This is an interview with myself and Paul from around 2000, made for Mixmasters, the late-night ITV series created by my long-time friend Graham Daniels and Addictive TV.
Mixmasters had a rather unusual format. Each programme contained two ten-minute music and VJ pieces, one on either side of the advertising break, along with separate interviews with the musicians or DJs and the visual crews.
Looking back, giving a VJ crew ten uninterrupted minutes of national television to make an audiovisual piece seems quite remarkable. At the time, of course, we were mostly concerned with making the things.
In the interview we talk about Overscan having started in 1994 and some of the different clubs and styles of music we'd worked with since then, from Tribal Energy through Trancentral and eventually to Fevah.
“Hard house, hard house, and more hard house.”
Paul: “Three rooms of hard house.”
“Which is fun. Much preferable to acid techno.”
That last line makes me laugh now.
I think by this point Paul and I were both getting a little jaded with acid techno. Trancentral was generally monthly, although for a period I think it went fortnightly. After enough nights of banging acid techno, we were both yearning for something a little more uplifting and tuneful.
Fevah delivered that, at least to a degree. It was still hard music, but there was more melody, more euphoria and rather more hands-in-the-air than gurning.
Apparently the cure for my acid techno fatigue was simply to wait a couple of decades.
These days I listen to the stuff entirely of my own free will. I thoroughly enjoyed Dave the Drummer at Utopia Frequency in 2025, and DJ Zebedee's 50th a couple of years earlier was very much an acid techno affair.
So perhaps I never actually stopped liking it. Paul and I just wanted something different at that particular moment.
It's also genuinely lovely seeing the two of us back then.
Behind me in the interview is a wall completely covered in flyers. At the time it was simply the wall behind my desk. Looking at it now, though, it feels like a rather perfect backdrop.
The flyers, the graphic design, the clubs, the music and the live visuals were never really separate things. They all overlapped. Overscan grew directly out of that world.
There is something slightly strange about watching yourself from more than twenty-five years ago casually talking about something you are still doing now. In the interview I describe Overscan starting in 1994 with:
“Which, in club terms, is a long time ago. A distant universe.”
This was around 2000.
Apparently six years already constituted deep history.
Which makes hearing it again in 2026 mildly alarming.
A small bit of Mixmasters economics
I also remember Graham telling me something rather funny about the economics of making the programme.
ITV, as I remember the story, was not exactly throwing money at Mixmasters.
Graham and the Addictive TV team therefore wrote and published the title music and other recurring music used around the programme themselves, rather than simply using library music or commissioning somebody else to make it.
My recollection is that this produced the slightly absurd situation where the publishing and broadcast royalties from those little pieces of recurring music may have earned them more than some of the actual programme production work.
There is probably a useful lesson about television in there somewhere.
Or possibly just a lesson about owning your own stuff.
Mostly, though, I'm just pleased this survived.
Myself and Paul, sitting there in front of a wall of flyers, talking about six years of Overscan as though we'd already been doing it forever.
We had absolutely no idea that, more than a quarter of a century later, I'd be digging the interview out of an archive and putting it on a website while still making visuals, still building ridiculous things, and apparently listening to acid techno again.
Some things change considerably.
Some things apparently just need a long rest.