Little did I know it at the time (that’d be 1987), but hip hop producers Steve Stein (the Steinski bit) and Double Dee were a true musical mavericks – walking, talking legends who would go on to shape almost everything beat-driven that was to come and all without a hit to their name.

Their music hasn’t been widely available until pretty recently due to ‘copyright issues’. See, back then the music industry wasn’t worried about file sharing, oh no, they had the likes of Double Dee And Steinski to deal with. Clap your ears round their Lesson 1, Lesson 2 and Lesson 3 and you begin to understand why the music industry is in the state it is – they have always fought against the very people driving it forwards. It’s madness. These days, kids swapping music they love are the enemy, in those days people making music with the music they love was. Bonkers.

Listen to Double Dee and Steinski now and it all sounds commonplace, but that’s only because of their huge influence. Coldcut and DJ Shadow are only the tip of the iceberg of folk who wouldn’t have existed without them. I don’t think I knew it was called hip hop in 1987, but I loved the funk of it, the skill involved was breathtaking, I loved the cheeky lifts and nods to other songs I’d heard.

I was first smitten around 1982 when I’d just starting gigging. I’d seen Altered Images and Echo & The Bunnymen. Then, for some odd reason, me and my pal Cuz went to see Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five. Yup, I know. They bowled up at the University of East Anglia dressed like the Village People, with two boxes of records, a table with some record players on it and a row of microphones front of stage.

Hazy memories, but they came on really late, and clearly had no idea where they were. Their opening gambit was ‘Hello London’. Boy, they must have been confused – here they were in what was then a total backwater. One road in, tractors, fields – London sure don’t look like it does on the TV.

So there was me and Cuz, two 14-year-old white boys from Mr Cubitt’s class, out on a school night, gawping as the coolest looking black men we’d ever seen, making the most exhilarating music we’d ever heard WITH OTHER PEOPLE’S RECORDS.

It was unbelievably good. Cuz says I had to ring my dad (from a payphone, using a coin) who was picking us up to tell him we’d be late. The thrill clearly outweighed his displeasure at a midnight lift home. I remember being involved in a huge stage invasion at the end. I was probably three feet from the decks and couldn’t believe what I was seeing.

So anyway, Steinski. I first found him on one the NME’s many cover-mounted 7-inch EPs. It was the only way to score free music back then, so we poured over the contents of these magical records. Bearing in mind how special they seemed to us, you hope they were lovingly compiled, but from my later experience of the Melody Maker/NME machine I suspect not.

Whatever, ‘The Motorcade Sped On’ was almost as gobsmacking as Grandmaster Flash. Lifting its drum loop from Rolling Stones’ ‘Honky Tonk Women’, it remains one of my favourite tracks of all time. If only I’d have known then what I knew today I wouldn’t have wasted so much time on hopeless indie guitar bands. Ho hum.

More hear…
- If you only buy one greatest hits album today, make it the download of What Does It All Mean? – 1983-2006 Retrospective or you can just grab the three Lessons for 69p each. Money very well spent.