It s a great pleasure for Digital Beat to report that the first act of the new millennium to top the UK club charts was Irish. The record (arriving in the shops as you read) was Pitchin by Hi-Gate, and while one of the two members (Judge Jules) only qualifies as Irish under the Jack Charlton grandfather rule (his real name is Jules O Riordan), there s no argument about what s on Belfast expatriate Paul Masterson s passport.
The extremely affable gay icon Masterson was one of the first people in the country to build a dance studio in his bedroom. That was back in 1990. Four years of going nowhere later and Paul decided to pack up and head for the bright lights of London in a bid to salvage a career doing what he loved most.
I was sending demos off every week to no avail, and I realised the dance industry was just like the music business in general, it s as much about contacts as it is about talent, he recalls. I had got tired of waiting for the record companies to come to me, but still loved house music and desperately wanted to build a career out of making music. So I took a chance on moving to London. I bought a flat which had a much more fully equipped studio in it, and within four months I d got my first remix.
That was for Pete Tong s ffrr label, and the record was Tinman s Gudvibe (which, coincidentally, was also remixed by myself and Tim Hannigan as Soundcrowd).
The first lady of hard house, Rachel Auburn was so impressed with Paul s early mixes that she called him up and begged him to record with her, as Candy Girls. Within weeks their incredibly infectious camp classic Fe Fi Fo Fum was signed to Virgin, and other hits such as Wham Bam and I Want Candy followed, establishing Paul as a producer to keep an eye on. Candy Girls enjoyed moderate success as remixers, as did Paul as himself, as Wand, and as one half of hard house act Amen UK!
Things really took a skywards turn early last year, when Paul cut Judge Jules an acetate of a new track he was working on, Synths & Strings .
It originally had a Donna Giles vocal on it, Paul says. But Jules hated the vocal and asked me to send him an instrumental instead, which I did. He started caning it on BBC1FM and out in the clubs, and then (in his role as A&R consultant for the major) he recommended that Manifesto sign it.
Synths & Strings was the first record Paul credited to Yomanda, and it became one of the biggest anthems of 99, spending seven weeks on the UK top forty, and peaking at number eight. Things really took off then, says Paul modestly.
He s now one of the most in-demand remixers in the UK, and has topped the club charts on several occasions with his uplifting style of pumping house with a Euro twist: bouncy beats and basslines, with catchy melodies and vocals always to the fore. The Hi-Gate collaboration with Jules was such a huge club hit that the pair will be working together on a regular basis.
We ve just remixed the new Geri Halliwell single, says Paul, and Jules is already getting great responses to radio plays of the next Hi-Gate single, Caned . We re also going to start our own label later this year. We don t so much want to license tracks from abroad as license our tracks abroad. We want to export our sound to the world.
Before all that, Paul s got a new Yomanda single ( Sunshine ) to promote, a single for Serious to be recorded, a host of remixes to get through, and a DJ diary that s starting to fill rapidly.
I received lots of DJ offers when Yomanda charted, so I decided to give it a go and really enjoy it. But I spend five or six days a week in the studio and I don t want to let the DJing interfere with that.
Surprisingly, Paul s burning ambition is to make a big beat record.
It s a style of music I ve never tried and I d love to do a track with Norman Cook to see if I could turn my hand to it. Whether or not Paul realises his ambition remains to be seen, but one thing we ll definitely be seeing is a lot more of Paul Masterson. n
Hi-Gate s Pitchin is out now on Incentive. The Yomanda vs Hi-Gate remix of Geri Halliwell s Bag It Up is out next month, and Sunshine , the new Yomanda single, is released on Manifesto early in March.