Wanting to experience such sounds for himself, Brown started going raving. However, the only clubs that would let him and his friends in, around the age of 16, were jungle and drum & bass clubs. Not that they minded, as d’n’b was “all we wanted to listen to”.
Naturally, this prompted 17-year-old Brown to buy a set of turntables and start DJing in his bedroom. “I became obsessed!” he enthuses, adding that his adolescent years became “totally defined” by those genres. Around the same time, he also started to produce his own music a few years later: “I always had aspirations to make a career out of music, but until I started making my own tracks it was just a pipe dream”.
While going to university in Liverpool and experiencing club sets by DJs like Carl Cox, Dave Clarke, Luke Slater and Green Velvet led to him discovering house and techno, Brown’s studious years also allowed him to start playing out at local club nights. However, he came to the realisation that “in order to progress, I would need to write and produce music”. Luckily, he moved in with a guy who not only had a small studio set up but started teaching Brown the basics.
