In my case it’s quite a funny story. I never had a lot to do with music when I was younger. Neither I grew up playing the piano or the flute nor I was able to tell anybody the name of a year’s top ten songs. I was far from being into music but I simply didn’t miss anything. Then in the age of 17 I started to listen to an online radio more and more often. It’s been a radio station for handsup music that still exists but to be honest I’m no longer the biggest fan of this musical genre. I’ve been listening to this radio station where DJs played one tune after another live on air for about a year or so until I felt it was time to get into DJing myself. I started with Virtual DJ Free (as most of us probably did 
) and came up with appreciable results quite fast. After having been doing this for about 8 months I decided it would be time to get a real controller. It took me a while to find out which controller would be best for me but as I did not yet have the money and had to wait anyway I took the time to do lots of research and testing in a local music store. You can probably imagine how happy I was when my first controller arrived then.
The story went on and finally DJing got me into music production!
In the meantime music has turned out to be a deep passion of mine and it’s hard for me to understand how I could live without that for so many years.
It’s an interesting question. Hmm…
Well, I got into Acid house at the tail end of the 80’s. I was well into stuff like Sonic Youth, Big Black and Fugazi (still am,) but acid began to pull at me. I got into techno, properly, one night when I was about 18, when I was out very late, just wondering around and listening to music. Late spring, full moon and about a foot of thick ground mist. It was like a weird art house movie. I can’t even remember what the tape was I was listening to…some form of early house compilation, I think. Most of it was OK, but not great. Then Rythim is Rythim’s ‘Kao-tic Harmony’ caught me off guard and I was smitten. There’s something about techno…it’s my music, in a way rock music, or other genres never really was. I became obsessed.
About a year later I was at college in Aberdeen. I had been going to the legendary Pelican Club on a semi regular basis, and dancing myself stupid. Any spare money I had was going on records from One Up records in the centre of town. Strangely, for all the vinyl I was buying, DJ’ing never occured to me. I was still playing guitar at that point, was alright at it and had just bought a Fender Telecaster with some cash I had gotten together.
One afternoon, before I had to catch a bus back to my parents, I went into One up and was browsing the mixtapes they had. Mixtapes, lol, this was such a long time before all the copywrite wars began. I doubt they were actually legal to sell, but no one cared back then. A lot of them were not really my sort of thing. Rave was well into it’s ascendancy in Scotland at the time, and it never did it for me: too fast, too soulless, too monotone for a kid who had musically brought himself up on the Belleville 3, Underground Resistance and dirty, jacking Chicago acid.
One of them caught my eye: a Derrick May mix tape, apparently recorded at Pure in Edinburgh. Now, I had heard about May’s Dj’ing: stories like one of his records skipping over and over, and, rather than panic like most of us would do, he calmly mixed the next tune into the skip…
The I listened to that mixtape with my jaw open. I listened to it twice on the first leg and then twice more on the second. I just kept turning it over and over. I still don’t know what 90% of the tracks were, but the ones I did recognise, like ‘Star Dancer’ by The Martian, I regard as cornerstones of my musical education. By the time I got to my parents I knew I wanted to learn how to DJ. I still find in funny that the man who made me fall in love with techno was the same guy that made me want to start playing records.
Took me a while to get the money together, another year or so. I bought a set of crappy Limit belt drives and a cheap mixer and learned to beatmatch. Anyone who thinks DJ’ing on the gear we have nowadays is hard ought to try a set of belt drive…
..About a year later I was shopping for new decks. One store I went to told me they had a set of Technic 1200s that had been ordered for someone who never picked them up. They let me have them for 300 quid for the pair. Best. Bargain. Of. My Life.
I think I’m lucky with DJing in the sense that I’ve never had to do it as a career. I’ve never once had to play anything other than the music I love. Every club I’ve ever played in I played acid house and techno. I simply wasn’t interested in anything else. For me, DJing is a means to play people the music I love. I’m not into it as an end in itself. we set up our own stuff, I made friends with some great DJ’s, and I’ve had the pleasure of seeing friends go beyond what I was capable of, in both DJing and running record labels.
I actually stopped for a few years. A lot of the non music side of being involved in clubs got to me and it damaged my love for the music. I’m all better now, though, and taken the next step into production. Who knows what’ll happen?
Long post, yeah. Sorry about that. I tend to run on when I gets to talking about techno.
Love of music. Hearing scratching for the first time. Hearing DJ mixes on the radio in the early 80s. Hearing the Street Sounds Electro albums in the early 80s which were really creatively mixed. Basically, realising that a great mix is better than the sum of its parts and wanting to be able to do it. Also, I loved scratching and used to try and copy the stuff I heard other DJs doing on hip-hop tracks, which I did a pretty good job of up until about 1989/1990, then the skill level of DJs I was trying to copy went right up (Qbert appeared basically, lol).