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Adamski (producer and keyboards) : In 1989, I was totally engulfed in acid-house culture. I'd had a hit with N-R-G. I had my gear set up in my flat in Camden, and I made tunes every day. I had an instrumental track I called The Killer because it sounded like the soundtrack to a movie murder scene.
I played a big illegal rave at Santa Pod racetrack in Northamptonshire, called Sunrise 5000. Seal was there watching my set. Afterwards, he handed over a demo to Daddy Chester, my flatmate and MC, who told me to listen: he had an amazing voice.
We bumped into each other at a London club, Solaris, and I asked him to come over, pick one of my instrumentals and sing on it. He said he had some lyrics that would work with The Killer, and I asked him to sing it like bluesy rock. In Ibiza, you'd hear things like Fleetwood Mac's Oh Well played alongside house tracks, so I probably had that in mind.
We recorded it on the day of the 1990 Freedom to Party demonstration in Trafalgar Square, against new legislation to ban raves – a stone's throw from the studio. We'd nip over there to absorb the energy. I used eight tracks of a 48-channel mixing desk. All the music came from my keyboard, which I played using two fingers. I added a Roland 909, which was the staple house-music drum machine after pioneers such as Mantronix used one.The track has a mournful feel: a lot of that early house music was quite melancholy. The cheesy, happy chords came later.
I had a huge following after playing raves, but I didn't expect Killer to have the impact it did. I remember doing a gig in Cambridge and going back to the hotel where a wedding party were getting down to it; schoolgirls would shout the rhythm at me across the street. At the time, I was on the Enterprise Allowance Scheme, which gave you £40 a week and your rent so you could set up your own business, to get people off the unemployment statistics. I was No 1 in the charts, and they were still paying my rent.
(Source : The Guardian, Mar 11, 2013)
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I played a big illegal rave at Santa Pod racetrack in Northamptonshire, called Sunrise 5000. Seal was there watching my set. Afterwards, he handed over a demo to Daddy Chester, my flatmate and MC, who told me to listen: he had an amazing voice.
We bumped into each other at a London club, Solaris, and I asked him to come over, pick one of my instrumentals and sing on it. He said he had some lyrics that would work with The Killer, and I asked him to sing it like bluesy rock. In Ibiza, you'd hear things like Fleetwood Mac's Oh Well played alongside house tracks, so I probably had that in mind.
We recorded it on the day of the 1990 Freedom to Party demonstration in Trafalgar Square, against new legislation to ban raves – a stone's throw from the studio. We'd nip over there to absorb the energy. I used eight tracks of a 48-channel mixing desk. All the music came from my keyboard, which I played using two fingers. I added a Roland 909, which was the staple house-music drum machine after pioneers such as Mantronix used one.The track has a mournful feel: a lot of that early house music was quite melancholy. The cheesy, happy chords came later.
I had a huge following after playing raves, but I didn't expect Killer to have the impact it did. I remember doing a gig in Cambridge and going back to the hotel where a wedding party were getting down to it; schoolgirls would shout the rhythm at me across the street. At the time, I was on the Enterprise Allowance Scheme, which gave you £40 a week and your rent so you could set up your own business, to get people off the unemployment statistics. I was No 1 in the charts, and they were still paying my rent.
(Source : The Guardian, Mar 11, 2013)