DJ Billy Nasty

To quote Karen Dunn of DJ’s Unlimited, “Billy is one of the nicest DJs you’ll ever wish to meet”. Veena Verdi agrees and uncovered the story of a man who has been kept in the dark for far too long.

It’s not that Billy Nasty is partial to a bit of glitter, he just can’t understand why a glitter cannister would be hob-nobbing with a sandwich wrapper outside a specialist dance record shop in Camden. Staring hard at the two articles, “What would somebody be doing with a sandwich wrapper and some glitter during their lunch break?”

Whilst most people wouldn’t have given these two bits of litter a second’s notice, Billy has to interrogate it for wider significance. This sense of observing the world undoubtedly accounts for what he describes as his, “weird sense of humour”. Who else would shelter themselves under the monicker Vinyl Blair.

After traipsing around Crouch End, looking for somewhere to satiate Billy’s hunger pains, we finally settle down in an Irish pub where all they seem to have on the menu are peanuts and Jack Daniels. Even these circumstances cannot cast storm clouds over Billy’s view of the past. One of the pioneers of British techno, Billy has yet to receive the plaudits that would provide him with the ticket to take his seat with the other ‘Ambassadors or Techno’ Andy, Darren, Justin and Fabi. This may seem like sheer injustice, especially to those who wax lyrical about Billy’s mixes being, “Mixes of the century”, but Billy seems indifferent about not having attained high priest status.

People say that I’m the one who inspired people to play like that and that I haven’t had my chance yet. But I’m spinning it down at The Drum Club, Strutts or The Ministry of Sound. I think every thing’s going OK”.

What marked Billy out during his incipient DJing days was his association with the burgeoning Balearic scene during the late Eighties. Most of the DJs on the Progressive-Techno circuit Darren, Justin, Fabi and Andy all came from the Balearic scene. It was based on shaking the whole clubscene up by playing dub with something like Yello. The only good thing about Progressive House was that progressive means things constantly change”.

“Some people are saying that Trance is dead now. That’s good if it keeps new things coming through. I think people should risk it more. I think that helped me was my first West End, Saturday night job that I did at the Brain with Steve Bicknell. Steve used to be into all the R&S stuff. I think working with Steve every week ridded me of my Techno phobia at a very early stage and opened my ears to new sounds. This helped me to go off and do my own thing. Some people can be a bit too serious about music. I’m serious about it, but I’ve still managed to keep a good sense of humour”.

“Few would refute that, because a sense of humour is needed when your head is superimposed onto the body of John Travolta frozen in his Saturday Night Fever stance”. He repeats, “Some people are so serious about things that it’s sad”. It is this flippant attitude which accounts for those ridiculous name Vinyl Blair – Billy’s collaboration with Steve Dub.

“We were editing the first Trancespotting EP on Scratch ‘n’ Sniff and we couldn’t come up with a title. We were smoking a lot and talking crap. Then one of us actually said, ‘This is a larvly bit of vinyl it’s a larvly bit of Vinyl Blair’. We all fell about laughing. That’s what we do normally. We get in a studio, smoke a lot, talk rubbish and whatever sounds the funniest, that’s what we call the track”.

Willing volunteers for unconventionality, they’d even consider working with Lionel Blairmaster of the cheesy grin. Billy gushes, I think Lionel is probably one of the most underrated actors in this country. Given the right amount of press at the right stage he could have been as big as Brando or De Niro. It’s a shame he’s so underrated”. Then he resumes a straight face. “Really, the name is just a play on words”.

And if Vinyl Blair isn’t corny enough then there is always Luna Dubs to salsa down the aisle with. Billy insists, “I’m serious about the music but I’m not serious about the thing I call myself”.

Billy is more serious than he realises, though. It can’t be all laughs managing a record shop in Camden, which has been the launching pad for his two projects, Shitake and Vinyl Blair. Billy is at least honest about his own idiosyncratic way of running a business.

“I’ve been working at Zoom for about four or five years. But the studio work, the DJing and the travelling is all getting a bit too much for me. So we’ve sorted it out so I’d do fewer days in the shop to fit in my travelling. Plus I didn’t really like having to shout at people that I really liked. I’m not a good boss really. It’s a bit too hypocritical for me to tell people what to do, because I have a tendency of arriving late, and I’m always smoking. But I’m really proud of what the shop has achieved. It has obviously helped me. I think that I have done well out of the shop”.

People do take Billy seriously. In fact so seriously they really do believe that he lives up to the notoriety of his name. They think he is part of a Techno mafiosi which terrorises unsuspecting neighbours with scuzzer Techno music and devours Harthouse and Sabres for breakfast. Surnames are, however, deceptive. Nice is also a characteristic that easily slots into his personate some thing that he is aware of. That’s why he had a bit of a complex about his dimples as they are the sort that people would go ‘aaah’ over. But then the ‘Nasty’ surname arose out of a misunderstanding in the first place.

It’s kind of a nickname that I got. My father’s name was Nastri. But because people couldn’t pronounce my name properly. I’ve been called Nasty since the age of nine. It’s got nothing to do with my personality”.

Returning to the smoking back room in Zoom for an end-of-the-day wind-down, Billy is coming to terms with how he is going to juggle working on Shitake and Vinyl Blair. They are the ld and the Ego of his musical personality. The first being melodic and tribal whilst the other is more brooding.

Shitake is the project David Wesson (owner of Zoom records) and I did under Zoom productions. All I’d done before was remixes for Nush, Rio Rhythm Band and Datura. It wasn’t until after four or five remixes that we realised it was time to do our own stuff, rather than put it onto other people’s tracks. So Shitake was the first actual thing that we did under our own name”.

“Vinyl Blair’s Trancespotter and Housework are a totally different affair as Billy explains, Shitake is meant to be based more around ethnic percussion whereas Vinyl Blair’s main purpose is to do stuff which is different. I want to do Ambient tracks that are minimal, hip-hop tracks that are chunky and techno tracks as hard as the German stuff. Even though Vinyl Blair is titled tongue-in-cheek, we’re deadly serious about the musical content”.

Already Billy seems to be creating another subsection ‘serious’ techno. Perhaps then he would be able to reap the accolades that would elevate him to Techno god, but this is all trivial daydreaming. All that Billy is interested in is concentrating on these two projects.

“We all think it is about time to start building an image and a vibe. You can only do singles for so long, then you have to start doing LPs. This is when you need to have an identity”.

“It’d be nice for Shitake to do some remixes of some commercial stuff like Deep Forrest or Enigma”. Dave interjects.

Billy agrees. Since Shitake’s quite ethnic and world-based, in the future we will be doing loads of different stuff. As I say those are all plans for the future. We’ve got an unhealthy amount of plans, it’s just finding the time to get in the studio and actually start putting them down”.

Billy is adamant that even if he was going to concentrate more on his music, he doesn’t want to end up working full-time in a studio.

“I don’t think that I want to spend everyday in the studio with deadlines to meet. Even if it was my only job, I wouldn’t do it. It’s quite demanding and does take it out of you. You’re on a rollercoaster of emotion. One minute you’re proud of the track, the next minute you’re embarrassed or suicidal”.

At the moment it all seems to be go. It’s a time when everything seems relentless. This manic place, though, seems to have had little effect on Billy’s ‘stroll on’ attitude.

“Even when things do get a bit hectic, I try not to let it get on top of me. But smoking quite a bit means that I find things amusing. I laugh at situations a lot more than I get upset with them. I think you do need to kinda develop a way to deal with it otherwise it can get to you after a while”.

It’s a fact of life that the DJing lifestyle dictates that you’re in Copenhagen one minute then communing with the didgereedoo in the antipodes the next. With all this going on, won’t the wick of Billy’s candle be burnt out by the time he is thirty? Dave juts in, “You’ve got another year to go, haven’t you?” Billy is incredulous.

“Another year? No I won’t be burnt out by the time I’m thirty. I’ve been collecting equipment, so hopefully in the next two years I’ll have a pretty good studio on the go. So when we work on LPs we won’t have to pay untold money. Hopefully in two or three years time I’ll have a studio so that the shop acts can work there. I can’t see myself burning out in the next five years…”

Billy’s nice streak is too strongly delineated for classic rock burn-out syndrome. That ‘Nasty’ part is just there to add another dimension to Billy’s reputation. Being cute is too twee. But there are time when he has to smile. And when he does those dimples appear. Aaaahh…