TIM SIMENON, AKA BOMB THE BASS, CREATED ONE OF THE MOST IMPORTANT DANCE SINGLES OF THE LATE 80S. BEFORE HE KNEW IT, THE YOUNG LONDON DJ HAD BECOME AN ACCIDENTAL POP STAR, BEEN BANNED BY RADIO 1 AND REMIXED EVERYONE FROM BJÖRK TO BOWIE. THEN HE KNOCKED HIS MUSIC CAREER ON THE HEAD TO OPEN A BISTRO IN PRAGUE. “WELL, THIS IS PRETTY MENTAL,” HE TELLS OLIVER HURLEY.

It was a chilly Thursday in late February, 1988. Tim Simenon was in the middle of a shift working as a part-time waiter at the Ajimura, a Japanese restaurant in Covent Garden, when the phone call came. On the other end of the line was Adele Nozedar from Rhythm King records, who informed the young DJ that his first single, Beat Dis, had entered the mid-week charts in the Top 10. His life would never be the same again.

“I remember thinking, ‘Well, this is pretty mental,’” says Simenon today from his home in Prague. “When it came out, the first week it was No.5, then it leapt to No.2. Two weeks later, I left my job. That’s when the real madness began.”

Even though he grew up absorbed by music, Simenon was an accidental pop star. He vividly remembers a school friend, in 1981, bringing in a synth-pop compilation called Some Bizzare Album [sic], which featured an early track by Depeche Mode. “I remember thinking, I’ve just never heard anything that sounded like it.” Although that didn’t stop him from going through a dodgy rock phase, too – the first album he ever bought was Led Zeppelin II. Simenon remembers playing the cassette so much that he wore it out.

“And then after that I bought myself a little turntable. I was DJing from about 15, 16, just doing house parties and then eventually, after leaving school, I worked at this place called the Wag Club, which used to be on Wardour Street.”

It was during this period that Simenon enrolled in evening classes at the School Of Audio Engineering in North London, with a view to becoming a sound engineer. But James Horrocks, his housemate in Brixton, had other ideas. Horrocks was a co-founder of Rhythm King and, in late 1987, offered to pay for Simenon to spend a couple of days in Hollywood Studios in East London to see what he could come up with. “He hooked me up with someone that had a little bit more understanding of the technology, [producer] Pascal Gabriel, and that’s really how Beat Dis started.”

Beat Dis was a revelation – an explosive audio collage of more than 50 samples edited together over a programmed drum pattern and bassline. “We had two days to do it in,” says Simenon. “I was spinning things from vinyl and Pascal had to get in there and chop it up. Like the Shaft guitar, that was just meticulously chopped up and replayed so that it could be in time. I would fire a bunch of ideas at Pascal and he’d say, ‘That’s good, we can do something with that.’”