ROCKSTEADY

WHERE IT ALL BEGAN

Chapter 1

I must have been five or six years old when the fascination with music first took hold.

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On Friday and Saturday nights, my parents would have friends and family over, and I would sit just outside the living-room door, listening.. 

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I remember the smell of rum. I remember the laughter. But most of all, I remember the music.

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The deep, thumping bass coming from the gramophone seemed to travel right through me. Then came the moment I loved most — listening to the 7-inch record drop onto the turntable, hearing the needle crackle as it found the vinyl, and waiting with baited breath.

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First came the drum roll, Then the instruments, and finally… the singer.

I was hooked.

The first song I can remember that has stayed with me all these years is “Last Train To Expo 67” by The Melodians.

The track begins with the unmistakable sound of a train — Choo Choo! — and as a little boy, I imagined what the train looked like and me running to catch it.

That feeling of excitement… the anticipation of getting to the party… has never really left me.

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BUILDING THE SOUND

By the time I was 11 or 12, my best friend and I had started creating our own little sound system.

We started with a small record player. We begged, stole and borrowed all the broken radios and record players we could lay our hands on, and we would strip the speakers out of their plastic housings, build our own speaker boxes from whatever scrap wood we could find, and wire everything together, then we'd play the few vinyls we had, and of course, we could never get enough power, and could never get enough bass!

So we were constantly hunting for bigger and better speakers, more components and anything else we could add to our growing mini sound system.

Looking back, I suppose we weren't just building speakers.

We were building the beginning of something.

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THE SOUND SYSTEM

By my twenties, after moving from West London and spending short spells in South and North London, I found myself back in East London.

And the idea came back.

I was going to build my own sound system.

There was an electronics shop on Romford Road called Ben Samon's, and I would stand outside looking through the window, absolutely fascinated by all the electronic components inside.I couldn't afford most of it.

But that didn't stop me looking and dreaming.

After weeks upon weeks of scrapping little monies together, I finally had just enough money to buy the pre-amplifier.

There was one small catch, It wasn't actually a finished pre-amplifier.

It was just the circuit board.

I still needed the aluminium case, the knobs, the input and output sockets.

And, of course, a soldering iron.

But that didn't matter.

I had started building my sound system.

And this time, I wasn't playing with broken radios anymore.

This was becoming real.

Chapter 2 to follow…