Normski Interview: Every generation has got its sound

Hertfordshire rave du jour Eastern Electrics boasts a particularly world class line up, crammed full of underground flavours across dance music, with some eye catching artists all clamoring for your attention (check the five must sees we picked here).

Out of all the possible interview candidates though, there was one name tucked away in the The Star Of EE Pub that leapt out towards us. A figure who stands as a clarion call for the heritage of dance music amidst a selection of DJs showcasing the full history of rave right up to the present day. That man is Normski.

'Yes' we thought, 'this guy's seen it all.' Among many musical things, Normski presented Dance Mania and fronted Def II on BBC 2 in the late eighties and early nineties,  and he used to flog his wares on Fleet Street as a photographer. Nowadays he has a show on internet radio.

His journey mirrors the one made by the electronic music media, which somewhere along the way has transformed from being a messenger of one scene to a mass audience, to being a slave to an almost infinite number of scenes with audiences that are anything but mass.

So we sat down and talked about it, and whether it really matters that there has been such a shift in the way people get their musical fix.

So Normski… you're probably most famous for presenting Dance Energy on BBC2 in the early 90s, which is quite fairly described as groundbreaking, because it was basically the first thing on TV that showcased the scene we are part of today, breaking people like The Shamen and The Prodigy etc. Things are a bit different now shall we say, so what impact do you think the media has on the scene now?

2014 we're in now, and I'd say the majority of people in the dance music world who are spending money in clubland or are part of it as DJs and producers… I would say about 80% of them watch almost no television.

So the impact of the show I did couldn't be repeated, but it still makes an impact if you know what I mean? The scene wouldn't be what it is now without it. There's people who come up to me now who say their parents used to watch it - stuff like that.

What was the rationale behind Dance Energy in the first place, and how did it come to be?

The TV show was aimed at a youth market of people that could sit there and watch television and could honestly say "there's nothing on TV that represents me", and I was lucky to be the guy that was at the forefront of it.

I was basically the boy next door if you like, who was part of this culture. So I could relate to anyone else who was like me, but that maybe wasn't part of the culture just yet (see his madcap delivery of the show below).

How did it change things?

Young people who lived outside the cities in villages or whatever… they suddenly felt that when they put on the box, they were part of something. It's things like that that help create a scene because something like that doesn't happen very often in life, and when it does happen, that generation will do anything to protect it and also to represent it.

But now, as you say, we're in a different generation… what are these young people listening to and what are they being influenced by? Because it certainly isn't one particular TV show.

Back in 85/86 when I first started getting into it, I was listening to all sorts of pop music from the mainstream, but young people now, if you put aside the manufactured X-Factor stuff, they've got their bands that they're in to who aren't necessarily top ten.

There are a load of cool artists out there that aren't mainstream. So if you look at a festival, the dance music DJ kinda crowd will not have heard of a lot of the bands on there because they pay less attention to mainstream music than someone like me used to; but all of those bands will have their own followings who probably haven't heard of most of the DJs either.

Every generation has got its sound. What people have got to remember is, everything that's happened before all of us, we build on. So we can go back a very long time to classical music for example, but when Soul II Soul did the legendary 'Back To Life' (above) which was seen as part of a new movement, they got some classically trained musicians in from an orchestra to do the strings.

And then the other day I'm flicking through the channels on TV and end up watching the James Bond film Golden Eye and I see the name on the credits, 'Nellee Hooper', who actually produced Soul II Soul. So that's my point - creative things and scenes just keep building and influencing each other.

So to bring this in to a media context, you'd say that even if the internet has watered down the impact of mainstream TV and radio, that the scene still finds a way to build on itself?

Exactly. People are still going to create. The internet is just another bit of technology that could come and go. I remember when it was all about the cassettes, like, 'oh wow, this is a chrome tape' and all that. Then CDs.

Then they realise that they can be scratched easily so then you've got the mini disc with that protective case. Everything's got its use - that's why it's invented in the first place - but life goes on.

The medium and the media is just on a treadmill I guess. Once an industry or scene is established enough, people will get their kicks from it somehow or other, whether it's youtube or a cassette tape.

Absolutely - you can't ever take the creativity out of people. If we look at radio, it's moved on from AM and FM and just a few stations to this whole digital thing where you've got millions of them.

Just because some of the older stations are losing listeners, it doesn't mean it's dead - people will be listening to something else somewhere else and people will still be broadcasting.

GET.TRONiC show featuring PBR Streetgang by Dj Mr Normski on Mixcloud

Yes - I have got a medium, a time and a space to continue and indulge myself and play a massive range of music that I couldn't play on a mainstream radio (hear one of Normski's finest moments on Hoxton FM, with the PBR Streetgang, above).

How do you feel about it being internet radio and being a much smaller audience than, say, Dance Energy on BBC2?

It means I can be more creative, and it's a new station and a new challenge. One of the things that keeps me going as a creative is that I always want to make it feel like it's the beginning again, and that is the basis of Normski.

Catch Normski at Eastern Electrics on Saturday, August 2nd.

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