Tales From The Dancefloor

We've been featuring DJs, producers, artist managers and industry leaders in Tales From The Dancefloor, and in this 45th episode, our last for the first season of our podcast, we wanted to turn the tables and put our very own Phil Morse in the hot seat.

Ben Stowe got his love of the geeky side of audio and visual gear from kicking around a TV shop as a kid. But his growing tech-savviness became his saviour when it literally allowed him to work his way out of his life in a homeless shelfer as a young adult.

As well as being a wicked DJ, Brandon Block was seen as one of the biggest party animals of the 90s in the UK rave and club scene, living larger than life. Stories of excess were legendary, and an infamous appearance on the Brits (UK music awards) in 2000 reinforced his reputation.

Tall Paul was one of the biggest UK DJs of the 1990s, made famous originally via his residencies at Turnmills in London. In fact, his Turnmills Friday night "The Gallery" is still running (nowadays at Ministry of Sound). He toured America and the world, has an Ibiza residency, and scored a couple of huge hits, not least Camisra's "Let Me Show You".

Like many a young DJ, Dominik Sobanski spend the obligatory ten years enjoying the music scene - promoting, DJing bars, hustling, living the DJ dream (in this case, in Huddersfield, in the north of England). Not many DJs can say they ended up booking Pete Tong and Calvin Harris though!

As one half of the "LuvDup Twins", Mark van den Berg - originally from Cape Town, South Africa - made a name for himself in the Manchester (or "Madchester") scene in the 1990s as a DJ, producer, and club promoter - culminating in DJs in places as far flung as Russia and Hong Kong. Later he found himself pivoting into working on an early social media platform, before getting into the video DJ business, supplying music videos to DJs across Europe.

For those who know, John 00 Fleming is one of the flag bearers for a certain kind of underground music that was once called "trance", but that in the past 20 years has had to relabel and regroup against the EDM onslaught. In great demand and touring the world still after 30 years of professional DJng, John also has a remarkable personal history of battles, including battling and beating lung cancer at just 19 years old.

Ean Golden is a name closely associated with the rise of digital DJing and controllerism, mainly through his championing the scene in San Francisco at the turn of the century, his input onto the design of some early iconic DJ hardware, and of course through being the founder and figurehead of DJ TechTools.

For many in the know, Innofader is held as an example of all that's right about boutique companies in the DJ industry. It's a company that exists solely to make crossfaders, either so DJs can replace those that came with their DJ mixers for better performance, or for forward-looking manufacturers to fit top their gear "out of the box".

Grahame Farmer is behind the Data Transmission website, which at its height employed 19 people and has spawned an online radio show and record label. While the site is still going strong, in the last couple of years Grahame has had a personal "pivot" into something quite different: DJ success coaching.