It was April 29th 1992 when Mike Ross, head of Delicious Vinyl, flew me from London to New York so that we could meet and discuss a record deal. He and his team would fly in from Los Angeles and meet me there.
They booked me into a recording studio in the city to check me out in action. I always suspected that they just wanted to make sure that I really was doing all my own programming, writing and producing. So armed with some vinyl and dats (those were the days) with my library of sounds and created samples, I headed over to the studio where they had rented in an Akai S1000 Sampler, an Atari 1040ST and Cubase. It was there, that I wrote, “Freedom Is A State of Mind”.
So there I was in the studio, like I was on another planet… but late in the day I was shaken out of my creative cocoon, when we switched on a TV in the control room and saw Los Angeles in complete chaos… the riots had broken out and Mike & the Gang had barely made it out on one of the last flights to leave the city that day. This was one of my early introductions to LA while I was feeling back at home in NY, but still living in London… The images came with such foreboding and it’s been a bittersweet mixture of loveliness and trauma ever since…
