FR: Hello girls and boys, my name is First Rate, but you can call me Paul or ‘Girthy!’
MT: Hello ladies and gentleman, my name is Mr Thing, but you can call me Mark.
FR: OK Mark lets kick things off with our backgrounds and how we met back in the day.
MT: Well you were a breaker weren’t you?
FR: Exactly sir and you were doing the graffiti thing right?
MT: Yeh, bloody hell that feels like ages ago, I’m feeling old right now! I started DJ’ing like 15 years ago just for my little group of mates really, down the youth centre in Sevenoaks (Kent), where I still live today. I first met you I remember at The Forum in Tunbridge Wells.
FR: I remember you played there a couple of times and my boys who I grew up with kept telling me ‘you gotta come and check this kid, scratching and cutting down the Forum’. That’s when we met man.
FR: So after that we just became good mates and practising buddies really.
MT: Exactly sir.
FR: A while after that we did the Scratch Perverts thing for a few years right?
MT: Yep… it all started really at the Mr Bongo’s record shop in London.
FR: Yeh man, no one really knew each other back in the early 90’s. I remember Tony Vegas used to work in the shop and had kinda called in all these heads for a meeting.
MT: Yeh, it was you, me, Joel ‘Prime Cuts’, Tony, plus I seem to remember Billy Bizniz and DJ Pogo being there
FR: That’s right. At the end of the session, Tony kinda said to you, Prime Cuts, and me lets make a sort of super DJ crew. And the name ‘The Scratch Perverts’ was born.
MT: Then we added little Neil… DJ Plus One after we kept going up to play shows in Scotland and kept getting blown away by this young kid. He blew our minds man remember?
FR: Of course, he was crazy! Tony brought him in soon after that and I brought Killa Kela into the set up. I just thought he’d make a great addition to our little family. He did his first show with us at The Ballroom in New York at the ‘World DMC Team finals’. What a first show to do hey!? He absolutely killed it and was in from then on.
MT: Then we brought in Harry Love and DJ Renegade.
FR: So how do you think ‘the scene’ or whatever word you want to call it has progressed since back then?
MT: I think it has progressed a lot, in good and bad ways.
FR: Yeah, I personally think the art of MC’ing has really moved away from the core elements of hip hop, like breaking and b-boy culture, DJ’ing… all the roots. These days Jay Z or Lil John would rarely be in the same room as a breaker! Which is a shame, but the people who know still know if that makes sense. That’s what I hold onto still anyway...