But apparently he’s always like this. As the main resident at the infamous Doncaster Warehouse, he also organises their promotion, he DJ’s all over the country, produces tracks for labels like Industrial Strength and at the same time looks after his young son and girlfriend at their family home near Doncaster.

For a man who’s now thirty years old, Mick should be given an O.B.E. for his troubles. He’s done an incredible amount in a relatively short time, and only now is he beginning to get the credit he deserves. At last the hard work seems to be paying off.

So Mick saved up for the decks.

“I looked at the price of Technics”, recalls Mick. “And realised that I couldn’t afford anything like that. So I had to wait. In the meantime, I started working for this bloke who had a mobile disco. He used to leave me behind the decks while he went off for a pint, so I had to learn it all very quickly, or there would have been no music! I even had to all the talking and stuff as well”.

This was Mick’s first taste of pub DJ’ing. Different to the DJ’ing he does nowadays. Mick found himself speaking over the microphone and playing the more commercial end of dance music that he had got into through the DMC Albums that were about at the time.

But soon it was all over, the guy who running this disco had a hole in his heart, and unfortunately died. So, knowing that there was a demand for this disco, he did a few more discos to save up some money of his own so he could afford his own set up. Soon he had a pair of old semi direct drive Gerrard decks, and luckily they came with a pitch control as standard that went from above seventy eight to below eight revolutions. Mick was in his element!

“All of a sudden everything took off. I got asked to do a town pub”. Mick tells me. “It was all dance music that I was playing no-one else was playing this stuff. So, the disco became even popular. There were even queues outside the door and this was when Graham, the owner of the Warehouse, asked me to play at his club. I wasn’t really up for it at first, I knew that I wasn’t into rave, but after things went wrong for me in Doncaster with my disco and I’d bought a load of R & S stuff, I changed my mind”.

Mick went down to the Warehouse for the very first time, armed with nothing but a few of those classic early piano tunes like the one Love Decade were putting out. Technics were strange to him, so, at first Mick had a few teething problems. But, after throwing down a couple of his tracks, people were climbing the walls and sweat was dripping off every corner. As you can imagine there has been no turning back for DJ M-Zone.

“I was a bit reserved up until recently about playing other venues though. I was one of these DJ’s that thought you should look after your own people at first, so I didn’t search for any more work. Even now, the way things are, I still do my best to look after the Doncaster Warehouse crowd. I still put so much effort into putting smiles on peoples faces, even though sometimes I feel that people don’t realise how much effort I actually put in”.

If you want to know how devoted Mick is, you just have to follow him around when he’s playing at his regular venues like the Warehouse, Distruxion, Uprising and loads of other places all over the country.

“If it wasn’t for the record production side of things I don’t think that I’d be playing as many places”, Mick states honestly, “It all started when I met Lenny Dee after a Distruxion event. He came back to my house and I played him some of my experiments that I’d been fooling around with. Basically he liked the tracks and wanted them for Industrial Strength, but because of my limited equipment, the production needed to be tidied up. This is when Lenny asked me to go down to Carl Cox’s house and do the tracks again on his equipment. I couldn’t believe it, and after I’d used his studio, Carl wanted some of the tracks for himself.

All of a sudden I had loads of people interested in what I was doing including other labels like Boscaland and Master Maximum Trance. Luckily the money I got from that enabled me to buy lots of cool equipment and work on even more tracks”.

At this point Mick feels it’s time for a quick plug….”I’ve now got loads of stuff coming out in the future. There will be a UK 44 release and one on Doncaster Warehouse records. I find this label a good source of promotion for myself and the club. As well as these two, there’s some more releases on Boscaland, Phoenix Rising and UK 44, DW Records, Master Maximum Trance plus some licensing agreements in Germany”.

Mick has without a shadow of a doubt made music his life. He’s not done too bad I reckon, from those early days of playing at a pub disco and shouting obscenities over the microphone to a drunken mass of Friday night revellers. All the best M-Zone.

“I now play Hard House and Hard Trance, in all its varieties, this is to give people a broader view of music. It’s a shame but, at present a lot of the people are getting tunnel vision because Happy Hardcore and cheesy Techno is getting thrown down their throats. It’s all starting to sound the same and at the end of the day that can’t be good for the scene. The amount of demo tapes I get sent to our club all sound so identical, it’s amazing. I don’t want to book DJ’s out like that. Techno has gone forward, and that’s why it has become as good as it is”.

“Music gives me so much inspiration and I don’t want anything bad to happen to it. Remember that you don’t just have to be into one thing to enjoy yourself. If you give yourself a bit of a chance, broaden your mind and relax, then you’ll have a wicked time”.