LED BY A BASSIST WITH A HUGE RECORD COLLECTION AND A KNACK FOR HIT ASSEMBLY, BIG BEAT BOUNDED OUT OF BRIGHTON TO DELIVER A RUN OF RECORDS THAT SHIFTED THE COURSE OF DANCE MUSIC AND CREATED YET ANOTHER DELECTABLE HYBRID. CLASSIC POP CHATS TO SKINT RECORDS BOSS DAMIAN HARRIS

JAMES KEN DALL 

We all know the excitement of sharing music. You’ve found a new song, you’re driving a couple of friends to a gig. Will they love it the way you do? You turn up the stereo, watch their reactions. Imagine multiplying that by a hundred – playing songs to 200 people. What a rush. Times ten thousand, and it becomes completely abstract – and big beat’s crescendo saw Skint boss Damian Harris playing his favourite records to 100,000 times our carload. On the Brighton seafront 200,000 eager fans looked back at him as he put the needle on his first record for the second Big Beach Boutique. By the time he’d got to Groove Armada’s Superstylin’ the whole city seemed to be jumping, and it wouldn’t stop until Fatboy Slim let All Saints’ Pure Shores fade out to a quarter of a million smiling faces. “I just sat on the stage looking and going, ‘This is nuts,’” Damian recalls almost two decades later. “If we’d said, ‘This can’t get any bigger, let’s just finish there’, that would have been fine.” They’d come a long way, baby.

READY AND LOADED 

By the mid-90s every small town seemed to have a nightclub playing dance music. It was a world away from the barren scene of 10 years earlier, but it wasn’t without its frustrations. The era of superstar DJs –Sasha, for instance, or Paul Oakenfold, or ex-Haysi Fantayzee singer Jeremy Healy – was in full effect and there was a lot of money at stake. The Balearic idea of playing a wide range of music was a distant memory, as even underground nights tended to stick safely to one genre.

Then a DJ and record shop assistant called Damian began to fill his musical melting pot by going out five or six nights a week, most of the time with a bag of records to play. When he wasn’t in clubs Damian could often be found at Norman Cook’s house. Norman’s time playing bass in The Housemartins was a distant memory; by this point he was fully immersed in dance music with hits under the Beats International, Freak Power and Pizzaman monikers. However, none of these projects seemed to stick.

As well as the riotous days-long parties at Norman’s place – nicknamed the House Of Love – the pair’s worlds drew closer when Damian got a job at Loaded, the house and techno label that put out the Pizzaman records. Clearly a man with more ambition than he lets on, Damian had soon persuaded Loaded to let him have a sub-label of his own.