The first time I encountered The Black Dog was upon visiting Mike who is now my brother-in-law. It was 1992 and I was a relatively solitary student at Glasgow University. Since schooldays I had followed music closely. Devoted to the music press I'd collected records since 1985 but, like many I'm sure, Acid House and Rave had at first proved difficult to assimilate and follow. My way in was through Dub Reggae and Kraftwerk. You went to raves, club nights and parties but you rarely had a handle on precisely w
Mike, who at that stage was part of a collective called (I think) Wave, sometimes DJ'd the second room at Pure in Edinburgh. Mike is an incredibly charismatic, magnetic character. He has a proper reality distortion field around him. Many people recognised this in him or get sucked into it. For instance, I remember him visiting our house in London once and him wrapping my mother round his little finger. I recall her cooking him breakfast in the middle of the day. He is the kind of individual that you find at
Mike had unusually immaculate music taste. I remember my (now) wife Catherine had a cassette he had made her with Neu! on it - back when you literally never had the opportunity to hear their music. So I remember I visited Mike in this flat on Queen Margaret Drive where he was living - and he played me the first A.R.T. EP. He explained the eccentric international nexus of musicians of the post Detroit era - how Carl Craig was hob-nobbing with Dutch and British artists. He alluded to an earlier record by The