That’s My Boy! was a trilogy of tapes I made whilst living in a house share in East Dulwich, they were given out to friends and neighbours around 30 years ago as my DJ career was just starting with Coldcut and Ninja Tune. Weirdly my old friend Jem Panufnik sent me a photo of his copy of this tape he’d found just a week after I’d digitised it (see below). There were three volumes of which this is the second and I was showcasing the tracks of the day whilst trying to find my style as the times shifted out of the ambient scene I had been playing in for the last few years. The first strands of what would become known as trip hop were mutating out of the hip hop, indie dance and acid jazz scenes and it was a fertile time for electronic music with Warp leading the pack with their Artificial Intelligence series. You can still hear the tendrils of the German kosmischer scene overlaid in places as well as the collaged soundscapes of the Orb and others of their ilk but this volume definitely ups the funk factor with cuts from the Beastie Boys’ then current Ill Communication album, the Ballistic Brothers vs the Eccentric Afros EPs and early Mo Wax and Ninja Tune releases.

There was definitely something in the air, the music was shifting and my hip hop knowledge from my first 80s forays into DJing was informing my tastes. Despite the late 80s tip into gangsterism which had soured some of the genre for me, I was still listening to hip hop via Max & Dave’s show on KISS FM alongside Coldcut, Colin Dale and Colin Faver’s more electronic-based shows and finding more interesting material coming out of the west coast. Even recently I’ve been finding hidden gems from the early 90s that never got past the promo stage or had limited releases but slipped between the cracks as they maybe didn’t hit the flavour of the day. The Prince Paul-produced Resident Alien album, Justin Warfield’s unreleased ‘Return To Planet 9’ and the recent reissue of Hard 2 Obtain’s ‘Ism & Blues’ all fit the early 90s overlooked rap bracket and are well worth tracking down.

This mix was probably done live on three decks and a basic CD player – the two Technics were used to mix beats and another old Panasonic belt drive deck for adding ambience with the CD reserved for more ambience of the occasional spoken word segment. The 4-channel mixer had a basic at best ‘echo’ function but this is mostly kept at bay as it was awful. You’ll hear bits of Sheila Chandra, Orbital, The Woodentops, Pulsation, Blue Pearl and more over these tracks as I was always layering and keeping to the chilled end of the beats. This was also the first time I’d used a Ken Nordine track, having been turned on to him by Mixmaster Morris the year before and then hunted down the Rhino Records compilation of Word Jazz they’d issued. There’s not too much you could call dance floor here, more of a head nodder for the smokers, something that would change on vol. 3 I seem to recall. Side B next week…

Side A Track list:
Material – Mantra (Praying Mantra mix)
La Funk Mob – Motor Bass Get Phunked Up
Saint Etienne – Like A Motorway (The Dust Brothers remix)
Unknown – unknown
DJ Toolz – Intercontinental
Beastie Boys – B-Boys Makin’ With The Freak Freak
Cypress Hill – Scooby Doo
Sheila Chandra – One
Unknown – unknown
Saint Etienne – Your Head My Voice (Voix Revirement)
The Woodentops – You Make Me Feel (Late Night Mix)
Ken Nordine – What Time Is It?

My second monthly Electrik Collage radio show debuts this afternoon: May 10th at 2pm wherever you are in the world on ROVR radio, download the app to get archive access. APPLE or ANDROID