I think I was a DJ the day I got my Fisher-Price record player. The little plastic records played nursery rhymes. I'm still not 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 hung over the sides.
Then I got inventive. I took two separate stereo systems, stacked one set of speakers on top of the other, and rode the volume knobs up and down on each to try to mix and scratch.
I'd seen it on TV. There weren't many white kids in Southampton who wanted to be Jam Master Jay or Grandmaster Flash, but I was one. So I nagged my mum and dad. For ages.
Christmas 1987, aged 12, I got 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 didn't match. They weren't special. They were mine.
I've no idea what the first record I put on was. That year I was living on Paid in Full by Eric B. & Rakim and Pump Up the Volume by M|A|R|R|S, so something like that. I couldn't mix. I tried to scratch. I didn't know what I was doing and I loved 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 was making mixtapes for friends all the time. Even a mate's dad started asking for them. Were they any good? Probably not. It didn'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.
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.
Suspect is semi-retired these days too. The music I'm making now goes out as Dust and Data.
As for 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.
What was the first record you ever bought? Go on, own up.
