One of the pioneers of Happy Hardcore and its various offshoots, Dougal has been shaping the sound of the genre since its creation. Who better then, to mix one of the discs of Helter Skelter's new triple CD retropsective United In Hardcore? Benz went down to Ministry of Sound's radio studio to talk with the legend ahead of his set at Tasty: Generation Energy at Renaissance Rooms on July 8th, while promoter Billy "Daniel" Bunter gave it large live on air!

So when you first started playing at Helter Skelter, was it already well established or was it just starting out...

When I first started playing it would have been about....1989/1990, really in the early days...it was very underground, and it was at a club called Milwaukee’s and it was absolutely tiny compared to what it grew to. It was an amazing time.

And what sort of stuff were you playing back then?

Well it was...what did we call it back then.....it was just called “rave music”. The record I always remember the best was “Move Ya Body” by Xpansions, and then also you had things like “Kubik” from 808 State...they absolutely blew me away at the time.

Would you say that seeing other DJs playing there, their influence rubbed off on you?

Where I got influence from was DJs like Sasha, ‘cos what happened was when I was first starting to go to raves myself, I sort of was listening to all the different styles and trying to find out what I liked, and he was the only DJ who was all about the hands-in-the-air type of thing...he was really the only DJ at the time who really did it to the extent that I wanted to hear the music, you know like it was sort of record after record had this really amazing feeling. But also people like Mickey Finn, DJ Rap, Grooverider all had massive influence on me.

At what point did it start to become apparent that the whole rave thing was really splitting off into two, hardcore and jungle, and that people like Mickey Finn and Grooverider were moving away from your sound?

There was a time when we were all DJing at Milwaukee’s, and there was a lot of......it wasn’t hardcore then, it was still...I’m trying to think...it was like breakbeat, everything was just really sort of....monotonous breaks with really sort of dub basslines going on and there wasn’t any vocals, and it was supposed to be a “cooler” sound. It was at that point that I was DJing but I was still a raver as well, and I was thinking “this is boring me to tears”....I was absolutely, really, really bored. So when I was DJing my sets, I was making sure I was playing as much uplifting stuff as possible and at that time there were a lot of people looking at me like “what the hell are you doing?”, but the people who understood what I was doing absolutely loved it. So it was an all or nothing kind of thing that I was doing, so that was the main way it all came about for me.

You’ve done the 1999 – present day disc of this United in Hardcore compilation. Over the last 7 years there have been some highs and lows in the hardcore scene – obviously you were one of the people who always stuck by it, but where there points when you just thought – “this is it, it’s game over”?

Yeah, there always is points like that. The thing is, because as DJs we’re all so connected to the music and so passionate about it, to be honest with you people don’t realise that if we turn up to a gig and we notice that the venue is maybe 300 people down – that really affects us emotionally. We’re looking at it thinking “why isn’t it that busy?” and stuff. And there was a time for about 2 years where nothing was happening. There were no gigs that were packing it out, all the gigs were really small...I remember my diary almost stopping for a while. But it was weird – as it sort of stopped from the happy hardcore sound of that time, all of a sudden old skool just blew up...so I started playing the old school again...and it was all the people who had been into it for the last 10 years suddenly getting back into it. And it was from that the we managed to revitalise the scene by introducing new records and new sounds...it was quite weird the way it happened.