EVERY SUCCESSFUL MUSICIAN has an albatross around his neck and A Guy Called Gerald is no exception. Say his name and you think Voodoo Ray, that seminal piece of electronic dance, a record that summed up the days of acid, the nights of raving. Except that was 1989. This is now. Thanks to the exceptional Black Secret Technology album, Gerald is up there with the leading lights of drum 'n' bass, a man who has followed the style from its techno forefather through the breakbeat era to its maturity.
You half expect Gerald to be some nerdy little techno boffin, scuttling around the studio, cackling like a demented alchemist. Instead, he's an imposing hulk of a man with a nest of hair haloing his face. He looks positively exuberant and, with his own West London studio juice Box to work in, it's easy to see why. "When I came here the guy just had a computer and a keyboard in a room with a table," recalls Gerald of the skeletal juice Box in his rumbling Manchester brogue. The rest was an old storage room, with lots of filing cabinets and stuff I thought, 'Cool!'. There was a space at the top to chill out and I thought, 'Yeah, it's homely'." Now Juice Box is rammed with the delights and detritus of Gerald's nigh decade-long career. The walls of the main studio are festooned with rave flyers, each individually pasted up by one Lady Miss Kier, formerly of New York groovesters Deee-lite. She's been laying down some vocals for Gerald's forthcoming album.
Juicebox (the studio, as opposed to Juicebox the label) is palatial in comparison to Gerald's previous working environments. He's had his fair share of studio set-ups, mostly ad hoc pre-production arrangements. When his mother and various girlfriends could take no more of his noise he moved into a Moss Side squat and even came across a new Mancunian legend after a time in Burnage.
"Yeah, Oasis are from there," he grins. "I'm sure they used to live across the road. There was a band who used to make loads of noise, but they never used to get any complaints. I used to get loads:'
And there's a more fabled story concerning Gerald and his legendary 'rack' technique - well, not so much a rack as a piece of MFI-inspired improvisation.
It was like the ultimate home studio," he says, without a hint of a blush. "I had this chest of drawers which I used to pull the drawers out of and then build a little shelf Th there. I built up a wicked little system though; I had these 18-inch speakers in there. At the bottom - it was in an attic - I had 15-inch bins and on top of them was a set of 12-inchers -four in a cabinet - and, on top of that, four tweeters. There was a load of sound in there:'
Gerald is as aware as anyone that it's about hard work - he has always been imbibed with the work ethic - but on his own terms. An early encounter kick-started his career and cemented his healthy attitude to authority.
My mum encouraged us, he reveals. "She bought us all those little toy keyboards, that sort of thing She'd get us things like a piano. We used to go to this old woman [for lessons] who lived down the road from where we were living, but all I can remember is that she had a ruler and if you did a note wrong she used to whack your fingers:'
His working practice today is free from old women with rulers - even large record companies with big rulers. Fellow record makers still suffer, he suggests, from large-scale interference. When, in the days of his major label deal with Sony, Gerald became subject to such an approach, he withheld his support. He's happily independent now.
The record label says, 'You got to do this' and I'm totally against working like that," he spits with justifiable malice. "When I start working I don't know how the end of it's going to be, and I like that:"
You might dabble with DATs and samplers in your bedroom but, even back in 1989, today's technology was still foetal. Gerald did all the bedroom business but what did he do the very first time he entered a proper studio? Damn well made one of the finest dance records of all time. It's enough to make you attack your MIDI patchbay with a chainsaw and take up embroidery.
One day a mate of mine said that he had some friends in Liverpool who were interested in doing something" Gerald remembers. "He said that he'd pay for the studio time. I just went in the studio with an 808, two SH-101s and a 303, got hold of a singer and did this mid-tempo kind of groove, with a bass fine and these drum machines, and did a track for her. I had some bits and pieces of programs and basically put them down on a multitrack in the studio - and got a single out of it. That was Voodoo Ray:'
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A Guy Called Gerald speakers !! (x2) Akai keyboard Akai MPC60 Akai S1000 Akai S950 sampler Alesis QuadraVerb Anatek SMP-7 (master MIDI) Atari ST Mega 4 Casio VZ-10M Digidesign Sound Tools E-mu Proteus Genelec Monitors Korg X3 Lexicon LXP1 reverb Nakamichi MR-2 tape machine Omni Audio speakers Otari MX-80 tape-to-tape Roland M-120 Roland SH-09 synth Roland SH-101 synth Roland TB-303 Roland TR-727 Roland TR-909 Soundtracs Quartz desk Tascam DA-30 DAT XR400 MIDI Mate syncbox Yamaha SPX 900 (x2) |
There, simple. Nothing easier. Except after that, he inked a deal with Sony. In hindsight it brought Gerald to where he is today - at the vanguard of today's most essential music, drum 'n' bass. At the time, however, Mr G Simpson of Moss Side, Manchester M60, was in a period of transition. He didn't much care for it.
I was sort of like drifting from the house scene, which had got really weird, to doing techno but more on the melodic side," he says, patently not bored with yet another reference to the past. "I was releasing things through a record label over in Detroit [Carl Craig's 33 & i/3J, And then I went to Sony and the whole thing turned me round. On the first LP I did for them, they wanted loads of vocals and loads of middle eights and all that. Things like that I'd never done before and they put me with producers to work with and I was just falling asleep:'
He reached a compromise and asked for his own equipment - a desk, a multitrack - so he could work to the best of his ability. This meant by himself. With little or no feedback from his label he was able to produce what he wanted with the knowledge he still had a major deal. It was a turning point. Disillusioned with major label politics and an increasingly sanitised dance scene, Gerald started making music that now shows itself to be the root of drum 'n' bass, tunes the likes of jungle top guns Goldie and Alex Reece now credit as a significant influence in their own careers.
"I worked out my own system of working I used the tape for storage. I worked with sequencers still Gerald explains. "Even now I have a Cubase set-up and I'll program stuff on the MPC, sometimes throw ft across to Cubase, edit if and then throw ft down to tape. Or I'll throw it down to DAT re-sample and put it through onto tape. It's a really weird development but I've started sampling more, using sequenced drums and incorporating them both:'
Employing breaks in a way that harked back to his early hip hop and electro days, Gerald started using more sequences and then dived head first into the refreshing sampling waters. He admits to Caning his beloved Akai S950 which even now he loves to shove drum sounds through. But with this need to do things differently, Gerald still keeps things within tight parameters."I've worked all different ways and every tune I'll use a different technique of working, but it's mainly from a sample from a tape, sometimes processed back onto DAT, then back to tape again," he explains.
Seven years on and Gerald's star is back in the ascendance. There are top names collaborating with him on the album (kept under wraps at present), as well as forthcoming projects for juice Box artists DJ Tamsin and Redeye. Gerald continues to DJ and hopes to get a live show together where he can indulge in the live jams he enjoys so much. They'll confirm the ever-growing reputation of drum 'n' bass as a fully rounded musical form. What's more, Voodoo Ray has been released again and Gerald's happy with the job that the phalanx of remixers have done.
This original drum 'n' bass invader has come around again. Make sure you don't lose him this time. FM
A new Gerald single, "So Many Dreams" will be released on 2nd September with an, as yet. untitled album to come in October.
In July, DJ Tamsin released a single called Snow and Bushmasters bring out their single, Distant Jazz, at the end of August All releases are on Juicebox.
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