alucidnation :: Profile

Profile

You know, it's hard sitting down and attempting to write a potted history/biog about yourself. But I'll give it a go...

1 The Early Years

From an early age, I was encouraged to be musical. My mum, Patricia thought it was a good idea for me and my sisters to have piano lessons. I started my grades at age 6, going to lessons with an old lady who taught classical piano in Loughborough, which is where we lived way back when. To be honest I have little recollection of these lessons!

We moved from Loughborough to Nottingham in 1975, and I do remember my next tutor; an old guy called Stan Haywood. He was very good actually; I progressed through a couple of grades in the three years he taught me. However, the lasting memories of these weekly lessons is less what I learned, more the biscuits and the laughing out loud at me farting! He was a great laugh.

In 1978 we moved to a place called Hughenden Valley, just outside of High Wycombe, Bucks. I did most of my formulative growing up here, most of my teens... Hughenden is a beautiful place, right in the heart of the Chilterns, and we lived on the side of a steep valley. My mum found a woman literally over the road from where we lived, Valerie Harris who taught piano, and I took weekly lessons for the next six years. By this stage, 1979, I was getting seriously interested in pop and chart music. I'd bought my first 45 back in 1976 (or rather my Grandma bought it for me) and had been collecting singles since then with any pocket money I'd saved.

2 Record Collecting

Around this time, I got my first job 'proper' as a paper boy. With my wage of £2.30 per week (bloody badly paid, even back then!) I would buy the chart records that I was really into that week, which meant I could buy three. I think I bought my first LP in 1979 too; Supertramp's 'Even in the Quietest Moments' which I'd listened to at my mum's sisters. 'Fools Overture' at the end of side two blew me away!

In 1980 I started secondary school, electronic pop was the order of the day back then, which I was into, but I was always keen to delve a little deeper to find the choicer cuts. Hence I think I was the only lad in the school to have 'Mike Oldfield' emblasoned on his bag. I was heavily into ELO, still am actually - Jeff Lynne is an undisputed master of the pop record and a great tunesmith to boot..

So yeah, where was I? I was still going to piano lessons, but gradually losing interest; classical piano taught me certain musical disciplines, but it lacked freedon - there seemed to be a lot of constraint in general. Looking back, I think I'd have probably been more into learning jazz-based piano, but there again, it probably wouldn't have meant that I spent an hour or so after I'd finished my daily practice just improvising with different chord structures and making up little songs with lots of sustain pedal..

My musical interests by the mid-eighties were very eclectic; I was a sponge, soaking up anything and everything, leaning towards the prog rock end of the spectrum I guess, listening to a lot of Pink Floyd, typical student vibes... In 1984, my Mum and I mutually concluded that my days of piano lesssons were coming to a close; teenage pursuits like discos and birds were getting in the way of regular practice. By this stage I'd reached the dizzy heights of Grade VI; when I recently looked back at the type of stuff I was learning, I quite surprised myself - pretty highbrow pieces!

In '85, after a trip out to Morocco for a while, I learned from my Dad that we were relocating to a place called Harrogate in North Yorkshire, which sort of threw me somewhat; I'd laid down roots in Buckinghamshire, had a girlfriend and some close friends too. At the time I was working in the music department of WHSmith, using my wages to buy as much music as I could lay my hands on, discovering artists like Joni Mitchell, Tomita, Vangelis, Santana, Yes... the list was extensive. While my parents and my sisters moved North in the January of 1986, I remained in High Wycombe and finished my contract at Smiths, before rejoining the rest of my family in Harrogate in February.

By this time I was eighteen; I was at that difficult stage of wondering what the hell I was going to do for a 'career'. I landed a job in Leeds working for Virgin, in their Hi-Fi department. It was a fucking disaster to be honest; I was working under a guy I didn't really see eye to eye with, and I didn't like being a hi-fi salesman, even though I'd inherited a passion for audio equipment from my father. I lasted about six months there, apparantly I didn't 'fit in' to the Virgin ethos. I can't say I blame them; I was useless at selling anything, let alone expensive hi-fi equipment!

3 My 1st Failed Career

So there I was, demoralised and on the dole, living at home - well aware of the fact that my folks were concerned about me, and more concerned that I was sitting around doing jack shit. What next? The natural thing seemed to pursue a career in music somehow, so I had the idea of writing around 50 letters to as many recording studios in the UK as I could find. Many didn't bother even replying, but a few did. The most positive reply came from Keith Herd, the owner of a small recording facility just outside of Kingston-upon-Hull called Fairview. He was looking for an apprentice of sorts to train as a sound engineer, who would eventually become a freelance resident at his studio. After a meeting with Keith and the rest of his lovely family, he took me on! The deal was that I was to be paid a small amount of 'pocket money', while the state looked after paying my rent. I'll be honest; it was a big deal moving away at 18 years of age to a place that I didn't know anything about, but after spending a weekend there looking around for a place to live, I decided on a little place called Cottingham, just outside of the city centre. It was a single room in a shared flat above the main Cottingham Post Office; my first place!

My main problem was that I'd been banned from driving earlier in '86, so I didn't have wheels; I had to rely on a pushbike to get around, which was OK, although the ride from Cottingham to Willerby, where Fairview Studios were based was uphill most of the way! So began my studio career. I was a keen learner, but looking back, pretty shy and arkward at that age; I was ingesting loads of information from my teachers - John Spence and Roy Neave; both experienced engineers and producers, every day, and also having to grow up quite quickly - I was finding life in the shared flat quite trying - you try living with a trainee vicar whose personal hygiene is non-existent, and a trucker upstairs who's addicted to pornography... not the best homelife!

However, life at Fariview was great! I was learning the tricks of the trade, the 48 track Soundcraft desk, the AMS samplers, how to mic up different instruments, Drawmer gating effects, patching, production techniques, cutting and splicing 2" tape... I learned pretty much everything under the watchful eye of Keith Herd, and listening back to some of the cassettes of work that I had a hand in producing, they're pretty good actually! I also got to work alongside Steve Nye (he of the Penguin Cafe Orchestra and also a prolific producer/collaborator with the likes of David Sylvian), the Housemartins, Norman Cook, The Sisters of Mercy, The Farm and many others you'll have never heard of.

Once I'd cut my teeth on engineering in the studio, I had a go at live engineering at a place in Hull called The Adelphi. Live engineering is worlds away from the safety of the studio; you've really got to keep your wits about you. I didn't last long at the Adelphi to be honest; I had a few gigs that went OK, and paid me a bit more pocket money, but the final straw came one night when I had to setup and engineer a live jazz ensemble that were reasonably well known. It was a big band, about ten players, and getting the levels sorted were a nightmare. There was very little soundcheck time, so by the time they took the stage to a capacity crowd I was nowhere near happy with anything. Of course, feedback was the order of the night; every time the saxophonist stepped up and blew, a cacophony of barbed, spiky, deafening distortion ensued, and I didn't understand what the problem was... I was in over my head, and after some of the looks and shouts of disapproval I was enduring from the audience I'm surprised I didn't get lynched that night! That was the end of my brief, but nontheless enjoyable live engineering career...

And I didn't last that much longer at Fairview either. After 20 months there, and no longer being reliant on Keith and the state for an income - I'd gone self-employed, and there wasn't enough work - I ran out of money. I coudn't even afford the rent on my flat, which I wasn't particularly happy in anyway; in fact I'll come clean - I was very lonely; possibly the unhappiest I'd been upto that point in my life. So something had to give, and it was with apprehension that I packed up my car (I'd got my license back by this point) and made the journey west back to Harrogate, back to my parents...

4 Art College and a Fresh Start

With my father working in the higher echlons of the banking industry, my mother doing secretarial work locally and both my sisters having moved away, the pressure was really on for me to do something, anything after the failure of my promising career as the second George Martin. So what did I do? Yes, that's right, I found a job as a petroleum pump operator.

God, when I look back on this period, I'd sunk to pretty much an all time low; I was working hours on end for very little remuneration, alongside people with whom I didn't get on, and to cap it all I got fired for allegedly nicking money from the till! I'd always thought that the accountant who came in to tally up at the end of each day looked like a shifty bastard; it turned out that it was he, not I who was embezelling money regularly from the company...

So, come the 2nd Summer of Love in 1988 I was pretty downtrodden, certainly not feeling the vibes that were eminating from the rave culture that was sweeping the country at the time! I was drowning in my own shit; what was I to do? I started art college in Harrogate that September, that's what.

And it turned my life around. Suddenly I was meeting people of my own age and hanging with people who shared my interests, which if I'm honest was listening to music and getting stoned as often as possible. Of course, I was a keen student; I'd inherited a Canon A1 camera from my dad in 1987 and photography was becoming a real passion for me. The course was a General Art and Design OND, and for the next two years I developed a healthy interest in design and more specifically letterform, whilst being bullied into a fine art direction by my tutor Alice Morgan... Ah, Alice... I recall vividly getting stuck in the stockroom with her whilst she laid into me verbally, telling me that I didn't have one ounce of artistic ability in me, everything that I did was shit, and if she had things her way, I'd have been booted off the course years ago. Man, was she a vitriolic Northern Irish woman!

Anyway, after two years at Harrogate, it was time to apply for either an HND or a degree. Being short of dough and wanting to get out and earn some as soon as I could, I took the HND route, managing to scrape into the London College of Printing, where I was due to start in the September of 1990.

5 London

I was never in any hurry to move into the capital if I'm honest. I've always been happier standing on the peripheries of things rather than getting embroiled. That was my reasoning for spending the first year of my Typography course residing in High Wycombe and commuting into Elephant and Castle every day... Looking back, it was a bit of a nightmare, not to mention expensive travelling all the way from Amersham at one end of the Metropolitan line right to the other end of the Bakerloo, but that's what I did. After all, I had close friends still in Wycombe; I was sharing a flat with one of my best friends and the whole year was really enjoyable - some great parties, trips away, walks in the Chiltern Valley, plus I was getting into a whole new music scene too.

In 1989, I was seeing a girl in Yorkshire and one night I was driving through the lanes to her place, listening to John Peel on Radio 1 when all of a sudden he played a track that I literally had to stop the car to listen to. That track turned out to be 'A huge ever growing pulsating brain that rules from the centre of the Ultraworld' by a band called The Orb. For me, it encapsulated everything that I was into at the time, a superb fusion of dub, ambient and electronica. The following day, I went to Leeds and bought a copy of the 12" from Jumbo. From here on in, this piece of music opened up a whole new wealth of undiscovered artists as the ambient house scene gathered momentum.

Being in London most days, it meant that I had access to cutting edge record shops like Rough Trade, so I used to buy loads of stuff and then take it back to my flat in Wycombe, then sit up late getting baked with my mates, digesting all this beautiful new music.

Around this time, I was fortunate enough to catch some pretty seminal gigs by the Orb in their best incarnation of Paterson and Thrash; I witnessed a mental gig at the Fridge in Brixton - it was absolutely rammed and I remember my sister collapsing and having to look after her; dehydration probably. I also saw Orbital's first gig - a 2000AD benefit in Camden, they were playing to about twenty people along with a stunning laser show; a few years later they were headlining Glastonbury!

By the middle of 1991 I realised that I had to move into town to make my course cost-effective, so I moved into the Ralph West Halls of Residence on Battersea Bridge Road overlooking the park. What a mad year that turned out to be...

I had probably the best hi-fi system in the Halls, certainly one of the loudest, so consequently my room (#820) was the 'chill out lounge'; people came along to listen and get high. I met some good people here, some of which I'm still in touch with, others that I'm not..

6 A 'Proper' Job

After I'd finished at the LCP coming away after being awarded a Merit, the time had come to go out into the big wide world and find a proper job. By this time I was seeing a girl from Lincoln so spent the Summer of 92 between there and Harrogate at my parents place, frantically applying for jobs as a graphic designer. By September I'd started at Planet Presentations in Covent Garden, a fresh, young and dynamic company who decided to take me on as a junior designer. I was one of the lucky ones; the majority of college leavers at that point in time would struggle for ages to find work in their chosen sector, but here I was in Covent Garden having landed a job in a London agency!

Of course, the money to start wasn't particularly brilliant, but so what - it was a wage and a foot on 'the ladder', so I was well chuffed. It also meant relative financial independence, and money to feed my vinyl and CD addiction, which I fed with gusto. There were a few rocky moments during the first year at Planet, but I managed to avoid being disposed of.. I have a lot to thank MDB and DJH for, you know who you are.

I was going out pretty regularly, most weekends, to places like MegaDog on the Holloway Road, seeing bands like Orbital, Aphex Twin, Knights of the Occasional Table, System 7; there was loads going on musically. Early computer music technology in the shape of the personal computer and Atari Cubase sequencers was just becoming available, and it was during visits to friends houses, friends who owned these primitive PCs that I started to learn what was possible to make music with the minimal amount of kit.

One of my closest buddies at the time was Anthony Beech, who was living just outside of Reading in the middle of the countryside. We shared similar musical tastes, getting into things like the Irresistible Force's new LP 'Flying High' and Ultramarine's 'Every Man and Woman is a Star'. He was the proud owner of a very basic PC, but also had a soundcard, a MIDI controller keyboard and a copy of Steinberg Cubase 1.0! During late night visits we'd sit up in the mezanine of his tiny place and jam together, discovering what was possible with this very basic setup.

I was also travelling to Frome in Wiltshire on odd occasions to make music with my friend Crom of the Fruit Salad Lightshow, who was looking after Eat Static's setup; a 'proper' studio with loads of outboard kit. These trips (literally) kind of whetted the appetite, so as you can imagine it wasn't too long before I started yearning for my own little 'studio'.

7 Taking the Plunge

In mid 1993, Anthony and I had been walking around Trent Park near Southgate, North London where I was living at the time, talking about music. He'd come up with a name - 'A Lucid Nation' that he felt encapsulated a spirit, and also sounded a bit like 'hallucination' frententically. It was and is a great bit of word play, and it was only when I started playing about with the typographical qualities of the name on the computer that I realised it should be one word; and so 'alucidnation' was born.

Later that year, against my then partners wishes, I arranged a rather large loan from my bank and bought my first studio setup on Tin Pan Alley in London - Great Russell Street. Initially I was going to go the workstation route; I seem to recall looking at an all-in-one studio solution - a full sized keyboard that contained a GM MIDI synthesizer, a sequencer and a sampler for nigh on £4000. But then after taking some advice from my friend Crom and having worked on bits of outboard gear, I decided to buy separates. I ended up with:

A 486mhz Gateway PC running Cubase 1.0
A Korg 05R/W general MIDI synth module, based on the fabulous M1
A Mackie 1202 micro mixer
An Akai S01 sampler with an incredible 15.1 seconds sampling time (!!)
A Novation BassStation keyboard
A Fatar mother keyboard controller
and an Alesis Quadraverb effects unit.

Unbelievably, this kit set me back close to £4500! I also got hold of a studio desk to install all of this lovely new equipment on, then it was simply a case of learning how it all connected up and worked. Fortunately, even though technology had moved on leaps and bounds, I still had my previous studio experience from my Fairview days, so I wasn't a complete novice..

So, to the detriment of my relationship, any available free time I had was spent on marathon recording sessions, backing up literally hundreds of tunes to cassette tape; live jams over small eight bar sequences in Cubase, some which sounded good, others that didn't. In fact, I listen back to some of the work that I produced using that minimal amount of kit and it sounds remarkable. I often think that the less equipment you have available to you, the more inventive and less distracted you tend to be. That was certainly the case for me. Most of the time I'd be working on improvisations by myself - chord structures that I'd been messing around with for years on various pianos, but I was also collaborating with Anthony on mellow, contemplative pieces and with me old mate Stuart Nisbet on more house-based stuff.

8 Moving on / The Big Chill Gala

I was amassing a nice little body of work on my own, but my personal life was fucked. It was only a matter of time until I decided enough was enough and I moved out. So on Valentines Day 1995 I moved my gear out, taking it up to Yorkshire for temporary storage at my parents, whilst I decided where I was going to live! Troubled times; for a couple of weeks I was once again commuting to and from High Wycombe, sleeping on people's floors, until a work colleague of mine offered very kindly to put me up while I got my shit together. In actual fact, I'd asked her prior to leaving my last girlfriend if she'd mind ever so much if I could crash at her place if things 'came on top'.

That work colleague was Nina, my future wife... She had a lovely place up on Harrow Hill about twelve miles out of London, easy commute, into cooking, hospitable, easy going, everything that my ex girlfriend wasn't, basically. You can understand why I wasn't in any particular hurry to leave there, but seeing as the offer of a roof over my head had been for about a week, maybe two at the most, she was keen to see the back of me after I'd been there about five weeks or so! By this time, my sister and her partner Derek who'd just got back from travelling Australia had found somewhere in Leytonstone, East London that had enough room to accomodate them and me, plus a room for one more, so I asked Anthony if he'd like to move in; he was having trouble with his lovelife too. Ah, the complexities of the middle twenties!

So there we all were, one big happy family, living in a massive flat with spacious garden, life was good. It was also the first time since my late teens that I'd been single. Looking back on this period, it was pretty debauched actually. We did some wild parties at that house, big house parties, good times... At this time I was very prolific with the music writing, with the encouragement of Anthony, we knocked up the first demo alucidnation tape, which contained some recent improvisations. We did the proper thing of mailing ourselves a copy of the tape, god knows where the other one went! Nowhere, more than likely.

What was strange was that I seemed to be writing more on my own, or with Stuart, which considering I was living under the same roof as Anthony didn't make sense. I guess we were just drifting apart, there were some misunderstandings as regards the music definitely. Nevertheless, I just kept on writing, acquiring new bits of useful kit; a friend of a friend was getting rid of some redundant studio gear, so I snapped it up, in hindsight it was vastly overpriced, but I was a bit green back then. Karl Bonnie (ex Rengade Soundwave) was selling an old Akai S1000KB sampler, a ridiculous beast of a machine with about 2 minutes sampling time available and also a Mackie 1604 desk. I also got hold of a new Alesis FX unit, so my studio was pretty comprehensive for the time! The one overriding memory of the S1000KB is the neckache that I endured having to program it; the display (in typical Akai fashion) was on the way out and was consequently difficult to read, unless you faced it head on - as it was horizontal you had to bend over it to see what was going on - a nightmare...

By the end of the Summer of '95 Nina and I had finally got it together and I moved out of the Leytonstone flat over to homely Harrow to be with her full time. I've never been so sure of anything in my life before, I was completely smitten. Here was someone who gave me full support without question - to be honest it was something of a headfuck after being with someone prior to her who was completely the opposite. My studio remained over in Leytonstone, I was still paying rent and it was actually quite good to be able to go over there and know that I was over there to work - a dedicated studio space. However, financial contraints dictated that I had to move my studio over to Harrow, fortuitously for me, the flat that Nina was renting had a spare room that with some slight modifications made a lovely music studio! Her landlady had been a keen photographer and she'd used the room as a photography studio, so once I'd ripped out all of her bits and pieces, I moved my gear in.

We'd attended a small music festival that summer called Bracknell Folk Festival, with the specific intention of seeing Ultramarine, and it was there that I met David Hatfield, who ran a small-scale operation called Changing World Records. He recommended a CD called 'Life Before Land' by an artist called Another Fine Day, who turned out to be Tom Green, who'd collaborated with the Orb on their fist LP. I found out that he was going to be performing at another small festival called 'The Big Chill' which was taking place at the back end of that summer in the Black Mountains just outside of Brecon, Wales. Only about 600 people turned up to Pete and Katrina Lawrence's first outdoor party, but it was the beginning of something that was to become much larger.. Nina, I and a few others attended, and it was amazing; everything that a festival should be. I've never missed one since!

9 The Advent of the Internet

It was around this time that the world wide web was becoming available to the man on the street via 28.8k modem, or if you were really lucky, 56k! I seem to remember that Nina and I got onto the net at home in '96 or maybe late '95. Whatever, it meant that I could finally start getting my music out to a wider audience via such sites as MP3.com, a fantastic portal for the amateur musician. 1995 saw my place of work getting a CD burner too, so I was able to start producing my own audio CDs too.

I'd also formulated a way of producing music that has stayed with me until now; to basically get a long loop on the go, and then to jam alongside the loop for about twenty minutes with the DAT/MD recording the live pass. With the advent of digital editing technology, it was then possible to record the take back onto the computer and then edit it, tightening up the loose ends and getting rid of the shit bits. This way, you'd be guaranteed a track that whilst repetitive, flowed in an organic and natural way. I still use this methodology now for most of the tracks I produce.

One particular track that I'd composed seemed to be getting very good feedback, especially on the MP3.com site. In fact, it won 'Electronic Song of the Week', which, considering the sheer amount of tracks on the site was no mean feet. It was called 'Summer '97', a meandering, smouldering track that some have described as 'Balearic', although I have to be honest and profess that I still don't really know what it means..

10 Towards the End of the Nineties

In 1998, Nina and I got married, a wedding that some say was the best they can recall; it certainly was a blast; we got married in Pembrokeshire in Wales and then honeymooned in Barbados. Most of 1998 was spent either organising that or working hard at Planet, where I was now design manager.

Fast forward to 1999, I was amassing a nice little body of work which I decided to put out as a limited edition CDR. It was called 'EP99', and contained six tracks - 'Jammer', 'Summer 97', 'My Bollocks Feel Funny', 'A Suburban Friday Night' and 'Seeking Shelter'. There was also a track called 'I'm Not Bad' on there, a throwaway number that caught the attention of all who heard it. I'd been tinkering around with a Ray Conniff sample one night whilst a mate was over who'd been telling me that he was unlucky in love. Once he'd gone, I started improvising with some vocals over the top of the backing track, set the DAT recording and taped whatever vocals came into my head as I sung them. The resulting track was 'I'm Not Bad', more of which later...

I sold about twenty copies of EP99 to friends, work colleagues and family, which covered the pressing costs, and gave me some satisfaction just to know that the product was out there.

11 The Noughties

The Big Chill's annual Enchanted Garden festival at the Larmer Tree Gardens in Wiltshire took place in August, and we'd been invited to be a part of the 'art trail' as 5ifth Dimension, erecting crazy UV string sculptures that viewers could participate in and walk through. I'd also decided to press up twenty copies of a CD containing recent work from the first half of that year, which I took along to Changing World to sell. I was delighted that all 20 had sold by the end of that weekend!

In the November, the Big Chill organised a trip out to the Greek Island of Naxos which my friend Marcus Bailey attended. He took along a copy of the CD, and on the last night there, Tom Middleton, a musician and producer whose work as Global Communication I particularly admired was playing the last set of the festival. Marcus asked him if he could play a track off the CD; 'I'm Not Bad', which he duly did. I obviously wasn't there, but Marcus kindly video taped the reaction from various people there; both Tom and Pete Lawrence were obviously very into this track that I'd considered throwaway. The following week, I received a telephone call from Tom Middleton out of the blue, which was kind of unexpected to say the least! Then Pete Lawrence contacted me via e-mail to arrange a meeting to discuss potentially signing me up to the Big Chill label. The back end of 2000 was a bit of a blur, everything started moving very quickly; a release schedule was drawn up, with a single slated for release in time for the next Big Chill festivals. There were to be two Summer festivals in 2001, one at Larmer Tree and the other at Lulworth Castle.

Of course, at that particular time, the whole 'Chill Out' genre was very much cutting edge - looking back on it, I was riding the crest of that wave, but as is always the case, you're never aware of these things whilst it's happening! All of a sudden I was being interviewed by various music magazines and appearing on compilations. Pete asked me to mix and blend the new Big Chill compilation called 'Glisten' which won awards, I was designing the artwork for my own EP that was being released on CD and vinyl and deciding on tracks for the alucidnation album that was due out that summer. A whole lot was happening.

I played my first Big Chill event in the February of 2001 at the 'Love In' at Baskerville Hall, Hay on Wye, UK. I can't tell you what a buzz it was to perform at an event that I'd been attending as a punter for the previous five years or so! I DJ'd a selection of my work with accompanying photography after Mixmaster Morris and Matt Black had finished and it seemed to go down very well.

'EP:01' came out just before the Enchanted Garden in 2001 to critical acclaim. However, I was still umming and arring about which tracks to put onto my debut LP. Having amassed a pretty extensive back catalogue of work made choosing potential tracks for the debut a nightmare! Due to my indecision, I missed the boat that year, and then the following year... ultimately the debut alucidnation LP didn't see the light of day until 2004...

Still, I kept on writing and recording, in 2002 I released 'EP:02', a three tracker with the rather laborious 'Battersea Park' as the main track. 2002 also saw me entering covers territory, completely re-working the 10cc classic 'I'm Not in Love', which was awarded 'Single of the Week' on the Big Chill site and made the cut on the Ministry of Sound Chillout compilation series. During that year, I played a variety of different gigs all over the place in the UK and across the globe, visiting Japan for the first time with Laura B... what an experience that was!

12 Touring

May 2003 saw the Big Chill Recordings posse hit the road for the first time. A motley crew was assembled, consisting of myself, Lol Hammond, Laura B, Pete Lawrence and VJs Adam Seaman and John Rixon. Together we toured a few venues, me driving my campervan and Pete comandeering his car across the UK. It was fantastic fun, some of the venues attracted largeish audiences, others (Manchester) attracting bugger all! Par for the course I suppose.. We also did another tour later that year with the mighty Ralph Myers and the Jack Herren Band, which was, in some respects far more 'professional' inasmuch as we had a tourbus! We played about six dates over as many days, and I was exhausted by the end of it all. You can see how performers can lose it when they're constantly on the road; one tends to overdo it on the alcohol and smoke, there are no responsibilities like driving - you crash out at one place, then when you wake, you're in another place, usually hungover. Still, I made the most of the whole experience; I was DJing alongside Pete Lawrence, who declined the offer of the bus - "the reek of testosterone" being his reason for going it alone! Got to hand it to the Ralph Myers lads; it didn't matter how small the venue or the crowd (in Liverpool we played to about thirty people) they gave it 200%!

I played some great gigs during 2003, one alongside Ulrich Schnauss at Cargo, a German chap who was very much on the ascent at the time and another alongside Dave Noble, aka Natureboy - a musician who I especially admire.

I also landed my own monthly night at the newly-opened Big Chill Bar in the fashionable Shoreditch part of London too, I called it 'Lucid' and at the time of writing, it's still going strong, four years later.

13 Finally, the album...

Early 2004 saw me compiling the debut album. I'd written some choice new material during the previous twelve months, so the tracklisting felt right. The LP 'Induction' came out in July 2004, initially being released just on-line whilst the label sorted out distribution issues. The reviews were unanimous in their praise, I got some good coverage overall. I really went to town on the artwork too, the initial 2000 coming out in a deluxe gatefold sleeve with 16 page booklet, which meant I could include a lot of my own photography, which is my other passion in life. It looked and sounded great; Laura B did a top job on the mastering of the CD - general production values aren't my strongest area! Due to there being no budget for any advertising, the LP kind of got lost in the avalanche of releases, so I wasn't about to retire on the royalties! The LP graced 'all good record shops' in May 2005, once we'd sorted out distribution through Vital. The launch party for the release was held at the Big Chill Bar one Sunday, where I got to programme the order of the day. For this, I invited friends and supporters down to play some records, including Tom Middleton, Mixmaster Morris, Stuart Nisbet and Pete Lawrence amongst others. It was rammed in there, a top day actually!

2005 saw me gigging all over the UK again, performing at places as diverse as the De la Warr Pavillion in Bexhill to Chris Coco's 'Balaerica' night in London, which was a top night as it goes.

14 As I write this...

It's now September 2007, quite a lot has happened in the last couple of years. Nina and I moved house, moving from the leafy suburbs to a place out in the sticks, actually quite a remote farmhouse in the Chiltern Hills. Then, deciding that we didn't much care for that lifestyle, we've moved back again! I've built a new studio, and in the process, written a new album which is due for release early in 2008. However, looking back at the history surrounding the first LP, who knows!! My writing seems to have taken a more 'poppy' direction, but that's not to say that I've stopped writing my more contemplative, ambient-hued material. Far from it, I have a wealth of new material that I aim to release as download only on this site.

I've also changed the way I'm working, with things becoming more and more 'laptop-based'. I now own a virtual studio, which enables me to compose whereever I like, rather than being confined to the studio. A proper upright piano has also been purchased as well, to add a further acoustic dimension to my sound.

Bruce Bickerton, September 2007.

alucidnation, by Pete Lawrence

“The music of Bruce Bickerton came into my life back in 2000 and has continued to occupy a central space for me ever since. It is music that yearns for a different mindset, whilst at the same time quietly dealing emotionally with the bigger things in life in its own unique way. It has an understated power and an uncanny knack of getting right under the skin.

Listening to alucidnation transports - at a stroke lifting me out of the everyday, the humdrum. Whether it’s one of his charming lyrical vignettes or one of his epic, floaty instrumentals, it offers an intimate, slow motion insight into Bruce's world, which in so many ways also relates to my world.

Highly personal, but totally accessible, it is filmic music that tugs at the heartstrings, often melancholic and reflective, often carefree and joyous, but never anything other than totally fresh, unique and inspiring, and a natural soundtrack to life.”

An alternative profile, by Freddie Baveystock

"The conclusion to the Big Chill’s epoch-forming week in Naxos last September was a highly emotional affair. The small crowd - ‘dancing under the stars pissed as loons’ as Daniel Newman of DJ magazine would later put it – just wouldn’t let Jedi Master Tom Middleton go to bed.

But of course all good things must come to an end, and Tom gracefully brought the assorted revellers back down to earth with the gentlest of touches. And then, just as he made it clear that the best party of 2000 was genuinely about to end, he sprung a real dubplate surprise – a haunting, blissed-out vocal track that touched a vital nerve in everyone present. Telling a simple story of unrequited love, the song paid tribute to a core truth embedded deep in the hearts of all dedicated Big Chillers: ‘If you don’t express your feelings, how is anyone supposed to know?’

It was one of those moments of musical bliss that occasioned a rash of communal smiles, hugs and tears. A Big Chill anthem was born. That track was Alucidnation’s ‘I’m not bad’, which is at long last now getting the release it deserves – on the Big Chill’s own label, naturally. Whether you are a dedicated chiller or not, rest assured that this track is going to get inside your head this summer and, from there, work its way down into your heart. The time for the wider world to meet Alucidnation has come.

Bruce Bickerton is the one-man powerhouse behind Alucidnation, responsible for all the act’s music, photography, design and website. A soft-spoken, naturally chilled fellow with a good deal of the Yorkshireman about him, Bruce is precisely the kind of person who makes the Big Chill what it is. Underneath his laid-back demeanour is a veritable wealth of talent, imagination and humour - and a passionate devotion to music.

His love of music can be traced right back to an early childhood steeped in piano lessons, his dad’s rock ‘n’ roll, and a deep appreciation of ELO that persists to this day. These qualities shine through Alucidnation’s debut EP. Recorded, edited and mixed entirely at home, it is music that is clearly rooted in a very personal vision and experience of the world. And with its washes of breaking waves, Roland Juno chords, and deep bass rhythms, there could be no better introduction to that world than ‘Beautiful house’. While its title could be taken as a tribute to the deep house music to which Bruce is so devoted, it is simultaneously a loving evocation of his feelings for his grandmother’s house in West Wales. ‘A spiritual sort of place,’ Bruce describes it, ‘where we spent some really beautiful summers near the sea.’ Luxuriate in this long track’s atmospherics and you can imagine it for yourself.

Indeed, some of Bruce’s most chilled music is imbued with the memory of summer - but we’re talking British summertime rather than Ibiza or Sydney. ‘Summer 97’ (originally titled ‘The Wet Summer of 97’ when it was voted ‘electronica song of the week’ by MP3.com) captures the mellow late summer mood that can be so special to the British Isles. It’s a reflective mood – this is a melancholy, cinematic track that opens in a thick downpour of rain – that is nonetheless wholly life-affirming. Its long, lazy pace effortlessly conjures up those summer moments when life on earth seems a blessing, whatever the weather. It is sure to find a natural home in the hearts of the Big Chill’s Enchanted Gardeners.

What is so charming about the music of Alucidnation is its domestic Englishness and simplicity. While so much of electronic music has been fuelled by a love affair with futuristic, abstract and sampled beats and pieces, Bruce’s soundscapes are rooted in more simple things. It’s no surprise to learn that Bruce is a fan of Radio 2 and its ‘Sing Something Simple’ show. It’s a philosophy that informs all of his work.

Many of his tracks are recorded live in one long take, to be subsequently edited down if necessary. ‘I’m not bad’ is a beautifully crafted song with an off-kilter harmony worthy of Robert Wyatt (and some of Jilted John’s wry humour thrown in for good measure), but it was for the most part improvised on the spot. ‘A mate of mine came round one night,’ Bruce recalls, ‘and told me all about this girl he had the hots for. The song is a live take from that very night with no overdubs except the harmonies.’ It’s why you can hear a telephone ringing as the song closes – ‘someone rang me up just as I was finishing it, and I left it in. I like to make music with nothing added, nothing taken away.’

It is this straightforward, holistic approach that makes Alucidnation’s sound so refreshing. ‘Music to drive to’ is just that – ten minutes of unfurling, overlapping rhythms that, Bruce found one weekend, formed the perfect accompaniment to a trip up the M1. This says it all - it’s not epic music for cruising the Californian freeways or a brooding tune for exploring the darker reaches of Detroit at night. It’s just simple, uplifting music for an easy drive; much of the pleasure it delivers lies in its small details and honest feel. And let’s face it, a lot of electronica just doesn’t have that kind of human warmth to it.

This kind of attitude – unpretentious, human, and wryly self-effacing - is also at the heart of what the Big Chill does. Thus the synergy between artist and label is perfect; both prefer to let their work speak for itself. Bruce describes himself as one who stands ‘on the periphery of things…it’s a good place to be.’ There’s a chance, however, that with the release of this EP – and an LP titled ‘Aural Architecture’ later in the year - Bruce may find himself somewhere a little more centre stage (certainly he will be performing at a number of Big Chill events in 2001).

Not that he is especially bothered either way: ‘As far as I’m concerned, I sit at home and make music. If something good comes of it, great, but if not, I’ll do it nonetheless. Music is just something I do anyway. It’s my passion.’

Amen to that. Earth needs more people like him."

Freddie Baveystock.