I spoke to Damian Harris, boss of Skint Records, about the early years of his and Fatboy Slim’s adventures. Published in the new Classic Pop special devoted to 90s Dance Music. Find it in good newsagents, or order here. Snippet below. Photo above is from when I saw Damian in the street a while back.
Extract:
It’s difficult to explain, 26 years later, how exciting the Santa Cruz single was. Kicking off with an insistent guitar riff from Lulu’s ‘Love Loves To Love’ over funk drums from The Vibrettes, until it drops down into a beautiful melancholic breakdown and hints at Joy Divisions ‘Atmosphere’, it seems like everything a music fan would want to dance to, all at once. On the flipside, ‘The Weekend Starts Here’, was no slouch either, pulling in jazz from Idris Muhammad and mixing it with Black Sabbath, Emerson, Lake & Palmer and beat icon Neal Cassidy for a sparse and sloppy synth groove.
“As an opening record as a statement of intent, it just couldn't be bettered,” says Damian. “It was emotive but quite hard, a bit fucked up and just stunning. It's still probably my favourite ever Skint release. It’s phenomenal.”
It set a blueprint for Skint (and everything big beat would become, for better or worse), and was a calling card for likeminded producers, like Bentley Rhythm Ace and Lo-Fidelity All Stars, who flooded to the label. These were a disparate group of musicians but they tended to have one thing in common – they were music nerds. Later big beat would have a reputation as lowest common denominator – “the loud, annoying drunken bloke you really wish would leave the party” Damian admits – but its initial magpie construction came from a real love of music.
“There was we were definitely a type of person who had grown up on lots of genres,” Damian explains, “Probably their brother’s punk records, and then they got into hip hop in the early to mid 80s, and then went through acid house. When they got their hands on a sampler that's where that's where their references were.”
