 10 minutes. There’s none of that. Everything’s pretty slick.”

Just how slick becomes clear as they work through the live set, making subtle adjustments here and there, patiently nailing down each of the songs until they’re absolutely happy with the results.

Forget all that trip hop, downtempo stuff. There’s something of the space of dub reggae in Man’s basslines, and a definite jazz tinge to Cobby’s sparkling guitar. The whole band have got the funk. And despite the instrumental nature of their music, Fila Brazillia have a wonderfully expressive and soulful sound.

Getting to hear this amazing music in what’s essentially a private performance by Fila Brazillia, well, I’m a lucky lad.

Lulled into a false sense of security by the beatific vibes coming out of the speakers, I make what turns out to be an ill-advised comment about how mellow everything seems. Bad move.

“Mellow?” asks McSherry, glaring at me. “I think a lot of our stuff is quite challenging. I’d hate to think that we made background music. Some of our stuff is pretty frantic”.

“Since we started, we’ve been put in these boxes,” growls Cobby. “That trip hop thing was the first one, then it’s like chill-out, mellow, laid-back, downtempo, leftfield .. Can we have the death of fucking labels, please? Because it’s killed us, people constantly trying to box things up.”

“In a way, it spurs you on not to repeat yourself, because as soon as someone can categorise something then it’s time to change,” continues Cobby. “It’s like trying to categorise David Bowie – Low, Heroes, Lodger, whatever, when he was he was doing decent stuff, they were all very different albums. You couldn’t say, they’re all X. It’s only now that journalists are obsessed with getting things into a marketing bracket.

“But fuck it. As long as people like it, I don’t care what they call it. It’s getting people to hear it that’s the toughie.”

McSherry talks about seeing their last album in the ‘downbeat’ section of one of the local record shops. He was so annoyed he went to the counter to put them right.

“I said to them, just put it in the music section – if there is one.”

I mentioned I was doing this interview to friends in Manchester who care about such things and they were seriously impressed. I mentioned it to someone who used to know you from Hull and she just said, oh, could you ask them to say hello to Beige for me. The name Fila Brazillia is known all over the world, but to people in Hull you’re just someone else trying to get to the bar at the Adelphi. I get the impression you quite like that.

“It’s not like we’re exotic to Lancastrians,” says Cobby with a grin. “It’s like American music is interesting to us because it’s so different and otherworldly. You can never be perceived in your hometown in the way that you’re going to be percieved by strangers. That cult of personality can’t take root because people would be like, what the fucking hell? The further away you get, you know, the more of an enigma you are.”

“Hull isn’t too big that you get lost, but it’s not too small that you’re bored out of your mind,” says McSherry.

“It could do to be a bit bigger,” says Cobby. “Well, not bigger, it could just do to have a few more .. things.”

Poncey bars?

“Not poncey bars. Poncey bars aren’t the answer. I don’t know what is ..”

So you’ve remixed Bjork and Radiohead – what popstar would you like to work with?

“Popstar?” says Cobby, like someone else would say ‘syphillis’.

Alright, what serious artistes would you like to work with?

“Timbaland. I love anything he does. He’s like a breath of fresh air. A popstar that we’d like to work with?” he muses. “It’s a new fucking question, that one. I don’t think I’ve heard that one before.”

McSherry suggests Greg Dulli from the Afghan Whigs.

“There’s that melancholy twist there, and we do like a bit of melancholy.”

“We do,” agrees Cobby.

For some reason – I may have been a bit flustered by them blatantly taking the piss out of my more uninspired questions – the talk turns to the titles of their songs.

“Obrigado is Portuguese for thank you,” says Cobby, helpfully. “I went to Portugal on holiday.”

“There’s a different story for every title,” he continues. “Most of them are trite and uninteresting. The titles themselves are more interesting than the stories, nine times out of 10.”

“A Z And Two Ls came about because people kept spelling the name of the band wrong. And it was like A Z And Two Noughts, the film. See?”

“It’s very clever that,” says McSherry, sagely.

“Look out! Funny kid’s coming!” exclaims Cobby. “People still spell it wrong though ..”

[This interview is an longer version of a piece which first appeared in the Big Issue in the North in October 1999. More info on Fila Brazillia here)

The presence of Danish television camera crews necessitate Thalia’s presence – some of us have an image to keep up – although David doesn’t seem to need much work. He looks far healthier than any man in the latter stages of a European tour has any right to. He’s positively glowing.

Craig David is the most promising singer/songwriter this country has produced in years. He’s got an effortlessly lovely and soulful voice, he knows how to write a decent pop lyric, he’s young, good looking and suddenly he is everywhere.

“There’s all this fuss being made and I’m just thinking, I’m just this guy from Southampton who writes a few songs. It’s a bit surreal, to be honest,” he says, visibly perplexed by it all.

Sometimes it seems like Craig David is the living, breathing embodiment of multicultural Britain at its wholesome best, with his flawless coffee-coloured skin and catchy soulful ghetto-pop. At the very least, he’s a pin-up boy for a generation of teens. Unlike previous UK soul contenders such as, say, Mark Morrison or even Omar, Craig David is about as threatening as Sir Cliff Richard.

Thalia diligently pads away at David’s face, stopping when he waves his hands around. She doesn’t seem to be doing much, some white stuff goes on and then instantly disappears under her brush. A brown smear, a shade or two darker than David’s skin-tone, goes on and vanishes just as quickly. We all swap over halfway through so she can do the other side of this face.

A homegrown and wholesome British talent, David doesn’t drink – apart from an occasional glass of wine – doesn’t smoke and doesn’t take drugs. The only chink in his careful diplomacy comes when he says he “hates” smoking. He doesn’t even swear – “knackered” is about as close as he gets.

But he’s looking good on it.

Unlike the crazy kamikaze nut-job who created Wired For Sound, Craig David still lives with his mum in Hampshire – if the 19-year-old globetrotter can be said to live anywhere. And rather than talking about sharing Mistletoe & Wine with all mankind, he talks about sharing Champagne and jacuzzis with all the ladies.

Today, it’s Tuesday, so we’re in Copenhagen, backstage in yet another huge, sold-out venue on David’s European tour.

“It’s amazing! Every gig has been packed to the brim and still there are more people trying to get in,” he says with his usual fresh-faced candour. “It’s like, I’ve sold out Wembley Arena three times now. Playing Wembley Arena one time is like a dream come true for me. But three times in a row?”

Craig David’s rise is indeed the stuff of dreams. Buying a set of decks at the age of 13, he rapidly progressed from pirate radio to local clubs before winning a national songwriting contest at 16, and releasing his first record, produced with DJs he met in local clubs in Southampton, at the grand old age of 17.

David has voiced one of the biggest hits to come out of the UK’s burgeoning garage scene, in collaboration with the Artful Dodger duo, with Re-Rewind (The Crowd Say Bo Selecta), which ironically enough, was only kept from the 1999 Christmas number one slot by Sir Cliff Richard’s Millennium Prayer.

Live performances are a different story again. The clipped two-step rhythms which made him famous are largely absent. A plaintive Re-Rewind for example, is performed with just an acoustic guitar for accompaniment, giving his rich, full voice room to fully flex (as they say in Southampton). He’s more of a good, old-fashioned soul singer than anything else.

“It was important not to take away the elements that people liked in the first place,” he says. “It was a bass-driven track. It was about the beats, it was about the club. I thought we just couldn’t do it as the whole big production again, the whole two-step garage flavour.

“So I go out there with Fraser and break it down. For me, it’s something special, it’s another element, it wasn’t just about, oh we have to do Rewind because it was a hit. I wanted to give it a unique feel. It’s the song I actually wrote.”

“When a crowd just erupts at you, it throws you for a second,” he says of his gigs around Europe. “I just have this flashback to when I was dreaming of being able to go and sell mixtapes and CDs to make a living. Next thing, you see a whole crowd embracing you and singing your songs. It’s just amazing.”

Craig David is amazed a lot these days. At times he seems like one of Harry Enfield’s Double Take Brothers, constantly bleurgggh-ing his surprise in getting so far, so fast. But Craig David knows that you make your own luck.

“I’ve DJed in clubs that have been absolutely dead with literally four or five people in them,” he says. “The thing is, I’d always look at the brighter side of it. I’d record my set for a mix tape. I’ve always had a way of getting something out of a situation that wasn’t working like it should.”

David’s athletic, engaging vocal delivery and adept songwriting skills make him standout head and shoulders above his pop music contemporaries.

He’s got gigs in the US next month. The aim, he says, is to “start the ball rolling. You can only give it your best shot, and I’m going to give it as much as I’ve done in the UK. Fingers crossed that they embrace it.”

“People in the UK are like, Craig, you’re doing great, the singles doing well, the album’s number, you’re the man!” he slaps his hands together in mock-rapture. “Well, not really. I can go to places in Scotland and they don’t know who Craig David is. They don’t care who Craig David is.

“I’ve got so much work to do in my home country, let alone the rest of the world. I’ve got so much more work to do before I start breaking out.”

As for the US, where many British soul artists have tried and failed to make an impression he says: “I think you can only go in with the attitude of, okay, I’m a British artist, I’ve got these songs in the bag, I’ve done well in the UK but now I’ve got to start from scratch. If I go over there and say, hey, I’ve gone triple platinum, sold two million albums in the UK, a million in Europe, they’d just say, okay. Thanks. Who cares?”

He generates something approaching hysteria among the young – and not-so-young – women who make up three-quarters of his audience in Europe. We stroll over to the press conference, walking down a glass corridor adjacent to the street outside, where a few hundred fans have gathered. We’re spotted and dozens of statuesque blonde teens rush towards us. They all hit the plate glass at the same time and it visibly bulges inwards.

It barely seems to register with him.

He’s in a weird position. Never has there been a more unlikely sex symbol. He’s keen to emphasise that he’s ‘all about the music’, but you get the impression that it’s not all about the music for many of his fans.

At times during his gigs you can barely hear what he’s singing. He talks about singing songs where he gets to give his vocal chords a work out “and people are just screaming at you”, but he says he takes it all with a pinch of salt.

So does he find that the sex symbol thing gets in the way of what he’s really about?

“People have bought into me because of the music. I always look at it like that. I think, Craig, you’re a normal guy, there’s hundreds and thousands of people like you around – but what you do musically is unique. That’s what I’m passionate about.”

It’s hard not to take what he says at face value – he is simply painfully sincere and seems to be utterly without guile of any kind.

“I want to make sure the music is strong and if anything else comes with it, that’s a bonus,” he decides, fiddling with the wafer-thin Marco Valentino on his wrist. ” That’s why the live show is based around the music – there’s no big dance routines. All you’re getting is vocal and music.”

Yeah, I get that. But you do wind them up a bit too, don’t you?

“There’s certain songs,” he concedes, suddenly coy, “say they’ve got innuendo in them, about .. er, sexual activity, like Follow Me and Nice And Slow, it kinda gets the crowd, ‘specially the ladies, up for it and very energetic. I’m trying to flex the vocals over it and” – he chuckles – “some of the moves can make it just that little bit harder to hear what’s going on.”

Do you feel the need to show out a bit more in bigger venues?

“You should be true to who you are,” he replies. “If I want to wiggle my backside a bit, I will do. But I was never brought up as a dancer in the sense of Sisqo, where there’s lavish dance routines and somersaults and everything. That’s his vibe and he’s great at that. As an artist you should have the integrity to say, hey, this is what I do.

“I want to perform this vocal in a way that touches you. You can watch an artist jumping around and the lights are fantastic, but I want people to connect with the songs.”

I never realised you had such a ragga-style vocal thing going on until I saw you live. I thought that was brilliant.

“Aw, dancehall’s the vibe, man!” he says, delighted, clapping his hands and snapping his fingers. “That’s one thing I’ve been disappointed about, that I couldn’t really incorporate that into what I do. Playing R&B in clubs was cool, you put acapellas over instrumentals, all that stuff, but ragga was about the whole sound system, because you had so many tracks with the same rhythm.

“You’d have like 16 cuts and people would get bored if you played the whole of each track out, so you’d play the intro of one track and then you’d cut into the next one and then back again. So you’d be going from turntable to turntable and having an MC there, the whole vibe was great.

“If you were quick, it was just hype.”

He shrugs.

“That’s one thing I haven’t actually yet been able to show out. DJing, I dunno, it’s a funny one. If I saw R Kelly or Usher DJing in clubs, constantly, it would feel like they were almost too accessible.”

“When I was DJing, you’re playing a song and the crowd would erupt, so you get the energy from that but you knew it was because of the song, not you. But when you’re going out and singing one of your songs and the crowd sing it back to you, it’s like, hey I’m the one actually dropping that song. And you’re singing it back to me. It’s another level.

“The whole thing about music is communication. If you can touch someone with something that was inside of you. You’ve expressed it, written it on a piece of paper, put it into a musical form and now they’re singing it to me.

“It’s so easy to write a song when you’ve been through it,” he continues. “Fill Me In was something I’ve been through. You just tell it how it is. I mean, I wasn’t driving a 4X4 because I was 16. My bike was runnin’. Or I was on foot patrol!”

If Craig David ever gets his dancehall album together, don’t expect any lyrical slackness from this MC. He’s a dyed-in-the-wool tease, an inveterate flirt who has that kind of indefinable doe-eyed vulnerability which seems to drive some women to distraction. He’s also a good deal more subtle than many 19-year-olds (although he seems to have been 19 for about three years now). Either way, you shouldn’t expect any Macy Gray-style dirty-talk from Craig David.

Babytalk perhaps.

“Even in Follow Me, where I’m talking about bodies touching in the jacuzzi, and we’re doing certain things, I kinda shut the door before any of that happens. I’m still only young and I don’t think I should talk about things that I’m really not that experienced in.”

And the good news for all you ladies is that Southampton’s most eligible bachelor doesn’t have a girlfriend “at the moment”.

Last summer there was a brief flurry of ‘is he? isn’t he?’ stories in the tabloids, when a disgruntled former business associate aired what appeared to be deliberately mischievous stories about David’s sexuality. Much of this seems to be based on the singer’s mild-mannered demeanour and his failure to take advantage of young fans throwing themselves at him in nightclubs.

As it happens, he seems about as gay as any bloke would if they were having make-up applied to their boyishly soft-focus features while you talked to them.

“I’m free and I’m single,” he says, brushing an imaginary piece of lint from his grey polo-neck. “I’m going round the world trying to find Mrs Right. You meet so many beautiful women along the way, but to me it goes beyond skin deep. Yes, you’re beautiful – there are a lot of beautiful people in the world – but I need someone I can get along with. I need to know, can you connect with me?”

Okay. Um, do you get much opportunity to look around places like Copenhagen when he’s on tour?

It seems not. “You just try and get as much sleep as possible,” he tells me.

With the wisdom accrued from a half-hour walk around Copenhagen I tell him he’s not missing much. All I found were streets full of hairdressers and hair product suppliers.

At this, the man who has his hair re-waxed every couple of days looks at Thalia. His perfect eyebrows shoot up towards his perfect forehead.

“Maybe we should try to make some time while we’re here,” he says to the make-up artist.

They both laugh like drains.

[A shorter version of this piece was first published by the Big Issue in the North, based on an interview in December 2000]

See also interviews with Amp Fiddler and Terri Walker

It was a lovely little package. Its front cover features a vintage Savage Pencil grotesque on a bright pink background, while the reverse has a photo of the band in the back of a candy-pink pick-up truck, in an airport, at night. I thought it was an impossibly glamorous scene.

In fact Thurston Moore’s look – a hooded top with khaki jacket over it, couture fans – exerted a strong influence on my own fashion choices for a good five years afterwards.

The EP came with an insert featuring the lyrics to the title track (rendered in blackmail letter-style Letraset by Sav), an interview entitled The Sound of Screwdrivers, production credits and a black and white photo of an open air gig in the Mojave desert.

It collected tracks from previous releases Sonic Youth, Confusion Is Sex, Bad Moon Rising and Kill Yr Idols, with just one new track, Satan Is Boring. It was all new to me.

I liked the big, angry guitars and dirty basslines. I liked the fact that they were doing this weird art-punk music in New York, that their attitudes and motives were often completely unfathomable, that after listening to Death Valley 69 a lot I still had more questions than answers.

Sonic Youth were every bit as intense as other US punk acts who’d been around for years, such as Black Flag and the Dead Kennedys, but they were much more subtle and nuanced and finessed, less straightforward, more opaque. They were right up my street.

“Sonic Youth: A band from New York City, a band who play their guitars with screwdrivers, a band with a female bassist, a band fixated with Charles Manson ..” I mused in my own fanzine, earnestly.

“Too many people are preoccupied with what Sonic Youth are, when they should be thinking about what they do.

“Try reading a live review of Sonic Youth without finding something along the lines of ‘what a strange way to play a guitar’. It doesn’t do them justice. It presents them as desperately avant-garde bohemians, toiling for their art in Greenwich Village, saying to themselves: What shall we shock the kids with next? I don’t think it’s like that at all.”

Greil Marcus, eat your heart out.

I was impressed enough with the title track to suggest covering it for the debut performance by my own art-punk/noise ensemble the Shreddies for a rock open competition at the Baths a year or so later. You weren’t supposed to play covers but we were reasonably confident of getting away with it.

For a start, I worked in the local record shop and I knew that nobody else had bought that record – at least not in Scunny. And secondly, we were so shoddy, ramshackle and under-rehearsed that even if anyone had heard Sonic Youth’s version of Death Valley 69, they wouldn’t have been able to recognise it from what we were playing anyway.

Our plan worked superbly. Guest judge Fast Eddie, as in the former Motorhead guitarist, said that we were the worst thing he’d ever heard.

I may well have flogged my copy of the Death Valley 69 EP to some record dealer guy who lived around the corner in LS6. Or I might have left it behind when I moved from Harehills to Armley, when I moved from Armley to Beeston, or indeed when I moved from Beeston to Chapeltown. It was a busy few months.

The point is, my copy of Death Valley 69 went west at some point between then and now and I don’t have a clue when or where or why or how, except that it was probably in Leeds.

You may not be that surprised to learn that I don’t even remember where I picked it up again – Really? Is this how it ends? – but it was probably Vinyl Exchange or King Bee, and I have a vague recollection of being pleasantly surprised by the relatively cheapo price tag. A fiver, maybe? I dunno, seriously. It’s been a long week at work. I didn’t get the original insert, either way.

Listening to it again for the first time in the best part of 25 years, I’m struck by how lovely and delicate I Dreamed A Dream is. It’s all about Moore and Renaldo’s gently dissonant, naggingly insistant guitars, Kim Gordon’s oddly unsettling, predatory bassline, her spoken vocal (“Fucking youth, working youth ..”) overlaying a folksy turn from Moore, with the drums skipping out of time. It’s like a lullaby for a serial killer.

Inhuman remains simply unhinged, betraying their punk rock roots and hardcore leanings, a clanging, distorted, throbbing mess. It seems like everything could tip over the edge at any moment. “I learned my lesson the hardest way .. But you don’t know me, You don’t know me ..” yells Moore.

Check it out here. “I love sonic youth!!! sometimes i get this weird creepy feeling wen i listen to them for hours and i_ love it :)” sez floatinghearts222.

Brother James is where it all came together for me, perhaps even more than the EPs mighty title track, and it still packs a big punch today. It finds the band creating music which sounds like a swarm of enormous angry mechanical bees one moment, and like a load of big brass bells clanging into each other the next. And all this over a beat which owes more than a little to disco.

What can I tell you about Satan Is Boring? It’s a rather tedious aural collage, which shows what happens when you don’t have a producer in the control room prepared to tell the band that it’s five am in the fucking morning, we’ve run out of songs and we’ve got spare studio time but this shit is not cool.

I don’t imagine I’m going to be listening to Satan Is Boring anymore now than I did in the first place.

The EP’s title track finds Moore dueting with fierce New York performance artist Lydia Lunch. Everything is cranked up to the nth degree. Lunch screeches, Moore screams, it is mental.

It’s not the first or the last time that great art has come from enormous tragedy and suffering – read Anthem For Doomed Youth or the Red Riding Quartet, look at Saturn Devouring His Son or Guernica, listen to Nagasaki Nightmare or Shipbuilding – but it’s not often that such visceral horror is brought to life so convincingly.

Death Valley 69 finds Lunch and Moore getting inside the minds of the Family, the motley crew of hippies, addicts and runaways who surrounded Charles Manson and did his bidding, who murdered their victims with unspeakable violence and cruelty in an effort to provoke a race war after which everything – in Manson’s mind, at least – would be alright.

It’s not hard to imagine that, born 10 or 20 years later, Manson’s meagre musical talents and unfocussed anti-establishment leanings would’ve made him a punk rock hero. Charlie Manson was just Sid Vicious on different drugs.

In this reality, the one where Charles Manson is a punk rock hero, people have tattoos of cartoon Charlies leaning in a doorway, with a swastika on his forehead rather than his t-shirt. His version of My Way always gets a few old punks pogoing again at wedding receptions. Gary Oldman turns in a particularly sensitive portrayal in the biopic.

If only Charlie had been given a bit more adulation, if Brian Wilson had managed to work some kind of magic on his shitty demo tapes, if there was only some kind of talent, something worthwhile within Manson’s confused, deluded, amoral psyche, who knows, maybe he would just have made a few crappy solo records and then killed his girlfriend?

As it is, Death Valley 69 captures all the anger, confusion and fear of surrendering your will to a madman, the headlong pelt into who-knows-what? The feeling that events are spiralling out of control: “I didn’t wanna .. But she started to holler ..”

The hippies tried to create their own version of the American Dream, with free love, free sex, all the drugs you can handle – and a few more besides – but what they created instead was the Manson Family.

Still, it all makes for a thrilling ride. Spattered blood notwithstanding, those guitars are still big and angry, those basslines still as deliciously dirty. It’s dramatic, unsettling, absorbing, seductive. It’s a trip.

Meanwhile of course, Sonic Youth’s motives remain resolutely impenetrable.

I don’t think I’d want it any other way.

See also: 1987 Sonic Youth interview