HOW I GOT HERE

In all honesty I never knew I was gonna do any of this, my art teacher in school wouldn’t let me take GCSE art as I wasn’t good enough, my music teacher told me to mime at the school recitals as to not spoil the performance, by the age of thirteen I had resigned myself to a life behind a desk or stacking shelves. The only turning point was being sat next to a girl I fancied in my media studies class, she told me she wasn’t doing school after the exams but going to an out of town art college to take her A-levels, I also passed enough GCSE’s to make the same decision. But when I arrived at the Media Studies Btec, I assumed she’d be there, but when I got there she never arrived, but the door to, music, art and culture did.

I met High Contrast aka Lincoln on a bus going to college in 1997, I guess we hit it off because we had just left our towns to go to a city art college and were both hungry for culture.  Culture was a lot more tribal back then, we were moshers; spiky haired, baggy trousered, skateboarders who listened to punk, grunge and metal.  Lincs and mine insatiable hunger to see, hear and taste what the world had to offer burst this bubble and made us consume everything. The turning point for both of us came during the aftermath of an altercation with bouncers at our favourite ‘mosher’ club. We received an eight week ban, but on telling them we didn’t care, because we were going to open our own club, they doubled it to sixteen weeks.

Within two weeks we had found a derelict basement in an inner-city pub, scrubbed it up, rented speakers, borrowed decks and opened the door. Neuropol was our first taste of DJing and promoting, our newly found insatiable love for dance music, hip hop and reggae became our quest.  Quickly I realised that being a DJ wasn’t for me, I loved to dance and the prospect of playing all my favourite songs so no other DJ would play them, didn’t sit well. I became the promoter, with zero budget, it soon became apparent that the skills of graphic design and photography were going to be my weapons of choice.

Always together, Lincoln became a record shop rat and I became an art magazine rat, we scoured cities for inspiration; Cardiff, Bristol, or our favourite trip, London, whilst I’d be waiting for Lincoln flipping plates in Blackmarket Records in D’arbly Street, He’d be behind me in Magma bookstore flipping pages, gushing over the street art by Shepherd Fairey, Kaws, London Police, Flying Fortress, Mike Giant, D*Face, I’d see the cross-over with streetwear; Nigo with Bape, Bobby Kim with Hundreds, James Jarvis with Supreme and my mind caught fire. We’d obviously end up in The Hide-out or Bond International Streetwear store.  Going home with our bags and minds full.

Our newly acquired skills gave us the keys to our hometown Cardiff. Typical weekends would see us zig-zagging to different clubs, through different genres. I’d be taking photos of punk bands, dancehalll dj’s, Hip Hop mc’s. Linc would be DJing main rooms at D&B raves or back rooms at garage, broken beat, techno dances. The city was our oyster until Lincs relentless tinkering on his mums work PC and a cracked copy of cubase, spewed out his beautiful ‘True Colours’ album, the key to the city, grew to the keys to the country. We were soon regulars to; Fabric, The End, Heaven, Herbal, Velvet Rooms, Bar Rhumba. Me being a sponge took everything in, the culture, the clothes, the people and most importantly the music.

I would collect the memories, the photos, the flyer packs, the magazines to recreate this scene back home. I created a night called Aperture, which reigned as the best Drum and Bass night in Wales for a decade, kickstarted a community into DJing and producing. I managed clubs that would preserve this culture and act as a melting pot for the dance music community. I starting a streetwear brand called DroneBoy, with it I opened three streetwear stores over a ten year period, dabbled in streetart, dabbled in getting arrested for street-art, and basically had a ball.

Epiphany’s tend to come when your backs against the wall and you need to knuckle down.  My son BenZep was born in 2013, I took a last roll of the dice at a streetwear store in a diminishing high street arcade. By the end, the money was bleak, the end was insight and the baby needed security and food on the table.  The last tee I designed for DroneBoy in the last shop I owned, I called ‘Concrete Junglists’ and was basically a love letter to the scene that had given me everything and I guess a thank you for all the great times I’d had.  The tee flew out the shop and the seed for Concrete Junglists planted. I came home built a small warehouse in the garden and plonked my laptop on the kitchen table where I have been designing and steering the good ship ‘Concrete Junglists’ ever since. So far, so good.