I remember reading somewhere that the word 'amateur' comes from the Latin 'amor' meaning 'love', so an amateur is someone who does something simply for the love of it. Bearing that in mind, it would seem that the difference between an amateur and a professional is the difference between a lover and a whore. For that reason, I am more than happy to be described as a complete amateur.
Of course, I fit the description of an amateur in another sense: that what I do is often a bit rough and scrappy - not of a professional standard. Again, I'm happy to admit this. I'm completely self-taught, using whatever tools I can get my hands on. It has taken a long time and I'm still learning, but I seem to have a happy knack for making something from nothing.
I've been writing music since around 1994. Initially all I really knew was what music I liked - rave. As to how it worked... well, I had no idea. I knew nothing about the basic structure of music - things like rhythm and harmonics - nada.
Its hard to say exactly why I was drawn to rave. None of my friends were into it. Maybe the vibe had some appeal to my latent hippy instincts. I loved (still love) the intensity of it - the crunch and flow of the breakbeats, the euphoria of the piano and string rushes alternating with the rawness of the synth and 303 breaks, the samples and scratches... aural bliss... From Black Box's 'Ride On Time' at junior school discos, to 2 Unlimited's 'Get Ready For This' at the edge of adolescence; from The Prodigy's 'Out Of Space' during the mental tumult of my thirteenth year, to Interactive's 'Forever Young' at the very death of it all.
When I started making music it was with a tracker program called OctaMED on an Amiga 500+. The very earliest tracks I recall writing were techno, perhaps because it posed far less of a challenge than breakbeat. Even though techno is fairly straightforward (especially the hardcore stuff of that time) the results were... shit. The trouble was that I knew what I wanted to do to had no idea of how to do it. I wanted speed and intensity so my approach was to make it fast - something like 220bpm. I didn't know that tracks can be much slower and still give the impression of speed by using certain hi-hat patterns, or how a good bassline makes a beat come alive. I didn't understand that apparently chaotic tunes like Hackney Hardcore's 'Caught With A Spliff' were really tightly structured. To try and emulate that chaos I hit as many notes as I could, with little consideration of how it actually sounded. The same was even more true of my earliest breakbeats: I simply threw in drums at random. Some times it came close to a recognizable rhythm. Usually it sounded something like Roni Size Reprazents' 'Matter of Fact', only more fucked up. It was a kind of impressionistic approach to writing music.
I'd like to be able to say that I learned from this trial-and-error technique, but I don't think I really did. I learned far more by pulling other people's tracks apart to see how they worked. My brother used to go to a market to get games and sometimes he'd get music demos too (a couple that stick in my mind are Kefren's Desert Dream and LSD's Jesus On E's. These were an invaluable source of samples for me, so for all those who made rave demos on the Amiga back then - respect!) I ripped tracks from these and loaded them into OctaMED to tinker with them.
Looking back on some of the tracks I did, it's a wonder I kept at it. Basically, they were shit. Everyone who heard them winced and smirked. Except me. I rationalised their responses by thinking, Well, they don't like rave anyhow, so what do they know? I knew how the tracks were supposed to sound and that tended to obscure from me how they actually sounded. Sometimes I did manage to listen to them with an objective ear and it usually resulted in a day or two of demoralisation. But what can I say? My ego is irrepressible. I always went back to it. Maybe the spark that got me going again was hearing a really cool track (or for that matter, a really putrid bit of pop-shit; let's not forget the power of negative influence - having something to kick against). Other times it was simply boredom; writing a song is usually a really enjoyable and engrossing way of passing the time. I'm fascinated by the idea of creation and evolution; watching something form and gradually take shape out of nothing. As a past-time, it pisses all over stupefying in front of the TV.
I made my first album in January 1997. It was called Into The Unknown and I think it's best described as techno-breakbeat with a whiff of happy hardcore about it. It came about more or less on a whim: I had a load of tracks that I didn't know what I wanted to do with (at that time I was in the habit of bunching tracks together into EP's of four to six tracks; by that point I had fifteen of them) so I spent a day doing remixes of some earlier tracks and wrote a couple of new tracks, and there it was: my debut album! Unfortunately, the rave reviews were too numerous and glowing for my modesty to allow me to cite them here. I enjoyed making it so much that the following day I made another, called Decision Time which leaned more towards drum & bass (it included a cover of Rage Against The Machine's 'Killing In The Name' - well, I say 'cover': the only link was two small vocal samples).
Two more albums (and many EP's) followed that year before disaster struck and my Amiga died. But before going into that, I should note that a new ingredient had appeared in my work, especially on the last album. Under the influence of the Chemical Brothers' 'Setting Sun' and of course The Prodigy's Fat Of The Land, I moved towards a darker, harder industrial sound. ('Industrial' was exactly the word I was looking for when I called that last album Manufactured Beats. I was always stuck for titles; how do you name a song that isn't really about anything?) Besides these, I was starting to get into punk: RATM, Offspring, Pennywise... it would be a while before punk had a musical influence on me, but it was already moulding my outlook.
For an ugly nine or ten months I had no computer to work with. I did however have a pitiful alternative: my brother's PC. Trouble was, the only music program he had was a demo of something called Music Works 2, which used actual musical notation which I couldn't understand (semi-demi-quavers? what the fuck?!). Besides that, it was a MIDI program that relied on a bog-standard PC sound card - no samples, no effects or distortions, feeble drums - and though I had a MIDI keyboard, I could never get it to work so all the notes had to be entered one by one... Christ, what a nightmare!
I didn't manage many tracks at that time; maybe fifteen, and my brother 'accidentally' deleted most of them, so I've only got about four of those tracks now and none of them are much good. On the upside though, I did learn a bit about harmonics and chord structures with MW2, which I never did with OctaMED because I was using a pretty limited set of sampled sounds. Also, MW2 had the advantage of having up to 64 tracks, while OctaMED only had four. The number of times I struggled to squeeze everything into four fucking tracks! But with 64 tracks, I had all the space I could possibly need, so I was eventually able to develop a more layered, more sophisticated sound. (Incidentally, has anyone ever actually used 64 tracks? Unless you're doing some fantastically complicated orchestral piece, I don't know how you could possibly need 64 - I rarely use more than 8.)
It was late summer/autumn 98 when I got my hands on a second-hand Amiga 1200 and immediately hit a purple patch that lasted 7 or 8 months. The albums I did during this time are amongst my favourites. Starting with Gone To Seed, which set the tone for most of what was to follow; Confused? which wasn't great, but was symptomatic; Slack Society, with it's title taken from a line in Asian Dub Foundation's 'Charge', was my first political record; Who's Paranoid!?! which was a proper manic depressive record; Reflections, which was easily my most polished work to date; and finally Disconnect, which almost was my final album.
A couple of things were behind this creative splurge. First of all, there was the months of frustration that preceded it. Secondly, there was the new knowledge that I picked up from MW2; from this point on, my music began to improve structurally, becoming less fractured and more coherent, with better beats and more emphasis on melody. The biggest cause however was that my motivation for writing music had changed: it was no longer just a hobby, but a means of self-expression. At that time my head was in a shit state: music helped me get through it.
The earlier happy hardcore sound had now dropped out of sight, to be replaced with what I think of as unhappy hardcore: fucked up breakbeats, thoroughly drenched in melancholic melodies, doom-laden bass and a suitably morbid title ('Lowlife'; 'Drag Your Feet One More Time'; 'Sign Off' to give just a few of many possible examples). My main points of reference now were Moby's Everything Is Wrong, Eels' Beautiful Freak and Nirvana's Nevermind (I nicked the cello on 'Something In The Way' for a track called 'Now Or Never Or 'Til Next Time' on Disconnect).
My output began to slow after Disconnect, at least partly because dance music was running to shit. Hardcore was dead, drum 'n' bass was something you heard on computer games, garage was just poxy, and the whole trance/hard house thing just didn't move me until it became so fucking ubiquitous I was practically compelled to react against it. (I remember going into a record shop once and counting no fewer than thirteen chart albums with the word 'Ibiza' in the title.) There have been very few dance tracks that have made an impression on me since big beat was the in-thing. Without new sounds to stimulate me, I basically lost my way and found myself going over the same ground again and again.
By mid-2000 I was totally bogged-down with writers block. An album I did at the time called The White Room took so long to put together that I came to hate the damn thing, though it did eventually grow on me. Weeks dragged by into months without me turning out a single track. It was nothing short of a nightmare.
To a large degree, the problem was that I was increasingly coming up against the technical limitations of the equipment I was using. There are ways around only having four tracks: for instance, a beat or a melody can be spread over all four tracks, recorded then sampled and used as a loop over one track. But this trick carries problems of its own: firstly, the deterioration in sound quality that comes from recording onto cassette on an ancient hi-fi; secondly, that these loops tend to use a lot of memory (not much by today's standards, but when you've only got 2MB of RAM and the song has to be saved on a floppy disk...) Evidently, I'd have to get with the times and move to PC.
It wasn't until well into 2001 that I'd saved up £350 for a PC (no mean feat when you're on the dole). I continued using OctaMED even once I got a PC as I was on for a good while trying to figure out how the fuck Cubasis works.
I did two albums with Cubasis both of which took a long time because as well as learning how it worked I was finishing off tracks on OctaMED. My final album on the Amiga was Erosion and it was a depressed, low-key sort of record. Even then I wasn't quite finished with OctaMED: I went back and re-recorded some of the better albums and EP's, tidying up tracks and making small alterations here and there with a view to putting them on CD once I got a CD burner. I'm still nowhere near finished this process: I wrote 19 albums on OctaMED - in total, some 550 tracks and I can honestly say that they aren't all shite.
The long, drawn-out switch from OctaMED to PC was nevertheless a definite break, not least because in that time I finally started getting my head together. The first Cubasis album I did, Get Up And Do Something, really captures that, mixing comically morose tracks like 'We're All Doomed' with upbeat rave tunes like 'Not So Bad' and quietly optimistic songs like 'Learning To Live With Your Ego'. Its also the longest album I've done - 14 tracks over 63 minutes (it was the first album where I wasn't consciously trying to keep it short enough to fit on one side of a 90 minute cassette). It is, in short, a Work Of Art.
Which is more than can be said for the follow up, Mo' Manik Cuts. (Like Rude Corps, Mo' Manik Cuts came from a word search; I think the theme was U2 songs cos I was looking for 'Stuck In A Moment' and there it was backwards.) The second Cubasis album has its moments, but overall its weak. I have the same basic problem with Cubasis that I had with Music Works - shit drums and no way to fuck around with the sound. As a result, the tracks rely on a strong tune too much for my liking (or more precisely, too much for my ability to write strong tunes).
I only wrote a handful of further tracks on Cubasis before abandoning it sometime around mid-2004 for a tracker program called Renoise. It was around then that 'Rude Corps' came into being, jumping out at me from a health & safety themed word search...
So, after all that shit, what is Rude Corps all about? Well, like everything I did before it, it's a hobby, it's self-expression and it's the music I want to hear that no-one else is providing. As well as this, it's a platform for my political views: a practical means of spreading anarchism, first of all through its content and also through the anti-capitalist, anti-authoritarian example it sets. It is 'propaganda by the deed'; an attempt at influencing mass culture by demonstrating that the power to create is within everyone's grasp and there is no need to simply accept the stupid, boring, sterile shit that the system tries to shovel down your throat. If I can do this, anyone can - and should. Culture is not a commodity - it is not something to be bought and sold. Nor should it be the preserve of some elite group. We live in a society in which culture is increasingly monopolised by corporations; where social and cultural movements are little more than the raw materials of marketing campaigns. Fuck that! Your culture is a key part of your identity. If your culture is stupid, short-sighted, shallow and superficial, then what are you? Little better than a battery hen; just another passive consumer, never more than dimly aware of your lack of freedom and control over the course of your own life. Cultural DIY is a means of rejecting that: create your own culture, your own values and ideals, and it's yours; no-one can take it from you. No-one can twist and distort it, strip it of it's meaning then sell it's skin back to you as the latest fashion. A valuable part of your life is back under your control, and with it, you move that much closer to freedom.
You can hear a good deal of the early pre-Rude Corps music at the Rude Corps Archive.