It's because I love music so much.Yeah, of course.It happened by proxy really. Because a lot of the DJs went off and started playing house. I remember Carl Cox was at Sanctuary in Milton Keynes and Grooverider was on. And Groove was the king of the dance, I mean he used to have dubs that no one else had. I remember me and Carl Cox sitting down and Carl was about to go on, and he went, "I've had it, I'm not doing this no more." I was like, "What?" He went, "I don't know one track Grooverider played. Not one." And he was like, "I'm going to start playing house." And I said, "Oh stop being stupid, man, what are you talking about?" And that was it. Next time I saw him again he had his own marquee serving lobster and shit like that.And everything in life is about the choices you make. And I'm really, really happy with the choices I've made. You know there's proper gold down the house route. Because me and Groove would have been really successful at playing house. I've got no doubt about it at all.Yeah, kind of. Because when we were at Rage, we started noticing that jungle had a different vibe about it. We turned Rage from a really safe house club into a ghetto. [.] Some ghetto shit was going on in there and we had gangs coming down. It was amazing because at the time we had Brixton mans coming down and I was like, "Wow, what are you doing here?" And then we had ICF, the West Ham people—they were coming down. And then you had these "it girls" which was Amanda De Cadenet, Emma Ridley and them lot. And I remember once Betty Boo came…Yeah, she made some of the worst tunes ever made. But I was sort of obsessed with her. I asked Grooverider, "Is that Betty Boo?" And he was like, "I don't know." And I was like, "Oh my god, it's Betty Boo." And I thought, I can't do this in front of Storm and Goldie and everyone, but I went to her and I was like, "I'm a massive fan. I love 'Doin' The Do.'" And she went, "Oh, all right." And before I could ask her for a photo, she walked off.The crowd was more eclectic back in the day. I mean, everything's so segregated now. Back then it was anything goes. But I remember one night I went into the office and Kevin, who ran Rage, he was like, "Look, some house purists are really not happy with what you lot are doing." And he went, "Fuck them. I don't care, you lot just do what you're doing." I mean, he was OK because he was making so much money at the bar. But he just let us do what we wanted to do. It was amazing to see someone do that, letting two young guys experiment in a huge club, one of the biggest nights in London. Experiment, and take it to another level.Massively. And the risks we took at Rage, I don't think a promoter would let anyone do that anymore. But Mantra, Double O and that crew, what they're doing at Rupture 's amazing, because they're trying to bring it back to the original vibe when you can just go in there and do what you want.I got my first set of decks bizarrely, because a girl I knew had a pair of Technics. She had customised them, they might have been pink. She was moving house and she asked if she could leave some of her stuff in my place, and I was like, "Yeah, cool cool." So she left loads of records and her decks. That's how I learned how to mix—just practicing 24/7.Learning on vinyl was a lot more difficult. The cueing is different. It's not as tight as CDJs. Of course, records jumping—that was a major problem. You've got problems with dust getting on the needle. Records, if you didn't clean them, they used to get dusty and they used to jump. And with styluses, the needles used to wear out pretty quickly because we were playing dubplates—this was a metal plate, and needles are really made to be played on vinyl, not acetate. Then you'd get the problem when you're out, like people jogging the decks, people spilling drinks, scratches in the records.DJs nowadays don't know how good they've got it, they really don't. DJing out on decks could be an absolute nightmare—sometimes you'd get dancers on stage as well and they would make the records jump. Some nights, especially if they had shitty cartridges, every single record would jump, some records would skate as well, if you got too much dust on the needle. Sometimes you'd realise and you'd have to mix it out quickly because it was going to skate and it would just go. If you're DJing to 2000 people and that happens, it's quite embarrassing. None of those problems exist now.After having the pink Technics, about a year later, I saved up and I bought a pair of decks and I got myself a Numark mixer. Technics were expensive back in the day, they were £300 per deck, which was a lot of money when you're starting out DJing, getting £30 a night.It was the original Numark, the fader was really good, you got a decent sound out of them and they were relatively cheap. I used them with a pair of Wharfedale speakers which I had from the reggae days. Wharfedale speakers used to have a warm soundsystem kinda sound, really deep boomy bass and nice treble, so I used to have a soundsystem vibe in my room. I had a Denon amp, I don't remember the make of it. I remember buying that from Richer Sounds, which is still going now, back in the early '80s.I had that setup for a while, until I got an Allen & Heath mixer. I think I got it from Velvet Rooms after it closed. I loved those mixers because of the filter, you could filter sounds out. You could put on one tune and when you were in the mix you could just filter it out. If I used to clang a mix I would fade out the mix instead of just pulling out the mix.Yeah, the Xone. Then the Pioneers came around, and then people didn't like the sound of the Allen & Heaths that much.Because it was quite harsh. If you turned them up too high they would start distorting. I didn't mind it, because I didn't notice at the time, but then I remember going to a friend's and he had a pair of Pioneers and told me, trust me, listen to the difference in sound. And the Pioneers did sound more cohesive and neutral. It did have an overall better sound, and also in the clubs, Allen & Heath tends to distort when you turn up the gain, a lot quicker than the Pioneers did.My biggest thing was headphones. I seriously must've bought hundreds of pairs over the years. Groove's has one pair that he's had for 15 years and he's never lost them, he refuses to use any other headphones. They might be falling apart but he swears by them. Since he's had those headphones, I've had at least about 30, 40 pairs. I tend to change a lot because I get bored of the sound of headphones.I was never into the Sennheisers, I always found the cups too small. Everyone used them—Randall, Goldie, most DJs. The only two DJs that didn't use them were me and Groove. I found the cups too small and it had a slight delay for me when I was mixing with them. I did buy a pair but I never got on with them.The ones that I've got now, which are the latest Pioneer HDJ X7s, are the best headphones I've had. They're very neutral sounding. If you're listening to headphones and there's too much bass, it covers up all the other frequencies, so sometimes I find mixing really difficult. The Pioneers have a very neutral sound, so the bass, the treble, everything is very flat sounding. They're very clean, they're very clear and they're loud. I just get the signal straight to my ear, no delay, the perfect sound. You can turn them up. I don't turn them up too high but they have got a lot of headroom. I'll use them for the rest of my career.What you find with sounds that are too sharp, is it affects your hearing. As I've gotten older, my hearing has gotten much more sensitive to treble. Spikes in treble are a little bit too much for me sometimes. You know, my hearing has definitely changed. Even when I'm DJing, I like sounds that are a little more neutral than I used to, and I try not to push the gain as much as I used to. Before, I used to whack everything up.Yeah, I just wanted everything to sound loud. As I got older, I tried to keep things as flat as possible, and keep quite a neutral sound because of my hearing. I've really got to be careful, a lot of DJs I know have tinnitus and I don't want to get that.I remember when sound engineers used to come and go, "Look, turn it down and we'll whack it up at the desk," and that was absolute bullshit, they never, ever did. They just wanted you to turn it down. Now I find that I don't ride the gain too much because I don't like that overbearing sound, especially when you're playing drum & bass, the mastering sometimes isn't great. They love distortion, the sonics are so loud that you don't need to turn it up. Sometimes you go out [to the dance floor] and you think to yourself, "This sounds terrible," because you're behind a nice set of decks and you've got a decent monitor system, then you go out and realise it's too loud.Jumping from Technics to CDJs, it's a completely different mindset. You don't have to look for records. It's a lot easier. I remember going and killing myself to try and get a dubplate to play at Swerve. And when I got it cut, the guy went, "Look, we've put the prices up and it's like £65 for one track." I walked into the nightclub and the warm-up DJ, Flight, was playing the same track. I walked up to her and I went, "What the fuck? When, what, how did you get this?" And I looked and she was playing it on CD. I was like, "Oh my god, I can't believe this." I'd just spent £65 plus cab fare to get the dubplate. I couldn't do that anymore.At the time my accountant said to me, "You could really buy a house with the amount of money you're spending on dubs. I don't know what you're doing, you're spending way too much." But the problem was we were on [BBC] Radio 1 at the time, and we had to have new music, that was imperative. We were there every week, it was a big thing for us. Don't get me wrong, it wasn't a problem for me at all, I love buying music, but there's got to be a stage where you sit down and think, "Right, I've got to change my shit up."I also got bad sciatica through carrying the record boxes. And another thing that used to happen, I came back from Dublin once, and I went to get my records I was like, "God, my bag feels light," and I looked in there and there were no records in the bag. All my dubs had spilled out. Clearly they'd searched it and hadn't locked it back up. I remember calling the airline up and they were like, "Oh, right. We found loads of really heavy records under the conveyor belt." And I was like, "Please give me my records back." I went back to the airport and half my records were missing. I have nothing against dubs, but everything was working against me and I just thought, "I've got to go digital now."So I made the transition. It's just progression. Whenever anyone starts about it, I'm like, "Listen, you don't know the struggle, so please don't tell me about what I should and shouldn't do." I respect the vinyl thing and when I see people playing vinyl, I respect it so much. But I felt that I paid my dues. I spent hundreds of thousands of pounds on dubs. So I was like, allow me, let me buy a pack of fucking CDs, yeah? And burn these tracks onto CDs and let me live, do you know what I'm saying?I hear a lot of people saying they miss vinyl but I don't. I don't miss all of the caveats that come with vinyl, the things going wrong, I find it so much easier now. The initial thing with that transition was that a lot of people said it feels so different not looking through your records. You're so used to looking through your records for so long that it's burned into your brain, and all of a sudden you see these tracks come up digitally. A lot of DJs hated it—"I cannot look at things digitally, it does my head in"—but I never found it a problem at all. Straight away I got into it.When I first went onto CDJs, I remember DJ Marky coming down to Swerve and he said, "You use CDJs now?" He said he was going to get a pair, and two months later I see him, and he says he can't use them. I asked him what he meant, he just said, "I like to have my hands flat on the decks, my brain can't adjust to having my hands up there." To this day, Marky will never use CDJs. He's got the new Technics decks where you can turn the deck upside down and do all kinds of mad things.Once I was in Brazil, in this really bougie club that Pete Tong was playing in. Marky took me there and it was for some Brazilian millionaires, this weird little playboy club. So, we went there and Pete Tong was playing and I remember, he walked in and I was like, "Where are his records?" and Marky was like, "No, he uses USBs, flash drives" and I was like, "No fucking way?!" and he got them out and my mind was blown.I still didn't think that it seemed real, as a DJ I still felt like you had to walk in with. That's the whole thing with me, you've got to look like you're going to work. You don't walk in looking no different from anyone else. I was cussing, man. Even the promoter went to Marky pissed, saying he's booked Pete Tong and he's turned up playing with USBs because he'd never seen anything like this either. He's saying, "Where's your music"? and Pete would be like, "It's in here" and he'd have it off. "I paid you X thousands of pounds to come and you come in here with a flash drive?!"It was really alien to me, it didn't seem right to me at all. Then what happened was, I was on Ministry Of Sound Radio and I left my CDJs in a taxi, but I had my computer on me. The producer came in and said, "Look, I've got a USB, you've got an hour, download all your music on the USB and we'll go from there." And that was it mate, just by total accident. I didn't think I'd enjoy it as much as I did, because I always remember cussing Pete Tong. I was kinda like, "Nah bruv, that's never gonna be me."Yeah, under duress. My CDJs came at the end of the show and I was like, "Fuck them!" []. Fuck the CDs, I never used them again. That was a sliding doors moment, it was so easy—he showed me how to link to the other deck, and I had to learn it all in an hour. I took to it like a duck to water. It just felt right, I got it straight away, felt like it was my next move.I don't use Serato because I'm not the calmest person when things go wrong. Grooverider, when things go wrong, he's calm. His Serato goes wrong all the time. If something happens, he unplugs it, plugs it back in and it starts working. Me, I'd have a nervous breakdown. I'm not that kinda guy, I'm not super technically minded either and if anything goes wrong, I completely freak out.Yeah, I've just learned how to do it. I haven't used it out yet but I've got all my playlists already. Probably the next time I'll DJ, I'll use rekordbox. It is the next wave, it simplifies everything again, it's great. Just one little issue I've got with all of this, is that it's really made DJing so easy. I don't think you can go wrong now. When I got shown what you can actually do on rekordbox—you don't even have to DJ anymore, it kind of does everything for you, everything you can think of.It can make you sound technically adept when you aren't, which I find slightly annoying. But it levels the playing field out a bit, because ultimately you have to be a good selector, you've got to know what you're doing, regardless of mixing. You see people who are great mixers but are terrible DJs. So, it does simplify everything down a bit. Because I'm old school, I think you can just do things so easily these days, you can mix thoughtlessly and never drop a mix. I don't use the gimmicky side of things on rekordbox, I use it as a tool to find my tracks more easily. There is a side of it where I'm sceptical, the way you can beatmatch perfectly now, and never go out of time. The element that shit can go wrong still has to be there for me when I'm DJing and with this technology, it's all gone.