Ace Of Spades

It’s certainly been an eventful 12 months for Gregory ‘Jupiter Ace’ Ferguson. Following the break-up of his relationship with a London-based dance label, and subsequent anguished soul-searching, the Belfast-born producer decided that his days of promiscuous musical bed-hopping would have to come to an end. It’s a decision that has paid off remarkably. After being seduced by house music into making a long-term commitment (although lapsing every now and again into the alluring arms of throwaway pop), and hooking up with an intriguing new label, he has subsequently spent his time attracting advances from as wide a selection of paramours as Princess Superstar, Hernan Cattaneo, Moloko and Dannii Minogue. High fidelity, indeed.

“I basically came to an impasse around the end of last year when I had a bit of trouble with a label who wanted me to go electroclash,” claims Gregory. “I don’t think that was very likely, there’s nothing particularly ‘London’ or, indeed, ‘sexy’ about me, so I got out of the deal. The whole episode made me look back over the three years I’d been recording as Jupiter Ace, and it struck me that I’d been trying to cover far too much ground – dance music, ballads, weird indie Beck stuff. You can’t be a million different things, unfortunately. I needed a base to work from, so decided to pick one field of musical style and project my talents onto that. I’d been listening to more and more house music, and became gradually obsessed with it. It was a real low point when I split from the label, I just thought no-one would be interested in me, but once I started focusing on house – to the exclusion of all other kinds of music – really getting into the history and theory of it, things took off.”
Which, in a field of music where the dominant conversion narrative usually takes place bathed in strobe lights and dry ice, sounds remarkably academic. However, like many autodidacts, the results of his study have benefited greatly from missing out on a conventional education. Exiled-Nordy Gareth Kane was quick to snap up Gregory for his fledgling label, FI (Fire Imagination) Recordings, on the strength of some early, curve-ball demos. The first fruits of this relationship will see the release of ‘Speared Thru The Heart’ in early autumn – a tune that has already graced the decks of Static Revenger and Freelance Hellraiser. Although, if his attitude to clubs is anything to go by, it’s a mystery how Gregory found this out.
“I grew up in indie clubs but would always be waiting for the dance music to come on,” he says. “But when I went to well known big clubs for the first time, I was just faced with this rabble with their fists in the air, shouting ‘Oi, Oi, Oi Fucking Oi’. I just can’t identify with it. Clubs in Belfast seem to be full of people wearing Ben Sherman shirts. Listening to dance music in a club always seems really aggressive because 99% of the time I spend listening to dance music takes place in one’s home.”
If you’re thinking this is the kind of attitude that sees people skulk off into dark studios never to return, you could have a point. In recent months, Gregory’s house-loving Jekyll has been joined by a Hyde, interested in just one thing: perfect pop. Remixes for Moloko and Dannii Minogue’s last single ‘Don’t Wanna Lose This Feeling’ have fed the urge, as has a stint writing for V2’s resident girl band Another Side, and now he wants to dive headlong in.
“I’ve always loved pop music and increasingly I’m looking at what I do as being split in half. One part of me wants to make pretty experimental, underground tracks. But the other part really loves pop and wants to write great songs for good singers who want to collaborate with me. I don’t know who – maybe the modern day Andy Bell. Really do something you can get your teeth into rather than just write a track to see if ‘X’ wants to use them.”
Some people just can’t stop roaming, it seems.