I think I've been a DJ from the day I got my Fisher-Price record player sometime in the late 1970s. The little plastic records played nursery rhymes. I'm still not even sure they were real records.
Next came a really cheap turntable with a platter the size of a 7-inch single. Put an LP on it and the edges would hang over the sides.
Then I got inventive. I would take two separate stereo systems, stack one set of speakers on top of the other, and ride the volume knobs up and down on each to try to mix and scratch.
It's the mid 1980s...
I've seen it on TV. There aren't many white kids in Southampton who want to be Jam Master Jay or Grandmaster Flash, but I'm one. So I nag my mum and dad. For ages.
Christmas 1987, aged 12, I get the most exciting present of my life: two turntables and a mixer. A silver deck off a Sharp hi-fi, a black budget deck, and a Realistic mixer from Tandy. (If you don't remember Tandy, ask your parents.) They don't match. They aren't anything special. But they're mine and they are special to me.
I've no idea what the first record I put on was. That year the soundtrack to my days is records like Paid in Full by Eric B. & Rakim and Pump Up the Volume by M|A|R|R|S, so the first record would have been something like that. I can't mix. I try to scratch. I don't know what I'm doing and I love every minute.
The bedroom years
Every DJ starts in the same place. A bedroom. Headphones on. Door shut.
That's where you learn the boring bits. Counting bars. Getting two records to sit together without it sounding like trainers in a tumble dryer. Getting it wrong. Going again.
Nobody claps in a bedroom. That's sort of the point.
By 13 or 14 I'm making mixtapes for friends all the time. Even a mate's dad starts asking for them. Are they any good? Probably not. It doesn't matter.
Somewhere between then and my early twenties I properly learned to mix. Don't ask me exactly when.
MC Melo-D and the Equal Posse
As a teenager in Southampton I was part of a crew called Equal Posse. My name was Melo-D. (I was a teenager. Be kind.)
We played parties. Parties teach you the thing a bedroom can't. A room full of real people lets you know straight away when you've got it wrong. They just walk off to the kitchen.
Suspect
By the time I got to university I was Suspect, a name I used on and off from about 1994 (sometimes as Mr Sus).
I was making tracks by then as well as playing them. In 2000 I put four of them on BT's getoutthere site, one of those early websites where anyone could upload music and people voted. I wasn't expecting much.
In November 2000 a track of mine called Bum Fluff won the Jazz/Funk/Hip Hop chart. Instrumental hip hop with a dark, menacing bassline. And yes, that really was its name.
A lad from Southampton making beats in his room, and strangers on the internet were voting for them.
Suspect is semi-retired these days. The music I make now goes out as Dust and Data.
Since then
Since then it's been festivals, raves and warehouse-type parties (not actual warehouses, before anyone asks). I picked up a few more names along the way, like Pint Size. Stories for another day.
The decks? No idea where they ended up. They got replaced by a pair with proper pitch control, a cheap copy of Technics. Eventually I could afford the real thing: Technics 1200s. I still have the same pair today.
And the mixer? I sold it to a good friend of mine. He went on to tour the world as a DJ, and he still makes his living from music today. I like to think a little bit of that started on my old Realistic.
Looking back, what that Christmas gave me most is gratitude. Plenty of grown-ups thought scratching a record was vandalism. Records weren't made to go backwards. My mum and dad didn't see it that way. They saw a kid who cared about something, and they backed him.
Nearly 40 years on, I still get the same buzz when two records lock together.
Dig out the first record you ever bought (or find it on Spotify) and play it today. Then message me on social media and tell me what it was.
