Tracklist:

1. Drop The Pow (Hoi!’S Insaine Mix) By Hoi
2. Fell This Sh&T By Terry Hooligan & Schema
3. Strike Glitches By Submerse
4. This High By Zombie Robot
5. Decender By Grand Ruckus
6. Madness (Killabits Remix) By Rico Tubbs
7. What You Know About Bass? By Rico Tubbs
8. Deadzone By Btek
9. Feel It (Kenji Kinetics Remix) By Rico Tubbs

Terry Hooligan… from Atomic Hooligan. Supreme party rocker and longtime friend of Pure Phunk.

Above you will find a mix showcasing what’s going on with his label ‘Bass=Win‘, which he runs with fellow basshead Rico Tubbs.

For those that don’t know who Terry Hooligan is, or what Atomic Hooligan was, I was going to post a bio… but this interview from LSD Magazine paints a much more informative picture. Enjoy!

FROM LSD MAGAZINE:

Serving up gloriously fat n funky slices of racked up, stacked up, scratched up, bass drenched, thumping mayhem skids in Sir Terry of Hooligan. Stepping up to a glinting infamy at the core of dancefloor destroying reprobates Atomic Hooligan whose scorching live performances and sparkling charisma tore global stages a new hybrid of swagger, grit and swashbuckling flamboyance, Terry is now ripping up virtual wax on an array of banging fronts. Lashing his twinkling largeness and endless supply of balls on the table, blatant front to his mesmerising DJ sets, Terry’s old school dedication to cooking up a freeflow, all systems go, hands in the air and off your toes controlled pandemonium have made him a towering as well as a pretty damn wide figure. With his own fresh releases flowing under whatever guise the groove deems appropriate, he is currently overseeing a fresh, genre shattering assault on the dancefloor through his label Bass=Win, and collaborating left and right, day and night, always keeping it tight to make you move all night with fresh projects such as the soon to be massive Grand Ruckus. We love our characters here at LSD, and when the amp rack starts to cool at the end of yet another foray into the sweet spot of raucous good times, Terry’s intelligence, insight and thoughtful perception, as well as his being a right fucking laugh were ideally suited for us to sit down for a chat.

What is it about Watford and its apparently seminal role in underground music culture.

Well the thing with Watford is that while it’s within the M 25, it does still have a pretty rural feel to it, and you’ve got similar places like Hemel Hempstead and Luton right on its borders. Back in the old days from the late 80’s onwards, you had the M 25 orbital raves, and all kinds of crews from round this area – half of Spiral Tribe came from Watford, Exodus from Luton and so on, so while you had that element and the freedom of the open air rave culture that the sense of countryside offered up, it was close enough to London to share a lot of the same crowds, especially with the bigger raves and to stay completely in touch with the capital’s currents on a range of levels. It’s a meeting of worlds between that liberating, out in a field in the middle of nowhere headspace and the gritty, grimey, urban feel of London.

How did you initially start out getting decks together and thinking about dance music?

I was a hip hop kid – pure and simple. Me and my mates would get ourselves sorted with a bag of weed, at least one of us had a set of turntables and we basically just used to congregate and hang out together getting spanked on the weed and trying our hand in the mix. I got hold of my own steel wheels in ’93, and we would head off up to Freedom Records and Unity in Watford, buy a load of tunes, steam home, smoke a load of puff, crack open the booze, spin the tunes and generally let it all flow. Camden was also right on our doorstep – literally 10 minutes on the train, and so we could get ourselves down to the big hip hop nights there like Apricot Jam and Mudlands and it was through that scene that myself and a few of the others came up. There still is a vibrant hip hop scene in Watford. It’s very underground but guys like Genesis Elijah, Double Edge and Ruthless are setting it ablaze. Then you’ve got influences coming in from someone like LTJ Bukem who did a lot for the mixtape scene, and pretty much everyone had an old Bukem mix somewhere in their collection.

It’s a funny old place Watford. It’s a proper culture vacuum. Nothing goes on here and it’s painfully homogenised. Everything’s part of a chain – all the pubs and all the shops are personality free, branded units and whenever anything remotely cool pops up – it inevitably closes down within 6 months. And yet that in itself seems to have generated a form of individualised resistance where people just do cool shit off their own back – be it music be it art – whatever – and so despite all the odds, an awful lot of switched on creativity does come out of here.

So the practise is paying off on the decks and you’re starting to rip it up – but how did that evolve into production and ultimately the live band?

Well the thing was, that my first mixer had a sampler function built into it, so I would loop bits of tracks and drop em in and out strategically while scratching over the top. Funnily enough, Rob the guy I still live with, used to be my rapper in our band which was called something like Basement Twins or Junkyard Dogs – fuck knows now, but those were the first steps into any sort of live performance beyond a straight DJ set. From there, I upgraded..ish to some Boss DJ sampler with all of 2 seconds memory and an optional expansion card I never got round to buying, but when the flaws in that plan began to shine through, I finally got a proper piece of kit – an Emu that is still sitting here to this day. At that point, it was still very sample based, and I’d be looking at people with synths and computers without much of a clue as to what they were actually doing because between my sampler and my old Korg M1 which had a built in sequencer, I could play through a midi link.

Then I met Matt who was a classical musician and he showed a lot of the musical side to production as opposed to hardcore sampling, dedicated record digging, 2 finger basslines and an overall loop that was only ever in key by accident. Basically a scratch DJ who made beats. By about 97 when Matt and I had paired up, it was starting to move beyond that into a more from the ground up approach to making tracks. After an ill advised period calling ourselves Mudskipper, we switched to Atomic Hooligan, and from the outset we had some form of live act – though we didn’t have any live instruments as yet. Me, Matt and this guy James would take all our stuff – samplers, synths, turntables, the lot to places like Redeye in Islington and the Water Rats in Kings Cross alongside a few of these ravey things that were going off in Hertfordshire and them live. We got ourselves Billy Bongo on drums and a couple of vocalists, then expanded the electronic drum kit that sat under the programmed drums into a full live kit, got a guitarist and at that point, a band called Freefall Collective got involved. We had all these disparate elements – Xander doing beatboxing, Justine, our singer and all the instruments and it was only really then that we managed to stir all those ingredients together into a cohesive liveset. When Matt was making the first album, he didn’t actually use that many live parts, largely because we didn’t really have anywhere to record them, but by the time the second album came around, we had whole string sections and virtually every form of instrumentation you can possibly imagine with the Akai MPC’s as the bedrock of our sets for timings and flexibility rather than running everything off a laptop. That’s how the live aspect of Atomic Hooligan evolved, and by 2006, we had something like 13 or 14 people on stage. It was big.

Given what you’re saying about not just running everything off a pre programmed laptop, does it surprise you that so many people get away calling it a liveset when they’re just pressing play, wearing a stupid outfit and waving their arms around a lot.

That’s what dance music has always been like. Which is cool. Whatever. It’s all good. Even if you look at the Chemical Brothers, and I’m NOT dissing them – I fucking love em, but they do press go on whatever equipment they’ve written their set into and it becomes all about the light show. It’s very hard to get dance music sounding good live – next to impossible, so it doesn’t really surprise me that it’s always gone that way. What does surprise me is that people are still pulled in by it and running round all excited that so and so is going to be playing a ‘liveset’ when all they’re really doing is pressing play on a computer and getting paid twice as much for it. If you want to call it a liveset so you get more bookings then that’s all good, but as far as I’m concerned, what Atomic Hooligan was doing was genuinely live, not 2 blokes in boiler suits with torches on their heads dancing about and occasionally EQing a fraction or nudging a filter. It was an actual live band.

Is it that risk element and that sense of things not being automatically scripted what makes getting up on stage so fulfilling and keeps the buzz high octane.

Absolutely 100%. Our sets were planned down to the last second, but there’s always scope for disaster when there’s a human element involved, let alone when the technology decides to have a breakdown in the middle of a show. I always had backups of everything we did on CD for those occasional fuckups and there’s one time in Japan etched on my brain where a power bar fried with god knows what plugged into it down the chain and the whole set cut. They had this mental looking converter for all the stuff with English plugs that we’d brought with us, and it must’ve been a case of style over substance as something smouldered, everything went deathly silent and we’re stood there with our dicks in our hands wondering what the fuck happened. It happened at the Glade as well when the MPC’s went down and I had to switch everything to the CDJ’s while the poor drummer was desperately trying to keep time with no monitors. But that’s what gives it the edge.

How did the dynamic of having a band around you differ from being locked down in the booth DJing on your own.

Well first and foremost, I’m a DJ, so I’ve always been out on my own. And I’ve always been a show off so being up there solo has never really fazed me. I’ve gone from playing to 50 people in a basement dive in London to 15,000 people in a club in Russia on the same weekend, and there really isn’t that much difference between them in where you’re head’s at. I like having people in the booth to vibe off, but I don’t need it. But then it all comes down to confidence at the end of the day, and cutting your teeth in east end pubs or dancehall venues in Kilburn where playing the wrong track will get you stabbed. And that’s not laying on the drama – that’s just how it was. What I found strange was being up there with loads of other band members. It takes the pressure off to a certain extent, but the flip side of that is relinquishing a lot of control – and I like to be able to just switch things up on the fly. That was the dimension of the liveset that I didn’t enjoy so much – the limitations on flexibility. We’d always try for a mash up element in our sets where we’d grab a Missy Elliot record or whatever was going around and just ride a jam with it, freeing up people like the drummer to whip their own spin onto it. Never really works though most of the time – though there is the odd gem like this one night in the arse end of nowhere at a club that wasn’t exactly heaving where we just went on a freestyle with everyone on stage doing their thing and bringing their own individual dynamic to the session. That I really enjoyed, but I do like to control my output and my environment I must say.

Speaking of control, what are your views on performing completely shitfaced.

Again – it’s a funny one. I’ve played some of my best sets completely off my tits. I played Secret Garden last year as I was coming up like a cunt and that turned out absolutely wicked. By and large though, while I like a couple of vodkas down my neck before I go on to get me in the swing of things, I’m not that keen on going over the top. Obviously as a DJ and someone in the music industry, I’ve made certain lifestyle choices but they don’t work for me when I’m playing. And I’ve tried playing, believe me, on the whole chemical spectrum, but bar the odd perfectly timed pill that miraculously appears in my mouth while the set’s rolling, most stimulants give you that tension and that fear that chips away at your confidence, and playing out really is a confidence game. Drinking in relative moderation – relative mind – in places like Poland where the vodka flows like water and the Russian courage kicks in is wicked, but getting absolutely slaughtered is definitely not a winner. It’s not good for me – and to be honest, it’s very self indulgent when you’ve got a crowd out there who’ve come to see you at your best, not licking the mixer and trying to sing.

You mentioned Poland. What is it about that sort of strange innocence in Eastern Europe that makes for such slamming nights where people are out to have a cracking time rather than standing about judging from the fringes.

I think it’s a younger scene for starters. But looking into it a bit deeper, in the UK, our cool is our mainstream. Breakbeat is really looked down on because it’s not in the mainstream – it happened to big beat and it happens to drum n bass every couple of years. If you’re not friends with Kanye West and making crazy electro that no-one really likes but pretends to because it’s trendy, no-one’s that interested. And that’s because we, as a nation, press the ‘cool’ button all the time. But if you look at the TV in Eastern Europe, you’re not going to see Kid Cudi or someone of that ilk. Nope, you’re going to see Herman the Singing German or some deeply uncool guy doing the splits in a pair of Cossack trousers. And that’s the sort of stuff your mum listens to, so when the kids head out to the clubs – they automatically feel cool, without there being all this nuanced politics and the ridiculous hierarchy what’s ‘in’ like the UK. They wear whatever they like, be it a Mickey Mouse t-shirt or a bin bag, and listen to whatever they like and there is, like you say, this innocence to conceptions of cool that is itself so fucking cool. We’ve made cool into this product that we sell to kids, it’s industrialised and commercialised to the last atom, and so if your look, your sound, your taste, your accent – whatever doesn’t fall into the sanctioned realms of cool – then you’re not cool. But over there, and in Japan – none of that elaborate trendsetting bullshit even exists let alone carries any weight – as long as you’re alternative, you’re on the firm.

Alternative….. You know, I don’t like using that word because it’s so misleading. I had this discussion the other day with someone about what’s alternative and what’s not, because if we consider our media the mainstream with all its ludicrous and totally manufactured claims to define cool, then flogging it for all its worth, then surely being really straight and listening to Cliff Richard is now alternative. Poland’s a bit different, but in a lot of the more closed off countries like Russia and Belarus where the media hasn’t moved on that far from Communism, anything that’s not mainstream is liberating. Won’t last forever though.

Staying with the cool theme, as you said breaks did hit the skids as far as fashion was concerned, but if someone’s making wicked tunes that they’re really feeling, why would they suddenly start churning out ropey electro wank or making a move into dubstep when it’s not necessarily coming from their musical instincts.

Money. Popularity. Yes there’s artistic integrity involved, but a DJ’s got to eat and pay the bills. It’s fucking hard out there and unless you’re selling enough records to get the gigs coming in, you may as well sack it and move into telesales because there’s no hope of a living. It’s a hard life, and I’m not ashamed to say that I’ve been through it myself where I’ve stuck to my guns and been kicked in the arse for it. I don’t think I’ve ever compromised my sounds in any of my various incarnations, but I have made them more accessible. There’s a lot of breakbeat out there that sells a shitload that I’m not that keen on. No disrespect at ALL because they’ve got their own niche, I love them as people and they do make wicked music, but I could never picture myself making anything like what Deekline and the Stantons put out.

Breakbeat fucked itself hard though by closing down and becoming a boys club for 30 something graphic designers who ‘never really liked it anyway’. Add in all those stupid message board clicks, the plain fact that people were making too many bootlegs and just the barrage of tunes that sounded 10 years old and there you have it. Of course something is going to die if no new kids are getting into it. But things are cyclical, and you have to trough before you can peak again, and just look at some of the stuff that’s sizzling now and guys like Nicky from Control Z and Pyramid, and RacknRuin making this 140 bpm jungle that’s buzzing again. That’s why breakbeat bit the shit so much – no-one was making anything new and original – apart from – ironically enough the Stantons and Deekline who were making their own sound which was totally different from the rest.

How did you personally adapt to dubstep when it impacted so hard and started to permeate everything around it

I’ve got no problem with dubstep at all as a musical form. I obviously do have a problem with all the bandwagon jumping and exploitation that’s going to kill it in the same way as breaks, although clearly breaks was never as big, though I have my own theories on that too. But that’s another story. I actually quite like it and it’s got a lot of elements I can get down with – big bassline and a bit weird – though it doesn’t sound weird now because it’s so ingrained in dance music consciousness. But it sounded strange when it first reared its head because it seemed too slow, but I always dug that. But now that’s it’s been subsumed into British cool and the Americans have got their hands on it and are, let’s face it, getting it a bit wrong, that relentless and self defeating quest for an ever bigger bassline is looking precarious in the long run. But then who the fuck am I to pass judgment on who’s getting what right or wrong and an entire scene. It’s great when promoters can pull off smaller, targeted club nights, DJ’s play music they love and make a success of themselves and fresh production blood keeps coming through. I suppose I just worry that the battle of the basslines is going to end in mild farce. But then you’ve got the bastions like Skream and Magnetic Men who are taking it down a more mature route, and Burial tried some really interesting stuff a couple of years back, but I just don’t think people were ready for it yet. We’ve done a couple of dubstep tunes and put plenty out on the label – so it’s all good….

Speaking of the label, just fill us in a little on Bass=Win and your new project, Grand Ruckus

Well Grand Ruckus is myself and Lex from Ben and Lex which is my new production project – my new Atomic Hooligan and Bass=Win is the label I run with Rico Tubbs. I’ve been pushing Grand Ruckus all over the gaff without actually telling people what it’s all about, but I wanted to get the name out there in the zeitgeist to pave the way from when stuff actually starts to drop. It’s very hip hop influenced with a dubsteppy dimension – loads of vocalists, little bit carnival, little bit electro and just basically our take on what we want to be doing. Genesis Elijah is on there, we’re talking to a couple of big American vocalists and it’s all shaping up very nicely. Menu Music is my other label that I run with Jay Cunning – we put out stuff like Rico Tubb’s Gangsters, Lady Waks’s Minimal, Soto’s Ghetto Blaster a while back, and as I say – looking now at breaks potentially coming back in a big way , it’s time to bring back Menu and start getting some quality out there.

Last question. No-one wants their DJ’s moralising too hard at them, but should dance music have a bit more to say for itself.

I certainly think so. Let me put it this way. If you inject too much of a message into music and make it too intelligent, you’re reducing the scope of who that music can reach. But if you make good music, have an opinion as a human being, and you’re in a position where having made good music, people will actually listen to you, there is a responsibility there. If you come at it all preachy and 2 dimensional – ‘sod the war in Libya’ style over a Dutch techno beat, no-one’s going to listen to you. They’re just going to think you’re a knob. But anyone in the limelight with a brain should be saying something that’s worthwhile. They have press attention – they have people checking their Facebook and Twitter posts – and that should be used for something more profound than your latest release from time to time. Opinions are like arseholes – everybody’s got one, but then it depends how good that opinion is and everyone should be informed on some of the myriad subjects out there worthy of debate. Artists are in the fortunate position where they can inform themselves because they do ultimately sit in the studio all day with unlimited internet access to get hold of information and then relay that information to all these people who will actually listen to them because they like their music. It’s a privileged position – so let’s not piss it up the wall.