The Norman was kind of pre-Fatboy Slim. One, but the guy that really changed my life was a guy called JJ Jax Alec from the Art of Noise. And I was so shocked by opening this door and suddenly seeing Kylie Minogue that I said Kylie Minogue and spat grapes all over it. Look, I'm not upset or annoyed at you, I've just got stuff to do and I've got to be somewhere. It's funny, I mean as much as the Flat Earth concept theory, whatever we call it, is really fascinating. I've seen what's kind of all of it. But it's also that the universe is just the regular universe, whatever your beliefs are. And it's so much of it we don't know about, isn't it? Yeah, and it's the same if you think about the Earth. Is it three-fifths of the Earth is water or something or four-fifths? I can't think of what it is. And there are certain parts of the sea that we just can't get to. So there's so much we don't know. It's like the human brain, isn't it really? Is it four-fifths that we don't know what it does or something? Yeah, I mean I'm just fascinated to think.  But what they don't tell you is something, and friends at home if you listen don't quote me on this, but the technical aspect of it is it's like 12 bar or whatever the figure and the configuration that they use, it would literally just rip anything apart that I guess wasn't a planet. And yeah, it really, I mean there's just so much we don't know, isn't there? We don't actually physically know. There's a beginning of that movie and I can't remember which, is it? It's the one with Jodie Foster. It's the one where she goes in that's craft. It's the one, oh my God, I can't think of what it's called. But I think the beginning of that film is they kind of start on Earth and they pan back. And you hear, it's one of the things about the audio thing, which are these are the sort of things that I pick up on. You hear radio broadcasts, so you have like a modern, this is KRFMW something. And then the further out from the planet, the planet starts to go in the background. Then you hear like the assassination of JFK and it kind of goes back and then you have like Hitler. And then you get all this kind of stuff as the camera pans away from Earth. You get this concept of how radio waves and they're not actually travelling that fast and how far they go and then it starts to disappear. And I think it's the beginning of that film and I can't remember the name of it, but she meets this kind of priest dude and they build a spaceship to take it to Vega or whatever it is. Yeah, it's amazing. It's a great, but the audio things like that I love where it was like a really clever use of audio where they're kind of like, let's have the radio waves that might be happening at that distance away from Earth. And then you realise the stuff that we're trying to send out into the universe to say to everyone, hello, we're here and they might get Noel Edmonds or something. And they might kind of go, well, we're not going to, we won't bother with that. Then we'll just leave that planet to rot. I'll tell you what, if we give the aliens the BBC, the universe is screwed. I mean, yeah, I'm not, I'm a believer in their existence for sure. I just think statistically doesn't make sense that there's nothing else around, but I just think a lot of, if there was intelligent life, it probably would fly by in the same way that we would go past. I don't know, a cow pat or something and see flies on it and go, I won't bother chatting with them for a bit and just, just I'll let them get over there. I'll let them get over what they're trying to do and maybe come back later. But yeah, I don't know. I've noted. I'll tell you something, right? So I just want to say thank you to the wonderful film producer, Martin Webster, who's put us in touch. Absolutely. I've seen a couple of mine's films now and they're just cracking. And I've got a role in the next film he's doing. So that's awesome. Yes. He's always going to be welcoming this house. That'll be a real tick off the bucket. I love that. Yeah. What a top chap. What an absolutely top chap. For anyone listening, I don't. This is not an ego thing. I just mean what a great thing to say. It's in your life. You were in a movie. Do you want to come and be in my film? And you're like, yeah, I'd love to. That'd be really good. Yes. So Martin, thank you ever so much. And we had red carpet tickets to go and see the premiere of Penitent. Yeah. Martin's last film, which is now winning loads of, loads of awards, a massive congratulations to my family. Yeah. It's been a, it's been a real ride. It's kind of came out of nowhere. Even though I think we all think it was a really good piece of art, piece of work, I think it's great. But suddenly it seems to have captured, and I can't wait for it to be out in kind of streaming services so people can actually enjoy it in its full kind of glory and, you know. Yes. So at the end, the cast and the crew got up on stage and they were taking questions from people. And I'm sat there and I'm going, and my question was, who did the awesome music? Wow. And there was so much of it. And it seems to be this one guy has done all of it. Yeah. I mean, normally when you see the credits go up, it's, you know, this bit of a soundtrack is done by this, this group or this band or this singer or this producer. Yeah. But no, that was just, it just went on again. I think it was quite funny, because I said to them, because Martin was insistent on like naming every track and who wrote it. And obviously it's me, apart from the very end song, which was the Leylines, which is amazing. But they kept that in, he was kind of like, you know, Q number seven, Lee Groves, Q number eight, Lee Groves. This is where something happens to someone, Lee Groves. And I was kind of like, oh man, thanks, but you didn't need to do that. But it was nice. I waited about patiently for about 40 minutes. Go ahead. And then just as Martin looked at me, he went, oh, and you're probably wondering, who did the wonderful music? It's classic. Yeah. I don't think we mentioned him, but he's somewhere in the mix. Oh, God. And then when we had a chat about you, I mean, we've chatted about your work in between then, just when we have our, you know, when we're chatting on the phone and stuff. And he just told me your incredible experience. And some, quite some people you've met along the way in terms of names in the music industry, in the film industry and this. Yeah. It's been quite a journey. It really has. I mean, I kind of left school in 89 and never really had a job other than doing music. And you sort of start out super enthusiastic and super green and not really kind of like knowing what you're going to come up with. I think if you did, you probably wouldn't do it. And then you just, one thing leads to another leads to another. And then you find yourself in these crazy positions where, you know, you're working with some people that are your heroes or whatever, which is a really interesting thing within sort of the art scene, because some, most of them turn out to be fantastic. And then a few of them turn out to be not so much fun. But the journey's been really long. And it's been, you know, literally pinpointed with incredible moments of sort of being very proud and then incredible moments of kind of going, oh my God, you know, a couple of my band members have died. When I've been in bands and things, you kind of have the whole gamut of human emotion.  It's a similar sort of experience in the sense that you get to see the best of people and the worst of people, I think. I mean, it's a lot of people think the kind of music business is quite glamorous on kind of a superficial level, it really is. But when you, when you're in an intimate sort of recording situation with an artist or a musician, and you really are all on the same page and the universe is kind of buzzing all at once. Those are the moments where you just think, I couldn't be doing anything else other than this right now. That energy and that vibe comes from somewhere else, Chris.  And I'm very, very, very, very fortunate and humbled to have actually made a career out of it for 30. I quit in 89, quit my school in 89. So I've been doing it 30, 32 years, whatever it is with all sorts of results. I mean, some great, some bad, but enjoying the always, always learning even after having done all the stuff I've done. There isn't a day that goes by where something comes out at me from the left field and goes, it either kind of humbles you down and makes you go, well, don't get too big for your bit or some bit of information or something that comes along where you go, God, I would never have, that's something new I've learned. You know, we're very, I'm very lucky to be working in the arts and at least being able to pay my rent, you know, that I mean, that's, that is the definition of success when I get to speak to kind of young people or whatever. You know, what's it like to have all this success? Well, the fact that I can pay my bills just about, that is kind of success. The fact that you can do what you love for a living and have an occasional cup of tea or a bottle of wine or go, that's success, man. It's not, you know, and so yeah, it's been a, it's been a journey. And I think I sent you a list of bits and pieces that you get a sense of. Yes. Very rich tapestry. It really is. Very sick tapestries, my dad used to say, but yeah, it's a, yeah, some good, some good moments and some bad moments, but definitely moments and that's the key thing, I think. Yes. I was patrolling the streets of Belfast with essentially a machine gun in 1989. Yeah. It was the year that the, the 10 Wolverines Bamsman were blown up at deal, wasn't it? Yeah. Wow. That was an amazing time. I mean, yeah. It's just, I think that was last week or something. It was caused fairly recently. And before we, I'd love to talk about, well, lots of the nitty gritty of the music industry and your successes, et cetera, et cetera. But before we do, you live in New York. Yes, sir. And I had my second ever proper adult holiday because my mate come round to my house, right? I think we, I think we probably just got back from Northern Ireland or it was around that time. And he said, do you want to go to New York for Christmas? I said, isn't that a bit expensive? He said, well, my uncle lives on Fifth Avenue. So. Wow. The Fifth Avenue. He said, we'll go and stay with him. I mean, it's quite long. It's not dodgy particularly, but it's quite long. But yeah, wow. And it's just that beauty of youth where you're like, yeah, all right, let's go. And we went to the travel agent and bought tickets. And the next thing we know, we're in a big yellow cab travelling from JFK. Yellow cab, like really smelt of curry. And it was my first insight into sort of immigration because coming from the Southwest of England, we didn't have immigrants back there. I mean, you had obviously a few, but I didn't personally, you know, I didn't, I wasn't in touch with any of these sort of communities. And, and, and there was us on the plane saying, yeah, we'll land in New York, the cab driver, it'll be like that, that taxi driver, there'll be some young cool dude, you know, all right guys, yeah, we're in a party tonight. And be like the movies, be like the movies. And no, it was some, it was a sort of Middle East, I think it was a Pakistani guy or something that just didn't know any English. No. And that was before, that was probably before GPS. So you had to give him the address. And any, and as you know, you can't say, oh, I live at 475 Fifth Avenue. You have to say, I live on Fifth Avenue between 37th and 30th or whatever. And if they can't understand that, you're a bit kind of like, it's like, can you show me? He's like, no, there's no way I've shown you. You're going to have to just know. And one of the highlights of that trip, we hooked up, I think, is the euphemism of a couple of girls from Texas. And they were just this real sort of classy, you know, it was a bit like, I don't know, I don't watch Sex in the City, obviously, but I imagine they were living this sort of lifestyle. They were hairstylists from Dallas. Oh, wow. So on our last night together, my Marine buddy went, watch this. And we're stood outside his uncle's apartment.  Now, as you know, a limousine is to a penny in New York. It's just like, it's a bit like getting an expensive cab. But yeah. And our driver for the evening stepped out, good evening, sir. Wow. And the three of us were like, ooh. Yeah. And we went back to my favorite ever restaurant experience, which was Windows on the World on World Trade Center. Sure. And I think I had lobster for the second time. And of course, you know, he's no longer there, is it? No. I mean, you know, that was an amazing time for me because I was falling in love with a girl. Well, I was in London, she was in New York. And we were chatting on Instant Messenger one day. I was just about to start an album at Olympic Studios, which we might talk about later, or we might not, whatever. And we've been kind of instant messaging quite a bit. And I just sort of got expletive, like F, Star Star K, and I'm like, what's up? She's like a plane's flown into, you know, the World Trade Center. And she was at home. She was late that day because we were on the phone all the time and stuff. And I actually made her late that day and she went up on the roof and basically saw it all unfold in real life. I mean, we talk about this quite a lot. Obviously it's thought it was, you know, the kind of anniversary a long ago, but one of her lasting memories was basically when the towers collapsed. She just said there were columns of smoke and dust that were left. And then those kind of fizzled out. And then everyone in New York realized they'd gone. And she would talk about the smell because she was living in Brooklyn and the smell would come across the East River and actually go down the streets. So that anchored kind of burning smell, which when you find out what that smell was later on, you kind of go, OK, yeah, that's that's not a very nice smell to have had kind of lingering. But yeah, it was an extraordinary time. I mean, I've only been in New York since kind of 2013 and I have massive, massive passion for the city.  But that kind of you're emotionally attached to a city. It doesn't happen often in people's lives. They just kind of, I guess, people exist in the city because they have to. But if you're emotionally attached to it and some is like having a limb calf or so it must be a terrible. Yes. I mean, do you remember the Falling Man? I do, yeah. I don't know if Iconics are the right word, but incredibly sad image of the guy that had been forced to jump. Yeah. And it sounds weird, but when we were in the restaurant windows on the world, you had this thing which again, I'd never seen in my life where you went in the bathroom, the toilet and there's a guy in there and he's running the taps for you and he's got a towel on his arm for you. And then he's got aftershave. And for friends this, and I don't mean like the guy in your nightclub, although it's the same. It is the same sort of thing. Yeah. It's essentially the same service.  Oh, what's that? Paul Hogan. Yeah. Really a film. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I can't remember what it's called, yeah. Crocodile Dundee. Crocodile Dundee. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's Yoko's. Yeah. But for years, I wondered if that guy Falling Man was that guy that I'd met on the... It wasn't. It turned out to be somebody else, but yes, my gosh. I think my wife was there. She used to work for Record Label in New York and she was there literally a matter of like two or three nights before that. Actually at a launch party, I think it was for some album or something. Actually in the windows of the world, you know. And yeah, I mean, I'm kind of a New Yorker, but I'm a pretend New Yorker compared to the real people.  And every year now, obviously they have the two big shafts of light which represent the towers that are in the location of Ground Zero. And wherever you are in the city, you can see them and it's such an incredible, incredibly touching kind of thing. But it's a testament to New Yorkers' strength.  There's something very magical about I mean, New York and LA, they're not really like normal America. I mean, we lived in Nashville. I think I told you that as well in some of my blurb. And that was a whole different experience to living in, say, a big city like New York. But New Yorkers are a tough, tough bunch. And it is a bit like living in the movies sometimes. So when something like that happened, that even seemed like something out of the movies. It was like, this is not a possible thing. And it was and it did. And yeah, amazing. How is it then? Because I absolutely love Americans. Yeah, me too. Pleasure of working with them in the military and the U.S. Marines and traveled. I've traveled a wee bit in the States, obviously not as much as your good self. Well, I've not been to as many places as I'd like, but I've definitely been about a bit and seen the kind of divide, if you like. They're just such kind people. And also, I love that thing that I love that bond that you have when you're an English person or you're from the U.K. And you can go to these countries like Australia and just immediately there's no barrier to building these wonderful friendships. But New York's noted, isn't it, for being a bit brusher than...   And you'll go, I don't know. Okay, thanks. Thanks very much. It really gives you a tough skin. But it's that thing if you fell over in the street or you got hit by a motorcycle, there'd be 10 New Yorkers there helping you get up. There'd be no problem with it. I tell you what it is, Chris, and I think a lot of people kind of read about this. There's plenty of books and stuff been written about it. Because New York is such a fast-paced city, we walk fast. We get to places fast. We've got to get our coffee and our bagels and our donuts fast. We've always got stuff to do. We're always busy. So anything that gets in the way of that seems quite an annoyance to us. And I've got a t-shirt. It says, I'm not annoyed. I'm not angry. I'm from Brooklyn. I mean, I'm not from Brooklyn. I'm from Canva behind in Essex. But that t-shirt is wonderful because it's like, look, I'm not upset or annoyed at you. I've just got stuff to do and I've got to be somewhere. And because we're all crammed in as well, you've got to be at a kind of function. You've got to be able to get on with people in the subway. If you're in a queue for some food or something, or in a line as they go, hey, you're online, but no, in a queue. Oh, I see. You've got to get your food order done. You've got to get out because there's people behind you who are on their work break or whatever. So this fast-paced, good, dark humor about it, which I love. I can't stand places that are too laid back. I mean, I remember we lived in Brooklyn for a bit. Then we moved to Nashville because I was starting to get bits and pieces of work. And I remember standing in the little local post office just trying to post my mom's Christmas present or something. And bless her. There's like a little lady at the front. Oh, how's little Jimmy doing? Oh, he's doing okay. How's he doing at school? And you just think, beautiful. In any normal rural British town, you'd have people asking how your son is, how's little Jimmy doing, what's he doing? And I'm at the back of the line with my parcel trying to pop. I'm on New York time. I'm like, well, come on, I've got things to do. And then you kind of go, you can't be like New York outside New York. Otherwise people think you are angry, arrogant, aggressive, which we're not. We just do things fast and we just get things done and there's no time to mess about. I mean, one of my great, one of the things that I've learned from being here, and this is going to maybe sound weird to the listeners or whatever. My capacity probably not as big as yours, but my capacity for humanity has tripled since being here. In other words, my understanding of other cultures and other people's problems and all of those things, I've just is like, wow, massive empathy, but my tolerance for dickheads has become zero now. And I even noticed it when we occasionally go back and do like a trip to the UK. You're kind of in New York, you can't help but be like, hurry up, why isn't this, come on, this is no good. You know, Forty Towers, the TV show. There's a bit where there's an episode within American in it and he comes across very much like, this food is not good and this kind of stuff. That is kind of how if something isn't right, we're particularly New Yorkers, we'll call it out, we'll go, I don't want this, it's not why I asked for it. A British person go, excuse me, would you mind awfully changing the, there's like the two old ladies in the Forty Towers? This British person just eats it and I'm like, oh. Yeah, and I was the same and you've got to just know your positioning. But in New York, you're able to go, this is not why I ordered. Where is the thing that I ordered? And they'll go, oh, sorry, here it is. And in the UK, they'd look at you like you've come down from another dimension, kind of going, you know, why are you being so aggressive? It's like, I want why I ordered. So they're kind of things, but yeah, that's, it's an incredible, it's my equal favorite city. I mean, I'm a massive head of London fan as well. London for completely different reasons, mostly because my family are all from there. But New York has a thing. I mean, LA has its own thing and Americans have their thing. There's very much you can do situate, can do sort of attitude here. Americans are quite likely to just to go, yeah, come on, we'll give it a go. And it doesn't matter if we cock it up because we're not sort of, but British people, there's a funny thing I kind of get a sense that the British people come up with a lot of amazing ideas. And then Americans nick the ideas and make them world-class. You know, I can't think of any examples off the top of my head, but it was a feeling that I've kind of been built with because British people have invented this incredible device which can do this, this, that, that. The American will go, oh, Nick, that, and we'll market it better and we'll give it a little bit of magical American aura. And then suddenly it's a big hit. So that's kind of one of the differences for me. You know, it's a hell of a town, man. It's great. You must come over again at some point. Yeah, so I can't wait. Absolutely can't wait. Yes. Lee, can we just do a bit of name-dropping and stuff? Because... I'm not very good. I don't like it that much, but I'm not kind of horribly averse to it, but... Are we talking New York or name-dropping? Oh, name-dropping. I'll put New York into as many sentences as possible. Yeah. Oh, I thought, hang on. We're conflicting ourselves. I don't like talking about New York. As you can sense, I really do, but yeah. No, but I mean... I mean, even Norman Cook... Yeah. I mean, what's it like? What did you do with him? So I'm trying to do the whole long story really short thing. I ended up being part of a company that made things called Sample CDs. This was before... So you could buy an audio CD with, say, 400 drum loops on it, which we recorded with drummer A, drummer B. Most of the drummers we got to work with, for example, were sort of famous people. And then it was kind of like, why don't we do a CD of drum sample, of dance samples? And Norman was kind of pre-Fatboy Slim, post-Beats International sort of time. And I think it was kind of half a kind of a thing where he was like, oh, it'd be a really good thing for my next project to kind of bring it out and sort of announce it through this thing. So long story short, I think he ended up contacting us, or we might have contacted him to say, hey, Norm, would you do an audio CD with kind of like a thousand dance samples on it? And he went, yeah. And it was called... I can't actually remember what it was called now. We did one with Coldcut, who you might know. And we called it Cleptomania, which is obviously thieving, which is kind of an interesting thing. But Norman's thing was called Skip to My Loops. That was it. And yeah, we did that. And he's just such an amazing bloke.  That was sort of around slightly after, actually, when he did his sample CD. I don't think the two things were related. But no, just the one... I remember sitting out in a... We had a studio in the middle of the countryside, which we'd invite all these kind of folks down to come and record their stuff. And we'd take him to the local pub, which was like a proper... It's called The Pub With No Name. If any of you go and look it up, it's amazing. It's called the White Horse Prize Dean. It's one of those pubs where there's a signpost with no signing. And it was like an 800-year-old pub in the middle of nowhere, crackling fireplaces, proper relays. And me and Norman and a couple of the other blokes just sit in the back garden at the pub in between kind of the sample sessions and just chat about life and music more predominantly. And it struck me what an incredibly knowledgeable and passionate bloke he was. Amazing, too. He was really, really great. We had great fun with him, actually. He was great. But yeah, that was a weird one. That was kind of way back in the 90s, I think we did that. But we got to work with lots of people like him. And lots of people started to come out of the woodwork and kind of go... You know, we worked with Pascal Gabriel, who was an amazing, amazing producer also. He's like, bomb the base, S Express is part of those kind of things. And yeah, I mean, and then I met... I got to meet one of my heroes through this, which is probably the reason... The reason that I'm doing music is because of this one bloke. Oh, thank you. Oh, that's a really nice thing you say, mate. Yeah, I mean, it's like... It's kind of like one of those things where it just takes one moment that completely alters the path of your life, you know? So, yeah, Norman was a cracker. He was a really nice bloke, really funny. And who... Oh, his Norman was the person was... Oh, well, there were several, actually. Norman was one, but the guy that really changed my life was a guy called JJ Jaxalek from the Art of Noise. Wow, that's a blast from the past. So, mate, the first seven-inch single I ever bought as a kind of a young man would have been 80. So I'd have been about 11 or 12, I think. Me and my dad took me to the cinema to see something like Superman 1 or it might even have been Tron. I can't actually remember.  It wasn't like, go and get your curry. It's 75 High Street, Chesney Road concert, whatever. It would be like a little animated video or something that would come on before the film just to keep the audience occupied. And it was this track called Close to the Edit and it was all animated. And I'm sitting there with my dad, munching my popcorn, waiting for the film to start. And then you hear the sound of a car starting. And then I swear, my entire life, I was like, someone's making music out of really weird sounds, but it's very musical. It's funky, it's sexy, it's soulful, but it's machines, but with samples and stuff. And I immediately went out and bought the seven-inch single for that. And then just became a lifelong fan of the art of noise and all the projects that they were involved in, sort of subsequently, you know. Wasn't it called Close to the Edge? Or am I close to the edit? It was like close to the, the words say close to the edge, but it was actually close to the edit. And I've still got the seven-inch single actually over there in my studio on my thing. Ah, I get it. So as a result of the sample CDs that I worked on, we thought, oh, how cool would it be to get one of the original pioneers of sampling, JJ Exotic from the Art of Noise, to do a sample CD for us.  And I was like, hmm, I can do that. And we sort of became mates, you know. And he's just a legend. I mean, he kind of gave up music, gave up the music industry and ended up going into, at the time it was called Futures, which I think is like stocks and shares. And then he went on to do, and then he was his teaching, I think teaching maths or something, but just an amazing dude. I mean, he was one of the first handful of people in the UK. There's a keyboard at the time called a Fairlight, which was like one of the first big professional kind of level samplers. And he was one of about five people to have one. It was him, Kate Bush, Peter Gabriel and Herbie Hancock, I think is Stevie Wonder or something. And he ended up basing a career being kind of a programmer. So that's how he started working with Trevor Horne on things like Frank goes to Hollywood and so forth. And in their downtime, that's how the art of noise started, which is fascinating. So yeah, through things like sample CDs, I've made some really lifelong friends. I have a great friend, Dave Ruffey, who's a drummer with a band called The Ruts. We did a drum sample CD with him. And I've known, he's known me since I was 16. And we've been mates ever since. And just amazing all about all coming from the right place. You know, when you meet people and you kind of go, we're doing this because we love doing it. And we sent it out into the world. And Ruffey and Seggs, Dave Ruffey the drummer was telling me a story, he went to a party and he got, he had to meet Dre, as in Dre, the producer Dre, because Dre had used some of those drum samples on a record that he was doing. And Dre was like, I want to meet the guy behind this record, they're behind these loops. So things like that, you send these good things out into the world.  So yeah, lots of lifelong friends from that whole process. And I learned a lot about production as well, which was like a 19 year old bloke sitting in some big recording studios with some incredible musicians or feeling my way, learning how to get the best out of them as humans. And also technically trying to get the best out of them sonically. So it was a great thing to learn at a very early age. And it was a very, yeah, very, really useful. So yeah, it was a great thing to do, man. And you started off on a Bond Tempe organ. Yes, sir. How competent were you at just playing music? I wasn't competent at all. I mean, I went, we were in Debenhams. Don't you remember Debenhams? The department's British department store. And I think I was seven or eight. I can't remember, but I just went up to this keyboard and started pressing. So you'd have a keyboard with actual black, white notes as you would normally have. And then down the left-hand side, you would have like buttons with chords or something like C major or C minor. And it wasn't like some weird spooky moment where I started rocking up and playing Rachmaninoff. And I was kind of like, oh, I like this. I like that. And I think mum and dad looked at me and kind of went, look, it's 25 quid. And you turn it on and it was air powered. So the sound would go through like, it would turn on again and then you play. So they were like, well, let's let him have, let him have one of the, yeah, we'll buy him one for Christmas or whatever it was. And I just sort of quickly learned how to play Silent Night with the chord changes. And then I sort of suddenly went, hang on, I love this.  And it was just like the difference between driving kind of a, you know, a Renault thing. And then suddenly someone, suddenly I was like, oh my God, the range and the power and the thing of a piano was the thing that really got. So I started playing piano in primary school. I didn't have any lessons for any of this. I think it was one of the things I was going to say to you actually is like, there were kids in my school who were fantastic at being able to write score and stave and write on the kind of like, you know, they could score out things. And I couldn't do any of that. There were kids at my school that were better at fighting and writing out scores than I was. And I couldn't ever work that out. But then I could sit at a piano and play for 15 minutes and improvise. And I still really struggle with the whole kind of like, it's almost like I'm dyslexic for the notes, which is a really interesting thing. And it hasn't actually hindered my career much because you can use computers now and you can go, this is a little melody. Can you print that out? So that was a really big thing. And then that kind of changed the whole course of my life again.  And then suddenly I think mum and dad realized I had a little bit of an interest, shall we say in it? And it shaped the course of my life because I quit all my education and just went and did music, which was, I mean, a lot of parents would never allow their kids to do that these days. It's like, you're going to do what? You're going to go in the music business, you're out of your mind. But they, we rolled the dice and you know, it mostly worked out, I think, pretty much. Yeah, you'll remind me now. I think I had a Yamaha keyboard. Oh, yeah. You know, wait, when they would just start, I probably got it in Debenhams or somewhere. Yeah. And I had a wonderful teacher. He used to just watch this and his hands used to just navigate this keyboard. Yeah. And the other hand doing that, you know, it was just, and of course, you've got all the backing tracks and the drum beats and all. Yeah. I mean, I am a guy kind of moved from the sort of rubbishy little Bontembe thing to something a little bit bigger with some rhythm is probably like the sort of thing you're talking about. And then for a short period of time, I got obsessed with those kind of techniques, two-tier organs with all the buttons that you could go, here's a flute and here's a vocal sound and you can fade in there. And then I sort of tried to learn how to play because it would have those bass pedals and you would sort of sit and try and do like the end of the pier kind of and I sort of hated it. But I ended up pressing loads of different buttons together and making really, really weird sounds on this sort of home piece of furniture. And that was when the fascination for sort of where electronics and music kind of came together. And then I kind of moved away from organs and went on to synthesizers. But that definitely set me on my path.  You'd be like, wow, that's incredible. So those are the things that shaped it for me. Yeah, I mean, they're not so trendy now. I want to re-buy all my old gear and I saw that Technics Organ that I used to have or the same model on eBay for like 75 quid or something. I don't have the space for it, unfortunately. I don't have a particularly large studio. But it's one of those things that just for old time's sake, I would love to re-buy. It's funny for all those gizmos and gadgets that it doesn't compare with sitting down at a piano. A grand piano, even just... Whoa! Well, even now there's a bit of a trend for... Did you ever watch Broadchurch? The TV show? Oh, I did, yeah. You'd have to remind me. Was it about some psycho-killing people or something? I think so. I wasn't an expert on the TV show, but there's a guy called Olaf R. Arnold, who's one of my favourite composers, did the music for it.  And I'll probably be corrected about this, but in one of the iterations of what he was trying to do, he took out... So most piano notes have three strings that make the same note, right? So one of the things I think he did, he took out two of them so it was left with one and replaced all the felt beaters. So when you hit a key, a mechanical thing hits a thing which hits a string. So there's this really clunky, weird kind of like, you know, back in the 80s when all production was really modern and clean. You would never have accepted this sound because it's sort of buzzy and noisy and sort of shitty. Entire... People have made entire film scores with this kind of thing. So even something like that, which is a very, very soft, felty piano. There's something incredibly emotional when you listen to some of these scores.  Midsummer actually has some of those things as well. That was a cool film.  There's an incredible, immediate emotional sound about that. I can't think of an example. It'd be like taking a guitar down to two strings or building a guitar with a bit of wood and a cardboard box or something. But you can still use amazing expression and passion to get notes and things out of it. But it's just a different way of looking at the piano. But yeah, all my school pianos were all up right, and I just played with them and I would end up taking the front off and kind of going, wow, when you hit that note with this note, you've got this amazing sound. I love pianos. It's the thing I start all my stuff on, to be honest, most of the time now. Because C6 Steve plays it, was it a one string guitar, I think? Yeah, there you go. It's all one strings all you need.  It's all about... I think most musicians will say that they can pick something up. I have a guitar and a bass guitar and I can sort of sit behind a drum kit. A guitarist, a drummer or a bass player. But if you have a sense of melody and rhythm and a rough sort of interactive... You can get a note out of most things. I mean, brass instruments are slightly different because they're all about technique and also soulfulness, obviously. But if someone gave me a saxophone, it would sound horrible. But if someone gave me a guitar, I could sort of go, hey, what about this? And that's a really weird thing that humans have, I think. It's like I can get a sound out of a kitchen table if I have to. You know, I've recorded... We're radiators. I've done all kinds of weird things like that. And I think that's nice. It's a nice thing to do, you know. You wouldn't be able to do that in this house. Got no radiators. Got no kitchen table. Got no kitchen table. Wow. Chris's man cave is very naked. I love going into those studios, the big studios, and you know, it's that whole thing. Over in the corner, they'll have a big basket full of anything you can hit or strike or scrape and you know, a lot of this sort of film composers that I really like are using all those sort of sounds now where it's like, what's that sound of little left and right on it? Oh, it's like me hitting a mouse or something. It's my cat breaking wind or something. I love that. There's an amazing story. Did you ever watch Chernobyl? You know, I think I did. It was one of the break down of Chernobyl. Yeah, it was kind of... It was a sky production. But the composer for that, as a lady called Hilda, something begins with G, but I can never pronounce her surname, so I won't. But what she did is she took David Attenborough's sound record, I believe, went to a still functioning nuclear power station in the Ukraine and just recorded the buzzers of the machines, doors slamming, pipes being hit and all these kind of incredible sounds and then came back and made the entire score for Grammy Oscar-winning, I believe, score from all these found sounds using her voice, because she's a cellist as well, so it's a bit of a cello, but every other sound that you hear is this Ukrainian power station, like being played notes and chords and it's one of the most incredibly moving scores ever. I suggest everyone goes and listens to it if that's your thing and you'll kind of listen to it and go, wow, she made that out of, you know, like real stuff. I mean, it's an amazing thing and there's lots of people doing that sort of thing, but she nailed it, man. She was one of the, you know, really amazing and proper award-winning level staff as well. Great, love that. And Lee, you were programming sound cards. Yeah. I guess for the electric keyboards. Is that right or was it for...? Yeah, the more I got into... So, again, another one of those long story really short, when I was, I don't even know how old I was, I placed an advert in a local paper and it just said, I think my dad helped me get it out. You think he paid for it, I think. Young musician seeks professional opinion of his music. So someone got back to me and they had a music shop, like a sort of a, like, high-tech music showroom, if you like, where you could come and buy sort of good keyboards and stuff. And I worked there during the summer for like six weeks during the separate school summer holiday. I can't even remember what year that was. When the sort of showroom was closed at the end of each night or afternoon or when there was no one around, I'd wire all the gear up and sort of start making music and learn how to use all this new technology that was coming through. And then I think through him, I bought a thing called a, I think it was a Korg M1, which was like a great synthesizer, one of my favourites at the time. And it turned out I happened to really enjoy programming it so like making sounds for it. And I made so many and I ended up demonstrating the sounds to the actual manufacturers. So I did stuff for Technics and Yamaha and Roland and all these guys. And then we sort of thought, well, why don't we start a business? Lee, you sit in a room on your own and make 70 trillion sounds. We'll put them on sound cars to which you can plug into the keyboards and we'll sell them. And we did. And I tell you what, I mean, I loved it. The trickiest part of the whole process was making up names for the bloody sounds. Because every sound had to have a name.  It would have to be like John Michelle Jarpad or something. You'd have to come up with something. And I loved it. And it's something you could do on headphones on your own in the middle of nowhere and just come up with stuff. And then that led to all kinds of other things. It led to the sample CD thing actually. Because someone said, oh, Lee's sounds. You should get some of them on a CD so we can actually put them into samples. And then that's how we started the sample CD thing. And that's the rest of history on that track. That's when I met lots of different people who started playing around in studios at someone else's expense. But yeah, that was sound card programming. As boring as it may sound, no pun intended. A lot of the sounds ended up on really famous records and lots of famous people used them. And it was really, really nice. It was like, I would sit and listen to something on the radio. And it'd be like, that's one of my sounds. And it was just an incredible thing. Instead of it being like, oh, that's one of my songs or this is one of my productions. It was like, this is before I even did songs or production. And I was like, that's one of my sounds used on a BBC TV show. I was like, wow, that's amazing. It was a real buzz, actually. It was really great. Yeah, it's that thing, isn't it? That when I'm doing my life coaching bit, I'm always stressing that action creates action. If you don't start something, you're never going to get any results, are you? Absolutely. When you see it in that context, my God, isn't it? It's just a nice thing, isn't it? It's powerful. And it came from a good place. And I think, you know, as much about this as anyone on earth, I think it's like, if you put the right motive behind it and sentiment, if you try and, you know, I made sounds because I love making sounds. It wasn't like I work up when I want to be rich and make sounds. I've got a synth and I love it. I'm going to make sounds. So you put in the love. And I think the love goes out. And I think people start to, if you start to play one of my sounds, you kind of go, wow, whoever did this really meant it. And that's a wonder. And it must be the same with you. It's like when you put the kind of love and the energy into what you're doing. And it comes back, it's what I was saying earlier, I think. And I think music without, I mean, we could talk about this one for hours. We probably shouldn't. But music, popular music, I shall say, I'm going to get into so much trouble with this. It sort of lost a bit of its love, I think. It's more about people wanting to be famous than it is about making a great song or changing the world. Of course, there are lots of people out there with messages and lots of people trying to do that. And with, you know, great. It's more about putting this image out to young people that success is being this, whatever it is, you know. Yeah. I mean, without sounding like two old guys is, you know, it's like with the advent of social media and so on and so forth and filters and all in TikTok. You can basically appear to be an incredibly beautiful, incredibly interesting person with absolutely no... It's like House of Cards. There's nothing there, you know. And I think... We started to realise that, didn't we? When you listened to like a Kylie track or something, you could hear where it had been, you know, that synthesised in the studio to make the voice put... You know, to get rid of all the rough edges on the... Kylie's a weird one because she's amazing. She's actually an amazing pop artist. So the people behind what she was doing and her sentiment was very much... She had all that package right, you know, like Madonna is kind of the same. Madonna would work with the producers of the moment, not because she wasn't very good. It's just because she was always trying to push music forward, I think. I don't think some of the later stuff was that great, but at the time she was cutting it. Kylie's a funny one because it's very easy to say, Oh, everything's going to sound like Kylie Minogue.  What's the word? They kind of had kind of a conveyor belt approach. But then when you look back on it and you listen to things like, Never gonna give you a... It's actually a brilliant pop song. So they were onto something, but they got... You know, it was almost like the anti-disco scene kind of suddenly came in or not at that time, way before, but when disco was doing really well, it was like, we've got to cut this down. People were very easy to... People were very quick to kind of go, Oh, Stock Aiken Waterman, it's just not that great. But actually the songs were incredibly great pop music. I mean, it's not really my thing. Oh, quick Kylie Minogue story. It's quite funny. I didn't work with her, but the place where I used to work at Olympic Studios would have famous folk coming and going all the time. And one day I was working one of the rooms and I opened the door, big heavy door. And Kylie Minogue is there in a jumper. She's like five foot one. And I was eating a load of grapes. And I was so shocked by opening this door and suddenly seeing Kylie Minogue, that I said Kylie Minogue and spat grapes all over it. And she was... I mean, she thought it was absolutely hilarious. But I was so taken aback by just sort of Kylie standing behind this door. But no, she's a man. I mean, she's an icon in a weird... Not my cup of tea at all, but she's made some amazing records. It's funny what a small world it is, because my ex-girlfriend met Kylie Minogue in a professional capacity. And we've had Anjali Rao on the podcast, who's a very well-known TV presenter. She's had her own show on CNN and all this kind of thing. And her one of her best mates is Danny Minogue. Oh, yeah, yeah. It's funny, isn't it? You go through... There's two people you know that know them in Oaks. Yeah, yeah, it's weird. I mean, they got a lot of grief at the time for being sort of like throwaway pop stars. But again, one of those things we can talk about forever. You know, my wife and I, we often do kind of an 80s back to back, kind of like playing sort of slightly deeper cuts in the 80s, which got a bit of a bad rap at the time, musically, I think. But when you look back on it now, I mean, there was some amazing, amazing music, I think, but, you know. So, yeah, Kylie, things are quite funny, but... I don't know, music's a funny, funny thing. It's one of those... Have you got... No, go on. Have you got a favourite film soundtrack? Penetrate. Yeah. Hey, that's the same as me. Yeah, and hopefully everyone else, because I'd like to be rich and famous. No, not really. I mean, I have a load of different things that I really, really like. I made a little note because I can never remember all this stuff. One of them is definitely what Hilda did with the Chernobyl thing, and she also did the Joker. So she worked a bunch of stuff on Joker, which is an amazing soundtrack. But I would say, I mean, I've got down here, because of what I'm trying to do now, it's sort of that fusion between it's mostly electronics, but like organic soulful electronics, not like dancey electronic bleepy stuff, but more like textures and pads and things. Van Gellis, right? I mean, he is... He's a monster. If you stick on... You can stick on the Blade Runner soundtrack, play it from start to finish and still be moved by it as an album.  I mean, Godlike, really amazing. Machines and organic instruments. What else have I got down here? I'm a massive John Barry fan. I mean, obviously, Bond. But Midnight Cowboy, things like Ip Cressphile. I mean, Godlike, genius. And Morricone's an amazing producer, an amazing composer too. I think people like John Williams are absolute geniuses. I mean, everything about what they do is... Sorry, not everything. They write this incredibly thematic, very memorable, you know, that's not my thing. I'm much more into kind of using weird sounds to create an atmosphere that makes you go, oh, I don't quite know how I feel, but it works really well with the pictures. There is a whole bunch. Did you ever see the movie Killing Fields? Oh, of course. So, you know, did you know did the soundtrack for that? Go on. Mike Oldfield. Wow. So he was using really weird cut-up sounds and all kinds of strange stuff and it goes so well with the imagery because the movie was such a weird, you know, just a deep sort. So those are things that I really love. Well, so I've got a couple of things down here. I'm a massive fan of... There's a guy called Christabel Tapia de Vera. I'm not going to get all geeky about it. But he did a bunch of stuff. Did you watch Black Mirror over there when it was kind of out? The TV show that Charlie Brooker wrote. Oh, gosh. Obviously, I know the name. I'm just getting it confused in my head with the film Black Swan. Oh, yeah, yeah. Okay. Black Mirror was kind of like a... I think there were four seasons, maybe six episodes, and it was Charlie Brooker's kind of vision of the future and how technology and things are affecting us. Oh, of course. And it was centered around the bloody speaker thing in the house, wasn't it? Well, that was one episode. They weren't connected. So, like, you'd have however many episodes he made, every single episode was a different story. And this guy, Christabel, did a bunch of music for that, which was amazing. So, yeah.  I mean, you've got the legendary things. I mean, something like Jaws or whatever is Genius Star Wars, all of those really big things are unbeatable. But I would say the things that I gravitate towards most of all are the more... where it's a bit more experimental, perhaps, maybe, a bit less thematic. Things that sit in the background and go, why do I feel... This is tense. I feel tension. And now I feel sexy. I don't know why. Why do I feel sexy? And these things that melt into each other and make you kind of feel emotions that a big melody going... doesn't necessarily make you do. Does that answer the question? I don't know whether it does. Maybe we went round the houses a bit with it. It's all beautiful stuff. I can't believe I'm lucky enough to have this conversation. Oh, mate, thank you. I'd love to put a list together and we could stick it on the... just, like, go and check these things out, kind of like a list of things to check out that a lot of folk maybe haven't got across. They probably listen to the shows or whatever the films and kind of go, oh, I really love that, but I don't... I wouldn't look up the composer. And then when you do get the composer's name, I strongly suggest looking up all the other stuff that they've done. I mean, there's a bit of a tendency these days. So you obviously know who Nine Inch Nails are, right? I imagine the band. Yes. So Atticus Ross and Trent Reznor. Trent, they're both from Nine Inch Nails. They've kind of pivoted into doing film scores. So you've got these modern electronic composers who have their sort of... their everyday electronic artist name. So, like, would be Fat Boy Slim. But Norman Cook, for example, would do a soundtrack under the Norman Cook name.  And some of those are absolutely mind-blowing. They're really worth checking out. Yes. That's another connection there, that I now know two people who know Fat Boy Slim. Oh, right, OK. We've had DJ Mark Wilkinson on the show. Oh, wow.  And they were both DJs back in the dance era, and, well, obviously, Fat Boy Slim's still sort of going strong. Oh, yeah, very much so. Yes. You just reminded me, I went to the Killing Fields on a come-down. Not recommended. No, mate. I was going to say that was quite a leap, but, wow. Isn't it funny? You watch a film when you... when did the Killing Fields come out? I mean, it was in... Oh, 70s, I think, wasn't it? Yeah, no. This is the thing about the genocide and we can all learn from this, folks. Those are sort of, can we say, we're a bit aware of how close we are on that razor's edge all the time of tyranny or even over it. It was in... It was like in the 80s and 90s. Hang on, I'm just going to have a look here. And so this film came out, wasn't it? And it was about this journalist trying to escape the genocide in Cambodia. Yeah. And of course there's... The film was very graphic in showing some of the millions upon millions of academics, teachers, all the clever people that are now trying to be shut up by Facebook. Yeah. I'm not going to say another channel, but people might know and, you know, all getting censored now. It's that same... Yeah. I think everything just comes round in circles. Everything is a cycle, isn't it, really? But there's just different ways to do it. Yes, it was... 84 was the film. Yeah, that's right. And was it the 70... Yeah. Set in the 70s, though, wasn't it? 73 was when it was all sort of kicking off with a Khmer Rouge. But yeah. But that soundtrack was an amazing thing. I listened to that as a kind of a young fellow and I was kind of like, how have they done that? I only really know about music and soundly stuff. I don't profess to know much about much else, really, but there was one of those moments where you just go, what is... It's just an amazing thing, you know? Yes, every now and again someone comes up and just turns everything on its head, don't they? Or they just put such a new spin on... Yeah, or you fight... It's all about parts, isn't it? It's all about kind of exploring that path and going, no. And then how one phone call can change your life and put you on a different path. I mean, I remember when I discovered certain artists that I'd never heard of and they were like, well, my God, you've never heard of that artist? I'm like, no.  And if you think about it, Chris, I mean, this is just me being passionate about music. It must be the same in film, fashion, photography, cooking, architecture, all these amazing creative disciplines. There must be passionate people like us that suddenly go, oh, my God, I didn't know that Frank Lloyd Wright did this as a side project. And then that inspired someone to do this. You can go down so many wormholes that I just sort of tried to stick to music because otherwise my head would explode, I think. And what did you think of... No, no, no, 19. Well, I mean, there's millions of stories around. It absolutely blew my mind when I first heard it because it was like none of them received it here as well. And then I would watch it creep up the charts and then you would see it as number one and I would tune into Top of the Pops every Thursday night and suddenly it would be Paul Hardcast be number one. So funny story, not even a story, it's like a fact. 19 management who look after the Spice Girls, Simon Fuller is part of that and the other Simon, can't remember his name, Simon Cowell. They were all part of 19 management. 19 management made their money from that song. No, no, no, no, 19. So you can blame Paul Hardcast for the Spice Girls pretty much. Yes, we could get a bit deep there and talk about that was when the policy of acknowledging servicemen and what the sacrifices they made, which is now a huge thing in America and it's been, I mean, now people here say thank you for your service and I'm like, you shouldn't really say that to a British person. Do you think that that track raised awareness of those sort of things?  And you kind of go, that fact kind of lodges in your head. And I think because it was aimed at people like me, I think there was this, I don't know how many people kind of dug deeper and went, what actually happened around that time? I mean, I'm sure a few people did on the internet.  But I think, you know, certain bits and certain music, bits of music, they certainly make you go and explore things deeper. And I would love to think that, because there were two or three different versions of that track. I don't know the full backstory. I have watched it on YouTube and he made several different versions. I think he ended up putting more samples in the second version or something. But yeah, just the words that he was saying should really make you stop in your tracks and think, wow, 19. I know 19 year olds and I'm like, I wouldn't even trust them with my house keys. You know, that's no disrespect to 19 year olds. Yeah, especially, I mean, I was 15 at the time. I mean, I've been 16. So these guys are three years older than me. I mean, mind blowing. Yeah. And it's not a world I know very much about, but I know at certain points that bits of music come along that make everybody jump tracks to kind of like, what do they mean by this? What is that about? There's a bit of a darkness behind it though, because, oh yeah.   Yeah. And everyone turned against it. Yeah. And then of course the people that make the bombs, bullets and guns can't be having that. No. They started to put out films like Rambo and Rambo when the producer first read the screenplay, he's like, what, like a guy who's a bit mental? Because he's been in, shouldn't he be a hero, like with loads of guns? And they were like, no, you don't understand. The idea is he's PTSD. Oh.  You can see why these guys slowly, you know, sowed this, we've all got to love servicemen because they knew that they was going to deploy them in the Middle East for the last 20 years. I think there's a tendency.  But someone like me has to be really careful to not get too. I mean, I got pulled into the wormhole when I was in my teens with all that stuff about the quote, unquote, New World Order and all those kind of things. And then I kind of realized that it's happening, I think, in its own little way.  It was a consuming my kind of brain. I was kind of like, I'm just going to go headfirst into music and try and do something good with that. And in a strange sort of way, like pop music is a bit like, I don't think that there are sort of political conspiracy concepts with putting out certain records, but there's a lot of politics in pop music, which has nothing to do with music. And it was one of the reasons I tried to sort of get into film music a bit more, because even though there are a lot more opinions, they're mostly, I mean, some of them are probably political, but generally, if the music that you're making doesn't work with the images, you have to go away and rewrite it. Whereas with a pop song, if you write what you think is the greatest pop song in the world and nothing happens, there is no kind of bar, agenda and film music is one of those things where you can make an amazing story, have an amazing soundtrack, and as long as those two things work well, you want people coming away from the cinema feeling moved in some capacity. You don't really want people being angry, but they're not all films end well, you know. Look at Rocky, the soundtrack for Rocky, that's really powerful. Yeah, I mean, there's loads of things that are really powerful. Some of those 80s movies, some of the songs like in Top Gun and stuff, I mean, they're incredibly powerful imagery. Americans do that stuff really well. Everything looks fantastic. All the actors look fantastic.  That's why something like Chernobyl doesn't have any kind of real digital effects in it. It's just a really raw story. But you sort of come away from the end of Chernobyl, kind of going, we must never allow anything like that to happen again. And if that inspires a generation of young people who are kind of scratching their heads after watching Chernobyl going bloody hell, that was the thing. Did you, you must have been to Japan in your life, right? Yes. Did you ever go to Hiroshima? Yes. Right.  Oh yeah, you can't, the peace museum, you can't not go there. Peace museum. So you come away at the end of that, scratching your head, even as a fully formed adult going, we must never allow those things to happen again. What amazed me is, I'm not a big fan of the war narratives because the more you look into them, the more you can see, we've obviously been sold a lie on a lot of stuff. But you've got this image of these young Japanese men that would fight to the death and that they were all a bit like Banzo Psycho and you know, but essentially, the kamikaze pilots and they fight to the end, they do that rather than die and all this kind of stuff. And then when you go to Hiroshima or Hiroshima, you go to the peace museum and you see, after they dropped that device on their country, that the country's completely dedicated to peace now, completely. I'd love to know what they really were like. I mean, that's a country of honour and the samurai kind of philosophy and stuff.  Yeah, yeah. And I got a coat hanger out the cupboard and I've got my samurai picture, right? I love this stuff. I love making my dreams come true, you know? Yeah. And then I walked, I left the little guest house I was staying in and I walked up to the bridge and when you look out, you see the only building in Hiroshima that was left and ironically, the bomb exploded about 200 metres above it and it was the only building in this devastated, burnt-out black landscape that was survived. And when I stood on that bridge, this weird feeling that I've never experienced in my life just come right over me and in that moment, I just pictured everybody in their house having breakfast, families, bang, like that. Yeah. Like that. Yeah. You know, I don't know, but half of them were gone, the rest were just burnt. They were huddling on the riverbanks. There were people drinking the pus from their blisters because they were so dehydrated and stuff. Yeah. I mean, you can't imagine that kind of stuff and so you can see how they suddenly went. Peace is the way, everybody. I mean, yeah, that is an amazing sight. It's a schoolhouse, wasn't it, Chris? I think was it a school that survived? I can't remember. I can't remember. I can't remember. I can see it very vividly. I've got loads of photographs of it. But yeah, same, I didn't get quite the same feeling, but you do stand there humbled. And you feel a combination, I felt a combination of kind of sadness for humanity, but also, hey, maybe certain bits of humanity have turned that corner and peace is better than war. Peace and love are better than war and it's better to kind of build and construct rather than deconstruct, really. I read these military papers, you know, that come out from the MUD and stuff and I get sent them and, ugh. And the narrative is like, in the 21st century, war is done.  Yeah.   Yeah. Like, can people not see? Can people honestly not see war just suits a certain, you know... Well, war is good for business, isn't it? Yeah. And now the papers are coming out. It's all about trans-human agenda. So basically plugging the human brain into a machine. Oh, wow. Because as we are, we ain't good enough to keep up with the technology of war. It's moving too fast. And the human being has things that slow them down, like emotion. I mean, physically, the physical body is not...   Well, I think it seems like a good moment to talk about AI, doesn't it, in a way? And obviously, AI is a fascinating thing for creating it for musicians and composers and music.  I mean, you probably listen to Spotify or Apple Music or whatever you use to listen to bits of music or whatever. And it gives you these suggestions. And it's kind of like, oh, you listen to Tina Turner. You should listen to something else or whatever. What my dream is, is that AI becomes this thing where it understands... I don't know why I said Tina Turner. It's a really bad example. But I'm going to go with it. That's embarrassing. She was great, though. Wouldn't she? No, she's amazing. Yeah, amazing. I mean, she's just sold her catalogue for $50 million. Now, my point was this. I want the AI engine. And this will be happening within a couple of years. I want the AI engine that serves me songs to say, oh, Lee, we know why you like Tina Turner. I mean, I don't particularly like Tina, but she's amazing, but I'm not a master. It's going to go, oh, I know why you like Tina Turner. Instead of going, you listen to Tina Turner. Therefore, you're like this, this and that. The AI engine will understand what it is I like about her and serve me things. It might be a bit of classical music. It might be an instrumental bit of music. It might be something that the engine will understand why I like what I like, not just the fact that I would listen to other things related to it. Does that make sense? I think that's going to be a constructive use of AI in music at least. Picture the scene when you drive down the road and we're all connected to this smart grid, which is now in place through the 5G. Yeah.  Traffic light goes red and suddenly Tina Turner comes over your car stereo because it's all connected. The grid knows you've just stopped your car at this moment in time. It knows that you're a bit hungry because it's studied your eating patterns from your money transactions and all this kind of stuff and it knows right. Lee now, he needs a bit of Tina. Lee's a Tina Turner and a beef burger. Yeah. He's probably getting a bit of road register. I mean, it is. It's interesting and scary, Chris, but I think the thing that's scariest about it for me is this idea that the robots could take over. Let's say overnight they gain into it. I know you know loads about this stuff or whatever, but they suddenly go, actually, we can make robots better than the humans. We're going to make them on our own while they're humans are asleep. Then those are the kind of things that are slightly concerning, but I see lots of positive things from that. I mean, it's called the Internet of Things is what they call it. So you can have an internet-connected fridge now. You can be sitting in on holiday and you're coming back from your holiday.  And you can get a little camera. You can fire it up on your iPhone. You can look inside your fridge. Your fridge will know where things are at by the weight. So all that data is being collected all the time and there are businesses.  They can harvest this data and they can slam these data groups together with someone and they can go, what's a 15-year-old Chinese girl doing at 4 p.m. on the afternoon? What can we serve her? Exactly what you're talking about. What can we put in her ad feed? What can we play a bit of music for her that's going to put her in a mood where she's going to go and spend money at another company or something? Those things are very much coming. I mean, the way that social media serves up adverts to you now as well is all to do with this whole thing about them listening to you. I don't think that that is the case and I think the reason I think that is because my iPhone battery is crap enough as it is. If it was permanently listening, it would be even more crap. I don't think it happens. It's all to do with geo-tagging. I think my wife explained it to me, but if you have an IP address and you're suddenly looking at skirts on Google, the next thing you see on Instagram or Facebook is an advert for a new skirt. That's all to do with your location. It's not to do with the fact that I've said skirt, skirt. I'd agree with you, but well, two things. I'm kind of like a bit too deep into this now to know that I know that they... Listen. I know how advanced the software is that we don't even know about yet. Yeah, but they're not listening. Alexa might listen constantly because it has to. I don't think that my iPhone is on now listening to me.  I've had this conversation quite a lot with people when they understand voice recognition.  And you just say, yeah, cool Lee in New York, please. Well, I watched the promotional video for there's a new little iPad mini coming. I love iPad minis. They're great. They sit in your pocket and they're brilliant size. And it's got this chip in it. It's a neural engine. So it's almost AI, but not quite. And you can use a translation program, which they demonstrated on the video. And I can be speaking into it in English and it will translate in real time into any language that you want. And that's quite a useful. Do you remember Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy with the Babelfish that you stick in your ear? It's going to be like that soon. And I think that's a good thing because it should mean, I mean, there's loads of dark sides. There's dark sides to everything, Chris, isn't there, mate? It's like, I can go and buy a truck. I can use it to help my grandmother move house or I can plow into a bunch of people in a car park. We have the choice. I think at the end of the day, the humans are the ones that decide to buy that skirt or decide to buy a Tina Turner record. It's up to us whether we make that decision, I think, and we can be fed stuff all over the place. But I think it's interesting how it's getting more and more personalised. I think that business is fascinating.  Yeah, I'd love to. But yeah, it's a big issue. It's a huge thing.  Yeah, but that would be great cider, probably not made with too many chemicals. You'd be with your mates. You'd be getting a bit pissed. You'd be in a show with other human beings, watching other human beings try and tell a story. Everything about that scenario is good. And I think the way that music is consumed now, as convenient as it is, is a bit of a weird, I mean, going to a show, I mean, obviously with COVID, we haven't even touched on COVID and how that's affected things. But I've had friends who are suddenly going out to shows again and their life is, their changes, their evangelists, they come back and I was in a room and we were all jumping up and down. And it was the best thing I'd done for a year and a half. And that human interaction with music is massively important. And we've been sort of obviously not being able to do that because of the virus, you know. Yeah, I've got a funny relationship with music and my is I really stopped listening to other music for quite some time after the dance era. And I only just worked out at the grand old age of 24. Yeah. What all that's about, right? Because I run, I try to have a little jog every morning and I just love listening to music. It's just my best time of the day, you know. Yeah. And I'm listening to these anthems and I'm thinking, what is it about? I can listen to all music. And of course, you know, I'd like Tina Turner. Just eclectic is the word with me. If you look at my running iPad, you're going to find some Kylie on there. You're going to find some Avril Lavigne. Yeah. It's just I'll listen to what I like. But I worked it out.  It's it's all keeping people in their identity. Yeah. It's cutting them off from this much bigger, greater power that's out there. Yeah. Right. The one that we all need to start plugging into if we're going to understand this life. Absolutely. And where is the dance music? And I'm just love house. The whole thing. The whole thing was set up, wasn't it? The black kids and white kids to come and dance together. Oh, yeah. Incredible nightclub. And then. And it's all lyrics about we are one. We are. There was unity. And then ecstasy as well. When you plug a good, a strong drug like ecstasy in.  I've got video. I've got you can look at video footage of like, here's a club in 2020. Here's a club in 1991. And it's dark and everyone's getting into it in the 1990s. And now there's no phones. And then in 2020. Hi, look at me. Look how pretty I am. And look how big the foam is and the lights. It's like, no, man. It's all about getting your head down, feeling the music. I mean, house, repetitive beats, beautiful, wonderful tribal, organic, human thing. Well, based on the heartbeat, right? Obviously it's like this kind of wonderful times. You know, I love the infinite possibility in that music that we are anything that we want. We can achieve anything. But in a weird way, it's sexy also. It's sexy. I can't, you know what I mean?  Modern music isn't sexy, but it's overtly sexual. It's different to being sexy, like a funky house record or a really deep. I mean, just on a sort of a superficial level, one of my favorite house records, if you call it, is I love LFO by LFO. I think it's one of the greatest, sort of like British techno house track all time. You stick that on in a club. I mean, I had a DJ residency for many years, just about winged it, put some records together, drunk slammed it a bit and it was brilliant. But I would always play, we would always play really great music.  And they'll just go, this isn't, what is this? It's sexy. It makes people go, wow, what is that?  It's just sexy sounds in a dark room with people. And that's gone. I don't think we'll ever get that back now.   They were kind of clubs, but the music was so amazingly good. I mean, our world was breakbeat, which is like different, different to house, but it's got the same idea as it kind of picks you up, drops you down and it's brooding. And it makes you feel, wow, great.   It's actually, it's not. I'm joking.  You know, things like that, just something about those tracks is impossible. And we kind of broke this down actually the other day we were talking about this, because of the way that copyright laws and things have been working in the last sort of 15 years, maybe. Do you know DJ Shadow? You know, DJ Shadow is? There's a lot of stuff, Lee, that I just don't know. You'd really love his stuff. He's an American DJ, been going forever. He released quite a lot of records and incredible sort of producer DJ. And a lot of his, a lot of his records, as they were back in that day, as you know, were kind of chunks of other people's records, chunked, slammed together with some beats. And now because we live in this weird litigious world where everyone's greedy, you're not really able to sample other people's records as much and use a vocal sample from here or a strange intro from there. You have to, you know, we're all having to be really careful because the record companies are being very greedy about a lot of those things. Can we just talk about it? Because there's a link here with massive attack comportment. Yeah. Oh, he's one of those. He was like, he's amazing. Yeah. You should just literally introducing with an ease. I think it's 20th or 30th anniversary soon or whatever it is. Oh, there we go, yeah. Yeah. It's like, it's kind of trip-hop, but it's beats. It's beautifully made. Yeah, he's amazing. I mean, me and my wife, we went to a show that he did. Do you know, you know, it was a DJ Shadow and I can't remember the other guys, how embarrassing, but they were playing Africa Bombarders record collection in a club in New York. It was cut chemist and DJ Shadow who kind of make tracks from other people's records, right? And that night they had Africa Bombarders record collection who was a very, very, it was at the time a very important kind of player and they would recreate the tracks that they were, that they had released using his record collection in front of you in a club with a load of heads all around the same age, just standing there crying, going, I'm watching these guys make this record in front of me with two turntables in some cases, four. Absolutely amazing, but you can't do that now because labels won't let you sample things so much unless you have to go through all the, you have to jump through all these hoops, getting clearances. You're unable to be creative in the same way. Don't forget lots of hip hop and lots of stuff like that was made from like samples of jazz records put together with amazing beats, then a really conscious lyric and then you've got an amazing hip hop track. It's hard to kind of do that now because record companies just jump on you. It's a bit of a shame really. Yes, of course, this whole copyright, it's so... It's... They don't do themselves favours, right? Because you say you've got a young person now, they would never have heard of, let's just say, I don't know, the urythmics, right? Yeah. And yet, if somebody makes a YouTube video and they put, you know, they take a little sample from your urythmics as backing or whatever, that young person can go, oh, I like this. Oh, you're... Oh, Annie Lenick. Oh, I'll get that, you know, I'll download that and they'll actually buy it, right? Yeah. But the companies, they don't see it like that. It's a very strange thing. It is. So when people write books and go, someone's put my book on the internet. It's like, yeah, that's like what you want. You want people to read your book because... I think there's a similar sort of thing in stand-up comedy.   But what was interesting, I actually read a report yesterday which basically says that AI-generated music, for example, will not be subject to copyright laws. So if a machine makes a bit of music and it gets released, I don't know who gets paid. It's like, there's no copy, you know, it's like, I don't know who owns that sort of thing. And then the second point, Eurythmics, one of my favorite bands of all time. I would obviously, in my capacity, you'd have kind of folks come and visit me and sit in the back of the studio and talk about their careers and what we're going to do and I want to make a record and so on and so forth. And I would put on a handful of things like Eurythmics or Human League. And there we go. This is amazing. Is this from last year or something? And then you go, no, this is from 1982 or something. And their minds would just go, oh my God. And we had a conversation with some people one night about Mad World, the song Mad World, the Tears for Fears song. And they were like, oh, I love that song. I'm like, oh yeah, it's like the vocals are a bit funny. I'm like, what do you mean? It's like, oh, Gary Jules, Mad World. I'm like, no, no, Tears for Fears, Mad World. No, what do you mean Tears for Fears? So we had to convince them that there was a cover. And then the next week they emailed us and they were like, I've just done a deep dive into Tears for Fears. They're amazing. I'm like, yeah, they're amazing. Go and do your research. I might have been 20, but I knew about jazz stuff from the 50s, 60s, 70s. You have to know where black music comes from above all, in fact. Where does that line follow? Why are you listening to what you listen to? And it's important to do that research, I think. And there's a whole disconnect missing with that now, I feel. Yeah. And we should mention Michael Jackson, shouldn't we? Jamal. You know, just geez, what in? Well, I mean, just the, I mean, on one level, the great, I mean, just absolute genius songs, genius production, genius mixes, genius artists, genius look, genius videos, multi-trillion selling thing. Genius dancing. Genius dancing, genius people involved.  Suddenly you have to scratch your head and go, well, I feel love for the music, but I feel really, I don't know how I'm supposed to feel about him as a human. Jen and I were sitting out having coffee, having beer or something on the street, and someone was blasting Billie Jean in their car, as it went by. And now there's that, instead of that reaction of, wow, this is one of the best bit, you kind of, we looked at each other and we kind of went, oh, Michael Jackson.  Yeah, we're talking about an incredible talent and just music beyond the pale, you know, that's all that is, isn't it? You know? Yeah. That's all it is. And you need to be able to recognise that, because if you're not, then you're probably a bit brainwashed. I think it's, I think it's, it shouldn't, well, it's a really grey areas. Like, can you separate the man from the actions? Yeah, I mean, yeah, I don't want to say any names, but I watched a film lately in the soundtrack of the film, I actually had the singer in the film, and he's a US legend, right? Yeah. I've also seen a video on that my mate sent me, of him peeing on his girlfriend in the jacuzzi. Right, I mean, you know. And allegedly having spy cameras, just let's not go there. But still, you know, that's... Well, it's what we talked about at the beginning, is this idea of working with your hero, sometimes it can be quite sort of undo, it undoes all the good vibe, and it sort of shouldn't, but it's hard to separate. You know, I've worked with some famous people who are absolute assholes, but you love their music, and you just think, I'm not going to listen to your music in the same way, and it's a shame because it should be a separate thing, but as humans, I find it really hard to separate. You know. They call it council culture, don't they? Where you just throw the baby out of the bathwater with no discernment whatsoever. Yeah, it really goes against my soul, really, because there are things that you know, and then the more of these kind of biopic films and things that come out, what a nasty person next YZ is, you kind of go, oh, I don't know if I'm going to be able to listen to their records in the same way, and you try to, and you sort of kind of go, oh, but they were this or that. It's good old human beings winning it, winning it again. Talking about what you had mentioned, wormholes and stuff, or rabbit holes, what's your take on this, you know, this occult agenda in the music? Actually, I just want to say, I'm more interested in like, have you ever come across it? No. A straight up no. I mean, is there an occult agenda in the music industry? I mean, I know, I can imagine there being one in politics. You mean a proper occult stuff. Oh, yeah, yeah. Yeah, like all the kind of like, yeah. I don't be completely honest. I don't know like really how much celebrities are into the occult, or whether it's just, you know, they know if they... Turn a blind eye to it. Well, conduct the agenda that their career is going to go like... I think you're talking about, you know, Beyonce's a member of the Illuminati, all that kind of stuff, right? In a nutshell, I mean... Yeah. I should say for our friends at home, obviously Illuminati is like the catch-all phrase. There's probably quite a few different cults. I have to say... Okay, so I think two things perhaps. I think I can see that being in politics, particularly British politics, but that's something I don't know anything about. And the second thing I was going to say is, no, I've never seen it. And I think I've been lucky enough to work with the actual artists directly on the music side rather than the sort of background business side. And I'm sure... I know that there's a million, trillion shady things that go on in the background.  That's slightly different. That's like, you've got to play Bob's records. And luckily Bob's records were... Well, he's got on Earth for me. He's one of those things that's just beyond. But with regards to career development, no, I've never been... I've never seen anything... You know, I mean, I haven't been working in pop music probably for 15 years now, really, in a way, because I kind of went off it. And I have plenty of mates who probably do have sort of stories where they go, yeah, that was a bit odd, but I don't know anyone who was like, yeah, we got invited to some satanic worship party and then Jay-Z popped out with a snake's head on and we all drunk Beyoncé's blood.  No, I've never seen that. I'm always lucky enough, really, to work on the creative edge rather than the sort of like, hey, let's all go to a weird party. Yeah, of course. And I spoke to a few... Quite a few of my guests have been like this. We spoke into celebrity photographers and stuff and they're just like, yeah, Chris, it's a bit weird when they start doing all this, you know... Yeah. This stuff he said, but it's... I'm nothing to do with it. They just start doing it and I take the photos. I think if I had a manager, which I don't, for example, and I wanted to pursue my career and my manager was a certain type of manager, maybe at the management level, there are intertwinings at that level, but it's not anything I've ever seen on a day-to-day basis. Can we talk about Avicii? We can. I don't know much about Avicii. I've had nothing to do with him. I don't know whether... Have you read something about me and Avicii? No, no, I just... Oh. It's just out of all the people in the world that I'd like to meet. I'd love to have met him. I mean, he was definitely a force for good, brought a lot of love to lots of people, and then tragic, you know? Yeah. But isn't that the same amongst...  How old was he, Chris? Oh, he was circa 30. He wasn't... Do you know about the 27 Club? Is it? I think it is. It's like... Oh, maybe he was in the 27 Club. Yeah.   I mean, I'm not a fan, but it doesn't mean that what Avicii was doing wasn't amazing. It's just it's not really aimed at me. It never really was. Like, well, my dance era stuff was earlier than that. But the news about him dying and then I did do a little bit of research. He's like, okay, putting the music to one side for a second. He was actually an absolute dude. He did lots of good stuff, you know? And he was really well loved and he seemed to be quite a nice bloke. And you just think tragic, you know? But there's always going to be tragedy around sex, drugs and rock and roll. I mean, there always was, you know? So are you saying that there's a conspiracy in there somewhere? I didn't mention it because of that. I mentioned it because I just... I loved a guy and I listened to him and I listened to his music when I'm running and it's sort of uplifting. Oh, it's really powerful. Yeah, really, really good. But there was a... It's fair to say there was a conspiracy at the time. Yeah. I mean, the actual photo someone posted the day died on the day that he... If you're his family, I guess they just think he killed himself and that's... We can't sort of dispute that. But obviously, people have said he was suicided and this sort of stuff. But he's out taking a selfie with a couple outside his hotel. Yeah. Forehand. And he's like... And I know, you know, we all know mental health works in very, very strange ways. Very peculiar ways, yeah. But no, the buzz was or was that... And again, I'm just... I'm not saying this is true. I'm saying this is what people were saying, was that he was going to expose a lot of, I think, kiddie stuff in the music industry. Wow. I mean, funnily enough, some things are starting to creep out, aren't they? But... And yeah, I think artists do get quote-unquote what they seem to potentially be taken out just at the moment where they're going to go... where they're spreading too many conscious vibes. People are a bit like, no, we don't want that happening. We're going to pretend it's a suicide or whatever.  That's pretty horrible. But again, not something that I've ever... I've never been in a pub with a guy who's going, right, what are you doing next week? Oh, next week I'm going to go and poison Michael Jackson. I've never had one of those conversations, thankfully. What, um... What shall we take on weapons of sound? What's that? Oh, you mean literally? Not... Um... There you go, one sec. I've got an intruder. Throw them out. What do they think they're doing? Yeah. Unless they're delivering pizza. There we go. There you go, saucy.  There you go. I've got handed a bunch of sticks. That's all you need. I don't know what you're talking about. That's all you need. It's a wonderful thing. I went to see Massive Attack. Not that...  I got a special... I'm one of the biggest fans ever. Yeah, a massive fan, literally, no pun intended. I drove across a... I drove a 12-ton British, old British laden school bus across the desert to India and driving through a sandstorm in Pakistan one night. It was just all the guys I was with were asleep and I was just driving and I had a rolly in my mouth and a cup of coffee and I was just listening to Massive Attack and it's just one of the most memorable experiences of my life. It was just so... Love that. God, what am I doing? I'm down-tracking you at that moment and that way that those images and that music forge and stay in your head forever. They're the moments I live for, my friend. I love those kind of things. They're amazing. They're one of my favourite bands. So we went to see them and we got that incredible vocals. Oh, my God. Which... Do you know which... What two? What album are you listening to? Can you remember? Oh, it was the classic... Mezzanine? Yeah. The Insect on the Front, Black and White? Is it the... That... Wow, I don't know how to react to that. Hey, have I sang to Robbie Williams? I saw that podcast. He's an excellent chap. Hey, I mean, come on. I sang to him. He actually said to me after the podcast that he thought I was a lot better than him. That's brilliant. So, Martin's offered you a spot in his movie and then you're going to sing on a Robbie Williams album. I'm in demand. Yes, the spot. I'm in demand here in South West England. Love it, mate. Bring it. Because they've had a few albums. I mean, you know, the first one was very different to kind of the next one. But Mezzanine's my favourite. Yeah. Yeah, I can't... I'm not going to sing to you. But...  Very true. This is... This is it. Yeah. This is a thing about me, though, is when I was on the dance scene, I was always dancing. Yeah. When we go back to a chill-out party, someone goes, oh, did you see Sansa? Like, to me, it was all one DJ. You know, you couldn't, like, see into the DJ box anyway. No, no, no. Right, you're just feeling the beach, man. Yeah. And so, when I... I DJed in China the biggest nightclub in southern China, I blagged my job as a DJ, right? And I'd never... The last record I played was when you had one of those red vinyl boxes and you could put a stack of 45s with a little arm on and play them one at a time, right? So I went in my local nightclub in Hong Kong and I said to Roy, who was an ex-army guy who was managing it, I said, Roy, can I go in the DJ box?   But it's the same when people ask me about music. I've never been like that anal with it. I just hear something I like. I think that's a good thing, though. I think it's important to not get caught up in the minutiae of it all. Obviously, I've got to know every single beat, every producer, every guitar player. And I love that. And it doesn't spoil my enjoyment of the music, but for normal consumers, I think it's important just to live with the music. You don't have to really know. But then the trouble with it is, though, Chris, now, is you're trying to find an album that you don't know the name of. It would be good if you knew what it was. That's why Shazam was such an amazing thing, right? When suddenly you could Shazam something, it would listen to it and tell you what it is. Yeah, Lee, it's that classic one with the brown diamond on the front and a little light. Blue lines? Yes, that one. Yeah, Unfinished Sympathy is one of the greatest. Oh, yes. Have you seen the video for it? Is it Sharon Nelson walking One Take video in LA? Yeah, it was a bit like the Verve video. Was it not at some... Yeah, exactly, yeah. Bittersweet symphony, yeah. Yes. So Unfinished Sympathy. You know the strings in that. You know they just know them in your soul. You kind of... It's got strings in it and it's got a beat and it's got her. The guy who did the strings, the guy called Craig Armstrong, if you don't know anything about him, go and look up everything he's ever done if you like the strings in that track. He's incredible. He's worked with Madonna. What's his name? Craig Armstrong, Scottish guy, Scottish composer, performer. He's done strings for Madonna and Bjork as well. So he's got this pop thing that he does strings for and it's all really moody and amazing. And then he also does a lot of compositions of his own, which are incredible as well. So if you like Unfinished Sympathy, symphony, Unfinished Sympathy, you'll love the strings. Go and check the strings out that the guy's done it on other records. That's an incredible record, by the way, the whole record. I mean... Yeah. But yeah, every track is an atmosphere.  It's just... It's almost perfect, I think. Blue lines, classic. Yeah. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. I might be getting my wires crossed here because weapons are sounds coming up and so like a drug gun. You know what, the Jamaican drum bands, you know? Yeah. Okay. But no, the... I thought you were literally talking about actual weapons, like can you blow up a building with audio? And you can, yes. No. What I refer to is they had this incredible... The... Sorry, my mic's going back. The massive attack had this incredible backing, but you know, their co-band or whatever you call it on the stage and... Okay. Was it... Let me just have a look. They've done lots of different bits and pieces. I mean... It sounds like something I should know about and I've just forgotten and I can't remember it. Yeah, I might be... There was another one as well. There was Weapons of Sound, which was incredible. I might be getting my concerts mixed up here for anyone who was there yet. Getting old, getting old. I always go and see Massive Attack wherever I'm living in the world and can go and see them. I mean, they did a show... They did a show in New York in the Park Armory, so it's literally an armory. So it's like the size of a warehouse, the size of an aircraft hangar in the city on Park Avenue. And you walk in and they had scrims down all three sides. So Massive Attack were playing the show. Do you know the documentary maker, Adam Curtis? Yes. Yeah, he's one of the greatest, I think, women. So Adam Curtis made a film, right? Yeah. And Massive Attack soundtracked it live whilst they projected this three-hour film on these 100-foot scrims. So you walk in, they sold out five nights, 3,000 people a night, three-hour-long performance, and you just stand in the middle of the Park Armory, watch the film, listen to Massive Attack actually play live with Horace Andy and Liz Fraser and all of the crew, and you just watch this amazing film. We went away from that show. We couldn't speak to each other in the car because we were so blown away with the combination of his images, Massive Attack playing live, and the way that it all joined. It's one of those most memorable concerts of my life. We walked away going, you're never going to see anything like that again, and we never did, I don't think. There must be stuff on YouTube about this, isn't there? Yeah, Adam, just look, Adam Curtis, Massive Attack. The story that Adam told is incredible, very deep political unraveling of craziness, and then Massive Attack did the soundtrack. It's absolutely staggering. Yeah, and let me just check something in here. I'm fascinated by weapons of sound, I don't know what that is. How weird is it, right? I've had two conversations, both with people in foreign lands. One was New Zealand this morning, and now this one, and we've talked about Adam Curtis.  It's a sign, I tell you. Everything he's ever made is, I mean, not everything, probably better. Do you know Chris Cunningham, the pop music director? Let me ask you another question. Do you know Apex Twin, right? Yes. Right, so you know things like Rubber Johnny and Window Licker, the really crazy videos come to daddy. They're all made by Chris Cunningham, who is an absolute monster. He might even be from the West Country.  Yes, Adam Curtis did a documentary called Hypernormalization. Yeah, but you've got to go back. He's done a bunch before that, and he's done a couple since then. I mean, it's right up your street, I think. Yeah. It goes very deep. It's very clever, very simple as well. He does little phrases where he summarizes a whole thing, and you can watch the thread of the world unfold and ask, and definitely ask small questions that it does answers, which is what I love about it. And he has an amazing taste for music. So another great source of music for me, honestly, is watching Adam Curtis documentary, and you kind of go, what's that? I've discovered about 10, 15 artists just by watching these things. He's amazing. I'll tell you what, I can't wait to watch some of this stuff now. I don't get a lot of time to myself to watch. No, I know what you like. But definitely look up Chris Cunningham as well. He's an absolute god.  That was what it is. So that was like ultra slick pop stuff. But generally his crazy stuff is no one's making videos like him. He's even now. And Lee, sorry, just you mentioned, you knew a couple of band members killed or died. Did you? Can we talk about that? Yeah, I mean, one particular one. So I was in a band called Terminal Head, which was like a breakbeat band from the 90s. I want to make a documentary about our band because we made every mistake possible. And it was a bit like an electronic version of Spinal Tap in the sense that, I mean, the music came from a strong place.  He was an incredible MCs, now MCing for Dread Zone. Incredible dude, amazing story. We were making really great music, but every choice we made on a business level was probably wrong. We had all kinds of different problems with management. And so one of our band members was a guy called Pascal Benazio. You may even know Pascal Bongo massive. That name might even be on your radar, but he was, that was him. He was a kind of a, he would go along with a DJ called, I think it was Fidget, a company with his name, but he would play clubs and he would play Bongo.  Anyway, again. Yes. Long story short, he was in Terminal Head for many years. We played all kinds of different festivals. I don't think he played Glastonbury with that. I played Glastonbury three times. I think he might have played with us once. But yeah, I got a fan call one day. He was a diabetic and he had a diabetic fit. And he was, and he was found by his wife surrounded by, you know, trying to get sugar into himself. And he passed away. And it was like before we were, to do a bunch of shows and stuff. And he was one of those crazy characters that was larger than life. He was incredible to be in a tour van with and by his own admission.  My wife tells me one of those people that the world was a better place with him in it because he was such a sweet character, but a nutcase at the same time. They're my favorite people. We were all great close friends. We were like an army unit, I guess, in a way. I guess you are when you're in a band. And then just to get a phone call out of nowhere, yeah, he was, he died. And it was like, wow. Yes. It's the shockers those phone calls, aren't they? Yeah. And there was another one. And I can't remember what it wasn't another member of the band. It wasn't like, it wasn't like the drummer had exploded. Like they did in Spinal Tap. With that band. Actually, we played most of the European festivals around the sort of 90s. Played Glastonbury three times, like I said. We were like a prodigy style.  And it was just at the end, there was three of us. And yeah, there's a whole podcast about just being on the road with those three. I mean, it was, it was incredible, really. Lots of fun. Lots of traveling. And now Spee's front's dread zone. And he's smacked, I don't know if you know dread zone, but he's smashing with dread zone. They're great. They play well. I'm actually starting to gig again now, but I have no plans to return to the live circuit. It's not really my thing. But so yeah, that was a shocker losing a band member.  Yeah. I was it. You just might mind to me, but something. I was at a chill out party once and there was a few of us in the upstairs bedroom doing stuff with doing some stuff. Let's do some stuff. And yeah. And the Aussie guy next to me went, I've got massive balls. That sounds like a very Aussie. Yeah. And everyone was like, yeah. Yeah. Have a look at this. I love it. Brilliant. He pulled out this goner.  Christ. Yeah. I hope he was, I hope he got that checked. I hope he was all right. But you know, I guess it's like being, it's like being in an army unit or whatever. However you describe what it is with you guys, when you group to be, when you're in a band, it's like it's all for one, one for all. And you go through these things and you get to know each other as brothers and you get yourself into the craziest scrapes, not necessarily violent scrapes with being in a band, but just the funniest. I have never laughed so much even now. I don't think since when I was in that band, because everyone was such a strong character. There were lots of drugs around, not for me, particularly not really my thing. I was more of a drinker, but just some of the funny situations that we would find ourselves in. I really want some of, if there's anyone out there wants to come and make a documentary about being in a slightly haphazard, but well-meaning electronic band, come and talk to me because I've got some stories, man. I've got some stories and they're so funny as well. It's just, it would be like a dark comedy. There was obviously some tragedy mixed up. We never really had much success, but we put quite a few records out on our own little label and made a lot of great friends on the way.  Struggling egos, but also with what we touched on earlier with Ecstasy coming in and affecting the dance music in, I think, in a positive way. Yeah. I meant the sort of darker side of drugs. Have you known anyone overdose and stuff? Yeah, yeah, definitely. But it was not part of our, I always used to describe my sort of other band members as they were like, they could handle their drug. It was never out of control. It was always, you know, like, not drink to get drunk, but it was always kind of like, we're going to go and smoke all the weed that we can find and then, you know, the locals in the West country, particularly because the buds are pretty strong down there. Right. We want you to come back here.  And you kind of go, great, we'll all go back. And then my boys would just do whatever was there and still get up the next day and do a show. So we, they were more like drug processors, but they had fun on it. I never, there was never anything. Cokes are horrible wine. I mean, you know about cocaine, I'm sure. That's the, that's the one drug that I wish sometimes in the music industry, you know, at large could be removed because it's sort of, if you have a bit of an ego going on, Coke will make that nightmarish. Yeah.  It was because you can't really function on a lot of those things. If you're going to go and do a show. I mean, one of the funny things about my band or our band was because we would play in nightclubs, because we were sort of club music, but like a live band, our set might be three o'clock in the morning and we'd have to soundcheck at 7pm.  And now most of the time it worked, but several times we're like, yeah, boys, we've overdone it a bit.  And they're the sort of things I'd love to put in there. I don't think there is an electronic band sort of spinal tap movie that's been made, but you know, I want to get all of that crew in a room with a dictation machine and just talk about ye olden times and write a book about it because it was so funny and mostly not destructive.  And apart from a bit of death and a bit of... And we didn't really have any success and there were certain moments where one of the band members got a bit violent and was almost going to prison. We just signed a deal with a record label and it looked like the whole thing was about to implode. But a couple apart from that, it was mostly sort of like crimes and misdemeanors really rather than sort of actual horrible stuff. I mean, I'm great friends with a band called The Ruts who are a punk band from the late 70s. And they had some big hits and their lead singer died. They were at their sort of pinnacle and their lead singer died of heroin overdose. So their whole trajectory changed. You know, they were like the next clash. They're still an incredible band. I've mixed a bunch of records for them. They still play live. If you ever get a chance to go and see Ruts DC is the name of the new inclination of the new iteration of them. They had a track called Babylon's Burning with a bass... Yeah, I was going to say I remember it from... Back in the 80s, wasn't it? Late 79, 80 was when they were at their most active. And in fact, Jen and I watched a doco about them the other night. Henry Rollins, who you may have heard of, he's like an American rocker. They asked him to front. So the Malcolm, the lead singer, died of heroin overdose and Paul Fox, the guitarist, unfortunately died from lung cancer, I believe. And it was Paul Fox's last ever show and they got Henry Rollins to come in and do the vocals and it's all on YouTube. And it was like sham 69 was supporting and the damned came out and played and it was just an amazing night and you just realize how great the music was and all the people in the crowd were sort of of an age that were like, they just got it. It was really... I mean, even this hoodie I'm wearing, Atomic's, a bar in Vermont in Las Vegas. There's a festival every year called Punk Rock Bowling. It started off with bowling and then gradually became like punk bands would go and play. So every year now you can go buy your tickets and the ruts were supposed to play. I think it was last year and we'd all got our tickets and we were all ready to go but obviously COVID put paid to that. But you were in a bit, this is back to the whole music thing again, Chris. You're in a crowd of like guys of our kind of generation, our age with a deep, deep passion and connection with music all jumping around whilst watching the damned or something. And then they've got their kids on their shoulders. Their kids have got Mohicans. There's a sort of a fake mosh pit. The festival itself is nice and clean. You can go and get a really cold beer and get out the sunshine because you're in Vegas. You're standing in Vegas watching the damned and you're watching the specials or whatever it was. Just kind of going, here's a bunch of people who really get it. They got it the first time and they're still getting it now. They're still deeply connected with the music. And yeah, that was just my little ruts thing. But they were supposed to play last year and stopped all that. But yeah, crazy. You reminded me of a West Country dope story that my mate told me. When I was in the Marines, my buddy went for a course in North Devon. I think it was a driving course or something. And he said, all the boys on the course were in a pub one, a local pub one night.  He went, who are? And it was empty. But as he tipped it up, this big nugget of hash rolled out of it, right? Oh, dear. So clearly it was the boys in the pub. That was their little... Oh, that was a stash spot. It's in the jar. That's fantastic. Yeah. You do the accent better than me. It's right over there in the left-hand corner. That's brilliant. And he said, all the Marines are like, well, how much is it worth? Right. We're going to go down the street. We'll find a drug dealer. They all thought they was going to get, you know, a million, under a thousand pounds or so. Yeah. It's not worth as much as you think. Yeah. My mate was like, oh, yeah, I know someone I can sell it to, right? And of course, you know... Oh, no. That nugget of hash never... That's funny. ...never made it any further than my mate Steve. We played a festival called Trams Music Hall in France, and you only allowed us to play it once. And actually, funnily enough, it was the same year Fat Boys Slim played it, and we shared a dressing room with him. And so some drugs made it out of the country in the van to the venue. So for a pool of us a lot, not particularly heavy, just personal use. But then what we realized, and we got pulled over as soon as we landed in France and they searched the van, didn't find anything. It was all well hidden away. So we did the festival. It had an amazing time. They treated us beautifully. It was an incredible festival.  And we were like, look, we got tugged on the way. We should kind of lose this, but we don't want to just throw it away. So between the trans musical, which is near Wren, I think which is bottom left to France. I can't remember. I was driving the van. It was like, we're going to have to smoke all this resin between here and when we get on the ferry. And I've just remembered him skinning this up and actually looking at, I'm getting passively stoned whilst trying to drive on the wrong side of the road in France, in an LT38 van. And they're smoking. And there's literally like resin liquid coming out. And they're like, we've got to smoke all this and we don't want to be taking it back or throw it away. And I remember obviously everyone got the munchies. And there's me trying to drive an LT38 van through a drive-in, drive-through McDonald's in France. And I remember winding the window down to place the order with the very lovely French lady that was there and always smoke billowing out something like Cheech and Chong and me getting the van stuck in the drive-through. But we kind of got there in the end and we managed to get rid of all of the, you know, all of them hash, and that was just a really funny thing. It was like, we're really going to try and smoke all this before we get on the boat. And they were like, yeah. And they did.  They managed to get rid of it, but it kind of worked. You're reminding me of some of my mates that went on a stag due to I think it was Estonia and they managed to get hooked up. Or it might have been Amsterdam or something. And one of the guys he had a real bad coke habit and he bought on the first, they're only there a weekend and he bought himself like 10 grams on the first night or something. And they all just indulged and at the end of the weekend they all got like four or five grams and they all tried and you know where this is going to end up. It's a funny thing. It's not a world that I've been around for many years, but it's not something that's of interest to me funnily enough. It's like maybe I'm lucky. Maybe I'm lucky in that respect. That's a crazy thing. Kids, if you're listening, just say no because when you learn to get high on life it's just way better than all that nonsense. Yeah, don't get me wrong. I wasn't necessarily high on life. I was probably pissed at me at most of the time. But I mean that was my drug and I had more enjoyment on that and I still do I think than anything else. But yeah, that's a whole other thing. Listen, I could chat all night, mate. I probably shouldn't say this, should I? It's been one of my favourite ever chats. Oh, mate, thank you. You've had some amazing... This is why I shouldn't really say it, but let's be honest, if music is just such a special thing, isn't it? It's a magical... Yeah, it's just... It's magical. It's hard to say and put it in words and that's the whole point, isn't it? So let's do this again, can we? Love to, mate. Come and have a chat with me once we've got an Oscar for Penitent. Oh, yes. And thank you again, Martin Webster. Penitent, folks, keep your eye out for it. 2022 is going to be out. And I'd like to thank Mark Ryan, actually, at Render Yard, who's the guy that put me in touch with Martin in the first place. Mark, bumblebee. Hang on, Mark Reid. It's been an amazing day. We watched Who Dares Wins the other night and I was looking and going, that looks like Mark and I Googled him. And I said... This is a weird thing about... This is what I say take action is... Did I ever think that the guy in Who Dares Wins, the classic all-time SAS film, is now one of my mates? Yeah, it's great. This is great. We're not mates, we just know each other and we're a big fan of what he does, and luckily he enjoyed the sound tracks that I've been putting behind his voice. What an amazing dude he is. We had a great chat too. Mark's former member of the intelligence community and he just knows an awful lot of stuff. Incredible. But yes, fascinating chat. Thank you ever so much. No, thank you. It's an absolute honour to be part of it, sir. Is there anything you want to mention or promote at the moment or what you're up to next? I just think if anyone's interested in me and my outspoken opinions and crazy past, go to LeeGroves.com, that's my website. And the only other thing I wanted to mention which I'll send to you after this is a private link. I did a David Bowie dub album which is not out yet, it's out in 2022 and I just think it's a really nice... to come around the world to vocal tracks for me and then I made like dub as in reggae dub versions of Let's Dance and Starman. It's just a really nice thing to have on in the background. I just think it's a really cool record. It's going to be out in 2022 so look out for that. Again, all the details will probably be on my website. Any links or anything you want to send me? Great. I'd love to. I'd love to do a little playlist of some of the weirdo music composers. Put together anything you think that our friends at home would be interested in. Put it below the video. Anything that's a gateway to exploring more music is a good thing, I think. How easy is it for you to knock up say a three-minute track of... What, a piece of music? Yeah. Is that something you just do like that? Yeah, pretty much. I don't want it to make it sound incredibly easy because it's very dependent on what the requirements are but the other part of what I do, Chris is I'm always writing stuff and it doesn't end up anywhere. I have a big folder full of all kinds of different things that I've written depending on the mood that I'm in in the day. Are you after some title music or something? I just think it would be great if you could compose or let me have say a three-minute track and I can put some of my live photos to it of all my tracks. Oh, yeah. Would you rather do it that way around or would you rather send me some pictures and let me feel the music if you see what I mean? Yeah, I used to have all these on my website. I think they might be on my Facebook, I'm not sure. Because if you imagine me sending you a bit of music and going, yeah, I'm not really feeling this and then putting some pictures to it, it's better for you to go, well, here's a collage of images. What would you do to this? And then at least you have the chance to go, I don't like that, do something else. Yeah, I'll do that then. And those images will inspire visually that will help me get a bit of a meter of what you're trying to put across. I'd love to, maybe, an absolute pleasure. Oh, that would be great. I've got pictures, you know, like I say, there's a real powerful monument, I suppose you call it, the killing fields. I think they've taken it down now, but it was made of all the skulls of the people that were executed. I've got photos of me fishing with the kids in Mozambique. Amazing. Catching piranhas in the Amazon, scuba diving in Antarctica. You could do a podcast just about the piranhas, I think. I'd love to know more about that. Oh, my God, that's just a dream come true for me. That was just a dream.  I'd love to know more about that.  How do you get them to... You kind of just shout at them. Come here. Well, everywhere I've travelled, I used to take a telescopic fishing rod because it's something I've always done is fishing. That's cool. And when I got to the Amazon, I... I was actually in... I suppose you'd call it a tributary or whatever. I was in the Amazon Basin in South America, probably somewhere like French Guiana or somewhere. Wow. And I just drove to the nearest river and then I was fishing, I think with a bit of chicken and immediately... I've got a big black... Black piranha, that's the one you see in... Well, you see two kinds, the ones that they talk about eating people and stuff. Not people, but dying... Bits of people. Yeah, dying animals and stuff. That's generally a big black piranha. And then you get the smaller one with a red flash on, that they... I think you see them in a James Bond film. Yeah, they frenzy feed or whatever it's called, wouldn't they? Yeah. That's that first piranha. And I was... So I stayed all day long and throughout the course of the day an Indian guy from the local village came and... came and brought his canoe out for me. And he looks at my fishing gear like they do in... This has happened to me in all the Indigenous places. They look at all your complicated technology and rod and they go... And then they just get a line with a hook on the end and he had a big bit of like beef on it or something anywhere. And he threw it out. Funny enough, he didn't actually get any, but I stayed there all day and just as darkness was falling, bang, I had my second bite of the day. I managed to land it in this Indian family. He cooked it for me. That's amazing. I've got one quick question for you though. It's a related sort of the same thing.  What's the biggest spider you've seen in real life in the loose? Oh, man. Right. And where was it?  Hey, I can hit you with a double whammy now. Please, I have spiders. Fascinating. I ate a tarantula in Cambodia. That's too much. Kentucky Fried Tarantula, right? Yeah. It's absolutely fine. It's a delicacy over there. They sell them to you fried or something. I've seen those. When I was working... I've worked in a place called Nicala Porto in Mozambique. And they lived in a tiny little African village like used to see on Tarzan as a kid, right? In a place called Muzwani Byro. Byro meaning like village. Yeah. And we were... We were sat outside our accommodation one night. And we had a view out of the Indian Ocean. It was just incredible. Just utterly incredible. We used to sit there and the weird spotlights were just casting a bit of light on the ground. This spider, tarantula-type spider was crawling up like a papaya tree that we had in the front yard. And it got halfway up and then this insect flew out of nowhere. I don't know if... some sort of flying insect landed on the back of a tarantula and that was it. It was game over. The tarantula was just... No way. And so what it had done is spiked it, killed it and planted its eggs inside it. Yeah, right. Did you know what the... Did you find out what the insect was? No. Friends at home, put it in the comments. This is your homework. You've seen the videos of the camel spiders, right? They look like something out of a different planet. We came across a bunch of stuff in Australia, too, which is to say it's like out of a different planet.  Like, oh my God. But I just wanted to ask you that because, yeah, that's... I love that. That's awesome. Yes. Lee, listen, just stay on the line so I can thank you properly, but much love to you, brother. Really look... Thanks, man. Same way. Massive love to everybody at home as well. Please look after yourselves. If you can like and subscribe. Really hope you enjoyed this as much as I did, and we'll see you next time.