ANGELIC UPSTART

The life of Dave Angel takes in drug dealing, pickpocketing and prison. It takes in six years building up his name as an international techno DJ and producer. It takes in his jazz musician father, his sister Monie Love, and it reaches 'Tales Of The Unexpected', his brilliant jazzy techno debut album. Story: Bethan Cole Photos: Daniel Newman

STANDING outside his mother-in-law's house in the Oval, South London, Dave Angel is teaching his small inquisitive niece Becky how to tie her shoelaces. His delicately handsome features (chiseled cheekbones, long eyelashes) locked in concentration while he tells her what to do and an assortment of kids including his six year old son Daine run around him playing.
Family's sacred to Dave Angel, like music. There's his wife Pat, son and soon to be born second child. And then there's his passion for the pure heaven-sent strings and synths of Detroit techno that makes him an isolated British proponent of the rigid aesthetic of motor city electronica. So whilst he spends weekends abroad, a hero of the Technics in Europe's most furious techno clubs, during the week he's at home with his family and working in the studio like a kind of transatlantic twin of Kenny Larkin or Carl Craig,
It's a perfect set up and it has produced a debut album, 'Tales Of The Unexpected', for Angel that will finally, deservedly, put his reputation as sky high as the Detroit legends. At 29, Dave Angel is living up to the virtue suggested by his name. For Dave Angel aka Nicholas Gooden (his real name) the past ten years have been anything but angelic. And his current personal equilibrium stands in direct contrast to the years when pickpocketing, drug dealing and violence dominated his day to day existence.




"ALRIGHT mate!"
Driving through the streets of South London, where he's spent most of his life, Dave Angel spots a couple of guys he knows in a pub doorway. After a minute long delay, one of them drags himself over to the taxi rear window for a second to return the greeting. As the taxi moves off Dave turns round, shaking his head in disgust.
"He was so out of it, he could hardly recognise me."
Later on we're passing through the streets of low rise and high rise dilapidated tower blocks where Dave was brought up, where his mum and members of family still live. He shows me his mum's flat over a shopping precinct and places where he used to do graffiti. We drive further on. He talks about the way crack and guns have taken over the neighbourhood.
"You wanna buy puff? You can get it there and there and there," he points at flats in a high rise, sadness in his voice. He's moved away now, to the comparative suburban calm of Swindon, to live with his wife Pat and bring up son Daine in peace. Because around 18 months ago his house was burgled and studio equipment stolen. Just couldn't take it anymore. "I've lost contact with so many of my old friends from here. A lot of them are still around, doing the same thing, some of them are in prison, some of them have got life," he pauses, relieved to have got out. "It's a bad area, but it's where I'm from."
But it's no longer where he's at. In fact, for the past couple of years, Dave Angel's been making records like he's from Detroit. And playing them like he's from Germany. Since his 1989 'ardcore debut (a remix of Eurythmics' 'Sweet Dreams' which charted) and tracks like 'Brother From Jazz', '3rd Symphony' and 'Airborne' he's wrought elegantly patterned and tightly programmed abstract techno: deep, jazzy motor city homages which align him more with John Beltran, Dan Curtin and Eddie Flashin' Fowlkes than any of his British contemporaries. Behind the decks, he's become one of a legion of British DJs - Colin Favor, Luke Slater and Colin Dale - to play hard, fast and vicious sets every weekend in Europe's most 'lost it' clubs, yet get fewer dates and less recognition on home territory.
He may live in Swindon, but Dave Angel's status is global as opposed to national. He was one of the first British artists to record for R&S. His unwavering Sound Enforcer tracks on Rising High dominate dancefloors all over Europe. And names keep cropping up in conversation - like Derrick (May) or Juan (Atkins), Stacey (Pullen) and Mad Mike (Underground Resistance). He feels most affinity with Kenny Larkin and Carl Craig, the stars of second generation techno who've removed it far away from the elusive realm of the 12" into the permanent medium of the album.
"Techno now is like jazz or classical," he says, as we talk about the way this sound which originated in Detroit has evolved from sci-fi obsessed, fearless experimentalism to a music with a very definite formula and constrictive structural rules. Dave continues to mentally equate and physically amalgamate the techno format with jazz ('Bebop' triggers a guitar sample from 40s jazz guitarist Charlie Christian in and out of the 4/4 beats). This attitude shows far more insight into the state of the genre in the 90s than those who continue to see it as futurist and avant garde.
"Techno's not dead. The music's here to stay," he argues, "it's just that the records are really few and far between now. I think what's gonna happen is we'll start listening to all those old techno records, by Juan, by Mike, by Carl, as a reflection of our youth, that's all."

"I'VE never talked about this before," says Dave as he rewinds to his own youth. Born in Chelsea in 1966 he was the first of four children. His father, now dead, was a jazz session musician, playing drums, trumpet, "everything really" and driving a minicab when he couldn't get sessions. One younger brother Richard, 28, still lives around Oval and Dave's younger sister, Rosie, is a soul and funk singer. "You'll probably be shocked when I tell you this," he says, looking unsure whether to continue for a minute, "but I've actually got two sisters in music - my other sister is Monie Love."
Once you know it all fits together - the surname, Gooden, which Dave never reveals, the jazz musician father he and his international rapper sister both talk about in interviews. So why has he never mentioned it before? "It's one of those things where you don't wanna make your name off somebody else's name, y'know."
Have they ever worked together?
"The last time she was in London, she had all these soul records we used to listen to as kids. She came to me and asked me to sample this tune so I did it and she says 'loop it!' and started rapping over the top. Easy as that. Anyway I tried to put some strings over it and she didn't want that so I just sampled it, gave her a cassette and she went off to a massive studio in America and finished it off." Tactfully, Dave explains that their musical tastes don't converge.
"She's not really a techno person and hip hop's too blatant for me. You find a record that's half made it already or that everybody can relate to, take a big chunk of it, write a few lyrics over the top and you've got a new record. I'm not really down with that and er," he laughs, "she's good at that."
Ask about his childhood and Dave Angel talks jazz. How he listened to Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk and Charlie Parker records with his father and learnt to play drums himself, which he still does now and samples.
"The best era was the 40s - bebop. When they were playing in bars and stuff in New York, before they started travelling the world. Those guys had it hard as well - they never came from good backgrounds, they fell in love with music from a young age and it was something to fall back on."
Dave hated school but took refuge in drumming, skipping off lessons to play in the practise rooms. He talks about how he was expelled for beating up a female teacher who had just caned his brother. "I wasn't violent, I was just energetic. When people fight you, you gotta defend yourself." After school he couldn't find work and drifted into petty crime, going up to the West End and pickpocketing. "There wasn't any work and I didn't have any money. I've always thought that being a pickpocket was kinda slick though. I was always dressed nice n' that - it was sharp in a way, 'cause nobody but you knows what's going on."
In 1983 he ended up in detention centre for six months. And this was just the beginning. Released from detention centre Dave continued to pickpocket and started dealing cannabis as well. "I'm a smoker anyway so it was natural to get into it. If you want a couple of ounces of weed you just call your mate up and say, 'I've got the readies!' You pay for it, set up a little house and you're in business."
Dave's life was changing in other ways too. Around 1984 he met Pat, his future wife. "She was a girl I had fancied for years and years," he smiles, bashfully, "the love came in '84, it was a mission. I played her music every day, made her tapes, 'love music'! Anyway she fell in love with me and we've been together ever since." Their first child, Daine, was born in 1988, when Dave was in prison. The second they are expecting in November. "If it's a boy, we'll call it Darcy or Fabian Darcy, if it's a girl, Page. This time I want to be there when the baby arrives."
In 1986 Dave Angel began playing on South London pirate Faze 1, where Fabio, Grooverider and many, now stylistically diverse jocks started their careers. Four til six in the morning, six til eight in the evening. But it wasn't long before he found himself in prison again. "When you're in prison, you've got a hell of a lot of time to think, you do nothing but build yourself up. You step very lightly, watch your back, think about what you do. You gotta act sharp all the time."
This second time in prison he became extremely depressed. "I phoned my dad and told him I was really down, I want this time to go quicker and he said, 'Check this out. I've been diagnosed with cancer, I've only got six months to live.'" When his father died, Angel lost control completely. "I didn't care about anything, that went on for a year. You just live life really fast." A third spell inside, however, for nine months in 1988 came after several raids on his 'puff house'. Dave believes it changed him for good.
"The last time I went away, I was supposed to be doing a gig for Passion Radio over in East London - this was like the acid days. I saw the promoter when I was on the bus going to prison. I'd just been sentenced. I waved to him and said, 'I'm going man, this is it, I'll see you when I get out.'" He contemplates the period with sobriety. "I'll tell you, that last burn was the best thing that ever happened to me. When Pat brought Daine in to see me, I thought, 'I can't come back here,' looking at this little baby. The rest of the time inside, I was thinking, 'What am I gonna do when I get out... go straight back into music and make a career of it.' I think with all that hustling and dipping, I was always trying, I've always been a forceful trier. It just wasn't channeled before and now it is."

'TALES Of The Unexpected', the debut LP, is the culmination of what followed his 1988 prison sentence. Six years of building a professional career as a DJ and techno producer. On the album, traces of house, electro and funk slip in and out of a continual tight roll of 4/4. 'Bump' bounces spongy, early 80s synths off each other, like Mantronix cut and pasted onto a minimal 90s b-line. 'Bebop' deploys the same structural trickery on a jazz guitar sample. "When I make a track I always start with the drums, then set a mood with the bass and keep on layering until I think it's got enough parts in it. The arrangement is the key part I'd say."
As a DJ, Dave plays more than on style: furious European, white noise Basic Channel headphunk (usually spun at plus 16). And the mellow, deep jazzy style, closest to his own production work, that he indulged in at his own Rotary club, which ran for a few months in 1994. His heart is so obviously rooted in the latter. But the big raves in Germany are still important to him, for their energy, their abandon and chemically assisted hedonism.
"I suppose there's Euro and there's techno," he offers. "Techno came from Detroit. The Europeans got hold of the name and mashed it up, put a big kick drum behind it." So is the Basic Channel/Dave Clarke/Ferox sound Dave spins in sets a deviation from Detroit? "Yeah it is. It's minimal and EQ'ed dirtier but it's still Detroit based. It came from Underground Resistance after all."




WHICHEVER way you want to see Dave Angel - as maker of jazz techno fusion or as one of Europe's hardest DJs - he doesn't fit into any established scene in Britain. He's never been part of the celebrity techno/trance league which grew up in London out of Balearic, nor really the rave scene where he finds the crowds too fragmented between happy hardcore, jungle and techno.
"I'd say I'm a loner really," he reasons, without self pity. But Dave Angel is no snob and he doesn't diss rave either and still makes tracks E'd up himself. "Most of these coke freaks [he means celeb techno jocks] sporting diamond rings and nice watches, I never see them in a record shop. I see kids of a Saturday afternoon go into a record store, standing up waiting to spend their £5 on one tune."
Dave Angel, like a legion of British producers and DJs has found fame in Europe rather than his home country, but even though he doesn't like sleeping in hotels abroad, it's no longer a problem. "With my first EP on R&S - 'First Voyage' - I was thinking, 'Fuck the whole of fucking England, you don't want me so I'm going to Belgium to make a track." These days he's confident his work has a longevity and integrity the 'coke freaks' can't touch. Before I go, he tells me two stories.
The first is about how he was DJing one night before Andy Weatherall. "I'd come in and done my shit and pitched up the decks, and he said, 'What have you done there?' Now I said, 'I've pitched up the decks.' He said, 'Why have you done that?' And I said, 'Cause that's techno man.'"
The second involves a scene in the film of Charlie Parker's life story, Bird.
"There's this guy and he can only play one note, he gets up and pretends to play sax and he gets the crowd going and everything. Charlie Parker waits outside for him and when he gets outside, grabs his saxophone and starts to play all this shit running up and down it. The guy whose saxophone it was says, 'Why did you do that?' And Charlie Parker says, 'I just wanted to see if you could play different notes on it.'"
And Dave Angel just smiles.