When I was 14-15-16 I heard this funk revival band, this soul band and they were part of this movement that came out of London called Acid Jazz, you know that later Jamiroquai came out of, it was just amazing. It just really turned me around to the kind of music that I wanted to listen to and make and, obviously you go through phases–you don’t just suddenly hear one thing and only want to make that for the rest of your life–but it really informed me, and I realised how much I loved a beautiful R&B vocal over these beautiful sort of jazz funk chords with these great musicians playing it. It’s actually what took me back to discovering a lot of the great jazz funk stuff of the original era, things like Roy Ayers and Earth Wind and Fire, so that fresh Brand New Heavies record was a really massive deal for me. It really changed the path I was going down musically.

[Then] it was New York, in the late 1990s, and there were these New York bands like Living Colour and these bands that me and my friends loved. We were five city kids, two black kids and three white kids, playing bad-funk-rock. Then I got really into hip hop around that time and there were great DJs all over New York radio at the time, from Funk Master Flex to Stretch Armstrong and all these people … and that’s when I started DJing.

Like anything in the beginning, you just play wherever you can. Someone’s doing a gig, they’ve got 20 bucks, you’re there with your whole speaker system and turntables … You love this stuff so much, you just can’t wait to get out and do it, and you’re just like, ‘Any way that I can get discovered.’  Then after a couple years of playing in clubs in downtown New York, people like Puffy and Guru and Premiere from Gang Starr and Biggie and Jay-Z and all these heroes of mine suddenly [started] coming into these places where I’m DJing, and it was a thrill. And if you do a good job, there’s the chance they might remember who you are, and that happened with Puffy. He started to book me for other gigs and later with Jay-Z, as well, so that’s how I started to make my name.

I was DJing in clubs for six or seven years ‘cos I loved this music, and I didn’t know anything about producing. I knew I didn’t want to be a rapper so DJing was the way for me to like live in this music and then that sort of led to producing.

The reason I found producing is a bit because I was never an incredible guitar player I was never a virtuosic piano player, but I loved all these things about music and I was decent at a lot of things [so] that production just became the thing that made sense; kind of a way that these talents fit together a bit.

Maybe because I actually care[d] about a lot of things that have become a forgotten art form. I care about recording live musicians, I care about analog, I care about all these beautiful things that people don’t really take the effort to do anymore. I can make music with live musicians that still sounds good in the club because I know how to record and mic the stuff in the same way that they did in the ’60s and ’70s. […]

There’s probably also a certain amount of subjective things, like taste, that go into it. You also have to surrender your ego when you’re producing a record for somebody else.

Even the times when I saw these more successful people just rocket past me and I was like, ‘I’m in the wrong profession.’ Cause, I knew people like Kanye and Dangermouse and Chad and Pharell quite early, and I’d just be like, ‘maybe I’m not supposed to be doing this, like these guys are massive and I’ve been doing it for six-seven years, like I should just give it a rest.’