Tracklist
A – Now Is The Time (Club Mix)
B – Now Is The Time (Bass-Line Mix)
The first take was done at my house, I had just purchased some equipment and wanted to produce music. We didn’t really have a clue about what we were doing but I was technical enough to set the “studio” up which allowed us to start putting our ideas down. Now is the Time was the first record I produced together with Andrew Lysandrou aka Kid Andy.
Not really knowing what was what at the time, I had walked into Turnkeys in Charing Cross and asked the chap behind the counter, what I needed to make music. I knew I wanted a sampler as I was really into Hip Hop at the time but not much more.
I ended up walking out having purchased an Akai s950, a Yamaha SY77, and Tascam TSR8 an Alesis Quadraverb, and a 24 channel mixing desk. In hindsight, this was a really bad purchase as I could have got so much more relevant gear for the price and which I might have ended up using more.
As it turns out though, the Akai s950 was the one piece of gear that I grew to love, it was easy to program and allowed me to sample sounds I heard on records or from old cassettes I had recorded from pirate radio stations such as LWR and Kiss.
Anyway, back to the record. As I’ve already said, the first recording was done back at mine, we then booked a day at a professional recording studio (Synchronised Studios) which we were given the contact info from a friend of Andys who had just recorded his first single there. His friend Richie Malone (Xpansion) had just recorded Elevation and not really knowing much about recording studios we just booked a whole day and walked out with two mixes of the track.
I remember walking out with a copy of the tracks on cassette and playing the tracks on repeat in the car until I got home and played them again on repeat until I fell asleep. It was a great feeling to have recorded our first track and at the time we were still young. I was just 17 and Andy was 18 I think.
A few days later when the whole experience had sunk in we decided to start sending the tracks out to labels. I had a few contacts at DMC so we sent them a copy and within a few weeks, we got a positive response back.
Within the space of a few weeks, we had gone from being two kids with an ambition to two kids with our first record to be released on a really cool label. At the time, DMC was a label I really aspired to be associated with. I had purchased all the DMC mixing championship Video Tapes from after watching the classic final where Cash Money obliterated all competition. I also took part in the competition a year later and came 7th in the London heat.
However, after a few more weeks, we received the news that they wouldn’t release the record, after all, it had way too many samples for them to clear and they decided to drop the record.
We were two kids hungry to get our music out there so we decided to do the next best thing. Start our own record label. Boogie Beat Records was born a couple of weeks later.
As soon as the record was released we had our first experience of running a label, back then Radio Play was still important so most of our days were spent going to various stations and pestering the DJs to play it. We had some great plays and the record made it to number 48 on the Record Mirror dance charts.