I remember the first time it clicked for me was at a soul weekender when I saw Adamski in Prestatyn. When acid house was around I wasn’t into it. It has the beats and bass, which is what made me get into dance music in the first place. Whereas other forms of dance music have sold out in some respects, you can still write hard drum and bass and find an audience. To me drum & bass is the last form of underground music that is still untouched. What is it about drum & bass you think gets people so excited? “Revolution” is very firmly in drum & bass, which has always had a big following, but somehow manages to retain an underground authenticity. Anglia news came to my home town, Peterborough, to do a ‘Break-dancing is taking off in Peterborough’ story, and there was me in the background, about 17 years old, body-popping with a perm! So, I’ve been through a lot of scenes. I was recently trying to find a video of me breakdancing on TV. Growing up I went through ska, punk, rare groove, went to soul weekenders, electro, funk, hip-hop, break-dancing. But there are better MCs than me out there now so it is their time to shine. Sometimes I think maybe I should do that. Moving into the party scene, it’s more about dancing, people don’t want to listen to you all night, there’s only so much they can take in anyway. The lyric writing dwindled as it became more about the performance. Once I moved into the party scene, I tried to bring a bit more performance in. That seems like good prep for your later career, how did your performance change once you moved on from the sound systems?īack in the day MCing was just about lyrics, it wasn’t so much about performing. And if you were the only MC there, you’d have to do it most of the night. And even half way through, they’d pull it up and go back to the beginning, and you’d have to keep going and keep the crowd hyped. You had to MC through the whole seven-inch record. Being an MC was about being fresh and being able to hold a mic and go somewhere and entertain a crowd and throw the lyrics down. It was competitive, but that’s what MCing was about. If you didn’t have lyrics, they’d embarrass you, they’d ask “what are you doing here?” So the week before you’d constantly be writing lyrics, every week you’d go with fresh lyrics. When I went to my brother’s friend’s house to MC, you couldn’t just turn up without lyrics. Not just someone who MCs for 10 minutes and then runs out of lyrics. What I call an MC is someone who writes lyrics every day. That’s where I come from, that’s what I’ll always go back to. It was a reggae sound system: massive wardrobe speaker boxes, one deck, a rotary mixer and an echo chamber. When I was at school I used to write lyrics in my school exercise books and go down to the sound system on weekends. How did you get into MCing at such a young age? What people probably don’t realise about me making drum & bass and using dancehall vocals, is that’s my foundation. People probably think I started in the party scene, reggae music is where I come from. Maxim: I started MCing when I was 14 years old, and later MC’d on reggae sound systems. MoS: What sort of music were you listening to growing up, where do your influences come from, did you live in a musical household? Meeting on a mild December morning at a recording studio in Wembley, we settled into the booth and started, as you always should, at the beginning. As 2016 was ending, we got a rare opportunity to sit down with him for an extended talk about his life and career. He's a man who obsessively creates and has always walked his own path. Known to millions as one third of The Prodigy, he has carved out an accomplished solo career in drum and bass, and is as impressive with a paintbrush as he is with production software. Maxim is one of the most recognisable faces in electronic music.
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