I’ve been telling stories for over 20 years. Your stories, fuelled by my own passions. The lyrics may have changed, but the song remains the same.

1995-99

So, the mid ‘90s. My first mobile phone and the recent discovery that you could do a job that was fun. The Golden Age of Hip Hop - in fact we were named after one of the greatest hip hop groups of all time: Main Source, but it was to the UK that we were looking and the first genuine homebred scene - jungle, drum & bass. The template for all the UK scenes that have followed. I think we worked with pretty much every label that mattered, and some that didn’t.

So here’s a question for you: in a pre-digital age how do you push 10-12 minutes of music with little to no vocals on unlabelled records to a wider audience. You have anything from 1 DAT to 200 white labels. Answer: from the ground up. You go to every club night you can, you speak (yes, actually speak) to every DJ you can, you go to the record shops, you go to Music House (where you know every DJ is going to be on a Thursday/Friday cutting dubs) or to their girlfriend’s house. You phone every DJ for a reaction and you threaten to cut off the supply to any DJ who doesn’t fill in their reaction sheets. In short: you know your consumer because you are that consumer. There’s no way that we knew that jungle would become the world-beating genre that it has or that it would soundtrack tampax adverts one day. We just loved it.

This gave me three solid lessons which still inform how I work today: #1 limit availability to build demand (still true now, as app launches prove time and time again). #2 don’t alienate your core audience while building a bigger one #3 don’t bs your client (they’ll be in the dance).