New York City – We’re in the Union Square park near 14th Street and Broadway on an early autumn morning, sitting on a rare patch of lawn, and DJ DB is talking about his good fortune. Ten years ago, before moving away from his London hometown, he never dreamed that he’d ship off to The Big Apple, with little more than a visa and two crates of records, and initiate New York City’s rave scene. Or that he’d be spinning drum-n-bass before it had a name, or open a downtown record store and move product, or become an A&R trench man of good repute, or marry a girl from the Bronx and father a child, or become an early pied piper of two-step, and on and on...

And just then, as a somewhat satisfied DB sits on that rare patch of lawn in the shade of some mighty oak trees, from overhead the air is pierced by a loud snap. A 20-foot-long section of branch falls from the sky and crashes to the ground, landing on the very spot DB had only seconds before been occupying.

More on his good fortune later.

DB’s importance to New York City dance music can’t be underestimated. Leave it to an Englishman’s sensibility, that rare combination of dance music zealotry and capital industriousness, to seize an underground element – early ’90s rave, mid-’90s drum-n-bass, late ’90s two-step – and promote it to the masses either through DJing parties, his Breakbeat Science record store, or his artfully programmed mix CDs.

And it was a faith in his industriousness that prompted heavily capitalized U.K.-based Ministry of Sound imprint to recruit DB, along with his former F-111 label partner Andrew Goldstone, to manage the label’s American division, sign acts, license compilation CDs, and develop artists.

As it now stands, Ministry of Sound is the biggest independent dance music label in the world, with hopes of doing what no American major label has yet achieved: sell gobs of dance music to a public with a wide range of tastes over an immense geographic expanse. Is DB up to it? DJ Times found out.

DJ Times: Your DJing career started in probably the most fertile of all places.

DB: London, yeah. I used to go to the Camden Palace in the early ’80s, and basically I’ve been inspired by two guys there, Colin Favor and Evil Eddie Richards. They used to play every Thursday night, and I would go and just gawk. They would mix everything from German industrial hard beat stuff to Shannon to Eurythmics to Art of Noise to proto-house kind of stuff, and it was all seamlessly blended, and I decided I wanted to do that.

DJ Times: Kinda what a DJ used to be in the classic sense, like Larry Levan, mixing Philly soul and The Clash.

DB: Exactly, and I’d never experienced the 12-inch mix before. I knew the songs, but I had never heard these versions before, extended, chopped up and whatever, and that really interested me. [Richards and Favor] were in some kind of remix club thing, because they would get these remixes that were not commercially available – they were probably American. But they also did a lot of phasing and blending of their own. They were technically amazing.

DJ Times: How did you get started DJing?

DB: I’ve been professionally DJing for 19 years. It was a yuppie club in Kings Road called Stocks, the clientele was very rich Arabs, and very rich, proper old English money, trouble-making youngsters of old English money. I had a girlfriend who knew the manager of this club, and they had fired their DJ. And I said, “Get me in there,” and I had no idea what I was doing. I learned on my feet. It was basically a hits format, so mixing wasn’t a thing they paid attention to, but after three months I became sufficient enough to mix. I’d just play the hits, and occasionally I’d try to throw something underground in there, and the floor would thin and then I’d have to throw on another Madonna record to get them back.

DJ Times: So that gave you a pretty good idea about dancefloor rotation.

DB: Yep, and it was old school, too. I got in there at 10 at night and I left at 4 in the morning. Probably got paid £30 or £40 a night. It was enough that I could give up my day job, DJing five days a week. Then Limelight came to England. [Peter] Gatien bought a beautiful church, and I got hired to do a mainstream Saturday night. Then house music came to London and everything changed. In 1985, Limelight was the first club to import Chicago DJs. I think they did a DJ International night. I didn’t know what that meant. I just happened to be in the middle of town that night and I stopped by the club to check out this thing from Chicago, and just had a life-changing experience, basically. The tracks were so minimal, and yet so unbelievably funky, I couldn’t understand how that was happening. It was like, “There’s nothing there. What is it that’s getting me grooving?” It was a combination of vocal house, like Frankie Knuckles style, and very hard acid also —Armando, Phuture tracks, stuff like that. From then on, I started spending all my money on Chicago and Detroit imports.

DJ Times: Even the kids were eating this stuff up?

DB: Absolutely. Within a year house music was absolutely everywhere.

DJ Times: Would you say it was the music or the lifestyle that people gravitated towards?

DB: There was definitely a revolution in drug taking. Ecstasy hit the U.K. at the same time, so they went hand-in-hand. Whether one couldn’t work without the other, I don’t know. London has always had incredible underground scenes. Before house music, there was the Rare Groove thing, which was also very interesting and I loved that. But the house thing was just new and that’s what was exciting to me. I had never heard anything like that before.

DJ Times: What precipitated your move to the States?

DB: By 1989, I was kind of getting bored with the Limelight and the London scene. So I called up Mars, which was a brand new club in New York, and basically told them that we were hotshot London DJs, and if they’d like we would come and play for them.

DJ Times: Had they heard of you?

DB: Nope, but they had heard of the Limelight. And we had done some fliers, so it was legit. And I was the main DJ in the Limelight, so I did have some credibility. They took the bait and we got to play the main floor, three nights a week for 10 days or something. So it was a really fun trip, and the Mars main floor had the most incredible wall of bass I’d ever seen or played on. What was going on at the time was a really healthy hip-hop alternative warehouse scene at this club called Payday, and another one called Hundred Thousand Dollar Bar. The owner of these clubs was winding down, because they had problems with hip-hop shootings. And because I’d come from this acid-house rave thing in the U.K., I wanted to start throwing warehouse parties in New York, because nobody was doing raves. When I went back to England after the Mars stint, Peter Gatien had sold the Limelight. I hated the new owner, and I had broken up with my girlfriend at the same time, so nothing was keeping me in London. I had a friend living in New York, who said, “Come on over, let’s make a go of it over here.” So I came with a two-month visa and two boxes of records, and started throwing an outlaw party called Deep, above a McDonalds on Sixth Avenue. It was a British word-of-mouth thing and we started pulling in 400 people, and then we went to bigger venues, eventually pulling in 2,000 people. It was really proto-raving.

DJ Times: Let’s jump to your A&Ring at Profile, and Smile. You were the first to license drum-n-bass tracks for American distribution.

DB: For Profile, I put together the Best of Techno and Best of House series back in 1991. By 1994, when I was at Smile, I compiled History of Our World, Pt. 1, the first drum-n-bass compilation in America. Basically, I went to the five biggest jungle labels in the U.K. and said, “What I want from you is four tracks each.” This was the Moving Shadows and Reinforced Records of the time. It was great.

DJ Times: I’m sure drum-n-bass was easier to license back then.

DB: Absolutely! Nobody was coming to them from America. I forged relationships that I still have today. That I’m able to do things with Moving Shadow that nobody else is able to do is because of that.

DJ Times: Eventually, the majors over here got hold of drum-n-bass…

DB: F-111, yes. Andrew Goldstone, head of A&R at Astralwerks, and I kept fantasizing about having our own label. We met someone from Warner Bros., and they talked to us about it, made us an offer with the promise of amazing support. F-111 was wholly owned by Warner Bros., but completely run by us.

DJ Times: When F-111 folded, did that spell the end of drum-n-bass and its commercial potential in the States?

DB: I think what happened was the media lost interest, and consequently they decided it was over. So it went back underground, which is where, of course, it came from in the first place. But I think it’s in a good place right now, certainly in America. It’s in a great place. You go to play a rave in Texas and there are 7,000 people in the drum-n-bass room. And [the hype] is totally quiet, nobody’s talking about it, nobody’s writing about it, and that’s fine with us. As far as it never breaking commercially, it’s too weird a music to really become mainstream. You know, the beats are going at 180 BPM, but the bassline is going at 90 BPM. It’s a bit strange. I think for the general populace, it’s too dark, also, the stuff that really gets kids excited is the hard, dark side of things.

DJ Times: But you had enough faith in drum-n-bass to open an all drum-n-bass record shop, Breakbeat Science in New York City.

DB: Right. At the same time that Andrew and I opened F-111, I also had the idea of opening an all drum-n-bass record store, and found a friend and partner in Dara. I had some savings from my DJing to open it.

DJ Times: What led you to believe that there was enough of a drum-n-bass market in New York to support a store?

DB: I was a partner in a record store with some German techno guys called Temple Records. And we were selling more and more drum-n-bass, and personally I was becoming less interested in techno. So I figured an all drum-n-bass store could work.

DJ Times: What did you see, musically, in the transition from techno to drum-n-bass?

DB: With drum-n-bass, it was the speed that the music was moving at, meaning, in a six-month period the music had dated already, whereas techno had started to stagnate. I’m not saying techno is boring; I still think there’s some great people doing some incredible things, like Richie Hawtin, doing amazing things. But for me it was beginning to stagnate, and drum-n-bass was going through this unbelievable phase, with people like LTJ Bukem, Goldie, and Rob Playford. It was a very exciting time and I just felt in my gut that it could work. So I opened it in 1996, just before Andrew and I started doing F-111, which had a drum-n-bass imprint called Higher Education.

DJ Times: The Higher Education mix CD you did is now standard in many DJ crates.

DB: The Higher Education did about 10,000-15,000, but the first F-111 release, which was Shades of Technology, did about 25,000 copies. To date, that’s been my best-selling CD.

DJ Times: The songs you choose for a mix CD, is it the same for the songs you choose for a DJ set?

DB: My personal love is the more emotional, melodic side of things. So when I play a set – and I hate the cliché – I usually take people on a kind of journey, starting chill and melodic and building to a harder, faster place.

DJ Times: For you as a DJ, does that formula work regardless of the music you’re spinning?

DB: Pretty much. Because I came up DJing in a yuppie club, my job was to keep people on the dancefloor having a good time. That is instilled in my blood. I’m very careful, possibly too careful in some people’s eyes, about playing stuff that is just for me, or just for a bunch of producers standing around the back. My job is to entertain – I believe it’s also to educate as well – but generally people are out looking for a good time.

DJ Times: Tell me about some of the things you look out for when you’re reading the dancefloor at a drum-n-bass party.

DB: It depends what I’m playing. If I’m playing drum-n-bass, it’s probably noise [I’m looking for], whistling, screaming for the rewind, not necessarily full-on dancing, because there’s a lot of jumping up and down in a punk-rock style.

DJ Times: What was your first experience with two-step?

DB: We used to get a lot of speed garage sent to the shop, and I used to listen to them just out of curiosity. But because the kick drum was four-to-the-floor, I always thought it was interesting, but it was still house music. And I liked the fact that they were using jungle basslines, but it was still house. And then around, I guess two or three years ago, this little change happened. The first record I remember hearing, which wasn’t straight-up house, was “Gabrielle,” which was an American record, by Roy Davis, Jr., and it had this weird breakbeat. But it wasn’t like a DJ Icey breakbeat. It was like chopped, like a half a breakbeat, and I thought that was a beautiful song with this wicked little break. I was like, “Wow, incredible.” But I never considered that I would be spinning that stuff, I just thought it was a pretty record. And then within three months of hearing that, all these records started coming out of London like Artful Dodger, MJ [Cole], and I just started buying them, not to play, but to keep, ’cause I just thought they were great. It had the energy of speed garage, but it wasn’t a four-to-the-floor. It had that breakbeat that always moved me.

DJ Times: You were one of the first to spread the two-step gospel in New York.

DB: Six months after all these records started coming out of London, I decided I wanted to start spinning it in bars in New York. Reid Speed had been doubling with speed garage and early two-step as well, so I started to see where she was playing, and I asked if I could play with her, and we started booking gigs together. And then at that point, I decided I wanted Breakbeat Science to start selling it. There was a little resistance from the general populace, the drum-n-bass massive, like, “What is this shit?” But now we are the biggest stocker of two-step – and Nu-School Breaks, for that matter – in the country.

DJ Times: In your DJ sets, are you segueing from drum-n-bass to two-step?

DB: It varies. A lot of promoters outside of New York are booking me to do half-and-half sets – 45 minutes of two-step and 45 minutes of jungle. And if they put it on the flier, it seems to go OK. The curious kids are there, and the ones that want to be in on the next big thing, and certainly the Anglophiles know what it’s about. But when I try to play two-step unannounced to a drum-n-bass room, it’s horrible. It’s like their arms are crossed. They’re staring at me, saying, “When are you going to play the real shit?” But I’ve played some two-step parties in Texas, in D.C., and they’ve been incredible. DJ Times: Why is two-step good?

DB: The drum-n-bass fraternity, I would say, is 80-percent male under the age of 20. A two-step party, certainly in New York, could be split as high as 50-50 among males and females, and it’s an older club-going crowd, rather than a bunch of cracked-out ravers.

DJ Times: That must make it a lot easier for you behind the decks.

DB: It makes it more fun. At least I can get off the decks after spinning and have a conversation with somebody who’s at least similar in age.

DJ Times: What things can you do as a DJ, at a two-step party, to make sure the women are having a good time.

DB: This is very sexist of me, but women love a song. And I think a two-step set, if you want it to, can be all song-driven – you can play dark and hard if you want. But I like to mix it up. I like to play some R&B type stuff, and some breakbeaty, dark, ravey stuff, too.

DJ Times: How do you best segue into the harder stuff?

DB: It varies. In small rooms, I could definitely play anything I want because nobody’s going anywhere. If I’m playing at an upscale, trendy party, and I start to play harder, the floor will split. Whereas if I’m playing at my residency in Philly, which is a rave club, if I play too much song-driven stuff, the floor will split. It just depends.

DJ Times: You’re now doing yet some more A&R for Ministry of Sound in the States.

DB: Without sounding cheesy, it’s a dream job. When we were at Warner and it wasn’t working out, we started talking to Ministry about signing one of their bands called Bent. We ultimately decided that it wouldn’t be a good idea to us, the band or Ministry to put someone in a situation where they wouldn’t get the attention they needed. But we made a good connection with the people at Ministry. And they asked us who we thought would be good to run a U.S. version of Ministry of Sound. We were like, “Hello!” We spent six months to figure out how to do it, and Andrew and I have been hired to head up A&R for the U.S. division.

DJ Times: What is the business model?

DB: We are doing serious artist development, signing two or three artist right now, and we’re also doing a huge amount of compilations. It’s so many that I can’t even tell you how many we’ve got planned for next year. And it’ll range from underground to pop-trance. I’ve never worked for a company that’s been so focused, and it totally comes from the street. They have 250 people working in the U.K. whose sole job it is to focus on dance music. They’re the biggest independent dance label in the world now. They did £135 million last year. So for me, every day is a long day, but it doesn’t feel like it’s a job, which is why I started DJing in the first place.